When election night comes in November, it will be up to thousands of local election officials to certify election results in their counties. Among those election officials are scores of Donald Trump supporters who believe his lies and conspiracies about stolen elections — and will be in prime position to act on those beliefs to try to aid his campaign in November.
In the swing states of Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania, Rolling Stone and American Doom identified at least 70 pro-Trump election conspiracists currently working as county election officials who have questioned the validity of elections or delayed or refused to certify results. At least 22 of these county election officials have refused or delayed certification in recent years.
Certification of election results is what legal experts consider a “ministerial task,” and one required by state and local law. But as Trump’s lies about the 2020 election have taken hold, Republicans nationwide have decided that certification provides them an opportunity to hear fraud allegations — and refuse to officially count their local votes. Republicans have refused to certify election results at least 25 times since Trump lost the 2020 election to President Joe Biden.
“I think we are going to see mass refusals to certify the election” in November, says Democratic election lawyer Marc Elias. “Everything we are seeing about this election is that the other side is more organized, more ruthless, and more prepared.”
While refusals and delays of certification have not held up in court, in Georgia and Arizona, pro-Trump local election officials are seeking to make certification discretionary — lawsuits that are currently being decided by state judges — in order to give his campaign another method to challenge election results in November.
Polls indicate that the race between Trump and presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris will be close. If employed on a large scale, the certification refusal movement would have disastrous consequences, fueling the fire of election conspiracies and delaying the tallying of votes crucial to determining the next president.
David Hancock, an election official in Gwinnett County, just outside Atlanta, is at the center of the certification refusal movement in his state.
“At this moment there are NO guidelines on what is required to certify an election in Georgia,” Hancock wrote on his Facebook page in late May. “But some of us are working to change that. Stand by.”
Rolling Stone and American Doom compiled its list of election-denying election officials by culling media reports about refusals to certify results and other denialist behavior — and by searching the social media profiles of hundreds of election officials in the six swing states.
The investigation revealed hundreds of posts from officials expressing belief in lies about the 2020 election and skepticism about November, as well as myriad posts about every right-wing culture war issue and conspiracy theory imaginable — a veritable stew simmering with the toxicity of the online American right.
“Wow!! I can’t wait till after the Next big election… We’ll get to find out more Binden corruption (sic),” Ann Weiler, an election canvasser in Bay County, Michigan, wrote in January 2023. Another Michigan election canvasser, Bonnie Kellogg in Muskegon County, shared a false right-wing news story in November 2020 headlined “Breaking Down the Greatest Electoral Heist in American History,” among other election denier content.
“I don’t trust the runoff,” Larry Brown, an election official in Pickens County, Georgia, who has posted prolifically about his belief in Trump’s election lies, said two weeks after the 2020 election, as Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock faced Republican Kelly Loeffler in a runoff. “The general election has turned in to a mess (sic).”
In Pennsylvania, Erie County commissioner Charlie Bayle — whose role includes overseeing elections with fellow commission members — is one of 19 election deniers throughout the state with power over elections. “Anyone in this country with an ounce of common sense knows the left cheated to some extent,” Bayle wrote in November 2021. “Their philosophy isn’t about making it easier to vote, just easier to manipulate the vote.”
Days after the 2020 election, Walter Nowosad, a commissioner in Douglas County, Nevada, shared an article in which disgraced Trump lawyer Sidney Powell (falsely) claimed that Trump’s legal team had found evidence of voter fraud that could overturn the election results in multiple states. “Someone’s hand has been discovered in the cookie jar,” wrote Nowosad. Another Douglas County commissioner, Danny Tarkanian, wrote in November 2022 that mail-in ballots are “the biggest issue in our election integrity, along with ballot harvesting. This is what the GOP should be questioning.”
Nineteen states have varying levels of local election administration, with county election officials numbering in the thousands. Rolling Stone and American Doom focused on the pivotal counties in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania.
Elias, the Democratic election lawyer, believes the findings in this investigation only represent “the tip of the iceberg,” because Republicans “are counting on not just that they can disrupt the election in big counties, they are counting on the fact that if they don’t certify in several small counties, you cannot certify these statewide results.”
The beliefs and behavior of the election officials discovered by this investigation are part of widespread efforts to call the results of November’s election into question, Elias and swing state Democrats say. Those efforts include mass voter challenges, implementation of unreliable hand recounts, restriction of voter registration rules, Republican takeover of local election boards via legislation, and certification refusals.
