Apparently, the U.S. government decided to ignore every analysis of what I ran would do in the face of attack for the past 50 years and they’ve been taken by surprise:
Nearly two weeks after the United States and Israel attacked Iran with an extraordinary display of firepower, Iran has found a way to inflict pain back on its enemies by strangling one of the world’s most vital waterways. By threatening shipping traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, attacking tankers in an Iraqi port and beginning to lay mines in the strait, Iran has sent oil prices surging and slowed global trade. It has also made clear that it is intent on using what advantages it has to sap the will of the United States to sustain the war.
The Iranian tactics have forced the United States to prepare to provide naval escorts for shipping traffic through the strait and to plan for anti-mine operations even as American forces target what is left of the Iranian navy, including Iranian mine-laying vessels.
On Thursday, Mojtaba Khamenei, the new supreme leader of Iran, sent the regime’s clearest signal yet that it would continue to endanger commercial shipping in the strait, through which a fifth of the world’s oil was passing before the war began.
“Certainly, the lever of closing the Strait of Hormuz must continue to be used,” Mr. Khamenei said in his first statement since being chosen to succeed his father, who was killed in an airstrike at the start of the war.
Iran, analysts say, is demonstrating that even in a weakened state, it can inflict significant economic and military damage on the United States. That further complicates President Trump’s calculations about how and when to end the war and how to deal with a post-conflict Iran.
They had no calculations. Trump was convinced that his new hand-picked leaders in Iran would “make a deal” in order to stay in power and would give up their military and cut him in on the oil and everything would be great. Bibi and LIndsey told him he’d be remembered as Alexander the Great. Nobody could tell him otherwise.
This is one of the dumbest mistakes any president has ever made. EVERYONE who knew anything about the middle east understood the risk for the world economy if the Strait was closed for any length of time. They ignored that or or were too stupid to know it and were completely unprepared.
It appears that he’s finally giving up his quest for the Nobel Peace Prize for real. He’s really letting his homicidal freak flag fly now. I’m afraid that as this goes on, it’s only going to get worse.
A MAGA’s buyer’s remorse. “Between him and her, I thought he was the better choice. But, honestly, I miss my Uncle Joe.”
Donald Trump’s MAGA base seems to be experiencing some buyer’s remorse.
Trump Voter Richard Stanley of Lantana, FL: "(Trump) is helping his buddies out…never mind charging us Americans all sorts of money for fuel that he just stole from Venezuela." "I miss Uncle Joe, I was a nobody and I was bawling then. Now, I couldn't even show you $5 in my… pic.twitter.com/fe59eK2i5p
Buzzfeed cautions that these are collected online comments “and not necessarily fact.” Nevertheless:
On r/AskConservatives, one person asked, “How many of you are upset that Trump lied about ‘no new wars’?” People did not hold back their thoughts. Here’s what some self-described conservatives had to say:
1. “I am. I don’t think people realize how much of a shit show the Middle East is right now and how infuriating it is for our government to start a war for a foreign country.”
4. “I really think the Republicans have lost so many people that supported them in 2024 and are about to get absolutely obliterated in the midterms. The skyrocketing gas prices alone are going to doom them. Not to mention the mishandling of the Epstein files.”
11. “My wife said, ‘I’m done with him.’ She mentioned the Epstein files, in that he ran on releasing those, and then suddenly didn’t want to release them. After that, he said he wasn’t going to start wars, especially with Iran, and instead became a puppet of Israel and started this war. She acknowledged how terrible Iran’s government is, but ‘Why is it our responsibility to take care of that? Did we learn nothing from Iraq?’ Honorable mention, the handling of Anthropic. ‘Do we want Terminators running around freely??? Wtf??!!’ The midterms are going to be a nightmare for the GOP.”
Casanova Frankenstein:It’s so easy to get the best of people when they care about each other. Which is why evil will always have the edge. You good guys are always so bound by the rules (throws switch & electrocutes the Frat Boys). You see, I kill my own men. And lucky me…I get the girl. (Mystery Men, 1999.)
