By Lisa Van Dusen

June 5, 2026

Yes, Donald Trump and Pete Hoekstra’s tag-team 51st-state trolling this week was symptomatic of just how insane our bilateral relations with the United States have become.

But what’s truly worth noting is what started out Monday as the subtext of Trump’s revived annexation threat — pegged to Canada’s now-notorious “technical recession” as all the more reason to capture the country — followed by Ambassador Hoekstra’s second-windy assist.

That subtext was the unspoken thing that made you wince about this particular gaslighting gambit — that feeling that Donald Trump of all people shouldn’t be Schadenfreuding about Canada’s -0.1% GDP vapours, and not just because presidents of the United States aren’t supposed to crow about the technical recessions of ostensible allies.

The reason you were wincing at Trump’s technical-recession triumphalism became abundantly clear by Wednesday, when, if you read former Parliamentary Budget officer Kevin Page’s Policy piece — ‘Technical Recession’, the Backstory: Why has the Canadian Economy Flatlined? — all the way to the answer (come for the brilliant analysis, stay for the Pink Floyd and Robert Frost quotes), your Trump-wince subtext suddenly became context.

“Real GDP flatlines from the first quarter of 2025,” writes Page, “coinciding with the inauguration of President Trump (2.0) and the launch of the America First trade policy involving frequent changes in tariffs and derogatory comments towards Canadian sovereignty.”

In other words, Trump is taking a victory lap for his own trade war, while belatedly yet helpfully filling the motive gap of its relentlessly obfuscated casus belli.

Shortly after he was elected in November 2016, Trump asserted during a sit-down with the New York Times editorial board that “The president can’t have a conflict of interest”.

Trump being Trump, he didn’t mean that the president of the United States must avoid conflicts of interest at all costs. He meant it in a way that refreshed for a new century Richard Nixon’s bombshell 1977 answer to David Frost that “When the president does it, that means it is not illegal”.

Donald Trump belongs to a class of political actor whose technology-enabled industrialization is unique to the 21st century: the narrative warfare mercenary.

And, Trump being Trump, it was absolutely clear then — just as when Trump said the war against Iran would be “wrapped up in four to five weeks”, or when Trump said he would, to the best of his ability, “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States” — that he meant the exact opposite.

It was, in the annals of misdirectional Trumpian telegraphy, the moment the world was put on notice that Trump would soon be festooned with more conflicts of interest than all the previous presidents of the United States put together.

His conflict of interest involving the Canadian economy arises from his concurrent roles as the president who deliberately tanked it, the president celebrating that destruction, and the president threatening to capitalize on it in a predatory fashion.

And because the stakes of that conflict-of-interest cocktail are torqued by the ongoing, unfrozen CUSMA talks (Canada-US Trade Minister Dominic Leblanc having wisely chosen “unfrozen” to describe the talks over the more orthodox, cancellation-magnet “resumed”), Canada’s technical recession has become fresh ammunition in Trump’s economic war, adding yet another conflict of interest to his euphoric embrace of the term.

Donald Trump belongs to a class of political actor whose technology-enabled industrialization is unique to the 21st century: the narrative warfare mercenary.

They behave like lunatics yet somehow know where all the fine-print constitutional loopholes are buried. They use their personalities to rationalize change nobody voted for. They deliberately inflict maximum damage on a very particular set of targets, including democracy, the liberal world order, the democratic superpower that led it, the systemic and geopolitical status quo that was expanding democracy when it was so rudely interrupted, real journalists, human rights, truth and — as a pre-emptive means to the end of inuring humanity to the notion that absolutely anything is possible — organic reality.

They are not just useful idiots, they are weaponized ones, whose coerced or corrupted amenability to shamelessly repurposing themselves to inflict otherwise impossible damage on people, places, and things has been a theme of the war on democracy since its inception.

So, while Donald Trump and Pete Hoekstra may seem like inexplicably belligerent clowns, they’re really not. They’re explicably belligerent clowns.

Policy Editor and Publisher Lisa Van Dusen has served as Washington bureau chief for Sun Media, Washington columnist for the Ottawa Citizen, international writer for Peter Jennings at ABC News, and as an editor at AP National in New York and UPI in Washington.