With an army of Republican lawyers and state lawmakers crafting voter suppression rules and laws across the country, pro-Trump Republicans can also count as allies some of the thousands of men and women currently serving as local election officials. Most of these officials carry out their duties with little to no fanfare. It’s only since 2020 that the routine, often boring, work of administering local elections has become the target of robust right-wing electioneering, with efforts to place pro-Trump zealots on election boards who are increasingly refusing to certify results in pursuit of bogus fraud allegations.
Many of the election deniers discovered in this investigation share their zeal for Trump on social media platforms like Facebook, where they frequently express their belief in election lies amid screeds on the broader right-wing ecosystem of conspiracies.
Hancock, who says he was appointed to the Gwinnett County election in May 2023, is a good example. “Those of us looking to expose what happened in the Nov. election are not going to stop on January 20th,” he wrote on Facebook in 2020. Hancock has shared posts about the discredited Dinesh D’Souza documentary 2,000 Mules and Gateway Pundit stories about supposed voter fraud in Georgia. He said most attendees of the Jan. 6 rally at the U.S. Capitol that led to the violent insurrection were “patriots who have done no wrong.”
He is just one of dozens of election officials whose Facebook pages look like the unhinged rantings of extremely online conspiracy theorists. Examination of thousands of posts from hundreds of election officials shows unapologetic belief in Trump’s election lies, support for political violence, themes of Christian nationalism, and controversial race-based views.
The posts show that belief in widespread election fraud has proliferated among Republican election officials, who are also skeptical that the coming November election will be free and fair. Some of the officials see Trump as a messiah-like figure battling nefarious forces for the soul of the country.
“This election is not about two different men,” read a meme shared by Kellogg, the election canvasser in Michigan’s Muskegon County. “It is about two completely different America’s (sic). Choose wisely.”
Lizzie Ulmer, a senior vice president at the States United Democracy Center, which tracks election deniers at the state and national levels, says that election conspiracists are at work at every level working to call this November’s results into question — but are especially focused on certification.
“From the influence of calling for hand counts of ballots, to the pressure to not certify an election … it’s all connected to this broader effort to change the rules, so that, if needed, election deniers can change the results of an election,” Ulmer says. “It makes sense that certification has become one of the tactics used by the election-denier movement to throw sand into the gears of running a free, fair, and smooth election.”
THE NIGHTMARE SCENARIO on Election Night 2024 recently played out in Washoe County, Nevada, where a moderate Republican fought to prevent the county commission, which oversees elections, from becoming majority-election denier. Events there in recent months show the chaos that could result from the certification refusal movement in November.
On June 11, Republican Clara Andriola, who was expelled from her local party for not towing the line on election denialism, faced off against Mark Lawson, a former firefighter who was fired for possession and distribution of steroids and who has questioned the results of the 2020 election. Andriola won, but local Republicans cited problems with mail-in ballots — and a bizarre claim about someone in a vote-counting room with a thumb drive — as evidence of fraud. On June 21, Washoe County commissioners Michael Clark and Jeanne Herman, both Republicans, voted against certifying the results of the primary. Andriola voted with the commission’s two Democrats to certify results, which showed her beating Lawson by 1,725 votes.
“We’re not saying that everything was perfect, that there isn’t room for improvement,” Andriola told local media. “All we’re saying is this is the election, these are the results.”
Following the certification, Nevada businessman Robert Beadles, an outspoken election denier who helped finance Lawson’s campaign, personally paid $150,000 for the county to recount the results of three races, including a recount for a Democratic primary contest as well as the race between Andriola and Lawson. After three days of counting, the results were the same — except Lawson had lost by one more vote than was initially counted. But that wasn’t enough. Beadles and other election deniers demanded a hand recount or an entirely new election.
Under pressure from Beadles and citizens who spoke for hours at a July 9 meeting, Andriola then reversed her certification vote and joined Clark and Herman in voting to refuse to certify the primary results for a second time. In the days that followed Andriola’s surprising change of heart, the Nevada secretary of state and Washoe’s county attorney reminded the commission of its legal duty to certify results.
On July 16, Andriola and Clark finally came around, voting with the board’s two Democrats to certify the results of the election, which had taken place more than a month before. Herman still voted against certification.
This debacle played out quietly, mostly in the local press, and held up the certification of Andriola’s win and that of a school board candidate. It took a month to certify the results, which only came after Nevada’s secretary of state and attorney general asked the state Supreme Court to qualify certification as a required duty of county commissions like the one in Washoe.
