The longest undefended border in the world has a new and insurmountable wall running the entire length of its extent, from sea to shining sea, a barrier as real as it is imaginary. For Canadians, the constant recipients of Donald Trump’s lurid attempts to be press-ganged into becoming the 51st state, there is no longer any need for American border control at the many crossings into the United States. The border is now self-controlled and self-policed, with virtually the entire population of America’s peaceful neighbor to the north, my homeland, agreeing that crossing over to America is not just taboo — it’s a kind of betrayal, even borderline treasonous.
For decades, the greatest cross-border threats to Canada have come from the south: guns, drugs, weak beer, idiotic wars, reactionary politics, reality TV, idiotic wars, and now epically stupid tariffs and the deranged lunge for annexation. For Americans, Canada has always been a place of refuge — for loyalists fleeing the Revolutionary War and slaves in the Civil War, to draft dodgers during the Vietnam War and women in the all-too-real fictional gender war of The Handmaid’s Tale. It has also been the butt of lame jokes — an easy source of mockery, yin to the Yankee yang, universal health care and social justice to America’s “we’re all going to die” nihilism. A quiet and politely passive neighbor, prospering under a mutually beneficial trade agreement negotiated by Trump in his first term, Canada has long been taken for granted, to the extent its existence is even noticed at all.
Former Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, father of the recently replaced prime minister Justin, once said that living next door to the United States was like sleeping with an elephant — every twitch and twinge can be felt. But what about trying to exist next to an angry, irrational, vengeful orangutan on a rampage, a tariff-imposing, grudge-holding mob boss with a Nero-strength case of narcissism, who seems intent making himself a Mount Rushmore-worthy historical figure, or failing that, a dictator — even as he turns himself and increasingly America into a laughingstock?
AS A SELF-DESCRIBED mastermind marketer and salesman, Donald Trump has always placed a supreme premium on the value of his brand, claiming it alone is worth billions — ascribing the greatest part of his invented net worth to the intangible monetary appeal of his P. T. Barnum carnival act. As president, Trump has enriched himself and his grifter children with corrupt crypto and creepo businesses, with his family demanding the construction of a Trump-branded golf course for peasants to play on the rice paddies of Vietnam as their latest extortion racket, along the way plunging the concept of graft to a new low — perhaps even rivaling his hero Vladimir Putin.
But Trump is also the steward of the most valuable brand in human history: the United States. Instead of Trump’s paltry few billion, the brand of America is worth trillions upon trillions, an incalculable value proposition that is undergoing the most radical relaunch since New Coke in the 1980s.
A Manhattan advertising executive for a global agency once hired to promote “Brand USA” during the Obama years tells me that the approach used then was simple and effective: democracy, independence, freedom. The key phrases now, he says, are capitalism and culture — but that is putting the best possible spin on what’s really happening to America’s global reputation.
“The world is in denial about what’s really going on in America,” the executive says. “The election was a mirror reflecting America back to itself — the election is who America really is right now — and that is frustrated young white dudes who are angry at the world.”
For Canadians intent on boycotting American-made goods and services in favor of Canadian content, as a reaction to Trump’s frontal assault on its economy and sovereignty, there is still a humorous element to the undeniable crack-like attraction of American culture. A recent comedy sketch from the CBC show This Hour Has Twenty-Two Minutes titled “Canadians Anonymous,” illustrates the point, as addled hosers admit that they can’t get enough Yankee three-ply toilet paper from Walmart, let alone swap Diet Pepsi for generic Canadian diet cola. As the mortified Canadians sit in a circle of trust, confessing to their relapses buying American products like dry drunks in an AA meeting, they share the strange love-hate relationship between the two countries — a longing felt exclusively, it seems, by America’s northern neighbor.
“Now, who wants to get drunk?” the sponsor asks as the group session ends.
“Me,” comes the instant reply. “I can’t be sober during this trade war.”
