Americans are not our enemy…

By Bill Kilpatrick

…BUT MAGA AND anyone who supports them is. I wrote something similar on my Facebook page the other day after I heard about an incident that occurred in the United States when a Canadian was harassed and threatened at an archery tournament in Chicago. Shortly thereafter, I got an interesting private message from someone who said that they have had “several interactions with United States citizens who support the Trump administration and have many friends that do business weekly and daily in the United States during all of this.” They adding that there has not been a “hint of this type of thing” from friends or Trump supporters that they have interacted with. Then they added, “I really doubt it is the norm” adding “all MAGA supporters are not your enemy, unless you make it that way.” Well, I'm drawing a line in the sand, and I'm making it that way.

My response to this person was as follows, “I guess I see it a little differently... I might have been able to buy this [that people voted for Trump for different reasons] in 2016, but there's absolutely no excuse now. The people who voted for this man knew that he was a rapist and a racist. They knew that he was a criminal, and that he tried to overthrow the democratic process. These same Americans that you speak to [who support Trump, but are not belligerent] would be the equivalent of the Nazis after the Second World War that said ‘yes I was a member of the party, yes I supported them, but I wasn't a real Nazi.' We need to learn from history not repeat it. There's no excuses anymore. If you support MAGA then you are the enemy. We are not turning on them they are turning on us just for the record.” Elon Musk's ‘Seig heil' to Trump at his inauguration should leave no one in doubt.

Trump is attempting to completely undo the international order that was put in place after the Second World War. He is trying to undermine the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the United Nations, The World Health Organization, as well as national and international treaties. He's threatening and bullying weaker countries like Canada, Greenland, Mexico, and now even the Ukraine calling the former United States ally, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, a “dictator.” According to a BBC article Trump further said that Zelensky “has done a terrible job, his country is shattered, and millions have unnecessarily died.” Trump even went so far as to insinuate that Ukraine was the one that started the war with Russia, only to say a couple days later that it was in fact Russia that invaded the Ukraine.

The BBC article further points out that Trump is trying to get his hands on Ukraine's precious metals such as “uranium, lithium, cobalt, rare earths and more and are used in applications such as batteries, technology and aerospace.” This also appears to be his motivation for trying to take over Greenland according to another BBC article. And if that's true for them then we can safely assume that's the reason why he would like Canada to become the 51^st state. He wants our resources, or rather, Elon Musk wants our resources.

While this may sound like hyperbole, much of the same rhetoric that Putin used before he invaded the Ukraine can be heard coming out of Trump's mouth. A point that was made by Mike Holbrook, the Green Party candidate at the Bancroft all-candidates meeting. This was also recently echoed by New York Times opinion columnist Masha Gessen in a CNN interview last week. Gessen is a Russian American who lived in Putin's Russia and is very familiar with their propaganda techniques. Gessen's assessment is that Trump and Putin have basically decided to split up the world between the two of them. The threat from MAGA is a clear and present danger to the United States, Canada and the world.

The New Blue Party candidate, Glenn Tyrrell, made the claim at the all-candidates meeting that his party would just “communicate” with Trump to end the tariffs. Good luck, have you ever tried to reason with a MAGA supporter? Tyrrell further stated that Canada just needed to secure its border and stop the fentanyl and the tariffs would not be “necessary” adding that, “we should have been taking care of those issues without it being brought up.”

What Tyrrell clearly does not understand is that we are taking care of those issues and no matter how hard we try there will always be people and drugs that slip though. It's impossible to fully secure a 8,891 kilometre border and Trump knows it. This is why he choose those issues to base his tariffs on. He knows we can never fully secure the border. Which means that he will always be able to point to drugs and illegal immigration as a pre-text to punish Canada and Canadians. He wants to break the Canadian economy and Canadian resistance to becoming the 51^st state. This way he can gain access to our natural resources.

Factcheck.org examined the claims made by Trump regarding immigration and fentanyl. The numbers speak for themselves. The amount of fentanyl that was seized at the Canada-United States border in 2024 was a whopping 42 pounds. The amount seized at the southern border was 21,148 pounds. The same pattern is repeated for illegal immigration. The number of people apprehended at the Canadian border in 2024 was 23,721 but at the southern border there was significantly more sitting at 1.5 million. The amount of fentanyl that entered the US from Canada amounts to less than one per cent of the total fentanyl seized and the amount of illegal immigration from Canada equals 1.5 per cent of the total number of people apprehended. Trump's claims that “The fentanyl coming through Canada is massive” are ludicrous. The amount of fentanyl is not “massive” and neither is the number of illegal immigrants crossing the border. It's true the numbers are climbing, but the reality, something that Trump continually dismisses, is that the amount of fentanyl and illegal immigration from Canada to the United States still represents a small overall percentage. We are securing our borders and Trump knows it, but he doesn't care. He wants our resources.

And here's the rub, no amount of communication will stop Trump because as Zelensky rightly noted Trump lives in a “disinformation bubble” just like his followers. The 77,284,118 who voted for Trump and who largely continue to support him are the enemies of democracy, freedom, and liberty. They may not have known what they were voting for in 2016, but they sure as hell did in 2024. We need to defend ourselves in any way we can and firstly we can stop doing business with Trump supporters like Wayne Gretzky. King Trump wants it all, but like the kings of old, that level of greed often makes monarchs lose their heads.