Counties like Washoe, where Biden won by 4.5 points in 2020, will be crucial to determining the outcome in Nevada this year — and even the presidential election. Delays or refusals to certify results would hold up statewide certification and vote tallies, and potentially the results of the presidential election itself.
Pro-Trump election deniers are working as local election officials in at least 16 counties across the six key battleground states. They include small, rural outposts like Bay, Clinton, Isabella, Macomb and Muskegon counties in Michigan, which have flipped between Democrats and Republicans in elections going back to 2008. The election denier officials there have flown under the radar. Rolling Stone and American Doom found them by searching their social media profiles, primarily Facebook, to ascertain their views.
Elsewhere, swing counties have already been the site of election denial tactics. In Berks County, Pennsylvania, which voted for Democrats in the 2018 midterms but saw Republicans narrowly win in 2020 and 2022, recount demands from right-wing groups delayed certification in 2022. In that same election, Berks County commissioners Michael Rivera and Christian Leinbach voted to delay certification over concerns about undated and other improperly prepared mail-in ballots — 16,000 ballots, most of them from Democratic voters, were discarded by county election boards in Pennsylvania. A three-judge panel eventually backed the decision to throw out undated ballots for November 2022’s midterm election.
Also in Pennsylvania, Northampton County commissioner Scott Hough refused to certify results of a local general election in 2023 after being encouraged to do so by the county GOP chair. Trump won Northampton County in 2016 but lost it in 2020.
Hough’s refusal to certify results came amid a smattering of similar occurrences across the country in November and December 2023. Republican election officials in Cobb County, Georgia, which has trended toward Democrats since Mitt Romney won there in 2012, refused to certify results of a local election in November 2023. Cobb was joined that month in refusing certification by Spalding and DeKalb counties in Georgia, Lancaster County in Pennsylvania, Surry County, North Carolina, and four counties in Colorado. Since then, the refusals have continued.
Among the first of them in 2024 was Hancock’s refusal to certify results of Georgia’s March presidential primary for reasons he hasn’t clearly stated.
“This is the opposition to validating the process before certifying the election that your county Board of Election (sic) members in Georgia are currently facing,” Hancock wrote on his Facebook page on May 23, sharing a link to guidance on preventing certification refusal from Protect Democracy, a left-leaning nonprofit. Hancock went on to falsely claim there “are NO guidelines to what is required to certify an election in Georgia.” Protect Democracy says that’s not true, and like many election experts and legal scholars, the group contends that Georgia state law stipulates certification “is a mandatory, ministerial duty, meaning that officials have no discretion to refuse to certify election results.”
In late April, Centre and Luzerne counties in Pennsylvania held up certification over ongoing court battles waged by Republicans regarding mail-in ballots. Both are swing counties, and Luzerne is home to election deniers Harry Haas and Alyssa Fusaro, a county councilor and election board member, respectively. Haas has posted on his Facebook page about election conspiracies, including writing in November 2020 that there are “many arguments to suggest this election was stolen.” Fusaro has refused to certify results twice, both in 2022.
In May, two months after Hancock’s refusal to certify results in Georgia, Republican canvassers Bonnie Hakkola and LeeAnn Oman refused to certify results in Delta County, Michigan. A week after that, Fulton County, Georgia, election board member Julie Adams refused to certify results of the May 21 primary.
Adams is now suing with the help of lawyers from the America First Policy Institute (AFPI), a Trump-supporting think tank. Adams and AFPI have asked a judge to rule that Adams has “discretion” to delay or refuse certification on the grounds that fraud may have been committed in a given election.
Such a decision would go against decades of legal precedent, says Derek Muller, a law professor at the University of Notre Dame who has written on the subject of certification.
“I doubt any court will find that election officials can refuse to certify election results beyond the narrow reasons set forth in state law,” Muller says.
Still, local election officials continue to press the issue of certification. On June 24, Adams again refused to certify results, this time in a low-turnout local runoff.
CERTIFICATION IS SEEN BY REPUBLICANS as one of the first legal steps to challenging the results of elections — and has been since the days immediately following the 2020 election, when the Trump White House consulted with fringe lawyers and conspiracists on ways to challenge the results of Trump’s loss.
