Well, you didn’t exactly hear this first here, but it sure is starting to look like Donald Trump is done like dinner!
The political demise of the U.S. president, if it happens any time soon as now seems possible, would have a number of positive impacts on this side of the World’s Longest Undefended Border, particularly here in Wild Rose Country.
After all, it is a truth generally acknowledged in Alberta that the worse Donny gets, the worse Dani gets.
Now, to be clear, the way the metastasizing Epstein File Crisis south of the Medicine Line has turned the worm on Mr. Trump will not change the essentially MAGA characteristics of Premier Danielle Smith’s United Conservative Party Government.
But now that MAGA Americans have had their Road to Damascus moment and see the president they elected as part of the “Deep State” (Derp State, more like), the American lunatic right of which the UCP is an enthusiastic foreign auxiliary is up for one of its necessary periodic makeovers.
As Nick Fuentes, far-right MAGA bloviator, put it last week: “When we look back on the history of populism in America, we are gonna look back on the MAGA movement as the biggest scam in American history. And the liberals were right, the MAGA supporters were had! When we look back in history we will see Trump as a scam artist.”
Or, as columnist Maureen Dowd wrote in The New York Times yesterday: “MAGA is reckoning with the fact that Trump is the shady elite, shielding information about Jeffrey Epstein. … It’s tough to blame the deep state when you are the deep state.”
So, just as the Tea Party begat Q-Anon, and Q-Anon begat MAGA, MAGA is going to have to become something new (and probably worse) to accommodate its cultish adherents’ growing disillusionment with their pumpkin-faced head of state.
As always happens with these transformations, there will be hard-to-follow doctrinal changes that will take time for Ms. Smith and the UCP – being so far, as they are, from Ground Zero across the street from Lafayette Park in Washington – to figure out and adjust their rhetoric. Factional ideological disputes are likely to grow more intense in the meantime. (Peter Guthrie, c’mon down!)
Whoever replaces Mr. Trump as president – probably the principle-free J.D. Vance, at first, anyway – may be better or worse, but whatever his qualities are, his enthusiasm for wrecking the U.S. economy with tariffs is bound to be significantly less than Mr. Trump’s. (And it will be someone whose pronouns are he/him, by the way, you can rest assured.)
This will be good news for Canada, and bad news for Canada’s thoroughly MAGAfied Conservatives, because Liberal Prime Minister Mark Carney will get some of the credit if we dodge the Trump-induced recession that now seems to be a certainty. Moreover, here in Alberta, the UCP will have one less thing to bitch about.
Interest south of the border in annexing Canada or absorbing Alberta as a 51st state will end the instant grownups are back in charge of the State Department. Even a few grownups will do the trick.
This is not to say U.S. control of Canada’s economy and foreign policy will end. Of course not. But Mr. Trump’s foolish notion of annexation, which would cause years of expensive and perhaps even violent complications for the United States and replace a much simpler relationship that works better for the Americans, will quickly be fed into the Memory Hole.
Obviously, this will deprive the Smith Government of both its No. 1 bargaining chip in its never-ending fight with Ottawa and its favourite political strategy, Alberta separation, not to mention its true objective – annexation as the 51st state.
From the start of this ugly chapter in Alberta history, I have observed that if you scratch any leader of the Alberta separation movement, you will find a 51st State U.S. annexationist. Despite the propaganda disseminated by the likes of the Free Alberta Strategy and the Alberta Prosperity Project, the economic case for a landlocked petrostate in the middle of Canada simply does not add up, and its advocates know it. So what else would the purpose be?
As for the UCP scheme to replace the Canada Pension Plan with an Alberta version underpinned by Bitcoin and fossil fuels, that too would lose considerable appeal the minute Mr. Trump no longer occupies the White House. What the UCP proposed to do with its “liberated” portion of the CPP fund once Alberta was part of the United States – their ultimate plan, as noted above – was never clear. Probably, it would just disappear into a few well-placed private pockets; too bad, so sad. It’s not as if the Americans would give us hapless Albertans Social Security, or tolerate a huge state pension plan to continue to exist north of the former international frontier.
Ironically, becoming the 51st state of a country not interested in annexing Alberta and its tarry oilsands, while still a bad idea, would be a far better one than being taken over by a United States run by MAGA kleptocrats bent on increasing that country’s debt to $47 trillion and fomenting a civil war with its most productive regions.
We’re well out of it either way, of course.
