'The President came up with the idea himself'
Well, at least that explains some things. PLUS: Some #sports content!
The Washington Post had a feature this week that began with a simple premise: what the actual eff is up with Donald Trump and Canada? (I am paraphrasing.)
The whole piece is here, republished on the National Post and thus beyond the WaPo’s sticky paywall. It’s written for an American audience, so most of it, describing how Canadians are both angry and confused by the President’s actions, would not be at all surprising to readers on this side of the border.
But there are a couple of things worth noting. First is this part:
A White House official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to detail the president’s thinking, insisted that the 51st-state concept sprung unbidden into Trump’s mind, that it’s a serious proposal, and that it’s motivated by his belief that annexation would benefit Americans and Canadians alike.
Unbidden into Trump’s mind. That is an interesting turn of phrase for a White House official to use.
Later in the piece, after noting that some in Washington think Trump advisor Peter Navarro is behind the 51st-state bluster, it says this:
When asked about whether Navarro has pushed the idea of annexation, a White House official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to detail the president’s thinking, said, “The president came up with the idea himself.”
These two sentences, from people (or possibly one person) in Trump’s orbit, are the best evidence we have that the completely insane idea to annex Canada just popped into his head one day. And, you know what? It makes everything else make sense. So to speak.
When Trump is on message about tariffs, following some semblance of a plan, he talks about immigration and fentanyl as the reasons for pounding Canada (and Mexico) with tariffs. This is, of course, nonsense. Everyone knows that the northern border is hardly a serious problem for the United States, as evidenced by Trump never mentioning it before December. But the complaint allows Trump to claim that the tariffs, which violate trade agreements he signed, are justified as emergency measures. It’s all bullshit: he’s lying and there’s no threat to his people from Canada, but you can at least see the rationale for trying to give themselves a plausible explanation.
The 51st-state talk, though, is just total Trump freestyling. Unbidden into his mind. A lot of us have spent time trying to understand how this position could make any sense as a negotiation tactic, since all it has done is absolutely hardened the Canadian public against making any concessions in a trade war, and the answer is that it makes no sense. He didn’t start out by trying to make the case for annexation, it just popped into his head and now he’s trying to reverse-engineer the reasons for why Canadians should be into it.
This also explains why his positions on the subject are so incoherent, such as when he insists that the United States DOESN’T NEED ANYTHING from Canada, but also it would be great if they just took the whole country. Or when he says we would finally have GREAT MILITARY PROTECTION, which has not been a problem for this country for 200 years or so, and which only recently became an issue when Trump himself started musing about annexation.
One more thing: Because almost no one in Washington has taken this as anything other that Trump making sillytalk, there’s been almost no examination of what it might mean if this incredibly unlikely thing would come to pass. What would happen if 40 million people who were used to public health care and strict gun laws, to name but two things, were suddenly part of the American electorate?
Why, here’s Newt Gingrich, former Republican big-hitter, now somewhat sidelined because he’s not crazy enough, in that same WaPo piece:
“I don’t think it’s real for a lot of reasons,” former House speaker Newt Gingrich said. “The Senate would be somewhere between Democrat and socialist for the rest of history. I would not take it as a serious project.”
Good point, Newt!
A thoughtful and reasoned debate
My editor at theScore asked an interesting question on the ongoing anthem-booing controversies: why do we still have anthems at sporting events? That was the genesis for my latest there, which as it turned out was an opportunity for a lot of people to get Very Mad Online. At one point on Thursday the piece had more than 1,200 comments, which is about 10x a typical column; they have since been turned off, I think.
The feedback, in a nutshell, was this: go to hell.
I would guess maybe 2 per cent of these correspondents actually read beyond the headline, but it is funny to me that so many people seem to believe that the singing of a national anthem is a deeply meaningful event before a game of sportsball. Having stood there for hundreds of anthem performances in arenas in Canada and the United States, I’m pretty confident in saying that the majority of people in the building are not that into it. Some sing, sure, but most just sway and maybe mumble a bit.
Anyway, you should read the piece, if only to see the linked performance of Jose Feliciano singing the U.S. anthem at the 1968 World Series. Catchy!
The Ovi conundrum
Alex Ovechkin is soon going to break Wayne Gretzky’s record for career NHL regular-season goals. It’s an amazing feat. But I can’t get all that enthused about it. For The Line, I wrote about Ovi, Putin, and things left unsaid. Read that one below:
If Newt were to prove correct, then sure, it would never happen. But if the entirety of Canada were to become the 51st state, that would mean just two additional senators, not nearly enough to swing the balance of power in that chamber. We'd maybe have a proportionately representative number of seats in the House, but even though Canadians are overwhelmingly opposed to being annexed, there are parts of the country that lean strongly conservative/Conservative, so some of the seats for this new state would be won by Republicans. And besides, who's to say an annexation wouldn't result in Canada becoming a new territory, like Puerto Rico, without legislative representation at all?