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It’s important for me to take a few minutes each day to sit with my grief.
Growing up in the post-World War II liberal world order it was inconceivable the United States of America would turn its back on our European allies and our neighbor to the north, Canada.
Acknowledging the grief of the US having moved from being a guarantor of freedom to an immediate threat to the remaining free world is important for me. It helps strengthen the work to acknowledge that I. Am. Grieving.
I recall an interview with intellectual historian Dr. Marci Shore in the days immediately following the 2025 visit from President Zelensky to Washington, DC, where she helped me process the horror and the shame.
I opened that column with these words:
America thought it won the Cold War in 1989 but didn’t read the battlefield. It ended on February 28, 2025, when the United States surrendered to Russia in full view of the world.
Among the Americans watching Oval Office theatre craft in shame and horror was Dr Marci Shore, a Yale professor of intellectual history who wrote The Ukrainian Night: An Intimate History of Revolution.
She taught me about the Polish aphorism ‘knocking from below’ – just when you think things can’t get any worse, you hear knocking from below.
“That was precisely the phrase that came into my mind when I was watching,” Shore said. “I thought, there is no bottom. You think you are prepared for everything, and then there is still more depravity to come.”
She told me she didn’t think she could be shocked anymore.
“But I was. I was shocked when I watched that video and filled with a kind of shame and disgust that I still don’t quite have words for,” she said. “It was so appalling that I thought how, as an American, am I ever even going to apologize to the rest of the world for this?”
In the Q&A part of the interview, she helps us get past our Freudian denial.
Heidi Siegmund Cuda: I am touring Europe right now, and I received so many messages from home from broken-hearted people (last Friday) telling me that they were so sorry, filled with despair and shame. I know that is the intention when you get these sort of theatre craft moments. But to you, who wrote The Ukrainian Night, who understands history, what did that event signify? Who was Trump representing and please give us your take on how Zelenskyy responded, because we’re all still trying to figure it out from a place of a broken heart.
Dr. Marci Shore: Let me start perhaps with the broken hearts. There are a couple pieces to that question. The only positive thing I saw about what happened yesterday was that it was such a decisive moment of the end of the affair. I felt like Europeans in particular, perhaps finally, belatedly, and this, of course, started with Munich, were shaken into realizing they absolutely cannot trust Washington.
This idea of America – despite all our problems and our hypocrisy and our racism and our violence – that it was still somehow the world’s deepest liberal democracy and the land of the free and the home of the brave, and everything that Soviet communism was not – will, in the end, be the rescuer and guarantor of freedom. I feel like the last vestiges of that are finally dissolving…
One of the things I’ve been telling my Ukrainian friends and colleagues, and not just Ukrainians, but other Europeans as well, since the election, is, you cannot trust us.
There’s this kind of Freudian denial that, ‘Okay, but it couldn’t really be that bad. In the end, it’s the United States, they couldn’t actually go that far, we couldn’t really switch sides. Your President couldn’t really be working for Putin’. I said, ‘No, you absolutely cannot trust us. It has to be over. You have to take that in, that these are not people you can work with, either rationally or cynically. They are volatile, they are narcissistic, they are moral nihilists. They cannot be trusted’.
As I continue to do this work, it is very important for me to seek out the sources that bear witness to reality, that can help find the words to illustrate what we are actually seeing.
Ten years into the destruction of America by Trump and his loyalists and still, there are so-called experts and pundits who dismiss the very malignant threats they represent to the US and the world.
Deeper in that interview with Shore, she said:
And Trump is living in a world where nothing is real and everything is a casino game.
I missed the significance of that quote the first time, but it feels very timely now.
This is a man who bankrupted casinos, and was bailed out by the Russian mob, over and over again. He acquired debts that he is now paying in full by destroying America for the Kremlin.
How else to view Trump’s latest attack on Canada?
I woke up Monday morning as I do each week in this very long decade to see what awful self-inflicted events, threats, and narratives are coming out of the Trump camp.
It was easy to spot:
Trump said on Monday that he will increase tariffs on Canadian cars and trucks, as well as auto parts, from 25% to 50% as of 1 January.
On Tuesday, I was pleased to see Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney offer the appropriate framing and pushback to Trump’s latest bullying.
“You’re at war when you get attacked. We got attacked,” Carney told reporters, as he also announced retaliatory tariffs.
