Idiocracy

If the Canadian election taught the Trump administration anything it is to "speak softly and carry a big stick," but Donald refused to heed Teddy Roosevelt's words and instead blew an easy win for Canadian conservatives out of the water.  Even on election day he was still posting that Canadians should vote for him and become citizens of the United States.  Canada hasn't been this united since the Continental Army invaded Quebec way back in 1775.  They clearly don't want anything to do with American exceptionalism.

I'm trying to figure out if this is part of a longer game or if the Trump administration is really that stupid?  It would have been much easier to show support for the Conservatives and talk of re-negotiating trade deals on mutually respectful terms.  Instead, Trump doubled down on what one initially thought was a bad joke, giving the Liberal party the ammunition it needed to turn this snap election against the Conservatives.  The Liberals fell only three seats short of a clear majority and will easily be able to form a ruling coalition with one of the smaller parties.  Not only that but the new PM Mark Carney has vowed to diversify Canada's trade portfolio so that it will no longer be so reliant on American consumers.

There is a similar dynamic underway in the Australian elections, where the Conservatives lost what little ground they had in the wake of Trump's tariff war.  The Labor Party is now the presumptive favorite after having trailed in the polls earlier in the election cycle.  Australia has also been experiencing economic woes but all this talk of tariffs has only made things worse and Aussies seem to feel the current government will do a better job of standing up to Trump than will the conservative coalition.

Trump's attempt to be an election influencer isn't limited to English-speaking countries.  His administration tried to shape the German parliamentary election earlier this year by visibly siding with the Alternative for Germany party, or AfD.  This is a notorious far-right nationalist party that has risen in the polls and got a boost when Musk hosted its wily leader, Alice Weidel, on X before the election.  Not only that but VP Vance chose to publicly chastise German liberal society and meet with the same AfD leader rather than the Chancellor of Germany when he attended the Munich Security Conference.  This so roiled Germans, Western ones anyway, that they voted overwhelmingly for the Christian Democratic Union, a very conservative party by nature, just to keep the neo-fascists out of power.  Pretty much a reversal of 1933 when Hitler's party won the most seats in the Reichstag and launched his "Third Reich."

A loss for the Conservatives in Australia would make it 0 for 3 in international election influencing, which has resulted in other right-wing parties now trying to keep their distance from the Orange Fuhrer and his jolly henchmen.  It no longer pays to be a Trumpist on the international stage. 

Why go so far out of your way to antagonize the world?  Surely there must be an easier way to get countries to bend to your will.  Clearly this noxious pattern of bellicose proclamations and talk of sweeping tariffs isn't working.  The US has managed to turn pretty much every country against them, all 200 to use Trump's count.  

For the record there are 195 countries, but it was reported that one of the "countries" Petey Navarro listed on the "Liberation Day" placard is inhabited solely by penguins.  Not sure how those talks went, but I imagine the same as Greenland.  It's not just bad math that went into calculating all these reciprocal tariffs, but an even worse sense of how to bring countries to the negotiating table.  After all these are sovereign countries, for the most part anyway, and they need to be treated as such.

Had Trump done so, I don't think he would have had any problem getting Canada and Denmark go along with a plan to boost military presence in the Arctic Circle to counter Putin's imperial claims.  After all they are both NATO countries.  Instead, we are stuck with Puffin Island or whatever they call the American "space base" in the remote northwest corner of Greenland where VP Vance froze his ass off delivering a meaningless speech on how important Greenland is to American geopolitical interests.  Once again, he "schooled" a European country, in this case Denmark, for not doing enough to protect this valuable island protectorate.

Trump did take a more conciliatory tone in hosting Norway's Prime Minister and Finance Minister.  Note in the video that VP Vance is nowhere to be seen.  It was ostensibly a discussion to work out a new trade deal between the countries but Ukraine came up as Putin had launched a massive missile attack on Kyiv four days earlier.  Both sides came away relatively happy with their encounter as there was no talk of annexing Norway.  Trump even seemed to be a bit wary of Putin's false peace promises.  As far as foreign policy discussions go, this was a positive step for him.

However, I don't hold out much hope that Trump will have learned anything from the international elections or from Vladimir Putin's all too obvious duplicity.  He will continue to do things his way, or at least those ways suggested by his immediate advisors, even if he ends up driving the American economy into the ground and taking half the world down with it.  Petey Navarro continues to insist that everything is going as planned, even if the declining GDP says otherwise.

Here we are 100 days into the Trump administration with 1360 days to go, and already the United States looks like a country in decline.  Don't tell that to the MAGA folk that BBC interviewed.  They buy into Petey's glowing assessments and Trump's rambling speech at a rally in Michigan, where his followers began filing out of the half-filled arena at the 40-minute mark.  No president has gone so far out of his way to celebrate such a bad start to his administration.  Yet, Donald discounts the approval polls as fake, and called for an investigation which I'm sure his dear attorney general Pam Bondi will be glad to oblige.  Here were all his cabinet members showing up with their red MAGA hats for a briefing yesterday. Can you say fascist?  I knew you could.

Somewhere between farce and black comedy lies are current state of affairs.  It would be laughable if it wasn't for so many people being deeply affected by this carnival of horrors, not least of all the countless immigrants and US citizens the Trump administration is deporting without any due process.  This is just plain cruel.  Not only Americans but everyone in this world is feeling the faux rage, constant taunts and "sarcasm" Donald expresses at the most inopportune moments, like suggesting himself for Pope in the upcoming conclave on May 7.  Idiocracy reigns supreme!