Is Mark Carney Helping Europe (And Canada) Plan Their Escape From Abusive Spouse Trump?
And is Mark Rutte in on the plan? Cool questions to be grappling with during the NATO summit!
And now we have read the second installment of the Wall Street Journal’s excellent report about Europe’s, and also Canada’s, efforts to simultaneously manage Donald Trump and also chart a path toward removing themselves from the relationship. (We discussed the first installment here.)
In the second installment, which focuses on Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney’s role in shepherding Canada and Europe away from relying on the US, hopefully in a way that brings the two entities closer together, it becomes a lot clearer how managing Trump and planning the work/working the plan to extricate from the US when The Time comes are intimately linked.
It’s not at all unlike an abused spouse setting up secret bank accounts and ensuring the children have a safe place to go when/if Daddy goes nuclear (literally) when he finds out.
And it brings up a thought for us, having just watched Donald Trump’s latest ass-kissing session with NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte. (Trump is obviously the bottom who’s receiving the ass-kissing, not the other way around.)
Rutte has a new phrase during this NATO summit, the “Trump Trillion,” AKA the amount Europe and Canada have upped their defense spending in response to Trump’s constant bitching and threats.
You can watch Rutte talk about it here:
Rutte said, “I could not do this without you!” Trump interrupted to bitch about Obama and Biden. “But hey, you are here now!” said Rutte, soothing the baby. “In total more than $1.2 trillion. I call this the Trump Trillion! The excess spend by Canada and [Europe].” Trump continued whining about Biden and Obama, which this time he pronounced as “Obuma,” because he is obsessed with putting “U”s in words these days. “It’s your win!” said Rutte, redirecting the baby.
Trump is, of course, obsessed, like a two-bit greater New York City mall developer/mafioso, with the notion that somebody is screwing him, which is always projection for those types, because they are supposed to be the ones doing the screwing. (In a flaccid MAGA brain like Trump’s, there is no such thing as an arrangement where everybody wins. Their masculinity issues can’t take it.)
So he’s been fixated for years on the notion that Europe is screwing the US by devoting far less of its collective spending to defense compared to the US, which could have nice things if it didn’t spend all its money on new bombs.
And indeed, during Trump 2.0, many of those nations really have upped their pledges! It’s the Trump Trillion!
But this WSJ article today about Carney really lays out that the game here — a game that we’re sure includes Rutte — is two-pronged, an effort to keep a pacifier up Trump’s asshole long enough for Europe and Canada to get their affairs in order.
Makes us wonder if Rutte’s “Trump Trillion” actually refers to something Trump is far too stupid and vain to understand.
The article is about Carney, but it starts when Justin Trudeau was still in power, revealing that literally batfucking shitcrazy Trump threatened in a phone call with Trudeau to fully blow up the 1908 agreement that established the US-Canadian border. “I tear that up and your whole country unravels,” Trump told Trudeau.
Which led at one point to a dinner at Mar-a-Lago where people on Trudeau’s team tried to redirect the baby’s attention away from stealing Canada by helpfully explaining that Canada would just be a great big huge fuckin’ blue state. But, the WSJ explains, “the president came up with a neat solution: just split the northern neighbor into two states, one red, the other blue.”
Would it be just like American blue states, where all the population actually is, and the red state would be Alabama, we mean Alberta?
Trudeau’s administration had been trying in vain to get Trump to stop babbling about the fentanyl coming from Canada by, at Jared Kushner’s suggestion, making a video showing how FORD TUFF Canada is about the border. That’s what got Trump so obsessed with tearing up the agreement about the border, as it turned out.
Trudeau’s administration, seeing the writing on the wall, had also inquired with UK intel services about how to manage it if/when the US left Five Eyes, AKA the open intel-sharing agreement that unites the US, UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. The UK at the time was like PIFFLE-ROT! because that’s the accepted British word for being sceptical about leaving intelligence-sharing agreements.
So then Carney, the former head of the Bank of England and the first foreign Canadian ever to run it, comes in to office amidst all Trump’s babble about Canada becoming the 51st state, and immediately HEREBY DEMANDS a review of just how tied up in Twister fuck-knots Canada and the US really are. That, of course, would serve as the beginning of a roadmap for getting out. (Sidenote of interesting trivia: The WSJ notes that on top of Carney, Emmanuel Macron used to be a banker with Rothschild, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz used to run the German arm of BlackRock, and Finnish President Alexander Stubb came from the European Investment Bank. Interesting skillset/background for a discussion of de-linking the EU and Canada from the US economically and defensively.)
The article paints an interesting picture of who’s been on what side here, who’s needed convincing of how serious things really are. Carney and Macron always saw eye to eye, sounds like, and Carney went to see Macron at the Élysée Palace in Paris two days after his swearing-in to discuss how to tell America, “It’s not me, it’s you.”
Just two days after assuming office, Carney traveled not to Washington—a conventional first stop for a new Canadian prime minister—but to France. Standing alongside Macron at Paris’s Élysée Palace, he called Canada “the most European of non-European countries.”
Over a private lunch, the two leaders animatedly exchanged ideas on how France and Canada could help each other dial down their reliance on America. Canada had the critical minerals needed by France, whose state-backed tech firms were taking early steps into the U.S.-dominated spheres of AI and quantum computing.
French diplomats joked that since Canada and Denmark share a land border on an uninhabited Arctic island off Greenland, that could make the North American country a legitimate candidate to gain fast-track membership in the EU. Carney laughed.
Yeah, we bet he laughed. IN EUROPEANUNION-ESE.
So Carney is seeing the writing on the wall, and has been seeing it. Meanwhile on the other side were Mark Rutte and now-outgoing UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer, who were advancing their theory that if they butter the insides of Trump’s asshole frequently and lovingly enough, they can keep him onside.
