Thoughts On The Fifty-First State
I am writing this early in the morning of April 29th in Korea, which means it is mid-to-late afternoon on the 28th in my native Canada, and Canadians are now at the polls choosing a new government and a new prime minister during a time of peculiarly existential pressure from their American neighbours, and primarily of course from one Donald J. Trump. Some thoughts on this election and its significance, which I record here while voting is still ongoing, in order to post them before any results become available. The results themselves will be unlikely to inspire any comments from me anyway.
On election day itself, Trump has issued a (by his illiterate standards) lengthy “statement” directly related to the election and aimed at Canadians, in which he quips that Canadians should vote for him, before reasserting his recent claims that Canada should in fact be the fifty-first U.S. state, and indeed has no viable future other than as part of the U.S. He has been working on this theme continuously since even before the current election campaign officially began, insinuating himself into the political debate as the primary issue. But to do so on election day itself constitutes a more direct violation of all the norms and protocols regarding foreign government interference in another country’s democratic election process, i.e., the protocols of respect for another nation’s sovereignty and self-determination. This is hardly surprising, of course, given that the substance and tenor of Trump’s meanderings about Canada for the past three months have been emphatically aimed at projecting a total disregard for Canada’s sovereignty, and a wish to end it — a wish which, as is typical of Trump, he first floated in a joking way, but which has become an increasingly serious and unironic position. That is, Trump repeatedly puts his “big ideas” out there in a sarcastic tone, as a trial balloon, so that his defenders can mock anyone who takes him at face value with their cult-driven epithet, “Trump derangement syndrome,” until, if the idea begins to pick up traction among the faithful or his most effective sycophants, he begins to repeat it with increasing seriousness. In this case, he has taken to insisting over the past couple of weeks that his “fifty-first state” talk is no joke at all, but rather the only proper solution to a problem he has imagined in his puffy head. Hence, in his social media rant on Canada’s election day, he writes that Canadians ought to vote for Trump, which is to say that they should reconcile themselves to the fact that their fate is to be a U.S. state, and therefore accept that the leader who can do the most for them is Donald Trump.
Now, though it is true that he is violating the international norms regarding election interference from foreign governments, two things are well-known about Trump: First, the reason he violates all norms of international politics and diplomacy is not because he is a muckraking champion alpha male, but rather because he does not know any of the norms, or understand the complexity, the seriousness, or the moral imperatives of the world in which he is operating. The second reason that he commits this offense without reservation is that, as we have all known since 2016, Trump has no problem whatsoever with foreign government interference in the election processes of sovereign nations, as long as those forms of interference serve his interest — this is true whether it is the American election and the interfering party is Russian, or whether it is another country’s election, and he himself is the one providing the interference.
Now given that he is not simply joking, it is interesting to speculate on Trump’s motives. I would say that there are two possible explanations for his fifty-first state rants.
For the people who believe in Donald Trump as the nine-dimensional chess genius who is always a thousand steps ahead of everybody else, the answer is obvious: He was hoping to save the Liberal Party from near-certain defeat in the upcoming election. He inserted himself into Canada’s election cycle at precisely the moment when Justin Trudeau was at his lowest ebb, failing as a prime minister. Trudeau and his Liberal Party needed something radical to change the discussion in Canada in a way that would save the Liberals from the focus on the faltering economy, the leftist moral impositions, and various political scandals within the government that had finally led so many people to become temporarily fed up with the Trudeau dynasty. Thus, for those who believe in the nine-dimensional chess genius interpretation of Trump’s brain, the explanation of his motives would have to be that he was trying to help Trudeau in particular, and the Liberals in general, to weather their crisis and somehow snatch electoral victory from the jaws of defeat. He wants the Liberals to win. He was hoping to help Canada’s woke leftist behemoth regain its footing in time for the election, and in fact he succeeded in doing so. For it is entirely thanks to Trump’s interference that the Liberals revitalized their popularity to such a degree, and so instantaneously, that they have come into this election day considered the favourites to win at least a minorty government in parliament, and for Trudeau’s successor Mark Carney to become the next prime minister. That would have to be the explanation for Trump’s insertion of his anti-Canadian poison into the discussion at this moment, if you accept the nine-dimensional chess version of Trump’s brain. He was, on this model, trying to help the Liberals and to destroy the Conservative Party. Indeed, he has more or less said so. In a recent Fox News interview, he said that the Liberals would be better to deal with, whereas the Conservative leader, he claims, has not shown him enough respect. This explains why he began an overt attack on Canadian sovereignty and pride at precisely the moment when Trudeau and his party, who are traditionally most closely associated with the notion of “Canadian identity,” needed a miracle to turn the tide and change the subject of domestic politics. Trump provided it, and in the process sucked all the wind from the sails of the ascending Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre, who is most closely associated with certain rhetorical aspects of the Trump movement itself, such as anti-wokeness and “grassroots populism.”
If, on the other hand, you reject the nine-dimensional chess genius picture of Trump’s brain, and accept the “spin the big wheel and see which ping-pong balls fall out” picture of his brain, which is the one I favor, then you would see that he is talking this nonsense because he actually wants to absorb Canada as new U.S. territory. He has actually become so unhinged from any sense of normalcy and decency, that he believes he should be truly able to demand and possess things merely because the urge enters his mind. He wants Greenland, and so he hates Denmark and sees that country as an enemy. He wants Canada’s resources, so he insists that America doesn’t need anything from Canada — doesn’t need logs, oil, auto plants, or anything else that Canada has to offer — while Canada’s very existence depends on America, which would lead a rational person to wonder why he covets that land so dearly. But Trump’s mind is not rational, so he thinks he is cleverly tricking someone with this feigned indifference to the existence of the very territory and people he hopes to possess.
The truth of the matter is that the reason Trump talks this way and thinks it is going to work, is because this is how Trump thinks. He operates on the model — this is what he calls “deal-making” — that if you just keep telling the person you wish to conquer, “Come on, you know you really want it, just admit it, you really want it,” she will eventually say yes. And I have no doubt that he believes in this method because of course it is the method he has used all his life successfully. Now, I am sure it works on a certain low class of women, as one can easily see by observing Trump’s personal history — that his infamous “grab ’em by the [you-know-what]” policy for making friends and influencing people is truly effective with a certain kind of woman, or by extension a certain kind of womanish man. Hence the make-up and substance of his current administration and “conservative media” fan club, as compared to his tenuous and frustrating relationships with women and men not of the type on which such pre-civilized methods of influence are effective, most obviously and amusingly Volodymyr Zelensky.
Is Canada Trump’s kind of woman? Canadians at this moment, feeling defiantly patriotic in the face of Trump’s immediate offensiveness, would undoubtedly say no. I am not entirely convinced, however, as a Canadian in self-imposed exile, that the answer will be no in the long run. I wish it could be so — it would constitute a great moral revolution or reversion in Canadian history — but we shall see.