As soon as Mr. Trump is gone, expect the U.S. government to quietly reopen the door to renewable energy projects and gradual electrification – pretty much like the rest of the world. This too will be bad news for the UCP, which has put all of its supply-managed eggs in the fossil fuel basket and driven away circa $33-billion in renewable-energy projects that will be hard to woo back, if not impossible.
Massive subsidies for the U.S. war industry and a subservient foreign policy will continue to be necessary, of course, but talk of an economy-crushing 5-per-cent-of-GDP NATO tax will quickly dissipate as well. And good riddance!
This will bitterly disappoint the generals who were looking forward to spending billions on swell new war toys, of course. Expect scary protest editorials in the National Post.
Another economy-destroying MAGA policy, Mr. Trump’s war on immigrants, who do about 50 per cent of the work in the U.S. building trade and keep the American food service and agricultural industries afloat, will have to go as well.
As a result, the racist Alberta Prosperity Project immigrant-removal policy will have to be rewritten too.
Likewise, the lack of enthusiasm on both sides of the U.S. Canadian border for some of the wilder expressions of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion policies doesn’t mean a post-Trump administration won’t soften its opposition to DEI as well. So this too means the UCP’s habit of constantly screeching about wokeness will need to be toned down too, pushing a few more of the Smith Government’s worst policies and key talking points onto the back burner.
But never fear (by which I mean, yeah, go ahead and fear) the coming MAGA reboot, the form of which we are yet to see, will be just as disturbing as the present one. Just subtler and without quite as much open goose-stepping.
As we now know, thanks to Mr. Trump and simple observation, while the U.S. armed forces are a formidable military and logistical force, when it comes to goose-stepping they just can’t match Germans, Russians, North Koreans, or China’s People’s Liberation Army.
Here endeth the prophecy.
I wouldn’t be so sanguine about the Benighted States in the event of Trump’s downfall. He’d be replaced by J D Vance, who wouldn’t be much better, and the next two in line of Presidential succession are, in this order, House Speaker Mike Johnson and Senate Majority Leader John Thune, both Republicans.
If the Democrats can seize control of Congress in next year’s midterms, things would begin to look better. But they need to get their collective thumbs out of their nether regions if they’re going to pull that off, and to date I’ve not seen any evidence that they have done so.
John Thune is “retiring”, says he will not run for senate next year. He also voted against Trumps budget.
I like your prophecy, David. The thought of having a government that actually governs for the people is refreshing. With Trump and his accolades out of the picture there may be hope yet. Still, your warning that whatever replaces the MAGA movement with “probably worse” is foretelling. Anything worse than Trump means untold destruction and chaos, and you thought it was bad now!
With the fascistic right winged movement occurring around the world any move towards democracy is welcome. I hope that soon the UCP will implode; that Trump et al. will go away, and, most of all, the populace wakes up to what is happening to their livelihoods, the earth itself, and does something to rectify the problems that these grifters have deviantly forced upon the people.
Well, much as I like your assessment that Dixie Dani will go down with Trump, I’m far less hopeful about it.
When I heard all those Zello convos between the truckers and the Americans, some of whom I deeply suspect of being Eyes due to their fomentation of resentment–that was long before Mango Mussolini was in office.
Trump isn’t the disease. He’s the symptom we can no longer ignore. The USA began the slide to fascism long ago, including the Patriot Act and overturning Glass/Steigal. The dems didn’t walk in and overturn that. Obama was the first one to lock kids in cages while bailing out the banks. DNC insider trading and corruption has been going on since its inception. Bush weaponized the President’s office with the help of Cheney and not one Dem tried to overturn that consolidation of power into the President’s hands away from Congress.
None of this excuses the RNC that have also enacted their fair share of repressive legislation (never overturned by the following dems) that’s contributed to Trump moving in before the American Empire’s dying gasp and robbing the treasury.
Dixie Dani’s Defection Plan is being well-orchestrated by people a lot smarter than she is, for reasons she doesn’t care about so long as it lines her pockets and gets her out of that steaming pile of turd she created by corrupting the healthcare system.
What nobody talks about with the tariffs is how it benefits the USA. While the regular people pay more for goods, it depresses the world economy with numerous benefits for the American Empire. It causes inflation which, given their staggering debt load–drops the value of their debt load compared to global inflation. Tariffs put China on the back foot, causes more European de-stabilization so they can’t economically organize against US hegemony, forces Canada into trade agreements that benefit the USA even more than the previous agreements, ruins Brazil’s economy, disrupts the growth of the global south and slows the BRICS plans for de-dollarization with SWIFT and IMF replacement–the next necessary steps for improvement in the lives of 50% of the world’s under-served populations.
