Freedom of Speech and Thought under Attack

Speaking your mind shouldn’t cost you your job, your education, or your rights. But right now, that’s exactly what’s happening all across America.

Example One:

President Trump on Thursday renewed a call to defund NPR and PBS a day after top executives from the public broadcasters faced an intense grilling from GOP lawmakers on Capitol Hill.

“NPR and PBS, two horrible and completely biased platforms (Networks!), should be DEFUNDED by Congress, IMMEDIATELY,” Trump wrote late Wednesday on Truth Social. “Republicans, don’t miss this opportunity to rid our Country of this giant SCAM, both being arms of the Radical Left Democrat Party. JUST SAY NO AND, MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!!!”

Example Two:

Students at public colleges and universities are protected by the First Amendment freedoms of religion, speech, press, assembly and petition. Private schools do not have that protection.

Columbia University, officially Columbia University in the City of New York, is a private Ivy League research university in New York City.

On 8 March, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) agents arrested Mahmoud Khalil, a graduate student at Columbia University, as he was returning from dinner with his wife in New York. The agents said the state department had revoked his student visa and green card, though he had never been accused of, let alone convicted for, a crime. He was held in detention in New Jersey, then transferred to Louisiana. He has still not been accused a crime.

Nevertheless, Donald Trump’s state department, headed by Marco Rubio, seeks to deport him under a provision of federallaw that gives him the power to deport someone if their presence in the country is deemed to “have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States”. Khalil’s crime? He was a lead organizer of Columbia’s protests for Palestinian rights.

“Who has the right to have rights? It is certainly not the humans crowded into the cells here,” Khalil, a Palestinian raised in exile in a Syrian refugee camp, wrote in a letter proclaiming his status as a “political prisoner”. He is the one of the most prominent targets of a chilling federal crackdown over pro-Palestinian advocacy in the US, particularly on college campuses. And he is one of the most forceful voices in The Encampments, a new documentary on the campus movement for Palestine that has drawn ire from across the US political spectrum, in particular the right.

Example Three:

The nation’s legal profession is being split between those that want to fight back against President Trump’s attacks on the industry and those that prefer to engage in the art of the deal.

Two big firms sued the Trump administration on Friday, seeking to stop executive orders that could impair their ability to represent clients. The lawsuits filed by Jenner & Block and WilmerHale highlight how some elite firms are willing to fight Mr. Trump’s campaign targeting those he doesn’t like, while others, like Paul Weiss and Skadden, have cut deals to appease the president.

In recent weeks, Mr. Trump has issued similarly styled executive orders against firms that he perceives as enemies and threats to national security. The orders could create an existential crisis for firms because they would strip lawyers of security clearances, bar them from entering federal buildings and discourage federal officials from interacting with the firms.

From The Atlantic

I subscribed to The Atlantic.

Here Are the Attack Plans That Trump’s Advisers Shared on Signal

The administration has downplayed the importance of the text messages inadvertently sent to The Atlantic’s editor in chief. By Jeffrey Goldberg and Shane Harris

So, about that Signal chat.

On Monday, shortly after we published a story about a massive Trump-administration security breach, a reporter asked the secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth, why he had shared plans about a forthcoming attack on Yemen on the Signal messaging app. He answered, “Nobody was texting war plans. And that’s all I have to say about that.”

At a Senate hearing yesterday, the director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, and the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, John Ratcliffe, were both asked about the Signal chat, to which Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor in chief of The Atlantic, was inadvertently invited by National Security Adviser Michael Waltz. “There was no classified material that was shared in that Signal group,” Gabbard told members of the Senate Intelligence Committee.

Ratcliffe said much the same: “My communications, to be clear, in the Signal message group were entirely permissible and lawful and did not include classified information.”

President Donald Trump, asked yesterday afternoon about the same matter, said, “It wasn’t classified information.”

These statements presented us with a dilemma. In The Atlantic’s initial story about the Signal chat—the “Houthi PC small group,” as it was named by Waltz—we withheld specific information related to weapons and to the timing of attacks that we found in certain texts. As a general rule, we do not publish information about military operations if that information could possibly jeopardize the lives of U.S. personnel. That is why we chose to characterize the nature of the information being shared, not specific details about the attacks.

The statements by Hegseth, Gabbard, Ratcliffe, and Trump—combined with the assertions made by numerous administration officials that we are lying about the content of the Signal texts—have led us to believe that people should see the texts in order to reach their own conclusions. There is a clear public interest in disclosing the sort of information that Trump advisers included in nonsecure communications channels, especially because senior administration figures are attempting to downplay the significance of the messages that were shared.

Experts have repeatedly told us that use of a Signal chat for such sensitive discussions poses a threat to national security. As a case in point, Goldberg received information on the attacks two hours before the scheduled start of the bombing of Houthi positions. If this information—particularly the exact times American aircraft were taking off for Yemen—had fallen into the wrong hands in that crucial two-hour period, American pilots and other American personnel could have been exposed to even greater danger than they ordinarily would face. The Trump administration is arguing that the military information contained in these texts was not classified—as it typically would be—although the president has not explained how he reached this conclusion.

