Trump’s ‘war’ on Canada, as waged by the so-called MSM

“As Putin sees Ukraine … Trump sees Canada?” The headline in the Washington Post seemed to say it all.

Except that it didn’t. Note the question mark at the end.

The paper owned by Jeff Bezos, the billionaire Amazon boss who’s cosied up to Donald Trump and was even invited to his inauguration, appears to be treading exceedingly carefully. In the process its analysis comes off as faux neutral and therefore more dangerous than obviously partisan outlets such as Real America’s Voice.*

Let me explain.

Mr Trump’s propaganda war, as waged by the so-called mainstream media (MSM) is more devious than we might have imagined.

Consider this.

The Post’s WorldView column, which is generally well-written, well-researched and reasonably argued, seems to have found it hard to make a determination on the behaviour of Trump’s America in its own neighbourbood. It noted the apparent similarities between Vladimir Putin’s aggression towards neighbouring Ukraine and Mr Trump’s verbal blows aimed at neighbouring Canada but then hastened to assure everyone that they weren’t really similar.

It wrote: “Putin has rejected the legitimacy of his neighbor’s sovereignty and even its distinct identity…Ukrainian culture, in his view, is an aberration that consolidated mostly due to Bolshevik social engineering. The integrity of Ukraine’s borders mean nothing to Putin’s Russia, which has been occupying Ukrainian territory since 2014”.

The Post went on to quote a rival paper to describe the US president’s behaviour towards Canada. It wrote: “According to the New York Times, Trump, who has repeatedly described Trudeau as ‘governor,’ aired out more than just his known grievances about trade imbalances in phone calls with the Canadian prime minister early last month. Trump told Trudeau ‘that he did not believe that the treaty that demarcates the border between the two countries was valid and that he wants to revise the boundary,’ the Times reported, adding that ‘he offered no further explanation’.”

That was weird. As anyone who’s been in the news business would tell you, no outlet likes to reference a rival if it can say something with confidence on its own. Hell, media outlets increasingly don’t even want to provide hyperlinks to other sources. They’d rather have their own. So, there was no reason for the Post to reference the NYT other than perhaps its reluctance to say hard things about Mr Trump’s aggressive intentions towards the United States’ neighbour. Rather than quote the NYT, the Post could have confirmed the stated details on its own had it wanted. The paper that broke Watergate could have found out the content of Mr Trump’s phone calls with Canada’s Prime Minister Trudeau rather than quoting NYT’s reportage!

Anyway, the Post’s column subsequently went on to assure readers that “Trump isn’t about to pull a Putin and infiltrate ‘little green men’ across the Canadian border.” The reference here was to Russia’s stealthy infiltration of Crimea in Ukraine in 2014. There was no particular reason offered for this reassuring message.

The Post did acknowledge, however, that “while there’s no rattling of sabers or mobilization of forces, the White House has been linked to several potential hostile moves, including the possibility of cutting Canada out of the long-standing ‘Five Eyes’ intelligence-sharing network, scrapping existing agreements over the management of the Great Lakes, and major revisions of current military cooperation across the North American landmass.”

In the spirit of reasonableness, the Post did point out “Trump is not the first US president to want to claim or annex Canada”.

That’s true. The War of 1812, as the Post correctly recounted, was “provoked mostly by US desires to expand into Britain’s remaining North American domains”. It also correctly noted later hostile efforts against Canadian economic strength by US politicians. One of these was Mr Trump’s hero, William McKinley, who would go on to be a Republican president. The Tariff Act of 1890, as the Post pointed out, “was conceived by US politicians in part as a measure to bully Canada into the US fold”. The Marco Rubio figure of the time, a US secretary of state named James Blaine, “saw the new measures as a path toward ‘a grander and nobler brotherly love, that may unite in the end’ the United States and Canada ‘in one perfect union’,” the Post wrote.

So far so good. The similarities between the 19th century and the 21st are striking and the Post appeared to be dealing with them pretty fairly. It did capture some of the angst felt by Canadians about the aggressive and insulting behaviour of Trump’s America towards them.

But what to make of the question mark in the headline on the Washington Post column?

“As Putin sees Ukraine … Trump sees Canada?” ran the headline.

Is there a question at all to be asked? Such equivocation may point to one of the more troubling truths of this moment.

*It was Brian Glenn, White House correspondent of Real America’s Voice who asked Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelensky the rudest question of them all in the Oval Office during that shameful shoutdown with Donald Trump and J D Vance. Mr Glenn is the boyfriend of Trumpy Republican Congresswoman Majorie Taylor Greene. Real America’s Voice is a streaming cable and satellite television channel.