Making America smaller

Winnipeg Free Press

25-04-2025

Opinion
Fans of the late John Candy might remember a 1995 movie called Canadian Bacon.
In it, an American president devises a scheme to demonize Canada in order to find a scapegoat for the ills of his country and shore up support from a naïve base.
A propaganda campaign follows with references to Canada having a long history of exploiting Americans and being nothing more than a U.S. state. Thirty years later, what was once a silly comedic fiction has become a living reality.
Within a few weeks of taking up his second term as president, the U.S. PresidentDonald Trump declared his desire to seize Greenland, take the Panama Canal, invade Gaza, enfold Canada into his national territory, and threatened 'reciprocal tariffs' that will likely harm the economic wellbeing of hundreds of nations.
All this, he insisted, was to make America great again. But where is the Art of the Deal in any of it?
It is not difficult to see how much Trump's infatuation with power drives his political decisions and the way in which he relates to others.
This was on full display at the Feb. 26 Oval Office news conference when he accused Volodymyr Zelenskyy of ingratitude despite the heartfelt acknowledgments offered by his guest on many prior occasions.
What Trump really wanted was for the Ukrainian president to grovel, to fawn over and kowtow to him, to feed his sense of self-importance in front of the whole world in the same manner delivered by the doting underlings who orbit him.
'You have to be grateful,' POTUS kept repeating. When Zelenskyy declined to demean himself to a degree acceptable by Trump, the latter decided to accomplish that all-important task himself.
The president of the most powerful country in the world was playing to a particular audience, trying to project an image of a leader demanding respect for his people, unaware, it seems, that there is no honour in denigrating the weak.
If America really is the home of the brave, it needs representatives who take this singular distinction a little more seriously.
Trump is fond of reminding us that he is just getting started, so we may continue to expect more of the same theatre.
But what we, the captive audience, see on this unhappy stage is quite different from the narrative peddled by the MAGA crowd. We do not recognize a commanding statesman leading a nation into its rightful place of greatness.
Rather, we see a man who is able to manipulate a large segment of the population he leads into shrugging off deception and accepting contradiction as a virtue.
Under Trumpism, America has become smaller, an unreliable nation that cannot be trusted to uphold agreements or to contribute to a harmonious world order.
The slogan 'Make America Great Again' has transformed into a call to arms against much of the world, and a call for the targeted to defend themselves. We are right, therefore, to waste no more time and turn quickly to our defences.
As Jean Chrétien reminded us at the end of his Liberal Party leadership speech, 'No one will starve us into submission.' To be sure, we may shed a few pounds. If that's the price of our long slumber, so be it.
We shall own our debt and make sure we are never again exposed in the same way. Above all else, let us never, ever compromise our national dignity.
But there must also be a price to pay for our southern neighbours. The world is not what it used to be.
Today, it is an orchestra of interdependent performers. When the cacophony of a hubristic, self-serving solo player bellows out notes of malice, the rest of the ensemble are duty-bound to unite and drown it out.
The lesson the U.S. must learn from its folly has to be clear: America first is America alone.
So much for the art of the deal.
Mazen Guirguis is a professor of philosophy at Kwantlen Polytechnic University in Surrey, B.C