Yesterday, we asked officials across the Trump administration if they objected to us publishing the full texts. In emails to the Central Intelligence Agency, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the National Security Council, the Department of Defense, and the White House, we wrote, in part: “In light of statements today from multiple administration officials, including before the Senate Intelligence Committee, that the information in the Signal chain about the Houthi strike is not classified, and that it does not contain ‘war plans,’ The Atlantic is considering publishing the entirety of the Signal chain.”

We sent our first request for comment and feedback to national-security officials shortly after noon, and followed up in the evening after most failed to answer.

Late yesterday, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt emailed a response: “As we have repeatedly stated, there was no classified information transmitted in the group chat. However, as the CIA Director and National Security Advisor have both expressed today, that does not mean we encourage the release of the conversation. This was intended to be a an [sic] internal and private deliberation amongst high-level senior staff and sensitive information was discussed. So for those reason [sic] — yes, we object to the release.” (The Leavitt statement did not address which elements of the texts the White House considered sensitive, or how, more than a week after the initial air strikes, their publication could have bearing on national security.)

A CIA spokesperson asked us to withhold the name of John Ratcliffe’s chief of staff, which Ratcliffe had shared in the Signal chain, because CIA intelligence officers are traditionally not publicly identified. Ratcliffe had testified earlier yesterday that the officer is not undercover and said it was “completely appropriate” to share their name in the Signal conversation. We will continue to withhold the name of the officer. Otherwise, the messages are unredacted.

As we wrote on Monday, much of the conversation in the “Houthi PC small group” concerned the timing and rationale of attacks on the Houthis, and contained remarks by Trump-administration officials about the alleged shortcomings of America’s European allies. But on the day of the attack—Saturday, March 15—the discussion veered toward the operational.

Listen: Jeffrey Goldberg on the group chat that broke the internet

Trump consistently frames policy around ‘fairness,’ trading on American frustration

A long article worth reading.

By Kevin Rector, Staff Writer for the Los Angeles Times

In a sit-down interview with Fox News last month, President Trump and his billionaire “efficiency” advisor Elon Musk framed new tariffs on foreign trading partners as a simple matter of fairness.

“I said, ‘Here’s what we’re going to do: reciprocal. Whatever you charge, I’m charging,’” Trump said of a conversation he’d had with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi. “I’m doing that with every country.”

“It seems fair,” Musk said.

Trump laughed. “It does,” he said.

“It’s like, fair is fair,” said Musk, the world’s richest person.

The moment was one of many in recent months in which Trump and his allies have framed his policy agenda around the concept of fairness — which experts say is a potent political message at a time when many Americans feel thwarted by inflation, high housing costs and other systemic barriers to getting ahead.

“Trump has a good sense for what will resonate with folks, and I think we all have a deep sense of morality — and so we all recognize the importance of fairness,” said Kurt Gray, a psychology professor at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and author of the book “Outraged: Why We Fight About Morality and Politics and How to Find Common Ground.”

“At the end of the day,” Gray said, “we’re always worried about not getting what we deserve.”

In addition to his “Fair and Reciprocal Plan” for tariffs, Trump has cited fairness in his decisions to pull out of the Paris climate agreement, ban transgender athletes from competing in sports, scale back American aid to embattled Ukraine and pardon his supporters who stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

Trump has invoked fairness in meetings with a host of world leaders, including Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba and British Prime Minister Keir Starmer. He has suggested that his crusade to end “diversity, equity and inclusion” programs is all about fairness, couched foreign aid and assistance to undocumented immigrants as unfair to struggling American taxpayers, and attacked the Justice Department, the media and federal judges who have ruled against his administration as harboring unfair biases against him.

Trump and Musk — through his “Department of Government Efficiency,” which is not a U.S. agency — have orchestrated a sweeping attack on the federal workforce largely by framing it as a liberal “deep state” that either works in unfair ways against the best interests of conservative Americans, or doesn’t work at all thanks to lopsided work-from-home allowances.

“It’s unfair to the millions of people in the United States who are, in fact, working hard from job sites and not from their home,” Trump said.

In a Justice Department speech this month, Trump repeatedly complained about the courts treating him and his allies unfairly, and reiterated baseless claims that recent elections have been unfair to him, too.

“We want fairness in the courts. The courts are a big factor. The elections, which were totally rigged, are a big factor,” Trump said. “We have to have honest elections. We have to have borders and we have to have courts and law that’s fair, or we’re not going to have a country.”

Before a meeting with NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte this month, Trump complained — not for the first time — about European countries not paying their “fair share” to defend Ukraine against Russian aggression, and the U.S. paying too much.

