Or: The Zero-Sum Pathology: Why Donald Trump’s Economic War on Canada Collapses Economic Logic to Satisfy a Grifter’s Worldview.
Why is Trump fighting a trade war with Canada — America’s best customer and closest ally? The economics collapse on inspection. The real logic is darker, and it’s been hiding in plain sight.
It’s past midnight in Ottawa and the coffee has gone cold and bitter in the mug. I keep scrolling through the August headlines like a man reading his own obituary in a language he only half-speaks. Tariffs. Threats. The word annexation orbiting the discourse like a bat that got into the house and can’t find its way out. Somewhere in the noise one question keeps circling back to bite me: why? Why would a president torch the most successful trading relationship between any two nations on Earth — an arrangement most countries would happily sell a kidney to possess — for no gain that any sober economist can calculate?
I don’t usually write about politics on this blog. I save that for OpinionOverload.Com, where the publication schedule moves at the speed of institutional caution. But this one kept me awake, and I think I finally cracked it. So here it is, hot off the keyboard, before the thread slips.
The Best Trading Relationship on Earth, Called a Disaster
Start with what we all know and somehow keep forgetting. Two wealthy, resource-rich countries. A shared language. Cultures so alike they argue about the same television shows in very similar accents. Geo-political and socio-economic interests that overlap like a Venn diagram drawn by a steady hand. And between them, a land border built for commerce — 8,891 kilometres of it, most of it undefended, much of it crossed by trucks that never slow down. Efficient, cheap, easy, profitable buying and selling and moving of goods.
The numbers, from memory and therefore approximate: roughly $1.3 trillion US in annual two-way trade before the current madness. About $3.5 billion changing hands every single day. The Ambassador Bridge at Windsor-Detroit alone carries something like a quarter of the merchandise that moves between the two countries. A car assembled in Ontario holds parts that crossed the border six or seven times before the finished vehicle rolled off the line. The energy grid is wired together — Canadian hydro keeps the lights on in American basements, Canadian crude feeds American refineries built specifically to process it. Michigan’s automakers, Minnesota’s hospitals, the entire American Midwest runs on inputs that arrive from the north on a schedule measured in hours.
And here’s the detail that should embarrass every trade hawk in Washington: on a goods-and-services basis, America has historically run a surplus with Canada. Canada is the top export market for dozens of US states. The United States sells more to Canada than it buys back. The relationship is no favour America grants a needy neighbour. In the coldest accounting terms, it is a gift that keeps giving largely in one direction. Canada sells cheap, low-price base resources to the US — crude oil, aluminum, lumber, minerals, etc. The US turns these resources into expensive things like cars and electronics and sells them back to Canada and the rest of the world. Canada is fine with this because Canada is making bank. Up until now, the US has been fine with this because it’s making mega-bank.
Trump calls this arrangement terrible. Terrible — the word he reserves for people who wrong him and his buildings with bad sightlines, applied to the finest bilateral trading partnership on the face of the planet. Most nations would kill for a fraction of what Canada and the United States built by accident of geography and patience. Most nations would murder for it, frankly. And the man in the Oval Office stands on the shore of the Atlantic and declares the tide a ripoff.
Sure, there are real grievances buried in the gravel — softwood lumber has been a fight since the 1980s, Canadian dairy operates behind supply-management walls that infuriate Wisconsin, and the auto rules-of-origin argument never quite dies. These are quibbles in the grand scheme of international commerce. Every trade relationship carries friction. Friction is what diplomats exist to smooth, what joint committees exist to adjudicate, what grown-ups resolve with a phone call and a compromise. None of it — none of it — explains torching the entire building because you object to the squeak in one hinge.
The Casino Owner Who Would Bankrupt His Own Casino
Now consider the man. Trump presents himself as the greatest dealmaker alive, the genius who could sell ice to an Inuit and sand to a Saudi. Leave aside the bankruptcies — the casinos that cratered, the airline that vanished, the university that dissolved under fraud judgments. Take the self-image at face value and ask what a real dealmaker does when he owns the world’s best customer.
He protects that customer. He courts that customer. He wakes up every morning grateful that geography handed him a neighbour this lucrative, and he builds the relationship like a vault.
