Old man yells at cloud - Shawn's Sense with Shawn Loughlin

The media - hey, some of my best friends are reporters - seems hellbent on doing whatever it can to stoke the flames of conflict between the United States - President Donald Trump and his Führer-worshipping goons - and Canadians. This was on display in Davos, Switzerland last week as the World Economic Forum held its annual meeting.

 

There, Prime Minister Mark Carney made a speech that will echo in Canadian halls for years to come; heralded by many in attendance and back at home as the speech of the event. Trump, half-asleep, rambled through lies and accusations, as he is wont to do, and dropped a pointed bit of trash at Carney, urging him to “remember” that “Canada only lives because of the United States”. He also called the Prime Minister - and us, I suppose - ungrateful.

 

This statement - and the reaction to it - made headlines everywhere just minutes after it was uttered by Trump. It came after Trump posted an A.I.-generated photo of himself talking to the European leaders in front of a map of the western hemisphere covered in American flags - yes, that includes Canada and Greenland. After that act of juvenility, similar stories were published, garnering reactions from anyone who would answer about Trump’s latest fit. 

 

As a proud Canadian and as someone who hates Trump with the fiery passion of 1,000 suns, these kinds of digs do annoy me. But in a way that is rather insignificant when I think about how annoyed I was when his second term began and his “51st state” talk started.

 

Trump has insulted this country, its people and its very values and way of life in ways that are impossible to come back from; impossible to forget. So, when he says things like he has in the past week, I can’t muster up the anger. What he says matters not. He has said all he’s ever had to say to insult us all so deeply and he has shown that, with the energy of a rambling toddler, that he’ll never stop. Getting worked up over every one of them is a fool’s errand.

 

He’s said he needs nothing from Canada. He’s said that NATO has given him nothing. (The one and only time NATO’s Article 5 has been invoked is after 9/11 when everyone came to the United States’ aid once the country was attacked after years of playing world police. Ask the families of the 158 Canadians who died in Afghanistan what they think our country gave for the United States. That also elides all of the other times that Canadians have stood shoulder-to-shoulder with Americans, helping as we always do.) He has repeatedly talked us down and propped up his decaying country. But, at international events like the one in Davos last week, world leaders are too smart and well-travelled to believe his lies at face value. He is slowly realizing that, outside of the echo chamber he’s created in his own country with the core supporters who are determined to go down with his ship, he is loathed, mocked and not taken very seriously.

 

So, unless he’s announcing plans to invade a country (maybe ours), I have very little interest in what he has to say. It’s all lowest-common-denominator garbage aimed at his uneducated, white supremacist voter base. The rift Trump has opened between our two countries is unforgivable and won’t be easy to mend.

 

I started this column last week, returning to it earlier this week to finish it and, in that time, Trump had another fit, lashing out at Carney and reverting to calling him “Governor”. That barb had been reserved for Justin Trudeau, but he’s breathed new life into it. When asked, Carney laughed it off, saying he would not be responding to every single Truth Social post the President makes. We should all be so wise.