The poutine was sour anyway
By Trump has assembled a group of dictators and/or 5th tier powers willing to bribe him to be Kapos in his Gaza seaside resort project. One world leader will surely be upset to find out that the invitation he was not going to accept has been rejected:
“Protesting too much” seems too mild a term for that description of the Orbán Man Group.
Krugman has a good blog about Carney’s speech yesterday:
It was a brave stand to take. Canada sits right next to the United States, whose economy is a dozen times larger. Moreover, as the map at the top of this post shows, Canada’s population lies almost entirely within a narrow band on top of the U.S. Back when I was writing a lot about economic geography, I used to joke that Canada was closer to the United States than it was to itself. Nature wants Canada and the United States to be closely intertwined. And for this reason Canada is arguably more exposed to the consequences of Trumpian wrath than any other nation.
But democracies can no longer maintain close ties with the U.S. The day after Carney spoke, Donald Trump showed why.
I listened to Trump’s Davos speech with fear: How much damage will this demented, vindictive individual do to America and the world? I also felt a deep sense of shame: What is wrong with my country, that we put someone like this in a position of unprecedented power?
As the whole world watched, the president of the United States (God help us) repeatedly referred to Greenland, which he is willing to blow up NATO to acquire, as Iceland. Don’t dismiss this as trivial: if any previous president had been that befuddled, the whole press corps would have been howling about senility and demanding that he step down.
The impact that a couple hundred thousand of America’s least informed voters have had on the world is unfortunate, but it’s also something that the world’s remaining robust democracies have to accept.