One more thing that is NOT to Smith’s benefit is that all of this market manipulation also tanks oil prices.
That, if anything, is what will destroy what remains of Dani’s political leverage.
Really Mr. C? This is your best guess as to the supposed unraveling of the MAGA world? Seriously?
I will bet you a basket of unvaccinated Taber corn that Trump will deploy his deflection shields and remove Epstein from our collective memories. He will then wait a few months before playing the old man/ill health cards to quietly exit stage right.
Sorry DJC. I just don’t see your optimistic dream of Faire Alberta coming to fruition. It would be nice. It would be nice.
David, I truly hope you are right. Wouldn’t it be great if the Mango Mussolini was brought down? Especially if his demise was because his followers finally realized that they had been sucked in by the ultimate conman. Marlaina might have to find another fascist to emulate.
God, one can hope this Epstein bull shite is the harbinger of doom for the orange shit gibbon. The potential schadenfreude is, well, HUGE!!
As for Trash Can Dani … I dunno. The Janet Brown/CBC poll just did not make sense to me, then we had the 3 byelections. Now we’ve got a revenant ABPC, Lukaszuk’s referendum, and the Alberta Next traveling gong show. My crystal ball is decidedly hazy. I hope yours is clearer.
Project 2025 has achieved a sizable percentage of It’s goals. The patrons are going to push forward regardless. The corner office at The Heritage Foundation still awaits for Ms. Smith.
It would take a cataclysmic event of planet-destroying proportions to knock him off his perch. The problem is that his base really is a cult. They follow the leader, regardless of the widespread harm he does, because they know that the harm will affect the enemy. Who is the enemy? Them goddamn satanic liberals. I have encountered this mindset among the evangelical crowd for some time, and it appears to be getting worse. I blame the effect of televangelists promoting their Prosperity-Gospel and End Times beliefs, full-throttle. So, if Trump goes down, he’s taking everyone with him. That is until he throws off his mortal coil, but we will not be relieved. Someone else will rise to take his place, and they are likely more competent and far more cruel.
The last POTUS to die in office of natural causes was FDR, in April 1945, of a hemorrhagic stroke, also known as intracranial bleed. He was succeeded by Harry Truman.
Before that it was Warren G Harding, in August 1923, of what Wikipedia calls a “sudden heart attack”, but in the absence of an autopsy I can’t say if it was what we now call a myocardial infarction, or a sudden cardiac death from an arrhythmia (as a long-time cardiovascular nurse, I draw these kinds of distinctions even if Wikipedia doesn’t). Harding was succeeded by Calvin Coolidge.
Historical tidbit: President Harding visited Vancouver, B.C., on July 26, 1923. He died in San Francisco on Aug. 2. Something he ate? DJC
Never underestimate the cult of the GOP. Trump has survived (thrived?) through many a scandal so being a buddy of that nonce Epstein is not likely going to be the thing that brings down the senile orangutan. Hell, a video could surface of the two of them grinning and smecking at young devotchkas (thank you Mr Burgess) or worse, and he’d still maintain the support of his twisted base. Kind of like this SCANDAL that’s supposed to pop up any day now that will force Smith and her crew to step down for good. Pretty hard to imagine a SCANDAL so bad that Smith would lose all her support….let’s just say I’m not holding my breath.
FoF: My memory of Nadsat is limited. So I had to think for a minute … Mr. Burgess? Anthony? Or Guy? Come to think of it, either would probably work. DJC
Great bolshy yarblockos…..Anthony, that is.
With a still half decent memory, I recall that that the Orange Pumpkin headed one was a life-long Democrat until he realized that the Republican herd was, according to him, the most “stupid” of the two parties, thus ripe for the taking – which he did. This cavalierness [!!] continues to this day, but seems to be fraying the baying. While the Democrats and E.S. media continue to be mired in irrelevance, there is a gap that needs to be filled in with more than BAU or more cow-towing. Of course, not much will happen here as there are not many avenues for public comment that proposes even a modicum of ‘difference’ – especially in printed media!