Instead, Trump has spent 2026 doing the opposite with the enthusiasm of a man setting fire to his own furniture for warmth. He picked a fight with Canada in February, slapped tariffs on Canadian goods, called the prime minister “governor,” floated the idea of absorbing the country as a 51st state, and kept escalating through the summer until August produced the collapse. Any ten-year-old running a lemonade stand knows the cardinal rule: you don’t pick a fight with the kid who buys more of your lemonade than anyone else.
Honestly, this is the kind of move that could bankrupt a casino — if such a thing was even possible in the absence of grievous corruption or gross negligence. It is economic arson committed with a smile and a golf club. If Trump were half the dealmaker he claims to be (Hint: he’s not), he would recognize the world’s most favourable imbalance of trade and guard it like a crown jewel. Instead he’s strangling the goose that lays the golden eggs while complaining that the goose owes him money.
Which brings me to the revelation. And it changes everything.
The Revelation: A Man Who Has Never Once Seen a Fair Deal
Why? Why is he doing this? He can’t be *THIS* stupid, can he? It makes no sense whatsoever. What’s the goal? What’s the aim? WHY is he doing this?
Here’s the revelation I had. Here is the crack in the marble that finally split open.
Donald Trump has spent his entire adult life grifting. Cheating contractors, stiffing suppliers, running a fake university, laundering a reputation through a TV show that taught millions of Americans that business is a blood sport where the only score that matters is the one where the other guy bleeds. He has never, in any arena, believed that a mutually beneficial deal exists. He believes every transaction is a battle, every negotiation a knife fight, every contract a trap with a spring in it. If you are not cheating, you are being cheated. If you are not screwing the other guy, the other guy is screwing you. Everybody is a shark. Everybody is a dog with one purpose, and the purpose is to eat the other dog. The grift is an American institution; Trump just happens to be the version that won the White House.
There is no room in that skull for the idea that two parties can both give a little, both take a little, and both walk away richer than either entered. To Trump, that arithmetic is indistinguishable from weakness. If he hasn’t cheated and bulldozed a deal into being entirely one-sided, then the other side has done it to him and he must simply lack the eyes to see it. This is how he thinks. Any agreement that doesn’t leave a corpse on the table is a loss. Any handshake that appears to benefit both men is a trick he hasn’t yet detected.
That is the lens. That is the whole miserable apparatus of his perception — a set of jaws that can only clamp.
So when he looks at the Canada-US trading relationship — the envy of the industrialized world, a machine that prints mutual prosperity in both currencies — he does not see a partnership. He sees a mystery. He sees a deal that looks fair on paper, which means the other side must be getting something over on him. The fairness itself is the smoking gun. He searches the ledger for the hidden theft, finds none, and concludes the theft is simply too sophisticated for his accountants to spot. The relationship must be a con so elaborate that its own victims believe they’re winning. And the only rational response to a con you can’t detect is to burn the table before the other player cleans you out.
This is the pathology of a man who has never once in his life experienced cooperation without suspecting the other hand. Because he knows his hands are always dirty. It is the paranoid style raised to a macroeconomic principle, applied to the one relationship on Earth that should have disabused him of it.
Why the Grifter Can’t See the Gift
Strip the psychology down to its mechanical bones and the tragedy becomes visible. Trade agreements between mature nations are built on a simple, boring premise: both parties gain more together than either could alone. Canada gets access to a market of 330 million consumers, many among the most affluent in the world amidst its numbers. America gets cheap energy, reliable resources, and a neighbour whose soldiers have never once threatened its border and whose banks have never once laundered its enemies’ money. The whole arrangement hums along on trust — the rarest currency in Trump’s universe, the one denomination he insists is counterfeit wherever it appears.
He cannot process trust as a productive asset. To him, trust is a vulnerability you exploit. So he projects. He assumes Canada must be exploiting the relationship the way he would exploit it, given the chance. He assumes the Americans are being fleeced because in his world, somebody always is. All business transactions are conducted either between two sides trying to fleece the other, or one trying to fleece a sucker. The projection is so total, so reflexively automatic, that he cannot conceive of a Canadian prime minister who genuinely wants both countries to thrive. He looks at a partner and sees a mark who hasn’t been taken yet.
