Trump Says Allowing Canada to Become Associate Member of EU Could Be ‘Hostile Act’

In Mr Trump’s first term, a sense of grievance lay at the heart of his America First worldview. Mr Trump grumbled that for decades America had been ripped off by allies and trade partners alike. Typically, he blamed America’s post-1945 ruling elites, who were too incompetent or craven to use the country’s unrivalled wealth and power to advance their national interests. Worse, they embroiled America in forever wars in a naive belief that they could make the world a kindlier place. He maintained that tone of grievance throughout his first term.


The second Trump presidency has seen grievance combined with talk of quasi-imperialist conquest. Upon returning to office in 2025, Mr Trump declared earlier presidents “stupid” for giving up American control of Greenland after the second world war, or for handing the Panama Canal to Panama, and pledged to take
both back. This was not mere posturing. The tone was set in January after American troops snatched Venezuela’s leader from his home, allowing Mr Trump to hand-pick a more pliant ruler for that oil-rich country. “American dominance in the western hemisphere will never be questioned again,” he crowed.

Now, in his sixth year as president, a third goal has joined grievance and dominance as a guiding principle of Mr Trump’s statecraft. That goal is vengeance.

A desire for revenge helps explain Mr Trump’s fateful decision to join Israel in attacking Iran six months ago. “Regime Change”, a startlingly well-briefed book about the second Trump presidency by two White House correspondents, Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, describes meetings in which Mr Trump savoured the chance to kill Iran’s top leaders and destroy their armed forces, whether or not this led to a better Iran. The Iranian regime had humiliated successive American presidents and tried to assassinate Mr Trump. Now he was being offered a chance to make them pay. A public aim of the war might have been the toppling of Iran’s despotic government. But the book describes Mr Trump, in a closed-door meeting with his close aides, dismissing Iranian regime change as “their problem”. Whether he meant the Iranian people’s problem or Israel’s, nobody quite knew. Punishment, though, was indisputably his intent.