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]]>So in 2024 with the Supreme Court ruling that a President while in office is above the law, the guardrails that can keep Trump from decisions with extreme consequences no longer exist. Trump unleashed is already showing what a malignant narcissist is capable of doing.
What characterizes a malignant narcissist? It is a long list. Can you recognize any of these traits in Trump?
The definition of malignant narcissism also includes a reference to these behaviours starting before the age of 15. Mary Trump, his niece, has described the Trump family dynamics. She has described her grandfather and Donald’s father, Fred Trump, as a “high-functioning sociopath.” It appears the nut has not fallen far from the tree.
On January 23, 2025, via teleconference, Trump spoke to attendees at The World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. Besides bragging about his unprecedented win and mandate, none of that being true, he claimed that free speech and democracy in America had been restored.
Then he began to attack the European Union which he claimed had treated the United States “very, very unfairly, very badly.” He described the EU policies as “noneconomic or nonmonetary tariffs” that blocked America from doing business in Europe. He claimed the U.S. had “hundreds of billions of dollars of deficits with the EU” and that American high-tech companies like Apple, Google and Facebook were being discriminated against with EU regulators charging them “billions and billions” in fees. This was hardly friendly.
Trump saved more enmity for Canada. He described the trade imbalance of goods and services between the two countries as Canada ripping off the U.S. to the tune of between $200 to $250 billion. This was more than twice as big a number as he had used in previous speeches. He then told the Davos audience about his offer to Canada’s Prime Minister. Here is the quote:
“You can always become a state, and if you’re a state, we won’t have a deficit. we won’t have to tariff you, et cetera.”
Why would he want Canada? His speech indicated that the U.S. doesn’t need cars made in Canada, lumber from Canadian forests, and oil and gas from Canadian producers. Why then would absorbing Canada have any value? Think Manifest Destiny and “Make America Great,” all in one and the image it portrays of the fantasist leading it all.
Trump turned his spleen on Mexico and then others in his Davos speech stating “There’s hardly a nation in the world” that hasn’t taken advantage of the U.S. He is describing the world’s most powerful country with the largest economy as a victim. Talk about fantasy!
Is this tirade for real a Trumpian invention? Should Canada consider this level of vitriol from America as a threat to its existence? Canada has felt American Manifest Destiny before during the American Revolution and the War of 1812. Is this latest Trump manifestation an equal threat? Trump has stated he only wants to apply economic pressure on Canada to lay the seeds for a future merger between the two countries with the inconvenient and artificial 49th parallel boundary erased.
Doesn’t Trump know that today, Canada and the U.S. couldn’t be more integrated? The countries have a shared economy beginning with the St. Lawrence Seaway Agreement in 1954 and the Auto Pact in 1965. Both have bound the countries’ economies together.
The Seaway made the Great Lakes a common ground for trade and development. The Auto Pact integrated the Canadian and U.S. automotive industry removing tariffs from parts and equipment coming across the border. Cars built on both sides of the border share parts.
Both agreements have been preserved in NAFTA and the USMCA. Now Trump is upending all of it with a 25% tariff on trade between the countries to be imposed beginning on February 1, 2025, or so he muses.
Is this Trump the bully, the malignant narcissist who acts with no remorse or accountability, or is it evidence of a person who believes he can act outside of common conventions, social norms and laws because they don’t apply to him? What has begun as a war of words may on February 1 unlock a tariff war, and may eventually lead to outright hostilities.
Consider this. The President just pardoned the Oath Keepers and Proud Boy militia members who stormed the Capitol Building on January 6, 2021, to stop the transfer of power from a defeated Trump to his successor, Joe Biden.
Now pardoned are these militias a private goon army that Trump can wield against enemies both domestic and foreign? In 1865, it was Irish-born Americans serving in the Union army who called themselves Fenians and raided Canada to try and incite a war to annex British North America before Canada came into existence. In 2025, 160 years later will it be Oath Keepers and Proud Boys playing a similar role, serving their leader Trump and disrupting the peace between Canada and the U.S. that has remained in place since the Treaty of Ghent signed 210 years ago?
As I read the Davos speech, I noticed that Greenland wasn’t mentioned, nor the Panama Canal. Maybe, Trump didn’t want to appear to EU attendees as threatening the sovereignty of one of its members, Denmark. For Canada, however, Trump’s musings about acquiring Greenland either by purchase or force and making “America Great Again” with references to its Manifest Destiny, looks like a first step in creating a single North American nation stretching from the Rio Grande to the North Pole. When you look at the world map, it appears that America would be carrying out a policy of containment against an ally, Canada, rather than against perceived enemies like it has done in the past with the Soviet Union and China.
Trump called climate change a scam and hoax in his speech. He announced he had pulled the U.S. out of UN climate agreements. He called for NATO members to raise defence spending to 5% of GDP, 250% larger than what is currently in place. He told the Davos audience that his win in November was “the most consequential election victory in 129 years.” He may have been talking about domestic consequences but the entire world will feel these results.
In giving Trump this mandate, the American people have let loose a malignant narcissist and megalomaniac to wield the economic and military clout of the United States on other nations. We have not seen anyone like him since the Western democracies allied to fight the common threat from another megalomaniac in World War II. Unfortunately, in this case, the malignant narcissist and megalomaniac is supposed to be on our side.
From this side of the American border, it is hard to imagine what the next four years will bring. What will be the state of my country, Canada, and the rest of the world with Trump as U.S. President?
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]]>The post Trump’s Pitch for Greenland and Canada Is Not Unprecedented When You Look At Colonialism appeared first on Techso Mogro.
]]>The modern geopolitical world is one largely drawn by Europe’s foray into colonialism from the 15th century to the end of the Second World War. The United States, Canada, and Greenland are all constructs of the European colonial expansion that began late in the 15th century.
An article in Vox in 2015 included a map that I have reproduced below. It showed the extent of Europe’s colonial influence on the modern geopolitical world.
The 16th century absorbed the Americas. The 17th century began the expansion of European influence into Australasia. The 18th and 19th conquered Africa. Very little remained that was not subjugated through Europe’s colonial project.
Only after two world wars did Europe’s colonial experiment ebb and eventually collapse. The legacy, however, lives on in the existing boundaries of nations in Africa, the Americas and Australasia.
Boundaries drawn by European conquest bear little resemblance to the cultural, tribal and ethnic diversity in those areas of the world before European countries claimed them as colonial property.
Here are two examples of just how different the map of the world could be without Europe’s colonial conquests.
What would Africa’s geopolitical map look like if European colonialism never happened? The map below comes from the African Research Educational Consult, a research organization focused on studying Africa through a decolonizing lens. It looks far different from the Africa we see today.
The Americas where Trump wants to redraw maps based on his unique interpretation of history would look far different if Europeans had never arrived. The map that appears below could represent what would have been a geopolitical representation of North and South America without European influence.
Donald Trump has a different North America in mind compared to the one seen in the map above.
What is behind his desire to acquire new real estate for the United States?
Is it his affinity for acquiring property, a distraction to keep those who oppose his ideas off balance, or a salve to feed his colossal ego?
There are some strategic, economic and geopolitical advantages to a North American+Greenland union led by the United States. These include:
Trump currently has no plans to acquire Mexico, just the Panama Canal. Why? The U.S. gave it away to the country in which it resides under President Jimmy Carter and Trump wants it back because he doesn’t like the tolls being charged to American shipping.
What I don’t understand is why just grab the canal back when Trump could solve the illegal immigration and drug trafficking problem across the southern border by annexing Mexico and the remainder of Central America creating a North American union that would fulfill a neo-colonialist Manifest Destiny dream.
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