Just so I don’t bury the lede: Republicans will sacrifice their own voters if that’s what it takes to retain power. Their voters are expendable. I’ll get to why in a bit.
A 40-ish guy walked up on the street on Tuesday. He was curious to ask what I was doing. He said he’d been in D.C. on Jan. 6th, 2021. I didn’t press for details, but told him I was on the sidewalk as part of an effort to turn out more voters in November. But does voting do anything, he asked. Sometimes you vote and don’t get what you want. Um, that’s democracy, I replied.
What I didn’t point out was that Donald Trump claimed throughout the 2016 campaign that the election would berigged against him. He won. Trump claimed throughout his 2020 reelection campaign that the election would berigged against him. He lost. Trump claimed he’d been robbed. You know what happened on Jan. 6th. During his 2024 campaign, by then a convicted felon and twice impeached, Trump claimed again that the election would berigged against him. He won. If U.S. elections are rigged, that’s working for Trump, isn’t it? Two out of three ain’t bad.
Yet again, however, it’s the Republicans trying to rig the elections. Their latest ploy is demanding immediate passage of the SAVE Act. The GOP is hyping it as a photo ID bill with help from the media.
CNN: "The bottom line is this: voter ID is not controversial in this country."
So why are Democrats in Congress voting against requiring photo ID to vote in any federal elections? pic.twitter.com/CopONRjDCX
See? See how popular requiring a photo ID to vote is, they argue? So why do Democrats oppose SAVE? It’s about preventing voter fraud, they argue (after scaremongering all-but-nonexistent voter fraud for 60 years).
COLLINS: Even the Heritage Foundation said they only found 100 instances of non-citizen voter fraud since 2000. That's out of 1.5 billion ballots.
SEN. ROGER MARSHALL: So, what are you afraid of? What are Democrats afraid of? pic.twitter.com/wv4uHUjzJW
How many times must the press (and anchors like Kaitlan Collins) fall for that diversion?
What are Democrats afraid of? Disenfranchising large swaths of legitimate voters in the name of supposed “election integrity.” To register to vote under SAVE, one must provide documentary proof of citizenship, something this country has not required in 250 years. The marketing of SAVE as a photo ID bill is a diversion. It’s another Republican voter suppression bill.
Here’s what the Bipartisan Policy Center says about the vote-suppressing impacts of SAVE’s requirement that voter registrants produce a birth certificate, a U.S. passport, a Consular Report of Birth Abroad, a Certificate of Citizenship, or a Naturalization Certificate:
Although at least one of these documents are in theory available to most citizens, not all voters have them readily available. According to recent studies:
9% of all eligible voters do not have, or do not have easy access to, documentary proof of citizenship.
Given how well voter ID polls, marketing SAVE as a voter ID bill makes it a Trojan horse for the proof of citizenship and other features. Republicans mean to dare Democrats to vote against photo ID ahead of the November election. So long as the press falls for the diversion, it’s helping Republicans with their vote suppression effort.
Republicans sacrifice their own
Furthermore, consider what happened when Kansas added this documentation hurdle to ballot access:
Kansas offers a case study of how a documentary proof requirement would likely play out in practice. Before the law took effect, noncitizen registration in Kansas was exceedingly rare, accounting for about 0.002% of registered voters. After adoption, the documentary proof of citizenship requirement prevented roughly 31,000 eligible citizens, or 12% of all applicants, from registering to vote. In short, the law prevented far more citizens from registering to vote than noncitizens.
That, of course, is the Republican plan. And that’s red-state Kansas! Key elections these days are often won on thin margins. GOP lawmakers know how to slice them.
Don’t let them trick you. The SAVE Act is not a voter ID bill. It’s a voter SUPPRESSION bill. pic.twitter.com/CJx8ux6cOT
Slate’s Dahlia Lithwick observed in 2013 that voter ID bills designed to suppress the votes of Democrats might also disproportionately suppress the votes of Republican women. I wrote about this phenomenon at Crooks & Liars earlier that year:
In a report issued in April, the NC State Board of Elections estimated that 176,091 registered Democrats are without the state-issued photo identity card most will have to pay $20-$32 for before they can vote under VIVA. Plus 73,787 unaffiliated and 1,126 Libertarian voters. Among registered Republican voters, 67,639 have no photo identity cards. Over 2/3 are women.
