There have been significant elections in His Majesty's three senior realms this last week, and a significant post-election development in Europe, too. I'll get to most of them tomorrow, but for now I'd like to focus a little more narrowly:
Today is the semi-anniversary of Trump's victory on November 5th 2024. It doesn't seem like six months ago, not to me. In the worthless federal courts, the executive branch is stymied by some rinky-dink district judge every time it makes a serious attempt to get moving the core agenda the President was elected on by the American people. Meanwhile, over in the allegedly Republican Congress, the so-called legislative branch doesn't seem keen to do any meaningful legislating. Gee, it's almost like Thune and Johnson are just this season's McConnell and Ryan.
Next year it's the midterm elections, when the incumbent president's party usually loses seats to the opposition: see 2022, 2018, 2014, 2010, 2006... True, in the 2002 midterms the Republicans made gains in both houses. But that was the exception that proves the rule - and so rare that it hadn't happened since 1934. Not to mention that it occurred in the immediate shadow of 9/11.
Having pulled off his Grover Cleveland routine in the face of lawsuits without end and near fatal Secret Service incompetence, Trump is getting used to doing things smaller men can't. So he could in theory buck the all but inviolable midterm rule. But, if he doesn't, he's got little more than another six months to get his core policies passed into law. After Christmas, Thune/Johnson and the rest of the do-nothing GOP Congress will be even less cooperative and increasingly focused on their own re-election campaigns.
The forty-seventh president surely understands this. So here he is on "Meet the Press" yesterday:
Trump's full comments on Canada on Meet the Press.
— Brian Lilley (@brianlilley) May 4, 2025
Says he will talk 51st state with Carney, asked about needing military force to annex Canada. pic.twitter.com/8jWmCc8P5c
So now we have serious commentators gaming out the pros and cons of war with Canada. What started out as a mildly amusing bit of presidential "trolling" is now being discussed as next year's Donbass.
If, for the purposes of argument, one accepts the President's line that a trade imbalance constitutes an American "subsidy" justifying annexation of that country, then the US is going to have to annex most of the planet: last year Washington had a one-and-a-quarter trillion-dollar imbalance with the world. It's not hard to figure out why: over recent decades the uniparty turned a country that used to make things into a crappy low-wage service economy. For an example of the Conservative Inc thinking that brought us to this point, see National Review's 2004 cover story on Walmart:
The New Colossus
Wal-Mart is America's store
...if by "America's store", you mean everything is made in China, and Americans get to be the "greeters". The US now has trade imbalances with - or "subsidies" of - not only the countries that you'd expect (China, Mexico, Germany, Japan, India) but a lot of ones you wouldn't (Finland, Algeria).
True, Canada is closer than Algeria, so there are national-security implications for Washington: the country and its politicians (Trudeau, Carney) have been entirely hollowed out by Peking, but then so it goes south of the border (Biden, McConnell). And Trump's plan for a "fifty-first state" will not solve that problem.
The "fifty-first state" shtick can't ever have been serious, can it? Geographically, the fifty-first state would be bigger than the other fifty combined, and with a bigger population than California's. Last time they added stars to the flag, both parties got something out of it: the GOP Alaska and the Dems Hawaii. So wouldn't it make more sense to make Canada's ten provinces and three territories a baker's dozen of new American states with a couple of senators apiece? Yeah, sure - if you want Republicans never to win a national election again.
So, aside from last week's vote, how is the other side reacting? Last Thursday's print edition of The Spectator contained a curiously phrased squib from my old editor, Charles Moore:
The President may be only hazily aware that the King, of whom, he says, he has the 'honour to be a friend', is also King of Canada. If, as seems likely, the King follows his mother's twice-used precedent and opens the new Canadian parliament in person, Trump may come to see that his next-door neighbour is part of a long-standing, legitimate order which Canadian voters are happy to endorse.
Let's just run that again:
If, as seems likely, the King follows his mother's twice-used precedent and opens the new Canadian parliament in person...
The last time his mother opened Parliament in Ottawa was in 1977 - her Silver Jubilee year. Trudeau-wise, Justin's father Pierre was not keen on it, but didn't feel he could pick and win a fight with the Palace over it. A quarter-century later, Trudeau's successor Jean Chrétien, a towering colossus of micro-pettiness, was annoyed at being given a crappy seat at the Queen Mum's funeral and so scuttled Her Majesty's Golden Jubilee throne speech.
So why would Charles Moore think it "likely" that the King would be opening Parliament in Ottawa later this month? If, as it was in my day, Speccie columns for Thursday's magazine have to be filed on Tuesday, that would make Moore the first guy in either the Canadian or UK media to know what was not revealed to the world until Friday:
The King has travelled far less in the first three years of his reign than his mother did: shortly after her Coronation, the Queen set off on a tour of parts of the Commonwealth that kept her away from London for six months. Her son can't do that because he's very sick with cancer. So it's quite something that he'll land in Ottawa on Monday May 26th, deliver the throne speech the following day, and then fly out again. Carney wouldn't be doing this if he weren't going to take the opportunity to put his view of Canadian sovereignty into the Sovereign's mouth.
So, if Trump really has the "honour to be a friend" of the King, the only point of this 24-hour flying visit is so His Majesty can send the message that friends don't let friends threaten to steal each other's countries. In fact, he has made a point of referring to himself as "King of Canada" quite a bit of late. Here he is just last month, as only the fourth non-Italian to address that country's parliament:
The "King of Canada" bit was done at the instigation of Carney. Which is odd. Especially from a party that has spent half-a-century diminishing and degrading the Crown, and for a monarch who is, unlike his mother, largely unloved and unloveable. Yet Carney seems belatedly to have come around to the old-school monarchist view that, without the Sovereign, there is insufficient to distinguish Canada from its domineering southern neighbour - especially when that neighbour keeps talking about taking it. On the other hand, both the King and his Canadian prime minister are bigtime players at the World Economic Forum, so they're not the most obvious choice for defenders of national sovereignty. On the other other hand, it's one thing to surrender it to fellow globalists, quite another to surrender it to Donald Trump.
I have no idea where this is headed, and if anyone can enlighten me I'd be happy to hear it. But Trump has doubled down on it, and Carney is playing the King card to oppose it. As longtime readers know, I have a general preference for smaller nations as happier homes for their people. If Alberta or Quebec voted to secede, why would you take the trouble to do that just to become a minor and inconsequential part of another big country?
But, that aside, why would it be in America's interest to absorb a hostile population of mostly lefties over a vast and unpoliceable landmass? The history of the last thirty years is that China has shown there are subtler ways of taking over the world without firing a shot, while America has persisted in doing it the old-fashioned way and, in Iraq, Afghanistan, Ukraine and elsewhere, has gotten nowhere. Why add Canada to the list?
~We had a very busy weekend at SteynOnline, starting with Mark's column on how following Fauci's Covid regime can now cost you your kids. Saturday brought a first-birthday edition of Steyn's weekend music show, and Rick McGinnis's movie pick - The Battle of Britain. As part of The Mark Steyn Club's eighth birthday observances, Mark presented a classical cavalcade of music from Tales for Our Time. And our marquee presentation was a brand new Tale: Three Men on the Bummel by Jerome K Jerome. Click for Part One, Part Two and Part Three. Part Four airs tonight at SteynOnline.
If you were too busy threatening to make America the eleventh province, we hope you'll want to check out one or three of the foregoing as a new week begins.