Call it the final triumph of the grifter’s epistemology: a worldview so thoroughly poisoned by its own dishonesty that it can no longer recognize honesty in others. The man who has spent seventy years assuming every handshake hides a blade now stands in a room full of friends and screams that they’re all holding knives. The tragedy is that his screaming makes it true. Trade partners respond to unpredictability with prudence, to threats with retaliation, to chaos with diversification. Every tariff he slaps on Canada pushes Ottawa closer to Europe, closer to Asia, closer to anyone who doesn’t treat friendship as a hostage negotiation. The allies he drives away today are the markets Canada will court tomorrow, and the US will watch its best customer drift into other arms wondering where the loyalty went.
The Collateral Damage Nobody Votes On
Meanwhile, the humans underneath the abstraction absorb the punishment. The autoworker in Windsor who loses a shift because a tariff spiked the price of a component. The farmer in Iowa who watches a soybean shipment rot on the dock because the buyer in Montreal found a cheaper supplier in Brazil. The small-town manufacturer in Ohio whose biggest client — the factory across the river in Ontario — suddenly stops calling. These people did not vote for a trade war. They voted for cheaper groceries and a stable paycheque, and instead they get a geopolitical experiment conducted by a man who has never once worried about how’s he’s going to make the rent this month in his entire life.
There is a grotesque symmetry in it. The billionaire who inherited his fortune and grifted his way to the presidency wages war on the working class of both countries, and a large portion of the working class of both countries applauds him for it — the Americans because they believe he’s sticking it to foreigners and Pwning the Libs™, the Canadians because they’d just love to have them some of that tasty Lib-pwning for themselves. Both sides cheer for their own funeral procession.
And for what? What does Trump actually win if he succeeds in strangling Canadian trade? A few thousand jobs reshored to Michigan at the cost of tens of thousands lost across the Rust Belt that depends on cross-border supply chains. Higher prices on Canadian energy, Canadian lumber, Canadian potash — every one of which feeds American homes and American farms. A neighbour humiliated, which is exactly the outcome that guarantees the neighbour never trusts you again. The “win” is a pyrrhic victory purchased with the goodwill of a century. Even the casino owner understands that you don’t burn down the casino across the street, because the smoke drifts over your own tables.
The Only Explanation
I’ve gone around this circle a dozen times looking for a rational motive — election-year posture, a negotiating tactic designed to extract concessions, a distraction from domestic troubles. Every one of those theories collapses on contact with the facts. A negotiator leaves himself an exit ramp. A strategist calculates the cost of burning the bridge. Trump has done neither. He has simply proclaimed the finest trading relationship on Earth is a disaster and started swinging, with the serene confidence of a man who has never once been held accountable for a consequence in his life.
The only explanation that survives contact with the evidence is the ugly one. He believes it. He genuinely believes Canada is cheating him, because he cannot imagine a world where both sides win, and every deal he’s ever seen has had a loser. He has looked at the most successful partnership between any two nations in history and seen a crime scene. The man who sees a knife in every hand has found a reason to draw his own.
There is a sadness in it, if you let yourself feel it. A man so walled inside his own transactional hell that he cannot recognize the one genuine bargain that fell into his lap. A president who treats the world’s greatest economic alliance as an enemy because he cannot conceive of an ally. The dogs are eating the dogs, and the dog who started the fight is the one who forgot why dogs hunt in packs in the first place.
The coffee is cold now. The headlines will churn on, and the trucks will keep crossing the bridge, and somewhere in Ottawa a trade official is drafting a response to the latest provocation with the weary patience of a man swatting flies in a hurricane. None of it will change the fundamental arithmetic: two countries, one border, a century of shared prosperity, and a man in Washington who cannot see a good thing when it’s wearing big, bright red and white flag.
He can call it deal‑making, leverage, or strategy, but the pattern is always the same. Trump isn’t looking for a mutually beneficial agreement with Canada; he’s looking for a victory, and in his worldview victories require someone else’s defeat. A winner requires a loser. That’s how he’s approached business for decades: every success defined by someone else’s collapse, every setback interpreted as someone getting the upper hand on him.
The idea that both parties can walk away better off simply doesn’t register. If he can’t point to where the other side is suffering, he assumes he must be the one being taken advantage of. In his framework, every transaction has two sides — the winner and the loser — and there is no third option. In Trump’s perverted world, in any deal between Canada and the US, the US doesn’t win unless Canada loses. Nothing else makes sense to him. Nothing else is logical. A deal is a contest. Every contest has a winner and loser — the victor and the vanquished, the conqueror and the conquered. To him, this all necessarily ends with one party falling into one of those categories and the other into its opposite. Understand this and everything begins to make sense.