Let Republican relatives and acquaintances know how little their party thinks of them
Why would Republicans make it harder for Republicans to vote? To give their subterfuge that stylish, party-neutral look. And because they believe their bills will harm more Democrats than Republicans. They’re playing percentages. They see sacrificing their voters as acceptable losses in their quest for power. Requiring proof of citizenship to vote is no different. The GOP is just upping the ante with SAVE.
Per the Democratic Committee on House Administration, SAVE would also “gut voter registration by mail and online,” and “disallow states from accepting the NVRA’s mail voter registration application unless the applicant presents DPOC [documentary proof of citizenship] in person at the office of an appropriate election official.” In person. Recall that when GOP-led states require citizens to obtain IDs for voting at the DMV, they have a habit of closingoffices in Democratic areas. What might happen with elections offices after passing SAVE? Trump also wants to add a ban on men in women’s sports and on transgender surgeries for minors. Apparently, vote suppression wasn’t enough red meat for his shrinking base.
Nick Corasaniti: There's a key provision in the SAVE Act that would require every state to upload their voter lists to the same database at DHS. That can be another way to really intrude in what's clearly, as the Constitution states, a state-based electoral process. pic.twitter.com/w9EjgZLcc3
SAVE is another of the GOP’s Orwellian bills like the Bush-era “Clear Skies” initiative that repealed key provisions of the Clean Air Act, and the “Healthy Forests” initiative that promoted logging of old growth forests. Promoting SAVE as a voter ID bill is misdirection.
Trump, of course, is scared to death of losing control of Congress, and he’s desperate to plop his stubby thumbs on the scales “strongly” with SAVE. He could face investigations and a third impeachment. Trump believes if SAVE passes, Democrats “probably won’t win an election for 50 years and maybe longer.”
BREAKING🚨: Senate Majority Leader John Thune just announced the SAVE America Act will hit the Senate floor for a vote NEXT WEEK.
This is pure theater—a total show vote. We DON'T have the 60 votes needed to overcome a filibuster, and Thune knows it.
For now, it appears that Senate Majority Leader John Thune does not have the votes to clear a filibuster and bring SAVE to a vote. Which is why Trump wants the filibuster gone. Anything to keep him from facing a House and Senate controlled by Democrats for his last two years.
“Senate Republicans are planning for days of marathon sessions as they try to put Democrats on defense over their controversial elections bill backed by President Donald Trump,” reports Politico. So DO NOT assume that Trump won’t pull a rabbit out of his hat. If you have Republicans representing you in the Senate (or John Fetterman), let them hear from you over the weekend.
There are a lot of scary things happening in this world but I think this op-ed by Michelle Goldberg (gift link) ranks right up there. It’s about a candidate for Florida Governor who is bringing in enthusiastic crowds of young GenZ men. He happens to be a hustler who’s settled on a platform of Nick Fuentes plus populism. It’s not good.
Slight and bespectacled, Fishback has a geeky charisma and the verbal dexterity of a former competitive high school debater. His policies are a mishmash of extreme conservatism and economic progressivism; nationalism tinged with socialism, if you will. He believes that Florida’s gun laws are too strict, its abortion laws too lax and its public teacher pay too low. He’s called for a 50 percent sin tax on OnlyFans creators and $10,000 grants to high-performing high school graduates to buy homes or start businesses. Though he’s the son of an immigrant — his mother is Colombian — he wants a total immigration moratorium.
Most of all, Fishback has made contempt for Israel and its American lobby a centerpiece of his campaign, constantly reminding audiences how much America spends on Israel while its own needs are ignored. He often calls Byron Donalds, a Black Republican congressman who is the front-runner in the governor’s race, “AIPAC Shakur,” a play on Tupac Shakur. Appearing on Tucker Carlson’s show in January, Fishback described the “sexual, sadistic” pleasure that pro-Israel donors get in forcing America to “bend over” for a foreign country. Carlson endorsed him and wrote, “Pretty soon, all winning Republican politicians will talk like this.”