“We were treated very unfairly, as we always are by every country,” Trump said.

Almost exclusively, Trump’s invocations of fairness cast him, his supporters or the U.S. as victims, and his critics and political opponents as the architects and defenders of a decidedly unfair status quo that has persisted for generations. And he has repeatedly used that framework to justify actions that he says are aimed at tearing down that status quo — even if it means breaching norms or bucking the law.

Trump has suggested that unfavorable media coverage of him is unfair and therefore “illegal,” and that judges who rule against him are unfair liberal activists who should be impeached.

The politics of feeling heard

Of course, grievance politics are not new — nor is the importance of “fairness” in democratic governance. In 2006, the late Harvard scholar of political behavior Sidney Verba wrote of fairness being important in various political regimes but “especially central in a democracy.”

Verba noted that fairness comes in different forms — including equal rights under the law, equal voice in the political sphere, and policies that result in equal outcomes for people. But the perception of fairness in a political system, he wrote, often comes down to whether people feel heard.

“Democracies are sounder when the reason why some lose does not rest on the fact that they are invisible to those who make decisions,” Verba wrote. “Equal treatment may be unattainable, but equal consideration is a goal worth striving for.”

According to several experts, Trump’s appeal is in part based on his ability to make average people feel heard, regardless of whether his policies actually speak to their needs.

Gray said there is “distributive fairness,” which asks, “Are you getting as much as you deserve?” and “procedural fairness,” which asks, “Are things being decided in a fair way? Did you get voice? Did you get input?”

One of Trump’s skills, Gray said, is using people’s inherent sense that there is a lack of distributive fairness in the country to justify policies that have little to do with such inequities, and to undermine processes that are in place to ensure procedural fairness, such as judicial review, but aren’t producing the outcomes he personally desires.

“What Trump does a good job at is blurring the line between rules you can follow or shouldn’t follow,” he said. “When he disobeys the rules and gets called out, he goes, ‘Well those moral rules are unjust.’”

People who voted for Trump and have legitimate feelings that things are unfair then give him the benefit of the doubt, Gray said, because he appears to be speaking their language — and on their behalf.

“He’s not just saying that it’s him. He’s saying it’s on behalf of the people he’s representing, and the people he’s representing do think things are unfair,” Gray said. “They’re not getting enough in their life, and they’re not getting their due.”

Lawrence Rosenthal, chair of the Center for Right-Wing Studies at UC Berkeley and author of “Empire of Resentment: Populism’s Toxic Embrace of Nationalism,” said Trump and his supporters have built him up as a leader “interested in fixing the unfairness to the working class.”

But that idea is premised on another notion, even more central to Trump’s persona, that there are “enemies” out there — Democrats, coastal elites, immigrants — who are the cause of that unfairness, Rosenthal said.

“He names enemies, and he’s very good at that — as all right-wing authoritarians are,” Rosenthal said.

Such politics are based on a concept known as “replacement theory,” which tells people to fear others because there are only so many resources to go around, Rosenthal said. The theory dovetails with the argument Trump often makes, that undocumented immigrants receiving jobs or benefits is an inherent threat to his MAGA base.

“The sense of dispossession is absolutely fundamental and has been for some time,” Rosenthal said.

John T. Woolley, co-director of the American Presidency Project at UC Santa Barbara, said Trump has “a remarkable capacity for constructing the world in a way that favors him” — even if that’s as the victim — and appears to be an “outlier” among presidents in terms of how often he focuses on fairness as a political motif.

“Certainly since his first term with impeachment, ‘the Russia hoax,’ ‘dishonest media,’ ‘fake news’ and then ‘weaponizing’ of justice — he’s constructed a kind of victim persona, in battle with the deep state, that is now really basic to his interaction with his core MAGA constituency,” Woolley said.

An idea for Democrats

In coming to terms with Trump’s win in November, Democrats have increasingly acknowledged his ability to speak to Americans who feel left behind — and started to pick up on fairness as a motif of their own, in part by zeroing in on mega-billionaire Musk.

In an interview with NPR last month, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) evoked the idea of unfairness in the system by saying American government is working for rich people like Musk, but not for everyone else. “Everything feels increasingly like a scam,” she said.

She and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) have since embarked on a nationwide “Fighting Oligarchy” tour, where they have blasted Musk’s role in government and questioned how his actions, or those of Trump, have helped average Americans in the slightest.

“At the end of the day, the top 1% may have enormous wealth and power, but they are just 1%,” Sanders wrote Friday on X. “When the 99% stand together, we can transform our country.”

Buy Canadian movement starts to take a sizable bite out of U.S. business

A man dressed as U.S. President Donald Trump poses for a photo near the White House in Washington on March 13. MICHAEL A. MCCOY/The New York Times News Service

The surge in patriotism among Canadian shoppers, fuelled by trade tensions with the United States, is already leaving a sizable mark on American business, early data from a variety of industries suggests.