Or: The Zero-Sum Pathology: Why Donald Trump’s Economic War on Canada Collapses Economic Logic to Satisfy a Grifter’s Worldview.
Why is Trump fighting a trade war with Canada — America’s best customer and closest ally? The economics collapse on inspection. The real logic is darker, and it’s been hiding in plain sight.
It’s past midnight in Ottawa and the coffee has gone cold and bitter in the mug. I keep scrolling through the August headlines like a man reading his own obituary in a language he only half-speaks. Tariffs. Threats. The word annexation orbiting the discourse like a bat that got into the house and can’t find its way out. Somewhere in the noise one question keeps circling back to bite me: why? Why would a president torch the most successful trading relationship between any two nations on Earth — an arrangement most countries would happily sell a kidney to possess — for no gain that any sober economist can calculate?
I don’t usually write about politics on this blog. I save that for OpinionOverload.Com, where the publication schedule moves at the speed of institutional caution. But this one kept me awake, and I think I finally cracked it. So here it is, hot off the keyboard, before the thread slips.
The Best Trading Relationship on Earth, Called a Disaster
Start with what we all know and somehow keep forgetting. Two wealthy, resource-rich countries. A shared language. Cultures so alike they argue about the same television shows in very similar accents. Geo-political and socio-economic interests that overlap like a Venn diagram drawn by a steady hand. And between them, a land border built for commerce — 8,891 kilometres of it, most of it undefended, much of it crossed by trucks that never slow down. Efficient, cheap, easy, profitable buying and selling and moving of goods.
The numbers, from memory and therefore approximate: roughly $1.3 trillion US in annual two-way trade before the current madness. About $3.5 billion changing hands every single day. The Ambassador Bridge at Windsor-Detroit alone carries something like a quarter of the merchandise that moves between the two countries. A car assembled in Ontario holds parts that crossed the border six or seven times before the finished vehicle rolled off the line. The energy grid is wired together — Canadian hydro keeps the lights on in American basements, Canadian crude feeds American refineries built specifically to process it. Michigan’s automakers, Minnesota’s hospitals, the entire American Midwest runs on inputs that arrive from the north on a schedule measured in hours.
And here’s the detail that should embarrass every trade hawk in Washington: on a goods-and-services basis, America has historically run a surplus with Canada. Canada is the top export market for dozens of US states. The United States sells more to Canada than it buys back. The relationship is no favour America grants a needy neighbour. In the coldest accounting terms, it is a gift that keeps giving largely in one direction. Canada sells cheap, low-price base resources to the US — crude oil, aluminum, lumber, minerals, etc. The US turns these resources into expensive things like cars and electronics and sells them back to Canada and the rest of the world. Canada is fine with this because Canada is making bank. Up until now, the US has been fine with this because it’s making mega-bank.
Trump calls this arrangement terrible. Terrible — the word he reserves for people who wrong him and his buildings with bad sightlines, applied to the finest bilateral trading partnership on the face of the planet. Most nations would kill for a fraction of what Canada and the United States built by accident of geography and patience. Most nations would murder for it, frankly. And the man in the Oval Office stands on the shore of the Atlantic and declares the tide a ripoff.
Sure, there are real grievances buried in the gravel — softwood lumber has been a fight since the 1980s, Canadian dairy operates behind supply-management walls that infuriate Wisconsin, and the auto rules-of-origin argument never quite dies. These are quibbles in the grand scheme of international commerce. Every trade relationship carries friction. Friction is what diplomats exist to smooth, what joint committees exist to adjudicate, what grown-ups resolve with a phone call and a compromise. None of it — none of it — explains torching the entire building because you object to the squeak in one hinge.
The Casino Owner Who Would Bankrupt His Own Casino
Now consider the man. Trump presents himself as the greatest dealmaker alive, the genius who could sell ice to an Inuit and sand to a Saudi. Leave aside the bankruptcies — the casinos that cratered, the airline that vanished, the university that dissolved under fraud judgments. Take the self-image at face value and ask what a real dealmaker does when he owns the world’s best customer.
He protects that customer. He courts that customer. He wakes up every morning grateful that geography handed him a neighbour this lucrative, and he builds the relationship like a vault.