[…]
Fuentes’s ideology is a sneering, adolescent sort of Nazism. As he said on his podcast last year: “Jews are running society. Women need to shut the [expletive] up. Blacks need to be imprisoned for the most part.” In Fishback, Fuentes’s followers — often known as groypers — have a candidate who is serious about representing them.
He’s not going to win the governors race or even come close. But this is a growing movement:
[A]nyone concerned with the escalating extremism of the young right should be paying attention to his campaign and the enthusiastic crowds it’s drawing. More than any political candidate yet, Fishback has managed to bring the paranoid, transgressive, meme-drunk spirit of the right-wing internet into the real world. Chris Rufo, a conservative operative who played a major role in Ron DeSantis’s war on wokeness, is no fan of Fishback, but said that “he’s demonstrated a pretty sophisticated method for turning a campaign with no budget, a skeleton staff, into the most talked about campaign in Florida politics.”
Fishback is tapping into an increasingly radicalized generation of Republicans. In December, the conservative Manhattan Institute found that 31 percent of Republicans under 50 identify their own views as racist, and 25 percent say their views are antisemitic. For those over 50, it’s only 4 percent for each. The same survey showed that a majority of Republican men under 50 think that the Holocaust either didn’t happen or was exaggerated.
Maybe it’s a passing fad, I don’t know. But for about a decade now, a lot of young men in the is country have been stewing in right wing radicalism that’s slowly but surely infiltrating the mainstream. Its not that far right extremism hasn’t always existed. It has. But these folks are being welcomed into the mainstream in ways we haven’t seen before. And its particularly worrying because they’re young and don’t have any other experience. Political identity tends to stick.
President Donald Trump, more than a week into his seismic military campaign in Iran, no longer wants to talk about winning the Nobel Peace Prize.
The president often claims that his peacemaking bona fides and “peace through strength” foreign policy agenda make him a shoo-in for the Norwegian Nobel Committee’s top honor.
But in a brief phone call with the Washington Examiner on Thursday morning, Trump claimed to have “no idea” if Operation Epic Fury will “get him over the finish line” with committee members.
“I don’t know,” he told the Washington Examiner flatly. “I’m not interested in it.”
“No, I don’t talk about the Nobel Prize,” the president added when asked if the subject had been broached during any of the conversations he has had with foreign leaders since last Saturday.
He doesn’t talk about the Nobel Prize??? I guess the Alzheimer’s must really be kicking in.
I mean:
Letter from Donald Trump to Norway
President DJT
Dear Jonas:
Considering your Country decided not to give me the Nobel Peace Prize for having stopped 8 Wars PLUS, I no longer feel an obligation to think purely of Peace, although it will always be predominant, but can now think about what is good and proper for the United States of America.
Denmark cannot protect that land from Russia or China, and why do they have a “right of ownership” anyway? There are no written documents, it’s only that a boat landed there hundreds of years ago, but we had boats landing there, also.
I have done more for NATO than any other person since its founding, and now, NATO should do something for the United States.
The World is not secure unless we have Complete and Total Control of Greenland.
Thank you!
He’s going for the Board Of Peace Alexander The Great Prize. It’s much bigger. And it’s sold gold.
Top allies of President Donald Trump are furious at the White House’s new rhetorical emphasis on deporting violent criminals over all unauthorized immigrants — and they’re launching a lobbying effort to reverse that reversal.
A group of longtime Trump allies, immigration restrictionist groups and hawkish policy experts have formed the Mass Deportation Coalition to lobby the Trump administration to refocus its efforts on deporting all eligible migrants. The group has commissioned new polling from one of Trump’s top pollsters to back its thesis that doing so will ensure GOP wins this November, and plans to share that data with White House officials, agency heads and every member of Congress.