And now, here we are…
I’ve asked both Shore, who works in Canada at the University of Toronto, and Dr. Michael MacKay, a political philosopher from Canada who has worked in Ukraine, to share their insights on the escalation of US threats to Canada.
Shore shared the following anecdote:
After Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, I spent a lot of time talking to American journalists and politicians, trying to explain the relationship between Russia and Ukraine. At one point in spring 2022, I was doing a briefing for a Democratic congresswoman and her staff. The room was full of smart people, who didn’t necessarily have expertise in Russia and Ukraine in particular. Everyone knew that Ukraine and Russia had both been part of the Soviet Union; that the Soviet Union had collapsed in 1991; that Ukraine had become an independent country then; and that Russian was spoken in both countries. And I spontaneously tried an analogy: I asked them to imagine that January 6th had gone the other way, that we were living in a Trumpist dictatorship, and that under the guise of “Making America Great Again,” Trump decided to send the US army to invade Canada and start shelling Toronto.
Well Canada, like Ukraine, is a bilingual country, where more or less everyone (also) speaks English. Canadians eat hamburgers and french fries just like Americans do. Lots of people in Philadelphia, say, have cousins in Toronto. Lots of Americans study at Canadian universities and vice versa… so why would they object if the American army were to cross the border, invade the country under the guise of brotherhood and start bombing a major city — or two or three or four?
I was trying to help American politicians relate to the fact that no possible cultural and/or linguistic affinity between Ukraine and Russia made an invasion and mass slaughter less outrageous. And this was such an incredibly effective analogy at the time precisely because it was inconceivable to everyone in that room that the United States would ever even vaguely contemplate invading Canada. And now, here we are…
—Dr. Marci Shore for Bette Dangerous
Shore told me it proved to be such "an effective analogy at that moment because no one in that room could imagine a world in which an American invasion of Canada would ever be on the table. It was absurd. Yes, it had been a soft border — you could cross to the other side of Niagra Falls with just a driver's license and not a passport — but that didn't mean you didn't realize it was a separate country.”
Her story made me recall the many meetings I have had with local, state, and federal officials, who despite the evidence I would present to them, simply refused to acknowledge Trump’s debts to Russia and Russia’s attacks on the US.
‘Canadians have a strong civil society and sense of collective responsibility’
Political philosopher Dr. Michael MacKay offers us this insightful take:
Trump and his regime are escalating their economic war against Canada and their information war. I believe this will lead to armed aggression by the United States against Canada, probably of an unconventional nature.
Keep in mind the last organized armed attack by Americans against Canadians was not the War of 1812 but the Fenian Raids in the 1866-1871 period. The Battle of Ridgeway (1866) was the last battle fought on Canadian soil and it was a loss for the Canadian side. This armed aggression can be described as unconventional because the attackers were the Fenian Brotherhood and not the U.S. military (although most of the Americans were veterans of the Union army in the U.S. Civil War).
I believe Trump will try something similar because his mentor and his master is Putin. When the Russians invaded Ukraine in 2014 they did so in the form of “Cossack formations” and “DPR/LPR pro-Russian separatists” and other irregular troops who were simply Russian soldiers with insignia removed. The full-scale invasion of 2022 was actually a broad offensive using Russian troops directly, without the fakery of the first eight years of the war.
It is not reasonable to say the U.S. won’t invade Canada because Americans don’t support such a war. That would be true if the consent of the governed was required. But the U.S. is no longer a democracy with popular sovereignty – it is an autocracy like Russia where the unchecked ruler (Trump) can go to war by executive fiat. Trump can use irregular forces against Canada the same way he uses his palace guard – the ICE paramilitary force – against Americans.
Another reason Trump can ignore the will of the people is the awful state of civil society in the United States. Ever since the Reagan/Thatcher years, American political culture has become characterized by extreme individualism with no sense of collective responsibility. Margaret Thatcher famously said: “There’s no such thing as society.” MAGA cultists bring their uniformity of ignorance to bear in support of Trump’s malice, but decent Americans lack unity in standing up for the foundational ideals that made the United States potentially great.
Putin doesn’t need the support of the people. When Russian vatniks say “I hate Ukrainians” and the rest say “I don’t care” then Putin has everything he needs to go to war with Ukraine. All Trump needs to go to war with Canada is to get the MAGA cult to cheer his childish insults and get the rest of Americans to say “Let’s wait until the election.”
