My generation envied and admired the USA for many reasons—Florida vacations, Hollywood and Disneyworld magic, icons like Martin Luther King and Babe Ruth, nail-biting elections that put the first Roman Catholic and Black presidents in the White House, first man on the moon, Johnny Carson’s mirth and the great broadcaster Walter Cronkite.
The USA was the most generous country in the world—whether it was fighting foreign dictators or responding to natural disasters, the U.S. Marines and aid workers were ready to roll. Immigrants from around the world were welcomed to help build this powerful and rich democracy.
Now? Not so much.
Today, our neighbour to the south is pitied, feared and scorned for having re- elected a president who is governing like a narcissistic fascist, giving his finger to democratic institutions and lawmakers and condoning masked government agents who bully, attack and murder citizens daring to stand up for their hard-earned rights and the rights of others.
U.S. generosity of yesteryear has dried up for everyone and everything that does not conform to the rigid, right-wing agenda of Donald Trump and the shady cast of cowering characters who advise, serve and protect him.
Many are getting rich from Trump’s America—legally and otherwise. Many more are suffering and dying, and sadly, there is no end in sight to the violation of constitutional and civil rights protections and the gutting of institutional oversight.
Trump collects gold while kids go hungry.
Increasingly, the trajectory of Trumpism is compared to that of Germany in the 1930s, and there are warnings that Canada must hope for the best but prepare for the worst. In dealing with Trump, yesterday’s worst fear can become today’s shocking reality.
The recent arrest by federal agents of two journalists doing their job covering a protest at a Minnesota church struck a blow for the vital freedom of the press. Was it revenge because one of the journos is a high-profile critic of Trump? Or a warning to all the media whom Trump disparages and despises.
Increasingly, in the wake of growing nationwide public protest, pundits debate whether a civil war is possible. Could the day come when Americans sell their properties, and hundreds of thousands flee north? Many will remember when Canada took in upwards of 100,000 Americans opposed to the Vietnam War.
Trump’s radicalization of the American state has cast a wide net, and there’s no indication of remorse or willingness to make any significant change of course. The courts provide a ray of hope, but his cronies are embedded there as well.
On the big stage, his regime has caused a rupture in world order, threatening economies and the future of sovereign nations like Greenland and Canada. The core of his support—the Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement—demands loyalty to their cause at any cost.
Victims of Trumpism include the most innocent and vulnerable—like the thousands of kids suffering from measles because the measles vaccine has been undermined for so long by Trump’s loony U.S. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Federal funding for food, research and health programs has been cut or eliminated across the U.S., as well as international aid.
Whereas the Statue of Liberty and Old Glory being hoisted on Iwo Jima were once symbols of American freedom, liberty and valour, images of recent Trump government-inspired brutality and murder on U.S. streets have become etched into the conscience of Americans and people around the world.
Five-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos of Minnesota had the bad luck to be born to a brown-skinned family who came to the U.S. from Ecuador seeking opportunity and safety. Recently, his Dad, Adrian, was bringing Liam home from preschool when Trump’s dreaded Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) gang of masked thugs grabbed them from their driveway while the rest of the family locked themselves inside and watched in horror.
Media photos of Liam being captured in his knitted blue hat with the bunny ears and his Spider-Man backpack and taken 1,300 miles away to a federal immigration centre in Texas quickly went viral.
With the help of a U.S. congressman who got access to Liam and his Dad, public protest and a lawyer, they are now back home after a week in confinement. Their lawyer says there is no indication that Liam’s father has a criminal record in either Ecuador or the U.S.
The federal judge who ordered Liam and his father released delivered a scathing opinion, slamming the Trump administration’s disregard for Constitutional rights and the “ill-conceived and incompetently implemented government pursuit of daily deportation quotas, apparently even if it requires traumatising children.”
All of this happened within weeks of two other Minnesotans—mother of three Renee Good and ICU nurse Alex Pretti, both 37—being shot to death by ICE agents as they participated in protests against the brutality of the deportation policy. In some cases, kids have been used as decoys to lure their parents into capture.