At a White House meeting attended by some of those figures, including Sidney Powell, disgraced former Army Gen. Mike Flynn, and Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne, the issue of seizing voting machines to prove election fraud was floated. In a never-issued executive order that resulted from that meeting, the Trump White House proposed having the Department of Justice seize voting machines in strategic locations in order to prove that Democrats had used them to steal the election.
As evidence of this fraud, the draft executive order cited the refusal to certify results in Coffee County, Georgia, where election conspiracists sat on the county election board. Coffee’s mention in the document is telling: It signals that Republicans believe certification paves a legal path to challenging results — and in the case of the draft executive order, more extreme actions like seizing voting machines and instituting martial law.
Since then, there have been at least 25 instances of certification refusals in eight states, Rolling Stone and American Doom found. Georgia leads the way, with seven certification refusals since the 2020 election. Meanwhile, the Georgia State Election Board — which now includes two Republicans who American Doom found are election conspiracists — has begun crafting a rule that would allow for county election officials to refuse certification if a “reasonable inquiry” can be made into fraud claims. The rule stems from a request from Michael Heekin, Adams’ Republican colleague on the Fulton County election board, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported.
Challenges to certification are just one part of an “anti-democracy strategy” being enacted nationwide, says Ulmer of the States United Democracy Center. Across the country, Republicans in state legislatures have passed 22 bills aimed at what they call “election integrity,” which in many cases “increase penalties for screw ups” and “take power away from election officials” in favor of political appointees, like those on Georgia’s State Elections Board, according to Ulmer.
Right-wing groups are behind mass voter challenges in Georgia and elsewhere, sometimes filing off-the-books challenges to sympathetic Republicans on election boards with the help of apps created by election conspiracists. Also in Georgia, state lawmakers have introduced bills that would allow for Republican takeovers of election boards.
In Arkansas, state officials have passed a rule that limits the ability to register voters online after a left-wing group was successful in registering hundreds of Arkansans, many of them in rural Black communities. In Arizona, Trump-aligned legal groups have filed at least eight lawsuits aimed at voter suppression, including one that argues county election officials should be able to refuse certification.
“In 2020, there were 85 or so lawsuits filed over the election. Right now there are more than 150 lawsuits currently in court, and about half of them are filed by vote suppressors or election deniers,” says Elias, the Democratic election lawyer. “If I would have proposed in 2020 the idea that there was a species of people like this who are trying to make it harder to vote and not certify elections, you wouldn’t have believed me.”
This story is being published in partnership with American Doom, a newsletter that focuses on right-wing extremism and other threats to democracy.
The first day of the 2026 Republican National Convention at the American Airlines Center, on Sept. 9, 2026 in Dallas, Texas.
People of all colors listen as Donald Trump speaks on the first day of the Republican midterm convention.
Trump supporters at the Republican midterm convention.
Apple Maps, August 30, 2026
Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney speaks at a press conference in Ottawa, Ontario, on Aug. 22, 2026.
How Mark Carney Became Leader of the Free World by Standing Up to Trump
In Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, Donald Trump has finally met an adversary who truly understands the art of the deal — and it could threaten the entire premise of his presidency.
There have been many self-inflicted catalysts to Donald Trump’s ruination: epic corruption, inflation and the soaring price of gas, the ceaseless angry old man posts and memes, ICE’s assault on the rule of law, the Supreme Court’s mullah-like extremism, his vanity, self-pity, cruelty, and of course the unprovoked, catastrophic failed war on Iran. They are all derived from Trump’s delusional belief in his nonexistent superpowers. But the downfall of Trump will also be forever dated to a small, inexplicable and quixotic folly: his attack on Canada.
Despite the president’s incessant, bizarre claims that he can destroy Canada economically as he wages a trade war against America’s neighbor to the north, in the last few weeks Prime Minister Carney has quietly but effectively ended Trump’s ability to lead the free world in any way other than as an extortion racket and disorganized crime syndicate.
In a potlatch, in the tradition of indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest, a head man would display his tribe’s wealth and power by lighting their most precious possessions on fire. The destruction appeared pointless to European eyes, but First Nations peoples understood the significance of the rite: If the chieftain of the tribe could squander incredible riches, what possible hope did a rival have in waging war against such an overwhelmingly powerful enemy? The mindless waste of resources in a potlatch, as every Canadian schoolchild learns, was actually a finely tuned demonstration of dominance, and a way to avoid conflict.