The star of This Hour is Mark Critch, a Newfoundlander, a peculiar subspecies of Canadian with a mid-Atlantic brogue and a wicked sense of humor — not the kind of comedy that travels to America in the milquetoast guise of Mike Myers or Jim Carrey, with Canadians passing as Americans. Critch is a specific kind of celebrity — world-famous all-over Canada, you might say — who creates comedy for Canadians, without having to pander in search of the supposed big time.
“When I order a Manhattan in a bar in Toronto now I get the instant judgy eye,” Critch tells me. “Like it’s the most horrible thing.”
Critch likens Trump to a toxic boyfriend negging Canada, a form of gaslighting that has the predator president claiming that America doesn’t need Canada’s lumber or steel or boundless fresh water — when of course the opposite is true. Ironically, Trump’s constant attempt to neg Canada has only developed an historically unprecedented positive form of patriotism, from urban hipster leftists to redneck prairie farmers insulted by the bullying and repulsive lechery for Canada’s own priceless resources — natural, national, intellectual, historical, but above all civilizational. For generations, Canadians have defined themselves largely as not being American, a counterpoint form of identity that seemed to lack its own driving force, until Trump came along. Now, not being American has taken on an entirely new significance — a national characteristic that is both exceptional and the envy of the world.
A LITTLE APPRECIATED aspect of the self-generated reality of the con artist is that they need to surround themselves with people stupid or craven enough to go along with their scams. The same is true for Trump, just on an epic level, with the halfwitted J.D. Vance and fake tough guy Don Jr. leading the charge, along with wide-eyed maniacs like Peter Navarro, Stephen Miller, and Kash Patel, as the new brand ambassadors for the United States. Then there are those who are wise to the con, but who believe it’s profitable to go along with the Big Lie while it lasts — like Elon Musk, depending on the level of ketamine in his system measured against his naked, corrupt self interest and sadistic impulses. Together, as the con artist preys upon the gullibility of his followers, promising fantasies that are literally too good to be true, they are enveloped by the giddy sense that if the lies are big enough the bullshit might actually come true.
But the result is that the loneliest man in every room is the con man surrounded by idiots — particularly because he is frequently his own victim, convinced by his own lies, isolating himself from his own tenuous grasp on reality. The new prime minister of Canada appears aware of this context — and the dire threat to Canada’s national interest Trump represents. Sitting with Trump in the White House, as poised as any Goldman Sachs banker — because he was one — freshly elected Prime Minister Mark Carney is the kind of sophisticated financial figure who routinely refused to do business with the failed businessman Trump, and for very good reason. Carney is a true plutocrat, fluent in the language of Wall Street and global commerce in a way that Trump can only dream of. As Carney sits politely listening to a torrent of Trump’s lies, he effortlessly deploys the arcane argot of the global elite, offering a “step change” in the trade agreement between the two countries, for example, as Trump leans forward in an odd form of deference wondering what precisely fancy words like “step change” might actually mean — an illustration of the Canadian leader’s mastery of America’s worst and most ridiculous excesses.
“Carney gives Trump the opportunity to not look stupid,” the comedian Critch tells me. “Carney can explain things to him. Carney has dealt with every kind of bullshit developer like Trump. They recognize something in each other.”
So it is that Trump lives inside a kind of Potemkin village, the fake model settlements 19th century Russians courtiers built to hide the truth about the poverty and suffering of the peasants from the clueless tyrannical Tsar. Only in Trump’s case, the entire world is his ornate Potemkin snow globe, a kind of inverted psychedelic trip where Trump is never wrong and foreigners pay tariffs — not American consumers. Inside this bubble, Trump is respected and admired and worshipped — not ridiculed and loathed. In this alternate reality, with Trump’s acolytes urging on his worst instincts, he continues to insist that Canada will become the 51st state, despite the nearly universal disgust and contempt the president engenders in Canada.
“The Canada stuff started as a joke, and I suppose it still is a joke,” Critch sighs. “But the world is starting to realize there is no plan.”
