(Dobbs) I’m Not As Proud Anymore. Just Embarrassed.Trump is never humbled. Not by his endless index of lies, not by his puerile petulance.
It is hard to admit, but in the personal battle between President Trump and Prime Minister Carney of Canada— and it has gotten personal— I’m rooting for Carney. He’s the one who’s playing it smart, he’s the one who’s playing it straight, he’s the one who’s playing it for his citizens and their sovereignty, not for his pettiness and his ego. That doesn’t mean I want everything from cars to lumber to appliances to steel in the U.S. to cost more, although if it does, that will be Trump’s fault because he’s the one who elevated the trade war with Canada, not Carney. What it means is, while many world leaders have embarrassed themselves sucking up to the president, a handful have fought back when Trump has insulted their nation and tried to walk all over them. Above all others, Carney has taken off the gloves. With not-so-subtle digs at the undependable American president like, “We are trusted…. we are reliable,” Canada’s leader has put Trump in his place, which is where he belongs. It’s not just about the tariffs, although while Trump is a man of the moment, Carney is a man of his word. Last Friday night, after he pulled out of trade negotiations with the United States because, as he put it, the U.S. “asked too much, and they offered too little,” Trump wasted no time putting punishing new tariffs on roughly $30 billion worth of Canadian goods marked for export to the U.S. Carney told his nation in a televised address, “We will retaliate dollar-for-dollar.” And they did. Saying “We are masters of our destiny,” yesterday he put new tariffs of up to 50% on hundreds of American imports. He’s playing it smart. They also are masters of dignity. Monday our ignoble president wrote, “Someone should get these clowns to ‘fall in line’ or, the consequences for Canada will be far WORSE!” Carney didn’t lower himself to that base level. He’s not above a dig or two, but as his minister for Canada-U.S. Trade told CNBC, “We’ve decided as a federal government months ago not to respond to sort of the daily social media posts of either the president or his Cabinet secretaries.” He’s playing it straight. At a news conference Saturday in Canada’s capital of Ottawa, Carney laid out his plan to help his citizens weather the storm. After telling them that they are masters of their destiny, he announced, “The government is matching that spirit with $25 billion to protect Canadian workers and businesses hurt by American tariffs. We’re helping our small and medium-sized businesses respond by investing in equipment, productivity, and supply chain resilience. And we’re financing large companies to keep large employers operating and retain their workers. We are helping our hardest-hit industries retool and pivot to those new international markets. And we’re being our own best customer. We have the right plan to build Canada strong.” He’s playing it for his people. CNN’s fact-checker Daniel Dale has been cataloguing the lies that Donald Trump has told about Canada since the trade war started. They are, he writes, “assertions that either wildly distort a kernel of truth or are just plain made up.” Yesterday he rattled them off: “Among other things, the president has falsely claimed that the Canadian public likes the idea of becoming the 51st U.S. state, which is overwhelming unpopular with the Canadian public. That Canada is one of the world’s highest-tariff countries, though it is actually low in world rankings. That Canada prohibits U.S. banks from operating there, though more than a dozen U.S. banks operate in Canada. That Canada doesn’t accept U.S. agricultural exports, though Canada is the world’s second-largest purchaser of those exports. That Chinese and Russian ships are ‘constantly surrounding’ Canada, though that never happened. And that ‘they don’t, essentially, have a military,’ though Canada’s very-much-existent military jointly operates the North American Aerospace Defense Command with the U.S. and fought alongside the US in Afghanistan, against ISIS in the Middle East, and in various prior wars.” Dale, by the way, is a native of the province of Ontario and still lives in Toronto. Trump, of course, is never humbled. Not by his endless index of lies, not by his puerile petulance. That’s what led to his newest slap at Canada, his announcement yesterday on his website that “The United States is giving serious consideration to changing the name of Lake Ontario to Lake America in that we don’t expect to doing much business with Ontario any longer.” Then Trump followed up with another childish post. “Lake Ontario” was crossed out. What you have to remember is, this isn’t about making anybody’s trade balance better or worse. It isn’t about making anybody’s cost of living better or worse. It’s about Donald Trump. It’s only about Donald Trump, and his mean-spirited way of jabbing a finger in the eye of anyone who defies him. For context, it was Ontario’s premier Doug Ford who the day before told Donald Trump, “Kiss my ass.” True, not the most dignified thing he could say about the American president, but he spoke for millions. Anyway, many would argue there is nothing dignified that you can say about the American president.Share Of course this name-change plan for Lake Ontario didn’t come out of the blue because we’ve seen it before, namely, when on his first day back in office last year, Trump signed an executive order to change the name of the “Gulf of Mexico” to the “Gulf of America.” Most other countries ignored it, including Mexico whose president Claudia Sheinbaum declared, “The Gulf of Mexico is still the Gulf of Mexico.” But the Associated Press wasn’t so lucky. Asserting that the president can’t just unilaterally change the name of a body of international water, it refused to go along, and for months after that, its correspondents and photographers were banned from selected events at the White House, and from space in the press pool on Air Force One. A federal judge called the White House’s punishment “unconstitutional,” but now the AP has to figure out what to do all over again.Leave a comment I always have been proud to be an American. Maybe even prouder than most, because of all the time I spent reporting from Soviet bloc nations and dictatorships and terrorist strongholds around the world. I saw what it was like to live with petty, vengeful, acrimonious autocrats waging war not just on their rivals but on their own people. Now we have one of our own. So while it’s hard to admit, I’m not as proud anymore. Just embarrassed. © 2026 Greg Dobbs |