David: you obviously had lotsa fun imagining what would flow from Trump’s demise, so I hate to burst the bubble. Losing the impulsive flakiness on tariff matters would be a small improvement, but I see no reason to expect substantial change to the main directions of oligarch enhancement, deregulation, anti-science crusading etc. Substituting Vance for Trump would have the advantage (for MAGA-world) of not having a senile Commander-in-Chief. If anything, with fewer sideshows to disrupt things, the rate of destruction could be ramped up.
Sub: I think that’s pretty much what I said, no? DJC
I’m 68 years old, born & raised in Alberta. I’ve never been able to understand why the US didn’t just take over Canada & get it over with. Sure, there would be some international outrage, but that would go away just like it did with underhanded efforts in Iran, Central America & other places.
But maybe we don’t give the Americans enough credit – after all, they’re into spies & subterfuge. Surely the best way to get control of Canada would be to flood us with American stories & American values. Which has happened, in spite of the CRTC & the rules around corporate concentration. I know people in southern Ontario who sincerely have a hard time understanding that Canada & the US are different countries. Because of the media they consume, they’re essentially already living in the US.
And what better way to get the ball rolling than to cultivate a pro-US movement here in Alberta? Is it really a coincidence that people like Tom Flanagan & Ted Morton moved to Alberta to spend their careers talking about Freedom and Independence? I notice that they have lots of home-grown supporters in people like Barry Cooper & Danielle Smith.
And there’s a background to this: Danielle Smith famously did an internship at the Fraser Institute (never mind their million-dollar donations from American dark money orgs), an organization set up to promote free markets & more American values. If it were just the FI, ok, but TEN clones all associated with the free-market Atlas Network? I honestly believe this is more than just a make-work project for Conservative polisci graduates. (More on the Fraser Inst. from Donald Gutstein’s excellent book, “Not a Conspiracy Theory: https://www.amazon.ca/Not-Conspiracy-Theory-Propaganda-Democracy/dp/1554701910/ref=sr_1_1)
My sense is that Smith & the UCP might be just the latest step in a larger project. (Paranoid much? Maybe. Maybe not.)
Flanagan
Flanagan was the protege of Allan Kornberg at Duke University, a Canadian who (from the Walrus) …periodically seconded to ply his expertise on Canada for the U.S. government, probing the risk of a destabilizing crack-up on America’s northern flank. Before the 1995 Quebec referendum on sovereignty, he was on loan to Washington’s National Science Foundation, constantly measuring Lucien Bouchard’s péquiste troop strength. Later, he took the pulse of Reform Party voters.”
If that’s not enough to raise your eyebrows there’s more ! He also was “a consultant on psychological operations and counter-insurgency” (!) during the Vietnam war. This would have been the era of the Phoenix program, when the CIA and the US military were engaged in all kinds of torture, murder, disappearances and abuse of the civilian population, a technique they later rolled out in Latin America.
But wait ! There’s more ! Before he moved to Canada Flanagan was living in Berlin researching an “obscure German novelist” at the “Free” university of Berlin, an anti communist university set up by the United States military against the prevailing influence of the Soviet Union, something they did everywhere. Would really like to know more about said novelist but I’m not even at the juicy part yet, he was recruited by E Burke Inlow, another American who himself was recruited from the pentagon where he worked in intelligence. Inlow would be the first head of U of Cs political science department where the “school of public policy” was set up. Barry Cooper it should be noted has been friends with Tom since their Days at Duke University, under the aforementioned Kornberg.
Wouldn’t it be really weird if the end result of this gang of intelligence connected “intellectuals” who *checks notes* specialized in analyzing and exploiting the rifts in societies the us military wanted to disrupt (starting with Lucien Bouchard and followed by the reform party ) established a beachhead to do that very thing in alberta ?
Wouldn’t it be really weird if that’s where we got Stephen Harper? And Danielle Smith ? Wouldn’t that be strange ?
All this from this excellent article on Flanagan from the Walrus, which does not make the same explicit connection that I just did but is nice enough to leave every single detail in there for you to put it together yourself. I miss journalism. (Shared to me by a reader on this blog, pat yourself on the back I don’t recall whom it was unfortunately)
https://thewalrus.ca/the-man-behind-stephen-harper/
The Man behind Stephen Harper | The Walrus
If Flanagan isn’t a spook he definitely has handlers ; it’s not like he’s severed any of his American connections, his eldest daughter retired after twelve years with the us military.