Trump, the self-described big chief of America, has concocted a new and perverse version of the potlatch that better resembles setting himself on fire. By lawlessly declaring an unprovoked trade war on Canada, Trump has set alight the most valuable assets of the United States: international alliances, the Constitution, respect, friendship, trust, goodwill, the rule of law (hell, the whole idea of law). Instead of displaying his power, Trump has demonstrated his fundamental weakness and loosening grip on reality. In Trump’s form of chaotic destruction, with his historical illiteracy and rat-like cunning combined with his desire to humiliate his perceived enemies, he isn’t pursuing trade policy or a geopolitical strategy. For Trump, domination is the point. The absurdity of farmers and fishermen and auto workers on both sides of the Canadian border having their lives set ablaze in service of the president’s ego trip is the end in itself.
Measured in a simpleton’s economic terms, America appears to have the upper hand in a trade war with Canada. The economy of the United States is more than a dozen times as large as Canada’s, so a trade war that represents a national cataclysm north of the border will barely register in Trump’s America. Trump’s pretextual use of an alleged “trade deficit” to justify his trade wars is concocted according to his whims, urged on by fanatical anti-trade sycophants and enablers, the ever-changing metric a means of blackmail, the nonstop stream of insults and half-witted social media posts somehow managing to be simultaneously enraging and mind-numbingly boring to my fellow Canadians.
“Just watch,” Trump trolled last week as he promised to gratuitously punish Canada, like an old drunk sitting in his underwear yelling at his television set — only with the powers of the commander-in-chief. “All we have to do to cut our trade deficit with a country is not trade with them,” he said in the Oval Office over Labor Day weekend, adding that America will also stop trading with Europe, Mexico, and Switzerland, threatening in one unhinged rant to end trillions of dollars in commerce. As if to underscore his madness, he followed it up with a meme showing the American colors covering all of North America, as well as Greenland and Iceland. But for reasons known only to himself, he has focused his true menace on my home and native land: “If we don’t do any trading with Canada, if we just end all trade with Canada, we’d save ourselves $90 billion. Canada would be in a heap of trouble. I don’t think they’d exist. Because, again, they do 95 percent of their business with us.”
If you don’t think this is the unhinged talk of a confused old fool showing signs of dementia, take a look at the bond market.
After Trump illegally breached America’s free trade agreement with Canada last year, imposing tariffs that were based on transparent lies about fentanyl crossing the border, he proceeded to gaslight America’s ally with a steady stream of infantile ALL CAPS derision.
Living inside a constant reality TV show, with fake deadlines and formulaic melodrama, Trump then imposed a 30-day timeline for a new accord, or he would unilaterally impose additional 50-percent tariffs relying on a never-before-used statutory justification — a preposterous gambit under America’s binding trade treaty with Canada. Confronted with the prospect of constantly changing trade terms in an increasingly lawless America, Prime Minister Carney didn’t take the bait, engaging in talks in good faith but with eyes wide open (and elbows up, as they say in Canada). Using one of the oldest tricks from an increasingly pathetic and obvious set of bullying tactics, Trump then prematurely announced that a deal with Canada had been reached when there was no such agreement — an attempt to box Carney in. But again, Carney didn’t cave like so many other world leaders.
Like the many con men I’ve written about over the years, Trump is convinced of his own genius, certain that the world is a ship of fools and that he — and he alone — can see through the tissue of lies and deceptions. The problem, inevitably, is that grifters are never as smart as they think they are, a fatal flaw compounded when they start to believe their own lies — and then encounter someone who can see through their act.
As his second term has illustrated, Trump is certain that everyone will cow in the face of his “Hulk Smash”: the Supreme Court, television networks, Ivy League universities, white shoe law firms, the abject former UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer chasing after the president’s windblown papers like a schoolboy — an image that quickened his downfall. Changing the basic terms of the proposed agreement at the last moment is a classic power play in any negotiation. So it was with Canada this summer. At the last minute before Trump’s invented time limit expired, as the clock ticked towards midnight, Trump’s minions attacked Canada’s profoundly important French culture — ridiculing the notion that there is such a thing as a distinct Canadian nation at all. He slapped tariffs on the automobile industry, lumber, steel, aluminum, and for kicks and giggles, hockey sticks to shove his version of reality directly up the ass of the milquetoast Canadians.
Under the new terms Trump purported to impose, the United States (which is to say Trump) would have control over any other Canadian trade agreements. Trump then reserved the right to change the deal at any time in the future, for any reason, with no notice — meaning the deal wouldn’t be worth the pencil it was written in, as Carney noted.