U.S. tour operators are reporting booking declines of as much as 85 per cent, while American distilleries are losing major deals. Meanwhile, Canadian grocers are posting a bump in domestic product sales of up to 10 per cent.

Donald Trump’s jabs about annexation, along with a 25-per-cent levy on steel and aluminum from Canada and the U.S. President’s threats of a 25-per-cent tariff on most Canadian imports have prompted a rallying cry to “Buy Canadian” across this country.

While consumer boycotts – combined with government policy actions – are causing trouble south of the border, concerns are bubbling up about the toll on Canadian businesses, too.

“To use some of the words I hear from tour company members of the National Tour Association, the drop-off is ‘astronomical’ when speaking about Canadians booking group travel to the United States,” said Catherine Prather, president of the Kentucky-based organization, which specializes in group tours.

The exchange rate and fluctuating trade policies have had a “resounding effect” on Canadians’ travel cancellations, she said. But tour operators shared that the rhetoric about making Canada the 51st state is “perhaps even worse,” and in many cases, has been the “deciding factor” for customers.

Traffic across some major border crossings in tourism states such as New York has dropped by 12 per cent in the first two weeks of February alone, said Corey Fram, director at the Thousand Islands International Tourism Council. He cited data provided to him by the Bridge and Tunnel Operators Association for border crossings on the Thousand Islands Bridge between Alexandria Bay, N.Y., and southeastern Ontario.

Statistics Canada data also show that Canadian automobile trips to the U.S. are plummeting. About 1.2 million return trips were made into Canada by Canadians in February – a 23-per-cent drop from that period a year ago.

The U.S. Travel Association warned in February that even a 10 per cent drop in Canadian visitors would lead to more than $2.1-billion in spending losses and a threat to 14,000 jobs.

The Buy Canadian movement is also hitting the grocery aisles. Per Bank, CEO of Canada’s largest food retailer, Loblaw Cos. Ltd., said in February that the company saw about a 10-per-cent uptick in sales for Canadian products in preceding weeks.

Pierre Cléroux, vice-president of research and chief economist at the Business Development Bank of Canada, told The Globe and Mail that if every Canadian household redirected $25 a week from foreign products to Canadian ones, it would boost GDP by 0.7 per cent and create 60,000 jobs.

According to his modelling, if Canadians also cut international travel by 10 per cent and spent that money domestically, the combined effect would raise GDP by 1 per cent and create 74,000 jobs.

Another U.S. industry reeling from the “Buy Canadian” movement and its manifestation in public policy – including provincial moves to take American booze off the shelves – is American distilling.

Canada is a critical market for U.S. spirits, making up “a little over 31 per cent of all U.S. exports” of distilled spirits in 2024, said Stephen Gould, a Colorado-based alcohol trade consultant at Consulting Alchemist Ltd and former distillery owner.

In addition to bourbon, Canada is a crucial market for U.S. whisky and other spirits as well as wine and beer. Bartenders, waitstaff and retail clerks in the U.S. are among those who will face significant layoffs if trade tensions continue, said Mr. Gould.

“The American industry is suffering,” he said.

Victor Yarbrough, co-founder of Brough Brothers,Kentucky’s first Black-owned distillery, said his company was “deeply disappointed” after losing a lucrative deal to sell its bourbon to New Brunswick Liquor due to trade tensions. The deal was projected to increase company sales by 2.55 per cent in 2025.

“Canada’s a large export market for us,” said Mr. Yarbrough. “Let’s figure out ways to move forward and amicably.”

Abridged article from the Canadian Globe and Mail.

Trump Does Not Have Absolute Power

Did Donald Trump have a face to face meeting with Chief Justice John Roberts or was it a telephone call? Either way Trump was apparently told he does not have absolute power over everything.

The consequence was Trump administration reinstated thousands of probationary federal workers. The Trump administration is making the move after several court orders ruled that the firings were not legal.

The decision reinstates at least 24,500 recently fired probationary workers following a pair of orders from federal judges last week that found the terminations pushed by President Donald Trump were illegal.

The reinstatements, spanning 18 departments, are outlined in a filing Monday by the Department of Justice in federal court in Maryland after a judge asked for a report on efforts to reinstate the employees.

The separate declarations from Trump officials within each of the departments offer the most detailed public account yet of the administration’s firing of recently hired or promoted probationary workers as part of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency’s push to drastically cut the federal workforce.