For Carney, having a plan always beats having no plan, as he said repeatedly during his successful electoral campaign. Like most every world leader — many eagerly watching Carney to see how it’s done — Carney’s plan is to not rile Trump, thus not poking the bear, at least in theory. But behind the polite deference, Canada is furiously building a future that looks beyond America to trade across the country’s provinces, with internal commercial barriers disappearing, along with new treaties with Europe and Asia; like the rest of the western world, Canada is frantically preparing for a post-America order, the aftermath of the decline and fall of an empire at the hyper-speed of the digital age.
THE WORD “CANADA” is derived from the Iroquois word for a collection of villages, an apt metaphor for a society defined by diversity and contradictions and multiplicity. There are countless complexities to Canadian politics, like the fact that the French-speaking separatist movement in Quebec likely saved the country in the past election by voting for Mark Carney’s federalist Liberal party, while a rump of hard-right prairie MAGA-wannabes have now set out to separate from the country. In the same way that Americans quake in fear at so-called “polar vortex” storm fronts that Canadians simply call “winter,” there is a word the folks north of the border use for resolving seemingly intractable problems, without resorting to fascism or assaults on sanity and fundamental human decency: “democracy.”
Just below the surface for Canadians, rarely mentioned, is the shocking and painful realization that virtually no one in America has defended the country and the centuries-long alliance — at least not until the economic pain started to be felt. Despite the unhinged attacks, Trump’s approval rating remains relatively high, with many Americans apparently more than happy to toss aside generations of cooperation — displaying the appallingly flimsy roots of the relationship with Canada. Another of the most difficult facts to swallow for Canadians is also the biggest reality of them all: Trump’s attack on diversity, equity, and inclusion is an assault on the most basic values of Canadian society. Canada is a nation built on immigrants, as is America, and it’s also a society that is facing a demographic catastrophe without the influx of immigrants creating a new kind of society and nation. Through a policy of multicultural toleration and even celebration of difference, Canada is becoming a post-national nation, as former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau noted in an interview with me more than a decade ago — a notion that has been mocked by Trump and America’s extremist nationalists, but that is the only plausible way forward for a species sharing a fragile, warming, and shrinking planet.
THE BORDER CROSSING north of Watertown, New York, usually has hundreds of cars lined up on both sides of the frontier on Memorial Day weekend, the traditional start to the summer. This year there were no cars waiting on the Canadian side to cross into the United States, despite the onset of the tourist season. Not a few cars or a slow day: only the one driven by my kids returning from a semester in university in Canada.
The statistics about declining tourism revenue in America aren’t simply numbers: This is a cultural and patriotic and civilizational transformation, a fact that MAGA extremists delight in, but that will only further isolate America in Trump’s chaotic, delusional, and cowering country. Canadians love America, truth be told, but not at the price of their dignity and independence and self-respect. The half-filled state fairs in Minnesota and the condos for sale in Florida and the struggling Maine hotels are a sign of a troubling change for relations between the countries, but on a deeper level they represent the fact that the two countries are really parting ways.
As seen from the far side of the 49th parallel, America doesn’t seem to be turning its back on Canada, so much as it is turning its back on itself — its history and Constitution, the world, the future. To Canadians, America is freefalling into an abyss where even freedom of speech is becoming a questionable right. Consider this: Possessing the magazine you’re reading — in print, on your electronic device — could now easily constitute a crime at the border crossing into America from Canada, if you possess the wrong nationality or passport or skin color or religion or immigration status. As Canadians are discovering on the frontier to the United States, all it takes is for an American border patrol officer to confiscate your belongings and search for any expression that is objectionable to the Trump regime — whatever the Dear Leader says that means on any given day, a category that might easily include Rolling Stone.
Cross into Canada at the same frontier, over the majestic Thousand Islands Bridge spanning the blue waters of the St. Lawrence River, and you, dear reader, can find yourself on the far side of the only actual wall Donald Trump has ever successfully constructed, in a land that is not seized by the pathetic rage and self-pity of a sad old man — in the true north, strong and free.