Perhaps because you’re are born ’n’ raised in Albetar you don’t understand that the distinction between Canada and the USA is drilled into every Ontario school-kid’s head from grade-one up. Maybe the people you know in Ontario aren’t really from there (there are plenty of immigrants in Upper Canada). But, to remind, Upper and lower Canada were attacked twice by the Americans (Lower Canadians —or Les Habitants of New France—are even more aware of depredations by New England freebooters that happened before the American Rebellion), both times repelled by United Empire Loyalists and indigenous nations, during the second time in the War of 1812, joined by their expat American neighbours, newly arrived British settlers, and a large alliance of indigenous nations from both north and south of the Great Lakes. We won, btw, when British marines burned down the US Capitol in 1814.
I sincerely doubt there is anybody in Ontario, Quebec or the Maritimes who have a hard time believing Canada the USA are different countries. Heck, the most-populated region of the USA is just across the border so Eastern Canadians know exactly how much they differ from Americans by regular, virtually daily comparison—whereas Albertans’ visceral comparative experience of Americans is what? Montana? The least-populated region of the Lower 48? …or, I guess, that bastion of truth and fairness, the internet (forgive the sarcasm).
Oh, yes, we UEL descendants (my ancestors crossed the Niagara River into Upper Canada in 1780) are fully aware of US “Manifest Destiny”. The cairn-studded highways and byways of the Niagara Peninsula are daily reminders of the multi-ethnic allies who died in two years of bloody fighting to keep Republicanism out of British North America.
Having also lived and worked in Alberta a number of times in my seven decades, and still having friends and relatives there, I think I can safely say there are NOT “lots of homegrown supporters” of maverick buffalo-headed secessionists in Alberta, just lots of small Wexit congregations who think there are—at least how it looks to them from the inside of their circled wagon laagers.
Maybe you should get out more.
Scotty: My family were not UEL, having come to Canada a little after the successful American Revolution, as the neighbours insist on calling it. But the first one was a Hessian trooper, so we’re told, who fought on the British side, demobbed back to Germany, turned around and returned to the States, and ended up in the 1790s farming on the Canadian side near Fort Erie, which is so close to the United States you can almost see the whites of American eyes across the Niagara River. It’s important to remember that the UEL were economic refugees, political refugees, and war refugees, all at once. DJC
Brother, you know it!
“Maybe the people you know in Ontario aren’t really from there”
Fascinating, thank you. But no, these are people who have lived in Ontario for more than one generation.
Maybe you should get out more.
Oh, so that’s why rumors were spreading about Peter Thiel and J.D. Vance holding a secret meeting in Montana.
Could it be that some powerful Canadians will suddenly make themselves scarce?
Here’s my prediction. Trump will be gone – maybe driven from office or driven to the morgue. (He doesn’t look healthy.) Either way, the MAGA faithful will claim it’s a hoax and that he’ll be back. Elvis sightings will be replaced by Trump sightings. The Maple MAGAs will book pilgrimages to Mar-a-Lago/Graceland. The UCP will build a direct train line to Florida, using a steam train powered by coal. Trump will return as a hologram – a deep fried peanut butter sandwich clutched in one hand and an upside down Bible in the other.
the things that make you go hmmmmmmm………….
What’s your opinion on those saying JDVance as President was always the endgame of the oligarchs? (Murdoch, Musk and Thiel) Would this be a “frying pan into the fire” scenario?
Bridget: I wouldn’t rule it out. DJC
A second option to consider ; Trump picked JD specifically for two reasons, he knew he could control him and that he did not present a challenge to the presidency. Second, he loves to humiliate people and there’s zero chance he doesn’t remember the negative things JD said about Trump in the past. It could be both things even, this administration certainly has no shortage of hubris or narcissism.
The thing is I tend to think the UCP are already in the “no going back” phase as in they’ve leaned in this MAGA-Lite, Populist-Right way of campaigning for so long I really don’t see any way they can course correct even if they wanted to, I think the only course now is the one we’re headed on now where the conservative vote continues to split
From your mouth to God’s ears David. In the upside down crazy world that is MAGA, I fear that the WSJ publishing Trump’s birthday note is all the proof they need that the derp state is going after Trump again and time to rally around dear leader. Not a criticism of the WSJ or suggesting this is Trump/Murdoch n-dimensional chess just that heads they win tails we lose seems to be the only game in town. Of course Trump’s abuse of his body may be finally catching up with him. That is a force no tyrant can control.