Here are the tallies of recently fired probationary workers, by department, the Trump administration says it is working to reinstate:

Environmental Protection Agency: 419
Department of Energy: 555
Department of Commerce: 791
Department of Homeland Security: 310
Department of Transportation: 775
Department of Education: 65
Department of Housing and Urban Development: 299
Department of Interior: 1,710
Department of Labor: 167
Consumer Financial Protection Bureau: 117
Small Business Administration: 298
Federal Deposit Insurance Corp.: 156
Human Capital and Talen Management: 270
General Services Administration: 366
Treasury Department: 7,613 (including 7,315 IRS employees)
Department of Agriculture: 5,714
Department of Veterans Affairs: 1,683
Department of Health and Human Services: 3,248

Conservatives have a 6-3 advantage on the high court and Trump himself nominated three of the current justices. The court has frequently sided with him in major cases, most notably the decision last year to grant former presidents wide immunity from criminal prosecution for their official actions. But in a series of emergency orders since Trump’s return to the White House, the court has preliminarily ruled against him.

At the same time, Trump appeared especially eager to woo Roberts during his joint address to Congress earlier this month.

Canada and Greenland

Yes, I was born in Canada. My parents moved to the United States when I was 6 months old. As a boy I visited Winnipeg every summer until I was 10 years old to see my grandparents. I have cousins in Winnipeg, Vancouver, and other cities in Canada. I have visited Canada many times as an adult. Toronto and Vancouver are fun places to tour.

That being said, I am concerned about Canada’s future.

It appears Donald Trump is serious about annexing Canada and Greenland. The difference between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin is that Trump wants to accomplish his goals without a war.

Earlier this month, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau publicly said of President Donald Trump, “What he wants is to see a total collapse of the Canadian economy because that’ll make it easier to annex us.”

Trudeau’s accusation was extraordinary and unprecedented. Here was the leader of Canada, one of America’s closest and longest-standing allies, accusing the U.S. president of engaging in economic warfare. More and more, however, it seems Trudeau wasn’t making this argument up. The evidence is piling up that Trump has declared economic war on Canada for the express purpose of making our Northern neighbor the 51st state.

Trump first referred to Canada as the 51st state in a December 2024 meeting with Trudeau. At the time, the Canadian Prime Minister assumed Trump was joking. But then, in January, he said it again publicly, this time threatening the use of “economic force” to pursue annexation. In addition, he began referring to Trudeau as “Governor” rather than “Prime Minister.”

By this point, one could easily chalk this up to Trumpian bluster. He couldn’t possibly be serious about annexing Canada? Could he?

But, two weeks after Trump’s inauguration, a private call between him and Trudeau, which was supposed to be about tariffs, took an odd turn. According to The New York Times, Trump told “Trudeau that he did not believe that the treaty that demarcates the border between the two countries was valid and that he wants to revise the boundary.” He also mentioned revisiting long-standing treaties between the U.S. and Canada regarding the sharing of lakes and rivers.

Even the Canadians were taken aback by Trump’s statement — and it slowly began to dawn on them that perhaps the president was serious (or as serious as one can be about an insane notion like the U.S. annexing Canada).

Publicly, Trump wouldn’t let the matter die. In an interview broadcast before the Super Bowl, on February 9, Trump told Fox News’ Bret Baier his plans to annex Canada were a “real thing.” And to magnify Canada’s economic vulnerability, Trump told reporters that Canada was “not viable as a country” without U.S. trade.

The problem for Canada is that Trump isn’t wrong on this front. Canada is so dependent on cross-border trade that if the U.S. were to turn the screws on The Great White North it could crater Canada’s economy.

In the current context of the emerging trade war between the U.S. and Canada, it seems more than reasonable to believe that this is precisely Trump’s intention.

Consider for a moment how this trade war has unfolded. When Trump first declared his intention to slap tariffs on Canada, he used the smuggling of fentanyl across the Canadian border as a justification (never mind that 19 kilograms of fentanyl came across the Canadian border last year, compared to 9,600 kilograms that crossed the U.S.-Mexico border). After Trudeau reminded Trump of Canada’s plan for slowing the smuggling of fentanyl, which was introduced late last year, he backed down.

But then last week, Trump returned to the trade spat with Canada, but this time blamed Canada because of its protectionist trade policies on dairy, lumber and banking. After Ontario’s premier, Doug Ford, announced a 25% surcharge on electricity exports to Michigan, Minnesota and New York, in response, Trump upped the ante announcing a new 25% tariff on Canada’s exports of steel and aluminum (which is in addition to already planned tariffs on steel and aluminum).

In announcing the new tariffs, Trump didn’t mention fentanyl as a justification, but instead wrote on TruthSocial that “the only thing that makes sense is for Canada to become our cherished Fifty First State. This would make all Tariffs, and everything else, totally disappear.” In a follow-up post, he wondered why the U.S. “allow(s) another Country to supply us with electricity, even for a small area?”

Trump’s zigzagging has left markets and the business community flummoxed. For Canadians, the confusion is even worse. How can they end these trade tensions if the reason Trump is slapping tariffs on their country keeps changing?

But perhaps the obvious answer is staring us in the face, and we’re all too dumbfounded to acknowledge it. Trump has been remarkably consistent in stating that Canada should become America’s 51st state — he has said this repeatedly for months now. Moreover, he has openly espoused using U.S. economic power to achieve that goal — and is doing precisely that.

