I get it that American administrations lie. I further understand that the president either lies directly or has someone in the administration lie on his behalf. Either way, once the lie is spoken and the policy of the administration acts in accordance with the fabrication, then the president should own the mendacity.
At least ideally there should be ownership. The outcome of that ownership depends on what the ideals may be, and how warmly a particular president embraces those ideals.
But, even before the supreme court granted Godlike immunity to the current president there were plenty of examples of presidential bullshit that guided or justified American policy, with little or no consequence for said bullshit. At least for the president. There were plenty of consequences for lots of other people that weren’t the president.
Except Watergate and maybe Bill’s blowjobs. Although when you’re measuring consequence it’s important to remember that Billy and Donnie were saved by the senate, so the actual impeachment amounted to fuck all, and tricky Dick got pardoned and took an early retirement.
But if we exclude Watergate and the semantics of defining sexual relations, there are a decent list of POTUS prevarications that were basically ignored, dismissed and then forgotten.
The Gulf of Tonkin, the Maine explosion, Iran Contra, Iraq weapons of mass destruction, bombing Cambodia, read my lips, no new taxes, Polk and the Mexican American war, Eisenhower and Gary Power, and Truman declaring that Hiroshima was a vital military target as just a few notable examples. And of course let us not forget to add to the list pretty much everything that escapes Don’s lips.
I understand that protecting a democracy has a unique challenge. There is an adversarial disadvantage when dealing with dictators and regimes that have a different set of rules as far as honesty and public disclosure are concerned. Russia, China and Iran for example have different rules of engagement. Their boss men can lie with impunity and there’s no immediate consequence. Eventually if they lie badly enough then some of them end up banished at best, or dirt napped at worst. But it’s actually pretty amazing how long they can hang around once they control the military, the courts and some version of death squad secret police that disappear their critics. ICE on steroids have helped keep Putin in the Kremlin for 26 years, and we’re looking at three generations of North Korean Kim’s as a couple of current examples.
Project 2025 has taken note.
But the Orange man is old, so it’s debateable if he’s going to be able to subjugate the courts and the cops in time to have wee Donnie and Baron secured as his successors to the American throne. The Kim Jong Un, deux and trois formula doesn’t look like its in the cards for the Don’s. If that somehow occurs I suggest the Trump family adopt a North Korean name style and add a g to become Dong’s.
It kind of works I think.
However, it seems to me there’s a line of deception that all American presidents have to deal with. That line is deciding if they believe a misrepresentation of truth serves the overall interests of the nation, or if the lies serve the interests of the president.
Or oil companies and defence contractors.
To complicate matters further, this line is interpretative and deciding whether to cross it or not is dependant on the political and personal philosophies of a particular president. Sometimes in order to achieve a policy goal it’s necessary to conceal certain details, and sometimes it’s necessary to stand at a podium and straight up spew bullshit. An end that justifies the means scenario. Or to put it more plainly, an assumption that the American people will like an outcome of some underhanded shit, but not be thrilled about the underhanded shit itself.
But Mr. Trump is very different from his predecessors in many regards. If we stick with lying as an example, I think it’s safe to say that past presidents lied on occasion while Donald lies in very nearly every occasion. Without fail and without effort, consequence, concern or conscience.
After enough examples of this behaviour are provided, how then does a reasonable person or country believe anything he says?
By our nature I believe that people seek truth. So Canada and it’s leadership are left with a new American dilemma. We need to understand a few basic truths about 2026 America, and your president is shall we say, unreliable. So we have three alternatives. We look for other Americans who we think are being honest, and then we determine if they have any power to project that honesty into policy. Our second option is to guess what the fuck Don may do every time an American policy decision is required.
Guessing sucks when we’re talking about trading and defence partners, and so there’s option three. We eliminate the guesswork entirely and chart a path that excludes America. This path is not optimal for many reasons. Proximity for starters, but there’s also a history of cooperation and cross border kinship that we need to discard first in spirit, and then in reality.
And it fucking sucks.
It’s good to expand our relationships with Europe and Asia, but it I can’t shake the sense that losing a neighbor that speaks our language and that we could trust, is a tragedy that is going to take years to fully understand and evaluate.
The decision to go this route is at it’s core because we no longer know who to believe when Americans express themselves. So we’ve taken a logic path that see’s us drawing the easiest conclusions first. Easiest in this case means identifying who not to believe. The process is challenging though because although the current administration is setting bullshit records that I don’t think will ever be eclipsed, there are examples of aggressive and punitive policies directed at Canadians that we’ve learned to believe. The bullshit part is the justification for the policies, but the results are in our face and entirely believable.
Like tariffs and withdrawal of defence pacts.
So I think what Canada has decided is that any policy from the Trump administration aimed at Canada is indeed aimed. Like a weapon designed to cause harm. At this point the reasons for the weaponization are something to debate in a political science class, or maybe a psychology course, and we can have those discussions at our leisure.
But right at this moment I really think most Canadians have accepted that America is primarily an adversary. This has caused a shift in our national belief system. What we thought a few short years ago as unbelievable from the United States is now entirely in the realm of believable.
And we have no choice except to structure our entire country to deal with this new reality. So, to borrow an often quoted line.
Fucking unbelievable, which translated means entirely believable but astonishing in a shitty kind of way way.