Americans support the arrest and deportation of dangerous, illegal immigrants, but they didn’t bargain for the chaos and tragedies that have ensued.
As public support for Trump drops, he struggles to appease his own supporters, including the red meat MAGA gang. Radical anti-immigrant forces demand that arrest and deportation quotas be met at any price, while business owners and donors argue they need immigrants to run their factories and farms.
Donald Trump promised to rid his country of the “worst of the worst” of illegal immigrants. It seemed like a good idea at the time and helped him get re-elected.
Tens of thousands have been locked up and/or deported, two people are dead, and wee Liam will probably remember always the day the U.S. government took him into custody and took away his bunny hat and backpack.
As neighbours, all we can do is hope and pray there can be a peaceful way to end this Trumpian nightmare—and soon before many more innocent people needlessly suffer and die.
Sally Barnes has enjoyed a distinguished career as a writer, journalist, and author. Her work has been recognized in a number of ways, including receiving a Southam Fellowship in Journalism at Massey College at the University of Toronto. A self-confessed political junkie, she has worked in the back rooms for several Ontario premiers. In addition to a number of other community contributions, Sally Barnes served a term as president of the Ontario Council on the Status of Women. She is a former business colleague of Doppler’s publisher, Hugh Mackenzie, and lives in Kingston, Ontario. You can find her online at sallybarnesauthor.com.
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I always look forward to Sally Barnes columns, usually wise and often humorous. Not so funny this time.I have heard Mr Trump quoted as saying the only limitations on him are his “own morals.” Mr Rubio recently put Europe on notice in Munich- there are no rules of law only transactions. Fear and horror will not help us if “transactions” with the US erase the border- Mr Moulson’s political attack on the current Canadian PM expresses no specific pragmatic action that any Canadian government should take now to prevent our total loss of Canadian sovereignty-never mind his perceived loss of “Canadian identity” –
What struck me most in this piece wasn’t the rhetoric — it was the grief. Many Canadians grew up admiring the United States as a democratic anchor: civil rights leadership, strong institutions, peaceful transfers of power. When those institutions appear strained, people react. That reaction isn’t hysteria; it’s concern about the health of democracy in a country whose stability affects the entire world, including us.
It’s also important to clarify something. Acknowledging democratic stress in another country is not a distraction from Canadian politics, nor is it disloyalty. Democracies are interconnected. Political polarization, contempt for institutions, and normalization of extreme language do not stay neatly within borders — they influence civic culture more broadly. We can debate our own Prime Minister vigorously and still recognize when institutional guardrails elsewhere are being tested. Those conversations are not mutually exclusive.
And this is where tone matters. When concern about democratic norms is immediately reframed as partisan attack, or when criticism is met with sweeping claims that leaders are “destroying the country,” we shift from policy debate into distrust. That shift is subtle, but it is corrosive. It replaces argument with accusation and turns every issue into a zero-sum loyalty test.
If we value Canada’s steadiness — and most of us do — then we have to model it. Strong democracies depend not only on courts and constitutions, but on citizens who refuse to normalize contempt for the systems that protect everyone, including the people we disagree with.
We can disagree robustly. But we still owe each other civic discipline.
Trump=USA implosion.
Another Trump bashing article to distract us from from the damage our own Prime Minister is doing to destroy Canada and strip away yhe Canadian Identify. At least Trump, unlike Mr. Carney, shows up for work and wants to make his country great again. Our leader wants to destroy us. Canadians need to wake up and stop looking in the neighbors backyard and seriously take a look at what is happening here at home.
I truly don’t think that we need fear Trump.per se. As noted by Mr Braun, Trump’s days are numbered. In fact, his programme maybe emasculated within a year (after the midterms). Of course, the chaos will continue until he is actually gone.
What we (Canadians) and citizens around the world) need to study, explore and address are those voters that continue to support Trump and his nonsense.
After all the lies, after all the unconstitutional manoeuvring and of, all the shit, a full 36% of American voters still support this. Media crows about this historic low. But I am befuddled by how high this number is.. And I am convinced that there is a similar sized constituency in Canada, We need to know who these people are (in aggregate) and why they relentlessly follow this path.