Just so we’re clear, this is not a Trump-only phenomenon. Yesterday, when asked if the U.S. still considers Canada a “close ally,” White House press secretary Katherine Leavitt said that Canada would “benefit greatly” from joining the United States and pointed to its high cost of living as a reason for surrendering sovereignty.

Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick sounded a similar theme, noting that “Canada is gonna have to work with us to really integrate their economy, and as the president said, they should consider the amazing advantages of being the 51st state.”

In recent days, the Trump administration has further imposed its will on Canada by requiring Canadians who visit the country for more than 30 days to register with the U.S. government.

The first 51 days of Trump’s presidency have been, for lack of a better word, an odyssey. Crazy has been dropped on top of more crazy. But in the year 2025, an American president, with no pushback from his Cabinet or Congress, has declared economic war on our closest neighbor to annex its land (which is larger than America’s) and wants to make its 40 million citizens part of the United States. This is the craziest notion of all.

The first three paragraphs of this posting are my words. The rest of this article was originally published on MSNBC.com

Trump Versus Canada

Donald Trump wants to annex Canada and Greenland. To accomplish that goal without an invasion he is using tariffs. Trump doesn’t want to use the military to obtain his objectives. Vladimir Putin’s effort to annex Ukraine using his military is a message that Trump should not use military force to reach his objectives.

Mr. Trump followed through on a threat at midnight Wednesday to slap 25-per-cent tariffs on aluminum and steel from all countries including Canada, Mexico, South Korea, Australia and Europe. The 27-nation European block joined Canada with retaliatory tariffs of US$28-billion on American goods.

“These tariffs are completely unjustified, unfair and unreasonable,” Canada Finance Minister Dominic LeBlanc told a news conference on Wednesday, warning U.S. protectionist measures will hurt American and Canadian consumers.

U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said the tariffs put in place Wednesday will stay in effect until there is a strong U.S. aluminum and steel industry. That is not a likely scenario.

Ontario premier Mr. Ford on Monday announced a 25-per-cent surcharge on electricity exports to three U.S. states, but suspended it Tuesday after a call with the Commerce Secretary. The Premier said Mr. Lutnick “extended an olive branch” to start a conversation about the future of the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement.

Canadian Foreign Affairs Minister Mélanie Joly said she’ll once again told Mr. Rubio that Canadians are fed up with Mr. Trump’s call for the annexation of Canada. “Everything that has to do with the 51st state rhetoric is unacceptable,” she said.

The President also defended his whipsaw approach to tariffs, after weeks of threats followed by retreats – and then new rounds of levies.

“It’s called flexibility,” he said. “It’s not called inconsistency.”

Will the American congress assert itself? The authoritarian has control for now.

Trump’s push to make Canada the 51st state could backfire on Republicans

Story by Ali Velshi of MSNBC. A 4 min read

Since entering office, President Donald Trump has been ambitious about territorial expansion. Sounding more like Donald the Conqueror, he’s insisted the United States take ownership of the Gaza Strip and the Panama Canal, he’s proposed buying Greenland from Denmark and he’s pitched Canada on joining our union as the 51st state. At his inauguration, Trump took America’s original expansionist slogan and blasted it skyward, “We will pursue our manifest destiny into the stars, launching American astronauts to plant the Stars and Stripes on the planet Mars.”

American history has seen the country grow in size and Betsy Ross’ flag grow in stars but Trump’s ideas ebb between delusions of grandeur and old-fashioned gunboat diplomacy.

There was Trump’s announcement that the United States would “own” Gaza, sending Palestinians to neighboring countries and establishing a “Middle East riviera.” With literally zero specifics laid out by the White House as to how exactly this would happen, this idea has received bipartisan and international condemnation as logistically impossible.

Trump has also set his sights on “seizing back” the Panama Canal, which was signed over to Panama by the late President Jimmy Carter in 1977. Trump has erroneously claimed that China is running the canal, which is actually operated by an independent authority in Panama. A subsidiary of a Hong Kong company runs two of the canal’s ports but doesn’t control access to the canal.

Trump has also floated the idea of purchasing Greenland from Denmark, a concept that, while not new in the grand scheme of American history, stands firmly against the interests of the people of Greenland, whose prime minister has said bluntly, “We want to be Greenlanders.”

Then there’s Canada, the second-largest country by land mass on the planet. It’s also my home country. While I can’t speak for Panamanians or Greenlanders, I do have a suggestion for my fellow Canucks on this:

Trump has offered Canada the chance to become the 51st state, but I say, why stop there? Canada has 41 million people, spread throughout 10 provinces and three territories. So, if Canada were to become part of America, some changes would be in order.

First of all, Congress would have to grow. That would mean Canada, as part of the new America, would net at least 54 seats in the House. For context, the 20 states with the smallest populations have just 46 House seats among them all.

