The Canada strategy

Trump praises Canada and says it "would be our biggest, most beautiful — it would be great, this state.”

Meanwhile he demeans the country and its leaders saying Canada has nothing Americans want, and that it leaders are incompetent and "nasty."

Strange. What does he think he is doing?

Frame One: Trump is the real estate developer who thinks big. Maybe President Trump is simply reverting to type. Real estate developers are builders. They aren't satisfied to sit back and enjoy the rent-checks and their current portfolio. They are on the lookout for the next big project in the form of some underdeveloped property. Trump's career is full of these. Some work out, some don't. Trump saw opportunity in airlines, vodka, a university, property on Fifth Avenue, Atlantic City casinos, and a TV show. Canada, like Greenland, is a growth opportunity with potential.

Atlantic City before casinos

Trump is belittling Canada to get the price down. He is showing he is not a foolish buyer willing to overpay. 

Frame Two: Trump leads a regional power and wants to extract tribute. This impulse is as old as humanity itself. The strong do as they will and the weak suffer as they must. Trump's view of the world is a diversion from the 80-year post-war consensus that we achieve peace through a rules-base global system. Trump believes a "rules-based order" is a sham and always has been. Strong countries pretend there is international rule of law only when it serves their interests. When it doesn't -- as with the U.S. in Vietnam, China in the South China Sea, and Russia in neighboring Georgia, Crimea and Ukraine -- it serves their purpose to ignore law, so they do. Trump believes in power, not law.

Trump has a notion of neighborhood, built upon the the ability to project military power where others cannot. Canada and Greenland and this hemisphere are America's neighborhood. Logistically, the U.S. can dominate. Russia has its own neighborhood. Eastern Europe will be dominated by the big power, which is Russia. It is the nature of power and geography.

Frame Three: Trump is playing out the oldest, most primitive of male behaviors: fighting for the only thing worth having, women and progeny. Billionaire Aristotle Onassis is alleged to have said, "If women didn't exist, all the money in the world would have no meaning." In a biological and anthropological context, all human achievement, all efforts to seek power, resources and glory, are efforts by men to compete with one another, to impress women and to find mates. 

The U.S. is experiencing a self-conscious backlash against second-wave feminism, supposedly-effeminate civilization, and rules-based globalism. Republican men are growing beards, Meta's Mark Zuckerberg praises "masculine" corporate values, Trump gropes women, and Elon Musk has 11 children that we know of. (This is nothing compared to Genghis Kahn, whose military achievements resulted in descendants numbering in the hundreds of millions.) Male competition and one-upmanship fits a pattern that flows logically from the difference between the few big gametes in females and many small gametes in males. Men compete for women, who offer sexual access and bear children. JD Vance warned that women who misunderstand this biological imperative and seek career first become childless cat ladies.

Male gorillas compete to hold their harem and keep sexual access. Male chimpanzees form alliances for the same purpose. Modern Americans sublimate this competition and exercise it though the media of modern civilization and economies, where women work outside the home and expect political equality. Trump is actively trying to re-establish traditional sex and gender norms, and is deleting federal web pages and signage that he considers remnants of "wokeness." Trump is re-normalizing male dominance displays, including violent sports, but he cannot simply go to the neighboring tribe and hit a woman over the head and bring her home.

Trump can sublimate. He is surrounded by richer men, but none of them have the capacity to demand that the winsome country to the north join his team. Other men can buy planes and islands and elections but they cannot command an army to seize and consolidate a continent. Trump can. Trump may be playing out his instincts to be the alpha male.

He appears to be doing this courtship with Canada foolishly, by pushing Canada away while courting her. There may be strategy and purpose. Trump is trying to damage and destabilize Canada enough that its best option is to join the U.S.  A bachelor gorilla who seeks to poach from a silverback gorilla's harem will sometimes do a surprise attack on the harem, grab an infant gorilla, and tear it in half. Its mother grieves. But shortly after she sometimes leaves the harem to join the interloper. Why? Because her former leader demonstrated that he could not do the primary job of a silverback gorilla, which is to protect her infants from invaders. She does the necessary thing. She moves to the male who showed he has the capacity to kill her babies.

If Trump can demonstrate that Canada and its leaders cannot protect its citizens from an aggressive and hostile bully like Trump's USA, then Canada may choose to seek refuge in the arms of its abuser. It would be the necessary thing.

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