When the snakehead is chopped off, “Don’t Tread on Me” is gonna need some ventriloquism. So, while Danielle practices gargling with oysters let us acknowledge that the craft, perfected, is history itself.
Trace the tRumpublican prelude to the presiduncy of George Bush Jr after the cultic vacuum left by Ronald Reagan was filled with vicious Tele-Dysangelism to ‘posthumously’ defend the former president’s dubious legacy even while his vacated mind was on life-support. Granted, the Soviet Collapse in 1991 was a hard act to follow but Jerry Falwell and Newt Gingrich’s Bible-based climate-change denialism and “trickledown” Reaganomics were so aggressively propounded to distract from the fact that the partisan-right had no helpful policies to deal with the two biggest challenges of our time, ecological disruption caused by burning fossil fuels and income disparity caused by market deregulation, corruption, and deprogramming of social benefits.
Dubya was himself distracted from the first of an increasingly frequent occurrence of tropical hurricanes (infamously, Katrina in 2005) and the culmination of a string of unregulated financing frauds (the Lehman Brothers banking collapse in 2008), and by the product of his own father’s legacy, the massing of US troops on Arabian soil to conduct the First Gulf War in which Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein’s army was chased out of Kuwait, a royal Saudi favour resented by radical Wahhabi fundamentalist Osama bin Laden by which he justified the terrorist attack on the World Trade Centre, 9/11, 2001.
We are becoming numbed by tRump’s galling disrespect for political and diplomatic decorum, so it might seem quaint, now, how appalled we were at the knee-to-groin bellicosity of the Dubya administration’s post-9/11 rhetoric. World sympathy for the heinous Twin Tower attack manifest in the UN-sanctioned occupation of Afghanistan where bin Laden trained his al Qaeda terror squads, but the last successful attempt in modern times to snub creeping US influence in Canada, Prime Minister Jean Chrétien’s refusal to join a US-led (and UN-condemned) invasion of Iraq, was but one manifestation of the world’s disdain for Bush’s cringingly obvious Weapons-of-Mass-Destruction stage-play. The more obvious it got, the nastier official White House rhetoric became. And more ridiculous, too: six weeks after the invasion, Bush was aboard aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln, safely returned home, to proclaim that the US’s “coalition of the willing” (not including Canada) had “prevailed” and, infamously, that the conquest of Iraq was “Mission Accomplished” — when in fact US troops fought in Iraq for the next 9 years and in Afghanistan for the next 20, America’s longest foreign war (only the domestic “Seminole War” in Florida was longer at 42 years). It might have been all bullshit, but post-9/11-GOP partisan hyperbole was on a roll…
…until, that is, Barrack Obama won the presidency over a war-weary, warhawk-wary, and nearly bankrupted USA. Ad hominem attacks from the partisan-right were of course nothing new and, after 16 years of increasingly vicious Republican rhetoric ascending hand-in-hand with ever expanding social-media, we were getting used to it. But how we could ever be surprised by the fact that the election of the first Black President would conspire to produce “birtherism” —the notion that Obama wasn’t born in the USA so shouldn’t be eligible to run for president—and by the promoter of that patently false charge (Obama was nearly finished his first term by the time his birthplace was propagandized), the bogus Reality-TV clown, Donald F tRump, is a measure of how distractingly hectic our world has become to either not-hear or ignore those little disembodied voices from the shadows of library shelves, newspaper pages and, now, the internet.
My perspective can only anchor in my own lifetime, so I can hardly ‘feel’ the fullness of “Bleeding Kansas” (1854-59)—which is the US Civil War (1861-65)—, but how can I not get that the most devastating War which still threatens to tear history’s most powerful nation asunder would not recoil with forked tongue at the first Black President and rattle down the golden escalator of tRump Tower in 2015?
I’ve aced a few Massasauga rattlesnakes in my misguided youth; while preserving the rattler, skinning for a belt, and preparing the deliciously dark, red meat for frying, always watch out for the head: it can still bite hours after being disconnected from the body. Here micro-history flows into macro: hatred of “the other” and territorialism mythologically predate written history, many a loathed head hacked off, many a strategist scanning enemy phalanx ahead for the leader without which the host loses cohesion —if not merely its head, skin, rattle and meat. This is the primal narrative whispered by chroniclers we can still hear, even over great distances and time. We are only deafened in the incredible noise of the present moment, the sin of presentism beguiling us time and again that our time is one never seen before , or the best of times, or the worst of times and the anchor of the most perverse story of all: that there ever was a “good old days”, or heroic golden age. Or that we’ve never seen anything like tRump or Danielle Smith before. For those who take them as harbingers, or even crafters of the future, take heed.