But here’s problem No. 1: This little thing called the Permanent Apportionment Act of 1929. That act mandates that the House is no bigger than 435 members. So, if you did the math, combining Canada’s population with America’s and dividing it by 435, Canada would net 47 seats. Those seats would be taken away from states all over the country. Who’s going to tell voters that Trump gave their congressional representation to a guy in Saskatchewan?

That’s just the House of Representatives. What about the Senate? Trump is only offering for Canada to become one state with two senators. But Canadian provinces, like American states, compete with one another. They aren’t going to be interested in all snuggling up into one state.

Each province would have to be its own U.S. state. So Canada wouldn’t be the 51st state; it would be states 51 through 60, at the very least, meaning Canada would have 20 senators. It would be the largest reorientation of political power in America since women were given the right to vote in 1920.

Trump is specifically asking Canada to join as just one state for that reason. Statehood for Canada would likely swing power away from Republicans. That’s one of the reasons most Republicans have long opposed statehood for Puerto Rico and Washington, D.C. They assume both would become Democratic strongholds, increasing the Democrats’ control in Congress.

If the thought of a couple of senators from Puerto Rico representing people who are already American citizens scares Republicans, I wonder how 20 from the land of maple syrup, Mounties and “Anne of Green Gables” would go over?

While it’s difficult to compare American and Canadian politics directly, we have some sense of how Canadians, or what might come to be known as “Camericans,” might vote:

Canada has a multiparty parliamentary system but in 2003, the conservative parties united under one banner. Since then, the conservatives have received, on average, about 35% of the popular vote in each election. On average, the left-of-conservative parties have received a combined 63% of the popular vote.

Expansion from Canada to the Gulf of America might be a fun idea for Trump … until our nice neighbors up north kick his party oot of office and install a liberal supermajority. And we haven’t even talked about what this would do to the Supreme Court.

Of course, in typical Canadian politeness, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said there’s “not a snowball’s chance in hell” that Canada joins America. But, Canada, if I were you, maybe the chance to take over your noisy neighbor from the inside isn’t the worst idea in the world.

America has Surrendered to a Madman

This column and introductory commentary was forwarded to me. Mike Greenberg of Texas wrote the opening comments. This is exhausting.

I don’t think any US journalist has written as tough (and spot-on) a portrayal of the threat facing us as this Canadian, Andrew Coyne of the Toronto Globe and Mail. If you read to the end, you will be rewarded with the most flattering photograph yet of the convicted-felon-in-chief:

“Nothing mattered, in the end. Not the probable dementia, the unfathomable ignorance, the emotional incontinence; not, certainly, the shambling, hate-filled campaign, or the ludicrously unworkable anti-policies.

The candidate out on bail in four jurisdictions, the convicted fraud artist, the adjudicated rapist and serial sexual predator, the habitual bankrupt, the stooge of Vladimir Putin, the man who tried to overturn the last election and all of his creepy retinue of crooks, ideologues and lunatics: Americans took a long look at all this and said, yes please.

There is no sense in understating the depth of the disaster. This is a crisis like no other in our lifetimes. The government of the United States has been delivered into the hands of a gangster, whose sole purpose in running, besides staying out of jail, is to seek revenge on his enemies. The damage Donald Trump and his nihilist cronies can do – to America, but also to its democratic allies, and to the peace and security of the world – is incalculable. We are living in the time of Nero.

The first six months will be a time of maximum peril. NATO must from this moment be considered effectively obsolete, without the American security guarantee that has always been its bedrock. We may see new incursions by Russia into Europe – the poor Ukrainians are probably done for, but now it is the Baltics and the Poles who must worry – before the Europeans have time to organize an alternative. China may also accelerate its Taiwanese ambitions.

At home, Mr. Trump will be moving swiftly to consolidate his power. Some of this will be institutional – the replacement of tens of thousands of career civil servants with Trumpian loyalists. But some of it will be … atmospheric.

At some point someone – a company whose chief executive has displeased him, a media critic who has gotten under his skin – will find themselves the subject of unwanted attention from the Trump administration. It might not be so crude as a police arrest. It might just be a little regulatory matter, a tax audit, something like that. They will seek the protection of the courts, and find it is not there.

The judges are also Trump loyalists, perhaps, or too scared to confront him. Or they might issue a ruling, and find it has no effect – that the administration has called the basic bluff of liberal democracy: the idea that, in the crunch, people in power agree to be bound by the law, and by its instruments the courts, the same as everyone else. Then everyone will take their cue. Executives will line up to court him. Media organizations, the large ones anyway, will find reasons to be cheerful.

Of course, in reality things will start to fall apart fairly quickly. The huge across-the-board tariffs he imposes will tank the world economy. The massive deficits, fueled by his ill-judged tax policies – he won’t replace the income tax, as he promised, but will fill it with holes – and monetized, at his direction, by the Federal Reserve, will ignite a new round of inflation.

