The Trump Presidency Is Going Great

NPR does its polite public-radio best to summarize the week where Donald Trump kept collecting foreign conflicts like they’re NFT drops, while voters quietly told pollsters they’re exhausted, broke, and somehow still being asked whether immigrants are the real problem. The Trump administration’s idea of “engagement” abroad appears to be a mix of impulsive saber-rattling and vibes-based geopolitics, with the rest of the world playing the role of unpaid extra in his never-ending reality show.

The poll, meanwhile, reveals the usual fun-house mirror of American priorities: people are worried about the economy hollowed out by oligarchs, but get handed another round of fearmongering about the border; they want stability, but are offered a president who treats foreign policy like live-tweeting a bar fight. So yes, democracy is technically still here, but it’s mostly being used as a focus group for whichever foreign dust-up Trump wants to wander into next.

In the latest episode of What If Russia Did This, far-right Alberta separatists have been holding covert meetings with Trump’s state department to ask a foreign power to help break up Canada, because nothing says "grassroots sovereignty" like flying south to beg Donald Trump for a $500bn US Treasury credit facility. British Columbia premier David Eby called it what it is: treason – the old-fashioned kind, not the Fox News kind where voting for a Democrat counts.

The Alberta independence crowd, still a minority in the province, is hustling for 178,000 signatures to trigger a referendum while openly fantasizing about US money and US backing. Conveniently, Alberta premier Danielle Smith recently made it easier to force referendums, but now insists she totally supports a "strong and sovereign Alberta within a united Canada" – in other words, she lit the fuse and is shocked, shocked there are separatist fireworks.

Trump’s treasury secretary Scott Bessent went on Real America’s Voice to praise Alberta’s "independent people" and to muse aloud about them leaving Canada, because when you’re running a barely-functional democracy at home, the obvious next step is destabilizing the neighbor that supplies your oil. Analysts are now openly gaming out a scenario where a separation vote fails, Trump declares it "fake", and the US moves troops up to northern Montana to pressure Canada into letting Alberta become the 51st state. But sure, tell us again how it’s the other countries that run fifth-column ops to fracture democracies.

Indigenous leaders, whose treaty rights actually predate Alberta’s existence, are pointing out that you can’t just redraw borders on their land because some oil guys got mad at equalization payments and found a sympathetic ear in Washington. Elections Alberta, they warn, is not remotely equipped to handle foreign interference in a referendum that the Trump administration seems eager to turn into its own little annexation cosplay. Canada, according to one researcher, is "sleepwalking" into this. The Trump crew, on the other hand, is wide awake and making a shopping list.