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Here is the list of the topic of top level posts in this thread since the viral ICE shooting.
Seven out of Eleven posts and they're by far the largest threads. It's probably too late at this point but I'd like to suggest that in the future mods should exercise some judgement and make a megathread on events like this that are likely to generate a ton of back and forth discussion with an expectation of new information coming out over the course of days/weeks. Both because it is more convenient for the reader to be able to check a dedicated thread and because it makes it much easier to find the more general discussion for those of us who find the interesting angles of the subject to have already basically been exhausted.
Are we thinking Greenland is really going to happen? This was one of the "just Trump being Trump" notions I dismissed, but he seems to be making noises like he's semi-demi-serious, and the EU seems to be taking it seriously.
I don't know whether to laugh or be terrified about it; is this the US attempt to finally technically qualify for Eurovision? Though it seems that they are currently ineligible, alas!
I don't think that means anything. There's political capital to win for western politicians in being the one who's most against or opposite Trump, and that's easier if you interpret everything he says in the least charitable, most unhinged way. We saw the same here in Canada, a certain defeat for the liberals was flipped by the media acting like Trump is seriously planning to invade.
That's true but there's equally political capital for Trump supporters to say no one should take him seriously when he says crazy things about invading allies. The fact their leaders are trying to curry favour with them is not an adequately reassuring thought to a European worried about the world order.
There really isn't - I think you underestimate the amount of TDS there is outside of the US. Seriously, we went from "liberal party may fit inside a minivan" to "a few seats shy of a majority" based not even on the CPC being seen as pro-Trump, but being seen as insufficiently anti-Trump.
If it helps, even Trump believes that he caused the LPC to win.
Poilievre losing to Carney is a profoundly non-central example of TDS. Canada's strategic situation actually changed because of a change in US policy.
If you treat the invasion threats as the social media rantings of a madman, the US (a) elected a madman President and (b) announced and executed on a tariff policy which Trump justified to his domestic supporters as a punitive measure to force Canada to address a non-problem (fentanyl flowing south across the US-Canadian border).
The tariffs were not really about fentanyl, and both Canadian elites and Canadian voters know this. If you think "Trump wants to annex Canada" is TDS then they are obviously not about that. So the best non-TDS read is that the US has, for domestic policy reasons, decided to pursue a new economic policy that was profoundly harmful to Canada (and is explicitly repudiating his own trade deal to do so). Canadian policy should change in response to this.
It is also worth noting that if Trump's threats to annex Canada were broadly understood in the US as the rantings of a madman, they would have been ignored (or even covered up) by his supporters and signal-boosted by his opponents. What actually happened is that MAGA Twitter went off on an orgy of reciting the (mostly made-up) crimes of Canada against the US that justified the invasion, boasting about how easy the invasion would be militarily and how cool it was that Canada and Canadians didn't get a say, and discussing plans for the government of post-annexation Canada. To remain in good standing with the Trump White House and the broader MAGA movement, MAGA-aligned elites had to pretend to take the ranting against Canada seriously. I don't think Trump is planning to invade Canada, but he is very careful not to send the kinds of reassurance you would expect if a joke between two friendly countries was getting out of hand.
The thing is, if people had been reacting on this basis I think they'd actually have had a point; they didn't.
They reacted solely as "Poilievre is conservative, Trump is conservative, obviously Poilievre is going to immediately capitulate and sell Canada to Trump!!!" (Nevermind that Poilievre almost immediately denounced the tariffs, and numerous conservatives stated that "Canada is not for sale").
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