When the United States was attacked by al-Qaeda on September 11, 2001, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) did something it had never done before and has not done since: It invoked Article 5, the collective-defense provision at the core of the alliance. With Manhattan burning and the Pentagon in ruins, thousands of Americans dead, and the future uncertain, our allies came to our aid.
And that included our nearest ally, Canada.
Canada did not send a bloodied and wounded United States thoughts and prayers via social media: When it came time to go after Osama bin Laden et al. in Afghanistan, more than 40,000 members of the Canadian armed forces served in what was not, narrowly speaking, a Canadian cause. And 159 Canadian soldiers died there.
That may not seem like a very large number, but it is 159 more than the Trump family has sent to fight for the American cause in the century and a half since that family’s first draft-dodging ancestor fled military service in Germany. Frederick Trump, the horse-butchering Yukon pimp who brought the Trump family to the United States, had no plans to stay in the country long term, but was expelled ignominiously from his homeland for his cowardly evasion of military service. During the Trump family’s time in the United States, Americans have fought in conflicts ranging from the Spanish-American War to the two world wars to Korea to Vietnam to the Gulf War to Afghanistan and Iraq. None of Trump’s ancestors served in any of those conflicts, and none of his progeny has, either. The president has occasionally, however, taken the time to sneer at figures such as John McCain, whose service was—whatever you think of his politics—genuinely heroic.
Other prominent American families saw that kind of service as a natural obligation of their class: Young George H.W. Bush volunteered on his 18th birthday and fought with distinction as a naval aviator in World War II. Gerald Ford served in the Navy in the Pacific theater during that Second World War, as did Richard Nixon. Dwight Eisenhower spent a sleepless night before D-Day preparing a letter taking full responsibility for the loss—and it was far from obvious that the assault was going to be a success—in case he wasn’t around to do so afterward.
Donald Trump has his name on the front of The Art of the Deal. John F. Kennedy’s name is on Profiles in Courage. Both men used ghostwriters, but we may take these works as testament to their priorities.
From father to son to father to son, the Trumps have been a line of small, oafish, grasping, chiseling, dishonest, dishonorable, cowardly, conniving, dim-witted, donkey-souled plotters and plodders, and no sensible country would trade the lot of them for one of the 159 Canadians who died in Afghanistan—or for one of the hundreds of British troops who died in Afghanistan, or for any one of the French, Germans, Italians, Poles, Danes, Australians, Spaniards, Romanians, Georgians, Dutch, Turks, Czechs, Kiwis, Norwegians, Estonians, Hungarians, Swedes, Latvians, Slovaks, Finns, Portuguese, Koreans, Albanians, Jordanians, Belgians, Bulgarians, Croats, Lithuanians, or Montenegrins who lost their lives in that conflict. And certainly not for the Ukrainians who served alongside U.S. forces in Iraq. Nor for any one of the British and European doctors and nurses who saved the lives of so many wounded Americans evacuated from those battlefields.
These are our allies, not our enemies. Many of them are our trading partners, too—not a gang of pirates trying to victimize Americans with … abundant goods provided at reasonable prices.
Donald Trump seems surprised by the ferocity of the Canadian response to his attempts to strong-arm the country with his imbecilic bullying and threats to annex it. I am not. Canadian pride may sometimes take the form of toxic anti-Americanism, but there is no doubting the resolve or the patriotism of our neighbors to the north.
Other than the fact that he is one of the few conservative leaders in the Western world who has literally cut the size of government (by reducing the number of members on the Toronto city council), I do not know much about Doug Ford, the Conservative premier of Ontario who has promised to fight back against Trump’s predations with such tools as he has at his disposal. But he has made a pretty good showing for himself so far.
His promise to one-up Trump and put his own tariff on Canadian exports—electricity sent to the United States—was clever and bold, and, of course, there is the blunter threat of simply turning off the juice entirely. And what was the response of the American president? To whine about how Canada was “stooping so low” in response to his attacks. That’s Donald Trump for you: He starts a fight and then complains when a relatively small figure—the provincial executive of Ontario, not even the Canadian prime minister—fights back. One wonders what Donald Trump thinks of as “low”—he’d have to don climbing gear and an oxygen mask to rise high enough to see a snake’s belly in a wagon rut.
But we know what to expect from Trump, which is the same thing any intelligent person expects from him: cowardice.
And, for Donald Trump, cowardice is a family tradition.