Lake Ontario, that’s now Lake America, and your prime minister is a governor, and you’re going to wish that you were the 51st state by the time I get through with you.
But then something bizarre happened to Trump’s bonfire of the vanities. In Carney, the president discovered that he had encountered a man who was not looking for a fight — but who equally wasn’t afraid of him. For all the bluster and menace and braggadocio, Trump didn’t realize that he had walked into a trap. By agreeing for negotiations to happen this summer, a year ahead of the larger deal for the renewal of the North American treaty, Carney had picked the time and place for the inevitable looming confrontation; with Trump vulnerable in the coming election, the canny Carney had managed to create real leverage. Carney then cleverly enlarged the dispute and raised the stakes by accurately calling America’s attack a declaration of war, surprising the flat-footed American negotiators who apparently didn’t take Trump’s threats seriously themselves — adding another layer of leverage to Canada’s supposedly weak hand.
In Carney, it turned out, Trump has met a leader of real strength, the understated but steely and confident kind reflecting Canada’s national character. The irony is that Carney was elected last year almost entirely as a result of Trump’s Kafkaesque trade war, defeating a weak-kneed conservative who very likely would have meekly submitted to America’s neocolonialist threats. Another irony is that the politically inexperienced Carney turns out to have genius-level instincts. The whippet-thin banker is an unassuming figure, the opposite of Trump, but every bit as ruthless in his way. He is a self-made man and intellectual with degrees from Harvard and Oxford, who epitomizes the meritocracy. The child of schoolteachers in the far north Alberta, raised in a home that prized education and social responsibility, Carney earned his way to the absolute heights of global finance through his intelligence and diligence. His resume is almost a parody of accomplishment, with stints as the head of the banks of both Canada and England, as well as years with Goldman Sachs and working for the likeminded businessman-turned-politician Michael Bloomberg. Faced with the global financial crisis of 2008 and then Brexit, Carney witnessed the idiocies of economic self-destruction in the 21st century, preparing him with a unique set of experiences to confront Trump’s lawless trade war — to Canada’s great good fortune.
In truth, Carney was elected specifically to deal with such a crisis, and Canada has had decades to prepare for this conflagration. Living next to an elephant requires a certain amount of caution and awareness, so Canadians understand American politics down to the last looney. Knowing your enemy is the greatest asset in war, as the ancient Chinese philosopher Sun Tzu said, and Carney’s deeply intimate awareness of America gives him the ability to exploit Trump’s obvious weaknesses: a thin skin, hubris, impulse control, arrogance
Plan beats no plan is a truism of all crisis management, an acknowledgement that any executive, sports coach, or sentient human being understands. If you want to shape events and succeed, do the work to anticipate and understand what lies ahead so you don’t live in a state of constant surprise, chaos, and disarray. Planning is also the ultimate expression of Carney’s life force, the guiding principle of his meticulously accumulated achievements and triumphs. While Trump, like so many fools throughout time, doesn’t read or listen to contrary opinions or care to prepare, trusting his gut and native intelligence, Carney is a careful student of power dynamics and the deep lessons of history. Control what you can control, Carney explains to Canadians as he describes the need to diversify and de-risk the relationship with a declining United States. Europe might seem distant geographically, but Russia’s attack on Ukraine and self-inflicted withdrawal of its resources from Europe present an opportunity for a resource-rich nation like Canada. Membership of the European Union seems fanciful now, perhaps, but there is no question that Canadian distrust of America is hardening into real anger and dismay. The same logic applies to the countless opportunities in Asia, with Carney traveling the world signing new free trade agreements as Canada pursues a strategy to end its dependence on the undependable Americans. There is also no turning back the clock as Canada duly notes how few friends it really has in the political and media classes of the United States.
Given Trump’s use of Manhattan real estate brute force strong-arm tactics, imagine Carney’s eyes lighting up when he realized that American negotiators were attempting to attack the French-speaking peoples of Canada and the entire notion of a national culture. There was obviously no way the Canadian people were going to accept such humiliation and subjugation at the hands of an amoral gangster. As Trump’s designated thug Howard Lutnick piled on the bad faith, last-minute demands, it became evident that Carney had no choice but to walk away — despite the awful short term pain America could inflict.