As David Frum pointed out in his 2020 book Trumpocalypse. “Polls have repeatedly shown that about a third of the electorate refuses to abandon Trump, no matter what he does, because they see the rest of the country building a future that doesn’t have a place for them” These are people who have been so left behind, that they are prepared to see the whole system/society burn to the ground. They fundamentally don’t belief in democracy or its prospects for them.
And these people exist in Canada …and around the world.
We need to, if not forget Trump….discount his relevance…..We need to acknowledge the citizens/residents that are being left behind. We need to bring them back into the fold. And we need to address it immediately Otherwise we (Canada and the USA) are always only 4 years away from another Trump.
Remember Trump’s reign of terror is temporary.
All the next presidential candidate has to do is say they will reverse all of Trump’s ridiculous moves.
Trump’s reign of terror may actually be over this year.
“Democrats only need to flip three more seats to win the House, and according to the non-partisan Cook Political Report, a whopping eighteen races have shifted into the blue column.”
I understand it’s down to one now.
Trump could lose Congress even before the midterms.
The Supreme Court will likely rule Trump’s tariffs are illegal and the US has to pay back billions.
I believe things will go back to the way they were after Trump is gone.
Could be starting before the next US election.
Trump’s reign of terror is temporary.
Thank you Sally for your compelling article.
You are expressing in such a lovely way what I have been thinking after Trump was elected.
Thank you for your clarity.
Don’t stop writing please.
Sincerely
Martina Schroer
Huntsville Ontario
The devil wears Prada.
Sally, to add to your story, here is an article by Paul Krugman, a prominent American economist and columnist for the NYT from 2000 to 2025. He explains how Trump and his MAGA group are making the USA backward, poorer, sicker and irrelevant. I have been following the story about using clean energy to minimize exploding climate change for 25 years and I think Krugman’s summary is the best I have seen.
https://open.substack.com/pub/paulkrugman/p/turning-our-back-on-clean-energy?utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email
Does nobody in the USA watch the news? Do they have such a short memory that forget the lies (nearly constant) that have and continue to issue from Trump and his cronies? Is the truth not worth something?
At some point the USA has to realize that what Trump is doing is destroying their country in the rest of the World. Now nobody trusts the US, for trade, protection or even to be fair to it’s own citizens.
They could just have signed over their government to the Mafia, a lot cheaper and at least they seem to operate with a plan and agenda. Not only that but they do not tax the lot of citizens, they just selectively extort, something Trump is still trying to perfect.
There are literally dozens of things Trump has said and done, any one of which in prior history would have resulted in an impeachment and removal of him from office, (see Richard Nixon who did much less) and yet there he stands, with his over size jacket, red tie and a mouth that speaks with forked tongue, surrounded by a gaggle of similarly deranged inner supporters.
Also, 6 million pages of Epstein?! You can bet that Trump is guilty as hell in there somewhere. Remember where he said to “grab the women” in his first term, or did you all forget that lovely line?
Bad, Sad, and Ugly, not even like the movie (Good, Bad and Ugly)
He needs to go and soon and far away.
As someone of roughly the same vintage as the writer, this piece moved me deeply.
It put words to something many of us have been quietly feeling. I too grew up admiring the United States from the idealism of Martin Luther King, the wonder of the moon landing, the cultural magic of Hollywood and the steady reassurance of Walter Cronkite. The U.S. felt confident, generous, and anchored in democratic norms most of the time.
Sure, there was Watergate, the Iran hostage crisis, the My Lai massacre; school shootings; the Vietnam war, civil unrest, but in general, people were on the same page surrounding these awful events.
To witness such a radical departure from those values is not something I ever imagined experiencing in my lifetime.
It isn’t triumph or smugness that I feel it’s sadness. Profound sadness. And fear. And anger. And disgust. When you have admired a neighbour for so long, those feelings cut deeply.
Thanks Sally Barnes for articulating that grief so honestly.
Trump wants to get criminals out of the country but at the same time pardons criminals. Also, he is one.