Instead, Trump has spent 2026 doing the opposite with the enthusiasm of a man setting fire to his own furniture for warmth. He picked a fight with Canada in February, slapped tariffs on Canadian goods, called the prime minister “governor,” floated the idea of absorbing the country as a 51st state, and kept escalating through the summer until August produced the collapse. Any ten-year-old running a lemonade stand knows the cardinal rule: you don’t pick a fight with the kid who buys more of your lemonade than anyone else.
Honestly, this is the kind of move that could bankrupt a casino — if such a thing was even possible in the absence of grievous corruption or gross negligence. It is economic arson committed with a smile and a golf club. If Trump were half the dealmaker he claims to be (Hint: he’s not), he would recognize the world’s most favourable imbalance of trade and guard it like a crown jewel. Instead he’s strangling the goose that lays the golden eggs while complaining that the goose owes him money.
Which brings me to the revelation. And it changes everything.
The Revelation: A Man Who Has Never Once Seen a Fair Deal
Why? Why is he doing this? He can’t be *THIS* stupid, can he? It makes no sense whatsoever. What’s the goal? What’s the aim? WHY is he doing this?
Here’s the revelation I had. Here is the crack in the marble that finally split open.
Donald Trump has spent his entire adult life grifting. Cheating contractors, stiffing suppliers, running a fake university, laundering a reputation through a TV show that taught millions of Americans that business is a blood sport where the only score that matters is the one where the other guy bleeds. He has never, in any arena, believed that a mutually beneficial deal exists. He believes every transaction is a battle, every negotiation a knife fight, every contract a trap with a spring in it. If you are not cheating, you are being cheated. If you are not screwing the other guy, the other guy is screwing you. Everybody is a shark. Everybody is a dog with one purpose, and the purpose is to eat the other dog. The grift is an American institution; Trump just happens to be the version that won the White House.
There is no room in that skull for the idea that two parties can both give a little, both take a little, and both walk away richer than either entered. To Trump, that arithmetic is indistinguishable from weakness. If he hasn’t cheated and bulldozed a deal into being entirely one-sided, then the other side has done it to him and he must simply lack the eyes to see it. This is how he thinks. Any agreement that doesn’t leave a corpse on the table is a loss. Any handshake that appears to benefit both men is a trick he hasn’t yet detected.
That is the lens. That is the whole miserable apparatus of his perception — a set of jaws that can only clamp.
So when he looks at the Canada-US trading relationship — the envy of the industrialized world, a machine that prints mutual prosperity in both currencies — he does not see a partnership. He sees a mystery. He sees a deal that looks fair on paper, which means the other side must be getting something over on him. The fairness itself is the smoking gun. He searches the ledger for the hidden theft, finds none, and concludes the theft is simply too sophisticated for his accountants to spot. The relationship must be a con so elaborate that its own victims believe they’re winning. And the only rational response to a con you can’t detect is to burn the table before the other player cleans you out.
This is the pathology of a man who has never once in his life experienced cooperation without suspecting the other hand. Because he knows his hands are always dirty. It is the paranoid style raised to a macroeconomic principle, applied to the one relationship on Earth that should have disabused him of it.
Why the Grifter Can’t See the Gift
Strip the psychology down to its mechanical bones and the tragedy becomes visible. Trade agreements between mature nations are built on a simple, boring premise: both parties gain more together than either could alone. Canada gets access to a market of 330 million consumers, many among the most affluent in the world amidst its numbers. America gets cheap energy, reliable resources, and a neighbour whose soldiers have never once threatened its border and whose banks have never once laundered its enemies’ money. The whole arrangement hums along on trust — the rarest currency in Trump’s universe, the one denomination he insists is counterfeit wherever it appears.
He cannot process trust as a productive asset. To him, trust is a vulnerability you exploit. So he projects. He assumes Canada must be exploiting the relationship the way he would exploit it, given the chance. He assumes the Americans are being fleeced because in his world, somebody always is. All business transactions are conducted either between two sides trying to fleece the other, or one trying to fleece a sucker. The projection is so total, so reflexively automatic, that he cannot conceive of a Canadian prime minister who genuinely wants both countries to thrive. He looks at a partner and sees a mark who hasn’t been taken yet.