The new poll was conducted by McLaughlin & Associates, a pollster that Trump has used in all of his presidential elections, and shared exclusively with POLITICO. It found that 66 percent of likely 2026 voters support deporting any migrants who enter the country illegally. When asked if they support deporting all deportable migrants, not just violent criminals, a majority (58 percent) say they do.
Eighty-seven percent of Trump 2024 voters surveyed, including 79 percent of Hispanic Trump voters, want the president to exceed the previous largest deportation effort in history, led in the 1950s by former President Dwight D.
I have nothing further to add except that if you see people like this coming you should probably cross the street. After watching the brutality and cruelty we’ve seen over the past year, the violence in the streets and the lawless behavior of the government, it’s clear there’s something very twisted and sick inside them if they still support this.
An alert was put out yesterday about a terrorist threat in Los Angeles. Apparently, there is some information that Iran plans to hit the city with drones which seems far-fetched but you never know. There has been a report that some drones were stolen from the military in Kentucky, so anything’ possible, I guess.
Nonetheless, it’s pretty clear that the country should be on high alert since Trump has started a war with Iran for no reason. Asymmetric warfare is most definitely on the table and I wouldn’t be surprised if LA is a target since there is a huge Iranian population here. They tend not to be pro-Ayatollah but I suppose there’s always a chance of an outlier.
In any case, there’s no need to be concerned. Recall the kind of people they’ve got dealing with terrorism in the Trump administration:
Thomas Fugate is the latest political appointee of President Donald Trump’s administration to raise some eyebrows. The 22-year-old graduated from the University of Texas at San Antonio in May 2024 and quickly found himself in an important national security role after helping with Trump’s third presidential campaign and working in a government affairs position for The Heritage Foundation, according to his LinkedIn.
He was tapped to be a special assistant at the Department of Homeland Security, who will now be entrusted with preventing terrorism.
Fugate’s role includes helping to oversee the Center for Prevention Programs and Partnerships, known as CP3, which works to combat terrorism and targeted violence. As of September 2024, CP3 is also in charge of administering 35 grants, totaling $18 million, under the Targeted Violence and Terrorism Prevention program.
Fugate’s LinkedIn profile, which was taken down as his story went viral, noted that he was a checkout clerk at an H-E-B grocery store as recently as 2022. It also listed experience on multiple political campaigns and in Model U.N., however, there was no evidence of counterterrorism expertise or any national security experience that would immediately qualify him for a DHS role.
He’s a good Trumper and that’s all that counts.
There are now thousands of Fugates in important positions in the U.S. government now.
Donald Trump doesn’t like protesters — at least the ones who don’t carry tiki torches while chanting “blood and soil” or who storm the Capitol to disrupt the peaceful transfer of power. During his first campaign for president, he was known to encourage people to “knock the hell out of” protesters at his rallies. After the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020, Trump became maniacal in his loathing for what he called the “radical left.” He wanted to unleash the military onto the streets and even tried to order his defense secretary, Mark Esper, to shoot the demonstrators.
So it should come as no surprise that protesters have become a target in Trump’s inhumane mass deportation campaign. On Saturday the Wall Street Journal reported that Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Patrol’s practice of arresting American citizens who are protesting the policy is a deliberate strategy to, as they put it, “detain and demonize dissenters” who are simply exercising their First Amendment rights. The cases are typically not supported by evidence, so they rarely go anywhere, but the victims are often brutalized in the process, losing jobs and spending money on lawyers and legal fees.
Those are the lucky ones. As we know, two protesters, Renee Good and Alex Pretti, were shot and killed in Minneapolis — and were immediately pegged by members of the Trump administration as domestic terrorists and members of the radical left.
In many ways, this moment was the fulfillment of Trump’s vision that stretched back to his first term. As Mother Jones’ David Corn documented, the first known instance of Trump using the phrase “radical left” came in June 2020 during a Turning Point USA event. In a speech almost certainly written by his aide Stephen Miller, the architect of the administration’s mass deportation campaign, the president thundered that the “radical left” hate “our history, they hate our values, and they hate everything we prize as Americans.”
