“Move fast and break things” was Facebook’s motto in its early days, and it’s only fitting that 47 and his team have seemingly adopted it, given Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s determination to crawl so far up 47’s fundament he’ll need a miner’s helmet in order to see. As I read about the constantly shifting demands and goalposts when it comes to tariffs, and 47’s inability to say exactly what it was he wanted Canada to do in order to make them go away, two things became abundantly clear.
First, despite what he says about imposing tariffs to stop the flow of fentanyl and illegal immigrants into the U.S. from Canada, that is — what’s the word I’m looking for — oh right, BS. Of all the fentanyl seized coming into the U.S. in 2024, 0.2 per cent came from our country, while only 1.5 per cent of illegal immigrants apprehended by U.S. Customs and Border Patrol came in via Canada.
When these two “issues” were first raised, as a condition for not imposing tariffs, Canada committed more than $1 billion to beefing up our border. Not enough! We needed to do more, said 47! When asked what was meant by “more,” exactly, there was no answer; then he claimed that it was unfair of Canada not to allow U.S. banks to operate here. Okay, maybe we could work with . . . oh, hang on, more than a dozen U.S. banks already operate here. Next?
However, the real answer had come the day before, when 47 coughed up a social media post claiming that the U.S. pays “hundreds of Billions of Dollars to SUBSIDIZE Canada. . . We don’t need anything they have. We have unlimited Energy, should make our own Cars, and have more Lumber than we can ever use. Without this massive subsidy, Canada ceases to exist as a Viable country. Harsh but true! Therefore, Canada should become our Cherished 51st State.”
(Side note: 47 uses random capitalization in a way I haven’t seen since I went through a spell of reading a lot of 18th century English novels. I doubt he does it as a literary affectation; he’s just borderline illiterate.)
So there we have it: the tariffs aren’t to “safeguard the border” or allow American banks access to Canada, or any other threadbare excuse that crosses the floor of the dusty attic that passes for 47’s brain. He wants to annex Canada, pure and simple, and since he doesn’t quite want to resort to military force like his buddy Putin, he'll do it economically until we cry “Uncle!” To which Canadians are saying, to a person, go whistle.
Second, I realized — from my many years working in jobs where I was dealing with the public — that he is the customer who can never, ever be made happy.
In my experience, on the rare occasions where customers had a big, genuine grievance, that was set right fairly quickly. However, there were the customers who had a small kernel of a genuine grievance wrapped inside a seething mass of anger, and they were almost impossible to deal with, because nothing you did could ever satisfy them. Nothing you offered, by way of making amends, was enough. If you did, by chance, hit on something acceptable, they wanted it more, or bigger, making outrageous demands that were simply not possible.
If they had been asked point-blank “What will make you happy?” they probably wouldn’t have had an answer, because being happy wasn’t the point. They wanted to either be allowed to continue feeling angry or aggrieved, or attempt to screw you over in order to “win”.
And that’s 47 in a nutshell: the ultimate angry customer who can never be made happy. Canada is the adult in the room, dealing with an angry toddler whose sense of grievance is infinite. The sooner we all get to grips with this, stop trying to reason with the unreasonable, and continue to show a united front in the face of a bully, the better.