Call it the final triumph of the grifter’s epistemology: a worldview so thoroughly poisoned by its own dishonesty that it can no longer recognize honesty in others. The man who has spent seventy years assuming every handshake hides a blade now stands in a room full of friends and screams that they’re all holding knives. The tragedy is that his screaming makes it true. Trade partners respond to unpredictability with prudence, to threats with retaliation, to chaos with diversification. Every tariff he slaps on Canada pushes Ottawa closer to Europe, closer to Asia, closer to anyone who doesn’t treat friendship as a hostage negotiation. The allies he drives away today are the markets Canada will court tomorrow, and the US will watch its best customer drift into other arms wondering where the loyalty went.
The Collateral Damage Nobody Votes On
Meanwhile, the humans underneath the abstraction absorb the punishment. The autoworker in Windsor who loses a shift because a tariff spiked the price of a component. The farmer in Iowa who watches a soybean shipment rot on the dock because the buyer in Montreal found a cheaper supplier in Brazil. The small-town manufacturer in Ohio whose biggest client — the factory across the river in Ontario — suddenly stops calling. These people did not vote for a trade war. They voted for cheaper groceries and a stable paycheque, and instead they get a geopolitical experiment conducted by a man who has never once worried about how’s he’s going to make the rent this month in his entire life.
There is a grotesque symmetry in it. The billionaire who inherited his fortune and grifted his way to the presidency wages war on the working class of both countries, and a large portion of the working class of both countries applauds him for it — the Americans because they believe he’s sticking it to foreigners and Pwning the Libs™, the Canadians because they’d just love to have them some of that tasty Lib-pwning for themselves. Both sides cheer for their own funeral procession.
And for what? What does Trump actually win if he succeeds in strangling Canadian trade? A few thousand jobs reshored to Michigan at the cost of tens of thousands lost across the Rust Belt that depends on cross-border supply chains. Higher prices on Canadian energy, Canadian lumber, Canadian potash — every one of which feeds American homes and American farms. A neighbour humiliated, which is exactly the outcome that guarantees the neighbour never trusts you again. The “win” is a pyrrhic victory purchased with the goodwill of a century. Even the casino owner understands that you don’t burn down the casino across the street, because the smoke drifts over your own tables.
The Only Explanation
I’ve gone around this circle a dozen times looking for a rational motive — election-year posture, a negotiating tactic designed to extract concessions, a distraction from domestic troubles. Every one of those theories collapses on contact with the facts. A negotiator leaves himself an exit ramp. A strategist calculates the cost of burning the bridge. Trump has done neither. He has simply proclaimed the finest trading relationship on Earth is a disaster and started swinging, with the serene confidence of a man who has never once been held accountable for a consequence in his life.
The only explanation that survives contact with the evidence is the ugly one. He believes it. He genuinely believes Canada is cheating him, because he cannot imagine a world where both sides win, and every deal he’s ever seen has had a loser. He has looked at the most successful partnership between any two nations in history and seen a crime scene. The man who sees a knife in every hand has found a reason to draw his own.
There is a sadness in it, if you let yourself feel it. A man so walled inside his own transactional hell that he cannot recognize the one genuine bargain that fell into his lap. A president who treats the world’s greatest economic alliance as an enemy because he cannot conceive of an ally. The dogs are eating the dogs, and the dog who started the fight is the one who forgot why dogs hunt in packs in the first place.
The coffee is cold now. The headlines will churn on, and the trucks will keep crossing the bridge, and somewhere in Ottawa a trade official is drafting a response to the latest provocation with the weary patience of a man swatting flies in a hurricane. None of it will change the fundamental arithmetic: two countries, one border, a century of shared prosperity, and a man in Washington who cannot see a good thing when it’s wearing big, bright red and white flag.
He can call it deal‑making, leverage, or strategy, but the pattern is always the same. Trump isn’t looking for a mutually beneficial agreement with Canada; he’s looking for a victory, and in his worldview victories require someone else’s defeat. A winner requires a loser. That’s how he’s approached business for decades: every success defined by someone else’s collapse, every setback interpreted as someone getting the upper hand on him.
The idea that both parties can walk away better off simply doesn’t register. If he can’t point to where the other side is suffering, he assumes he must be the one being taken advantage of. In his framework, every transaction has two sides — the winner and the loser — and there is no third option. In Trump’s perverted world, in any deal between Canada and the US, the US doesn’t win unless Canada loses. Nothing else makes sense to him. Nothing else is logical. A deal is a contest. Every contest has a winner and loser — the victor and the vanquished, the conqueror and the conquered. To him, this all necessarily ends with one party falling into one of those categories and the other into its opposite. Understand this and everything begins to make sense.
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