This became Trump’s most relentless theme throughout the 2020 campaign, and it culminated at his weird — and likely illegal — convention acceptance speech delivered in the Rose Garden at the White House. The election, he said then, would “decide whether we will defend the American way of life, or whether we allow a radical movement to completely dismantle and destroy it.”
Trump would go on to lose that race. But that didn’t stop him from having the chutzpah to deploy the term again during the 2024 campaign — even after the violent pro-Trump insurrection at the Capitol on Jan. 6. He even took it up a notch, pledging that as president he would “root out the communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country that lie and steal and cheat on elections — they’ll do anything, whether legally or illegally, to destroy America and to destroy the American Dream.”
This time, voters rewarded him for using such rhetoric, and returned him to the White House.
Since then, Trump has tied his words to actions, targeting organizations, institutions, universities and law firms he perceives as being his enemies. He and his administration have attacked the press, limiting access to the president and the White House briefing room. In April 2025, he signed an executive order directing the Justice Department to investigate the Democratic small donor platform Act Blue. Following TPUSA’s founder Charlie Kirk was assassinated in September 2025, the administration all-but declared war, with Vice President JD Vance invoking the last message he received from Kirk, which said “we have to dismantle and take on the radical left organizations in this country that are fomenting violence, and we are going to do that.” Within days, Trump issued a presidential memorandum directing the FBI’s joint terrorism task force to pursue various “domestic terrorists” who allegedly believe in “anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity.”
Reuters reported shortly after that Miller, as White House deputy chief of staff, was heading a multi-agency task force that included the FBI, IRS, Department of Homeland Security and the Justice Department to crack down on Democratic groups like Indivisible, which they falsely accused of funding violence and terrorism.
The right was in high dudgeon. Individuals all over the country were fired from their jobs, shunned, ostracized and run out of town for insufficient reverence for Kirk on social media. People were refused entry into the country for “making light” of Kirk’s death. Cancel culture had never been so successful.
Miller’s use of the power of the state to take down the left was an escalation. Influential conservative activist Christopher Rufo inadvertently drew the proper parallel when he wrote on X, “The last time the radical Left orchestrated a wave of violence and terror, J. Edgar Hoover shut it all down within a few years. It is time, within the confines of the law, to infiltrate, disrupt, arrest, and incarcerate all of those who are responsible for this chaos
“Within the confines of the law” is a convenient disclaimer. But what they were and are doing is pretty much exactly what Hoover did, they’re just not hiding it. Since Trump returned to office, his administration’s get-out-of-jail-free card has been “it isn’t wrong if it’s out in the open.” Regardless, as was the case with Hoover, using the power of the government to punish your political enemies is a textbook abuse of power.
Hoover was caught at this by chance when people who burglarized a suburban FBI office in 1971 found documents that showed the bureau had been engaged in a long-standing program going back to the 1950s to harass and “neutralize” organizations and individuals they deemed political enemies. COINTELPRO, or the Counter Intelligence Program, targeted all the usual suspects — communists, socialists, civil rights organizations and yes, the left, with a particular focus on protest organizers. Tactics they used ran the gamut from misinformation, wiretapping, bugging, burglary, blackmail and infiltration of groups by provocateurs and instigators.
The revelations led to congressional investigations. Along with all the other abuses uncovered during the Watergate era, new rules governing the FBI were put in place to preclude such abuses from happening again. Those haven’t held — and all it took was the election of a man who has no respect for the rule of law or the Constitution, and is completely unrestrained by his party to show how inadequate those reforms really are.
The rhetorical tarring of Alex Pretti and Renee Good following their killings by federal agents in Minneapolis showed that the administration isn’t giving up. As recently as Feb. 27, Trump used the term “radical left,” this time to describe a corporation — Anthropic, the artificial intelligence company involved in a running dispute with the Pentagon and is now suing the federal government for allegedly being “punished on ideological grounds.”
Trump considers any person or entity who voices dissent to be his personal enemy, and he’s determined to make them pay.
Donald J. Trump promised to make America great again, whatever that means and for whatever that’s worth. (The “peace president” also promised not to involve the U.S. in any more foreign wars, after all.) A driving motivator for this undereducated, amoral dolt for decades has been to relieve the nepo baby’s nagging sense that the world is laughing at us (him).