All the pieces are in place. Trump is able to follow the Russian playbook for invading Ukraine as he prepares to invade Canada. If a convicted felon can sit in the White House then certainly the U.S. can start an unjustified, immoral and criminal war against Canada.
As a Canadian, I expect U.S. aggression to escalate to armed conflict and am looking for ways to defend my country and way of life. Canadian political culture is nothing like American political culture and it is much more like Ukraine’s. Canadians have a strong civil society and sense of collective responsibility. Our instinct in times of trouble is to look out for one another, rather than “everyone for themselves.” This is a strength in a time of war. Ukrainians believe in their victory and are confident they will eventually prevail against a much larger neighbour who is now an aggressor. Canadians are in the same position and we’re finding in ourselves the same quiet confidence.
Canada has endured and evolved for hundreds of years as a distinct political entity. Canadians will see off Trump, the MAGA cult and even the U.S. military. We will keep trying through the generations to build a good, decent society where we can all live together in peace.—Dr. Michael MacKay for Bette Dangerous
I took Wednesday off from the world to manage self-care. Learning about the loss of Dolly Parton during our Tuesday Happy Hour felt too damn heavy. Because I’m me, I ended up reading Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil by Hannah Arendt, and watching a Shore Yale lecture on Arendt, who she calls one of her first loves.
For the task of reading Eichmann, I chose a lavendar highlighter with silver sparkles, my attempt to pretty up the ugliness.
Two highlighted words keep flashing in my mind, like a light up marquee in a downscale neighborhood.
“Ubiquitous Complicity”
Will there be a mass movement of decent Americans to stop the worst from happening or will there be ubiquitous complicity?
Despite the grease-paint and blonde wig, I don’t see a clown when Trump takes a sharpie to a map to erase the name of Lake Ontario.
I see dehumanization, Russian style.
As Dr. MacKay wrote on Twitter:
Trump is Putin’s puppet. He follows the Russian playbook for the Ukraine invasion in his plans for U.S. aggression against Canada:
–dehumanize Canadians and deny them agency
–claim Canada isn’t a real country
–amplify hate propaganda against Canadians
–prepare Americans for war
We see the playbook clearly, right? The Russian-US influence in Alberta, yes?
A hardening to the operations and a refusal to be surprised is important in moving from defense to offense.
I would also say the vulgarness and brutality of words is part of the operations.
Here, I feel it’s appropriate to quote investigative reporter Anna Politkovskaya, who was not fooled by Putin.
In my book report on a collection of her essential writing, where she documented the Second Chechen War, the ‘age of the oligarchs’, and Putin’s rise to power before being murdered on his birthday in 2006, she notes his vulgarness.
As she writes about starving and stranded elderly people, she reports on the “slovenly inefficiency” of government, and how the “State does not exist in Russia.”
“What earthly use to me is the Putin we see, prancing about on TV and telling us that’s he’s going to ‘wipe out’ the bandits after they’re cornered ‘in the shithouse?’”—Anna Politkovskaya
Rodrigo Duterte, who is in detention at The Hague awaiting his November trial by the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity, also used words like that.
“I will really kill you. If I become president, you will all get wiped out. I will order your execution within 24 hours,” Rodrigo Duterte, 2017
He, too, is a vulgarian, who attacked the poor in the Philippines with dehumanizing language before murdering them en masse.
Now, he sits in detention and waits for judgment day.
In a transcript from a 2017 phone call, Trump applauded Duterte’s murderous rampage.
“I just wanted to congratulate you because I am hearing of the unbelievable job on the drug problem.”—Donald Trump to Duterte, 2017
So of course Trump is escalating attacks — on neighbors, on Americans, and on the ICC.
He has a small window to delay his own judgment day for crimes against humanity.
Yesterday, convicted Bosnian Serb war criminal Ratko Mladić died in a UN prison at The Hague. In 2017, he was jailed for life for committing genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity during the 1992 - 1995 wars in the former Yugoslavia.
Known as the “Butcher of Bosnia,” he was put on trial after being found in Serbia in 2011. He had managed to evade arrest for 16 years.
He died at 84, about the same age as Trump.
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