It’s not that the UK hasn’t seen it at all. Apparently they have commissioned their own reports on how to break up with the US, and Fiona Hill, former Trump 1.0 Russia expert and impeachment witness, was a co-author. She compared Trump to Mikhail Gorbachev, “weakening a superpower he meant to strengthen.” Hill does tend to have receipts on these sorts of things.
But Starmer, whose ass is on the way out the door, he is the one who has always been sceptical.
This is the stupidest fucking paragraph:
Carney would have to try again to bring Starmer on board in November, when they headed to the G-20 in South Africa. The U.S. was boycotting in protest of what Trump had called “white genocide,” which gave Carney more time with Macron, Finland’s Stubb, and Spain’s Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez, all of whom shared his perspective.
Sorry Trump can’t be here today, he’s protesting white genocide.
Anyway, Starmer. He’s told Carney they have to patch things up with America. “We don’t have a relationship to keep!” Carney has replied.
There’s so much in this article, you really should read it yourself and stop making Wonkette do all the word-interpreting for you.
There was the January 6 meeting of Ukraine backers at the Élysée Palace. Trump had just kidnapped Nicolás Maduro from Venezuela. He had also just had dinner with Katie Miller, wife of Nazi, who reportedly reassured him like he was terminally ill (????) that he still had time to rape and murder Greenland, so it was on his mind. (In case you were wondering what her foul husband saw in her.)
That was the meeting where someone, an aide to a European prime minister, passed a note that said they can’t count on the US anymore. “All we have is international law.”
Then came Carney’s speech at Davos a few days later, the one that was heard round the world. That speech really pissed Trump off, the way Carney basically said the world, especially western powers like Canada and Europe, had a choice, either to stand up for themselves, or “be on [Trump’s] menu.” Carney said, “You cannot live within the lie of mutual benefit through integration when integration becomes the source of your subordination.”
Oh grrrrr he was being “ungrateful,” impotent Trump whined from Air Force One. Oh grrrrrr, “Canada lives because of the United States. Remember that, Mark, the next time you make your statements,” Trump bitched in his speech.
Ever since then, and ever since Trump really started grunting about invading Greenland again, it sounds like Europe is more on the same page every day. They know they need time to put in the investments in tech and defense so they can break up with the US, and they know they have to keep the baby distracted until that time comes.
Basically Rutte’s job is to be in the front tonguing Trump’s ass, to keep him distracted from how Europe and Canada are doing all this under his nose:
Europe was going to have to spend hundreds of billions of dollars replicating systems America traditionally supplied. Carney, in another lunch with Macron at the Élysée Palace and during a jog through London’s Hyde Park with Finland’s Stubb, was discussing how Canada could better integrate into—and augment—those systems. In February, Canada joined a new €150 billion EU defense fund and launched the Sovereign Technology Alliance with Germany, to deepen collaboration on AI security and compute capacity.
Canadian and European officials began to meet more frequently for discussions that would have once included their American counterparts. During preparations for the G-7, officials met in the French city of Toulouse in March, discussing quantum computing, food security and AI between conversations on how Canada would join Europe’s student-exchange program, Erasmus, or its song contest, Eurovision.
Ahead of it, some of Carney’s top national security officials stopped using Starlink.
France meanwhile ordered its 2.5 million civil servants to replace Microsoft Teams and Zoom with Visio, a domestically built videoconference platform. Germany, France, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, and Belgium started rolling out their own homegrown texting services—discouraging civil servants from conducting official business on Meta Platforms’ WhatsApp. German officials complained about the clunkiness of the non-American software they were now expected to use. Germany’s parliament passed an act favoring European suppliers for its defense needs.
“Even if Biden came back it would not be the same,” said Alice Rufo, deputy defense minister of France. “The time of warnings is over. Now is the time to do.”
They’re even getting off WhatsApp? If you know anything about Europe, you know that’s a HOO BOY moment.
Some of it, Trump and his minions have indeed noticed:
The Pentagon said it would retaliate if the EU enacted policies to favor domestic arms manufacturers. To smooth things over, Rutte visited the Oval Office in April, bringing papers listing how many billions of dollars in American weaponry Europe was still purchasing. “Maybe you haven’t noticed,” he said, careful not to imply the president didn’t know these facts.
The president threatened he would leave NATO. No, you won’t, Rutte pushed back.
As butt-sniffing goes, “No you won’t,” exudes a confidence we don’t see from Trump’s butt-sniffers in the US. It does indeed suggest that Rutte, as gross as he is in his interactions with Trump, knows exactly what his role is in all this, and he’s committed to staying in character.
So we go back to our question at the top: Who is that Trump Trillion really for? Gonna be interesting to see if it’s not necessarily for Trump, at least not in the way he thinks.
Also gonna be interesting to see whether Canada or the UK is the first to join/rejoin the European Union, but that’s a whole ‘nother itch to scratch on another day.
In conclusion, get a load of this Danish reporter giving Mark Rutte the business about kissing Trump’s ass at NATO today:
Hahahahahahahahaha, well done, Danish guy!
We guess it’ll also be interesting to see which parent Rutte actually goes to live with after the divorce.
Some of his ass-kissing is indeed li’l too real.
OPEN THREAD.
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https://substack.com/@ziggywiggy/note/c-290456543?utm_source=notes-share-action&r=2knfuc
The damage America's Pilonidal Cyst has done is generational. And he's also ensured—like any narcissistic abuser—that we are isolated from outside work...so he can have his way with us.
The only semblance of a check on this comes this fall...you need a Democratic impeachment+removal-sized majority for even a *semblance* of a check. It's the only way.
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