Well, no, the world is not laughing now. It’s horrified. Trump shot the United States’ reputation in the middle of Fifth Avenue and killed its trust in us. Now the world is working at shunning the United States like it would a sex offender or murderer in the neighborhood.
Dean Blundell reported on Wednesday that in the wake of his stunning speech at Davos, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney is building “a 40-nation alliance totalling 1.5 billion consumers across 40 countries, representing almost half of the world’s GDP.” The object? To render reliance on U.S. trade irrelevant:
The combined EU-CPTPP bloc would represent about 40% of global GDP and 1.5 billion people. The U.S. economy is about 25% of global GDP. China is about 18-20%.
Read that again. This alliance is bigger than the American economy. It’s bigger than China. It is, by raw economic mass, the largest trading bloc ever assembled. Trump’s tariff threat — “buy from us or else” — loses its teeth when these 40 nations can buy from each other instead, at zero tariffs, with harmonized supply chains that don’t need American ports, American consumers, or American approval.
According to the World Bank, the two blocs together account for almost a third of all world trade. That’s trade that can now flow between them — without touching the United States.
The 39 nations of this coalition, for the record: the EU’s 27 member states, plus the 12 CPTPP members — Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, the United Kingdom, and Vietnam. Canada holds memberships in both. Which means Mark Carney isn’t just a participant in this alliance. He’s the architect sitting at the intersection of both blocs, holding the blueprints that he laid out in Ausralia [sic] last week if you were paying attention.
Global supply chains would avoid Trump’s tariffs by routing component parts and finished products around the U.S. Politico reported last month on this effort to bypass the mercurial (or do I mean insane?) U.S. president (Politico):
The middle powers are taking action. The EU and CPTPP are starting talks this year to strike an agreement to intertwine the supply chains of members like Canada, Singapore, Mexico, Japan, Vietnam, Malaysia and Australia with Europe.
It would bring nearly 40 nations on opposite sides of the globe closer together with the aim of reaching a deal on so-called rules of origin.
These rules determine the economic nationality of a product. A deal would allow manufacturers throughout the two blocs to trade goods and their parts more seamlessly in a low-tariff process known as cumulation.
“The work is definitely coming along,” a Canadian government official granted anonymity told Politico.
Blundell explains:
Here’s the piece that doesn’t get enough attention: this alliance won’t just trade differently. It will set the rules for how global trade works going forward. Digital trade standards. AI governance. Supply chain transparency. Green technology. Environmental rules. Labor standards. Investment protections.
When 40 nations representing 40% of global GDP agree on standards, those become the de facto global standards — whether Washington likes it or not. American companies that want to sell into this bloc will have to meet those rules. Not Trump’s rules. Not the rules of whichever MAGA donor wants a carve-out this week. The coalition’s rules. “Governor” Carney’s rules. And there’s nothing the Pedophile rapist felon in the Oval Office can do about it.
This is the point at which Trump declares victory and (with Stephen Miller and Russ Vought) turns back to dismantling our democratic republic and replacing it with a white, Christian-nationalist homeland ruled by tech oligarchs.
U.S. trading partners are looking to marginalize Trump and the U.S.:
This is the long game, and Carney knows it. The country that sets the rules for digital trade, for supply chain accountability, for AI — that country shapes the world economy for a generation. Trump abdicated that seat at the table. Carney walked in and sat down.
“In a world of great power rivalry, middle powers have a choice: compete for favor or combine for strength,” Carney told leaders gathered in Davos. He meant it like the labor union slogan, “United we bargain, divided we beg.”
Trump’s entire leverage model requires countries to come to him one at a time, hat in hand, desperate for access to American consumers. Carney just gave those countries a different market — bigger, rules-based, and explicitly engineered to function without American participation.
The tariff is only a weapon if you need what the person threatening you has to offer.
Canada’s Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre is floating his own proposal for marginalizing Washington. The handwriting is on the wall for Trump. But he can’t read it.
