Canada and the Trump-Musk Dictatorship
There is really no more pretending that the Musk-Trump administration is anything more than a white supremacist dictatorship with all that it implies. Last night, at his private residence at Mar-a-Lago rather than at the White House, Trump signed an executive order declaring himself the final arbiter of what is legal. This only days after posting on social media platforms, “He who saves his Country does not violate any law” while Elon Musk demonstrates a strange fascination with the number 14.
“14 words” is a white supremacist dogwhistle. It refers to the slogan: “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.” We’ll come back to that in a moment.
Trump’s Mar-a-Lago executive order wording is more than a little concerning, reading in part:
The President and the Attorney General, subject to the President’s supervision and control, shall provide authoritative interpretations of law for the executive branch. The President and the Attorney General’s opinions on questions of law are controlling on all employees in the conduct of their official duties.
It is hard to interpret this in any other way than the President is asserting his own interpretation of the law over that of the legal system, up to and including the Supreme Court. Combined with his statement only three days earlier that nothing he does is illegal, this is clearly the continuation of an attempted rapid and total coup. It is a statement that the executive branch of government will disregard or overrule court rulings that do not align with their own view. If the two other branches of government — the Supreme Court and Congress — do not rapidly challenge that notion, it will become entirely self-fulfilling.
Now, back to Musk’s fascination with the number 14. A Reddit thread noted that the Nazi-era German Labour Front’s logo is remarkably similar to the original DOGE logo — note in particular the gold ring around the swastika and the one around the US flag in their respective logos, which on top of the visual similarities each have 14 teeth. If there is any doubt about the white supremacist intentions of these implausible coincidences, it might be time to recall another Trump executive order from two weeks ago, which grants refugee status in the United States to white South Africans, Musk’s native country. And just for good measure, Musk posted exactly 14 American flags as his tweet curiously recognising JD Vance for President's Day.
Also yesterday, the official White House X page posted a video of a deportation flight showing “illegal aliens” being chained up and loaded into an unmarked aircraft to be sent away. The caption, “ASMR: Illegal Alien Deportation Flight”. ASMR is “autonomous sensory meridian response”, in essence a sound so comforting and relaxing that it creates a tingling sensation.
Meanwhile, in a bizarre court filing, the administration claims that Elon Musk is a senior advisor to the president, not the director of DOGE, and they aren’t really sure who runs the group that they won’t call an agency lest it be subject to Freedom of Information. It’s all spelled out in journalist Heather Cox Richardson’s most recent post, which I won’t rehash:
If there is any remaining doubt about the Trump administration’s fascination with their own power and rewriting the world order, two more events on the international stage that also took place this week must be noted.
Trump’s Vice President, J.D. Vance, flew to Germany to attend the Munich Security Conference. While in the country, he did not meet with German chancellor Olaf Sholz. He did, however, meet with the leader of the AfD, Alice Weidel. The AfD, Alternative für Deutschland (Alternative for Germany) party is an overtly anti-democratic political party that opposes the European Union, immigration, and Islam and has been monitored as an extremist organisation. Its youth wing, the “Young Alternative for Germany” has been categorised by German intelligence as an “extremist entity that threatens democracy”.
It all brings Musk’s still-undenied inauguration salute into fairly clear perspective.
In case there was any remaining doubt about the overall intentions of the new American administration, they met with senior Russian officials in Saudi Arabia yesterday essentially to divvy up post-war Ukraine, rather resembling a cross between the Yalta Conference and the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, which divvied up Europe between the Allies and the Soviets at the end of a theatre of war started by divvying up Poland between Germany and the Soviet Union.
It is easy to become overwhelmed by the rapid and unprecedented actions by our southern neighbours, but that is not the point here. The United States has made its own bed and now must sleep in it.
For the rest of us, it is time to pivot away from the United States. We cannot rely on them militarily, economically, or democratically any further until they get their own house back in order, and there’s no evidence that the American people have fully come to terms with that need.
But there are partners for us to get closer to. Following the Vance snub of Germany’s democratic government, European Leaders are coming together rapidly and forcefully, and if Canada is to maintain its sovereignty, we will need to strengthen our bonds with a continent that is fully cognisant of the dangers posed by a white nationalist authoritarian régime with a significant military and industrial capability.
To ensure that happens, though, we need to keep Pierre Poilievre and his MAGA-supporting ex currently running his show as his top advisor out of the machinery of our own government, lest we, too, end up on the wrong side of history.