Smith’s agenda might be preposterous, literally, but just because the lifeblood of her venom is losing his head while all those around him are regaining theirs doesn’t necessarily mean Alberta’s perennial and no-so-distinctive cause, and Big Bitumen’s not-so-patriotic lust will lose their way, leaderless, blinded falcon-food. The Wild Rose province’s mythos existed long before either were even born. Without doubt it’s all about the redoubt that is the western high prairies and, given the vast bitumen-sand-mixture can only be moved teaspoon at a time over a horizon of centuries, some other iteration of the old redoubters’ creed will gall our descendants with something they never believed possible because ventriloquists of history long past will convince them so.
Remarkably poetic rattlesnake description, Scotty. Bravo! DJC
I really hope you are right, David, but I am not making any bets.
I believe it was a commenter on this blog who introduced me to the truism that it is easier to fool someone than it is to convince them they have been fooled. In that vein, I am hopeful that the Alberta chapter of MAGA might realize that since they were duped by Trump, they may also have been duped by some of the Wildrose/UCP types.
My spouse cannot stand even to see or even hear Donald Trump. She mutes his voice when a clip is shown on the news.
She came to feel the same way about Pierre Poilievre during the last election. She had enough of him.
And she feels exactly the same way about Danielle Smith. She refuses to listen to news clips, with Smith spouting her nonsense.
In her words she has had Smith up to her eyeballs and can hardly wait to vote against her and against our current member in Calgary Heritage. She told me that she might even be forced into voting for that perennial candidate Larry Heather! That is just how fed up she is with the entire UCP crew.
She realizes that her vote will not impact the election but she desperately needs an outlet for her frustration and for her utter disdain.
It really is hard to believe what Politics has become in North America. Putin must be laughing his head off at how stupid Trump is. Those of us who have relatives in other provinces know they know how stupid Albertans are and we have agree, you can’t be any dumber than Danielle Smith, can you?
Their best friends are criminals, the sleazier the better.
I suppose we will see where the Epstein controversy goes. It is ironic that Trump encouraged his conspiracy theorist supporters to believe there was a client list, which he now seems to either not be revealing (perhaps because is on it) or because it does actually not exist. Good luck on convincing the conspiracy theorists of the latter. He seems to be hoisted on his own petard now.
Personally, I don’t think this alone will do him in, but it will just add to the list of things he is alienating or disappointing his supporters and former supporters with, including: his bombing of Iran, reductions to US medical coverage for low income people, tariff threats and so on. I don’t think many of his supporters signed on for this much mayhem and chaos.
Back on the home front, our Dani should have been more careful about who she got cozy with, especially if Trump’s support and power starts to diminish more. Bluster and kooky ideas can sometimes work in elections, especially when voters are unhappy, but not so well when one is in power. This all now seems so 2024.
I am not as optimist about a J.D. Vance government. The man is as bad as puke and the biggest idiot I have ever seen in politics.
There is no way that the states would chance making Canada or Alberta the 51st state. Too many of us vote progressive. They want our resources, not our votes. Like Puerto Rico, we would become a US territory. Like Puerto Rico we would have a lot of resources but would be dirt poor.
What resources does Trump get from MAGAnauts? He gets only their votes; the only thing he wants from them is blind loyalty, not policy proposals or American patriotism, just their votes. Remember how he told so-called “evangelicals” that if he won in 2024 they wouldn’t even have to vote again because he’d have elections “fixed”—his own words. In other words, he wouldn’t even need their loyalty anymore after dispensing with voting in elections, just their obedience.
If he could do that to his own compatriots (in reality the literal idiot has none), imagine what he would do to Alberta, Puerto Rico North.
But I bet tRump would go for an even swap: he gets Danielle (but not Alberta) and Canada gets Puerto Rico (but not tRump).
Trump will never leave office. We’ve heard this song play out a hundred times, each claiming to be the end of all ends. Trump got into office and will stay in office as long as he plays the racist card, whether it takes the form of a “wall” or ICE raids or the military tribunal of Obama which he is currently suggesting. It doesn’t matter if he is a scam man, which many MAGAts already know, or a sex offender or diddler of children. That doesn’t matter one iota in the eyes and ears of the MAGAts.