Most of all, the insane project of deporting 12 million undocumented immigrants – finding them, rounding them up and detaining them in hundreds of internment camps around the country, probably for years, before doing so – will consume his administration. But by then it will be too late.

We should not count upon the majority of Americans coming to their senses in any event. They were not able to see Mr. Trump for what he was before: why should that change? Would they not, rather, be further coarsened by the experience of seeing their neighbours dragged off by the police, or the military, further steeled to the necessity of doing “tough things” to “restore order?”

Some won’t, of course. But they will find in time that the democratic levers they might once have pulled to demand change are no longer attached to anything. There are still elections, but the rules have been altered: there are certain obstacles, certain disadvantages if you are not with the party of power. It will seem easier at first to try to change things from within. Then it will be easier not to change things.

All of this will wash over Canada in various ways – some predictable, like the flood of refugees seeking escape from the camps; some less so, like the coarsening of our own politics, the debasement of morals and norms by politicians who have discovered there is no political price to be paid for it. And who will have the backing of their patron in Washington.

All my life I have been an admirer of the United States and its people. But I am frightened of it now, and I am even more frightened of them.”

The only thing standing between democracy and dictatorship in America

Opinion by Thom Hartmann on Alternet https://www.alternet.org/

Trump wants FBI agents who investigated his coup attempt, his facilitating espionage, or his other financial and criminal activities fired.

Let’s be very clear: this is how dictatorships start.

A guy who wants to be a dictator always begins by changing how the government works. Even though the majority of the nation had agreed previously that the government should do certain things in certain ways, he reassures everybody he’s got a better way and it’ll all work out.

In the process, he breaks a bunch of laws, but people mostly shrug because they don’t directly affect them. Pastor Niemöller wrote about this in 1930s Germany; to paraphrase: First they came for the government workers…

Then people start resisting, which is when he begins to use the police power of the state. The people who show up in the streets, the people who speak out in the media, the people who try to fight him in the legislatures and the courts: he figures out ways to get them fired, harassed, and ultimately imprisoned.

When she was being confirmed, Attorney General Pam Bondi refused to say that she would not executed an illegal order on Donald Trump’s behalf. Like if he directed her to investigate somebody who irritated him. Or prosecute somebody who had investigated him. Or imprison — perhaps only temporarily, at first — somebody who has spoken out against him.

We’re there now. Bondi just announced that the political prosecutions are about to begin. At first they will be going after the police agencies themselves, as a way of bringing them to heel: Terrify the terrifiers.

Next will be the Press. First they will use financial terror to force compliance; we’re already seeing that with Trump’s lawsuits against all three major networks and multiple newspapers. That will expand. Eventually it will turn into shutdowns and arrests.

He will remake our schools so they become indoctrination factories for his white, male supremacist worldview and the new authoritarianism.

He will realign our democratic country away from democratic allies and toward countries run by dictators like he aspires to become.

He will purge the military of leadership that might resist him and of troops who might refuse his orders.

He will remake our criminal justice system so it becomes more violent and brutal, opening prisons for “the worst of the worst“ in places beyond the reach of law, like Auschwitz in Poland or Guantánamo in Cuba.

He will remake our media so it becomes a Greek chorus, singing his praises and carrying his every word.

By proclaiming, as every dictator does, that divine providence and the blessings of God put him where he is, he will bring the country‘s largest religious institutions to heel.

He will proclaim grand plans and spectacular efforts, like the Autobahn or remaking Gaza, Greenland, and Panama. They will distract the public from the relentless, grinding destruction of the guardrails of government itself.

He and his allies will empower civilian militias who will then become his terror shock troops against the people who oppose him. Hitler had his Brownshirts; Republicans in Nassau County are right now trying to field America’s first armed private militia.

He will remake commerce and business, so the most successful companies are those that throw money and resources at him. Fritz Tyson wrote a book about this, about his shame at facilitating it, titled I Paid Hitler. Someday, perhaps, Jeff Bezos or Tim Cook will write a similar book.

America today is early in this process, although it doesn’t typically take very long. It took Hitler 53 days. It took Putin about a year. It took Victor Orban about two years. It took Pinochet less than a week, although he had the help of Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger.

Trump and his project 2025 friends, however, have been preparing for this for four years: They hit the ground running.

This moment proves that the preservation of democracy requires constant attention and a collective commitment to uphold the integrity of its institutions.

Right now, though, the only thing standing between democracy and dictatorship in America are public opinion, the media, and the Democratic Party; Republicans have completely caved and the courts move too slowly to stop him.

Elon Musk and Donald Trump seem to think they can pull this off in a matter of weeks, and so far — because of the cowardice of Republican legislators and the disorganization and lack of leadership among Democrats — they may be right.

Unless we all stand up and speak out now.