Thus Carney’s plan has been put in action, with the backing of a nation unified in outrage at America’s belligerence. Trump can harm Canada, but that street runs two ways. By standing up to Trump, Carney has lured him on to the economic battlefield at the precise moment when his presidency is collapsing, with the calamitous midterm elections looming. Tight races are being run in many states that are heavily dependent on trade with Canada — Ohio, Maine, New Hampshire, Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Alaska — the exact jurisdictions Canada will target with long-planned tariffs aimed at specific economically sensitive economic sectors, in order to increase the pressure on the ill-prepared president.
Apart from cheap shots and idiotic put downs, Trump has no history of seeking compromise and no real plan in response, as usual, apart from lashing out like a cornered animal. Trump also has vanishingly little popular support in America for his personal grudge match with Canada, an obsession that looks weirder with each passing insult. The struggling North American car industry has been jerked around by Trump’s vengeful destruction of the electric vehicle, losing billions in the process. and taxes described as tariffs will make life even more unaffordable for working American consumers. Uncertainty and unpredictability are lethal to any investment strategy, as actual business people and union leaders understand. Across the rust-belt industries Trump proclaims he is protecting, his tariff-taxes are disrupting and distorting markets and driving up costs for no purpose other than his insistence on harming America’s neighbor and ally, an enemy only in the president’s fevered imagination.
But to what end? It’s a question with no sensible answer.
Many Americans like to think foreigners draw a distinction between Donald Trump and themselves. But this self-serving piece of evasion is rapidly disappearing for Canadians, as the United States wages a war of aggression to impoverish a friendly nation, and heedlessly attack its history and sense of place and purpose. When Trump threatens the Canadian dollar, implicitly saying that he will do all he can to make the country economically uncompetitive, the statement is front page news in Canada, while it barely rates a mention in the American press. The American politicians who register tepid defenses of Canada are remarkable not so much for standing up for their neighbor or the rule of law, but for how few and far between they are — and how feckless.
As the trade war escalates this week — or evaporates into another TACO (Trump Always Chickens Out) — the damage done to America’s reputation will be lasting. Once American arrogance is seen in broad daylight, it suddenly is everywhere, in Secretary of Treasury Scott Besant likening Canada to a “yipping dog,” or in former President Barack Obama distractedly turning up to a speaking engagement in Toronto carrying his cardboard coffee cup as if he can’t wait to collect his fee and return to Chicago to gaze admiringly at the shrine he has built to himself.
Damnatio Memoriae is the Latin term for the ancient Roman ritualistic destruction of all memorials to a tyrant, a kind of reverse branding deal with posterity that Trump is furiously trying to counteract with his White House bunker and ballroom and sad sack victory arch that memorializes no victory — structures very likely to be torn down or repurposed when Trump’s presidency expires.
With a mid-term election tsunami gathering force, Trump has already become a lame duck in the eyes of the world, albeit a particularly dangerous one facing richly deserved corruption investigations and possible impeachment. But the damage to the nation’s brand as ugly Americans and wannabe neocolonialist hegemon will be impossible to erase. As the trade conflict intensifies and Canada retaliates in a measured defensive way, taxing golf clubs to counter Trump’s childish hockey stick impost, Trump’s impulsive provocations will only reveal his inability to formulate anything like the concept of a winning strategy. When reality descends and he leaves office or is forced to finally end his mindless war and inevitably declare himself the winner, as his fragile manhood requires, Trump will further diminish himself and his country in the eyes of the world. Under Trump, America risks ending up like the president: alone, lost, friendless.
Despite Trump’s flailing efforts at waging a mutually destructive internecine war, foreign investment is growing in Canada, with a summit taking place this month for investors representing a trillion dollars to extol the virtues in backing a reliable, trustworthy country governed by the rule of law. Holding Canada’s main weapons in reserve, in accordance with Carney’s disciplined plan, if necessary Canadians can fight back with damaging export taxes on oil, gas, electricity, potash for America’s farmers — truly damaging countermeasures that will be employed only as a last resort. But Canada is already showing the world that it is possible to defy Trump, even when the country has so much to lose. Bullies like Trump can’t survive defiance because it reveals their true nature. In that sense, Mark Carney has become the new leader of the free world, fighting on behalf of nations too afraid to confront the American despot. As a result, incredibly, under Carney’s leadership Canada is becoming a kind of law-abiding underdog badass outlaw nation, in its understated but determined way — a reality I could palpably sense when I was in London in recent days and my 15-year-old English cousin expressed awe at my homeland’s willingness to stare down the bully-boy president.
“I would kill to be a Canadian,” he said.