The year of living dangerously: it’s here

HALIFAX—Twenty twenty-six will be the year of living dangerously. United States President Donald J. Trump will see to it. Here’s why. This is the year that Trump and the GOP face a reckoning: the November mid-term elections. After a year of chaotic and calamitous governing, where the rich got richer and regular Americans lost their medical coverage, judgment day is fast approaching. According to virtually every pollster and pundit, the Republicans will follow Trump over the electoral cliff like the political lemmings they are. The president himself has looked into his own crystal ball and has seen this: if the GOP loses the mid-terms, the Democrats will, at a minimum, regain control of the House of Representatives. Trump knows exactly what that would mean. His kingdom of lies and lawlessness would crumble like a sand castle at high tide. That’s why the president himself told his sycophantic followers that if the Republicans lose the House, he will be impeached. If that should occur, Trump could be moving from the Oval Office to a place where the door is always locked, and it will be considerably harder to order up those Diet Cokes. In a word, Trump can’t afford to lose in November because it may cost him his liberty. And that is what makes this a very dangerous year indeed. For now, Trump is still president and he still wields enormous power. He is already using and abusing it to affect the coming elections by fiddling the system. That’s why Trump has asked GOP governors to “re-district” their congressional seats. Just as he once asked Georgia’s secretary of state to find him enough votes to win an election he had lost, he is asking GOP governors to create more Republican seats to avoid defeat in November. And he is asking for that re-districting just months from the momentous vote. Normally, re-districting is done in the middle of a decade, years away from an election. It is designed to deal with demographic changes, not political ones. Along with trying to cheat by re-districting before the November vote, Trump is employing another strategy to stave off judgment day. The president is deliberately starving Americans of any information potentially damaging to him. That’s why Americans will never find out what’s in the Epstein files before November. He doesn’t give a hoot about the hundreds of victims, just his own skin. Trump is so determined to keep the nature of his personal connection to the infamous child sex-trafficker secret, he has encouraged his attorney general, the contemptible Pam Bondi, to slow walk release of these mercilessly redacted files. Sap comes out of a maple tree faster than Bondi is getting the documents out. That’s why she keeps on finding millions of “new” documents that will bring the process of release to a slow crawl. Never mind that Bondi and the DOJ are in violation of a congressional subpoena that required them to release all of the Epstein material in December. What, one wonders, are they hiding? As if fiddling the electoral system—and illegally withholding information from Americans that has been subpoenaed by Congress—wasn’t bad enough, Trump has another dirty trick up his sleeve. Massive, outrageous diversion and distraction, designed to make him look a powerful man of action. The invasion of Venezuela by U.S. military forces, and the abduction of the country’s president and his wife to face charges in the United States was partially designed to get people talking about something other than the Epstein files, or the looming debacle for the GOP in November. Instead, it has turned into a dreadful and worrisome flop. It is true that Trump got some credit for toppling a very bad man. A dictator, a drug-dealer, and, by some accounts, a killer. A trial has yet to be held. But whatever credit Trump might have gained by taking down the likes of Nicolás Maduro was more than eclipsed by how he did it. In clear violation of international law, Trump violated Venezuela’s sovereignty by attacking the country with military force. That undercuts the most basic principle of the rules-based order that has regulated international relations since Second World War. That was bad enough. But then Trump brazenly announced that he would be “running” the country for a lengthy and unspecified period of time. He also announced that large, American oil companies would be coming into Venezuela to take over its oil industry. And, just to make clear who is in charge, Trump announced that Venezuela would begin sending its oil to the U.S. in tranches of up to 50 million barrels. The U.S. would then sell the oil domestically and to other western nations. The revenues from these immense transactions would be held in American banks until the president determined that Venezuela was stable enough to resume control of is own oil. There is no fixed sunset date for this arrangement. Which is about as imperialistic as it gets. And that is the gravest danger of all. Evidence is fast emerging that Venezuela is not the end of Trump’s hemispheric muscle flexing, only the beginning. It could go something like this if Trump truly believes he owns the Western Hemisphere. America First, Venezuela Second, Greenland Third, Cuba Fourth, Mexico Fifth, and who knows, Canada Sixth? Canada has, after all, has one of the largest oil reserves in the world—and there’s nothing Trump likes more than other people’s oil. For those who think it is over the top to even imagine that the U.S. might reduce Canada to a vassal state the way it has done to Venezuela, consider the words of a man who knows a thing or two about politics. Bob Rae, Canada’s former UN ambassador, says that this country faces an existential challenge from Trump’s klepto-imperialism. Calling Trump’s recent actions “extraordinary and unprecedented," Rae said, “the American government doesn’t take Canada’s sovereignty seriously,” adding that it would be a mistake for Canadians to think that they are not “on the menu, too.” The words of Trump aide Stephen Miller more than back up Rae’s assessment. Here’s what Miller had to say about the country that could well be next on Trump’s shopping list. “Nobody’s going to fight the United States militarily over the future of Greenland,” he told CNN’s Jake Tapper. “We live in a world, a real world, Jake, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time.” “Stand on guard," indeed. Michael Harris is an award-winning author and journalist. The Hill Times

The year of living dangerously: it’s here

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The year of living dangerously: it’s here

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