Please Advise! Where Are Carney’s Elbows Today?

[Editor’s note: Steve Burgess is an accredited spin doctor with a PhD in Centrifugal Rhetoric from the University of SASE, situated on the lovely campus of PO Box 7650, Cayman Islands. In this space he dispenses PR advice to politicians, the rich and famous, the troubled and well-heeled, the wealthy and gullible.]

Dear Dr. Steve,

Prime Minister Mark Carney campaigned on a platform of getting tough with Trump and his tariffs. Now he has announced that Canada's reciprocal tariffs against the U.S. are being dropped. What happened to “elbows up”?

Signed,

Gordie

Dear Gord,

Surely you know the dance: elbows up, elbows down, flap, flap, flap, at every wedding and baseball game. It's the chicken dance!

There's a lot of disappointment over Carney's climbdown. Months ago, after Trump lowered tariffs against China, someone coined the term “TACO,” for “Trump Always Chickens Out.” Some might now say Canada has its own version of TACO — “Trump Asks, Carney Obeys.” Not only are our elbows down, we've pulled the goalie.

All the same, Dr. Steve does not wish to blow the whistle on our new prime minister. Any game plan must be based on good scouting. And however feisty it might sound, “elbows up” does not work so well when your opponent is essentially a sugar-crazed six-year-old with a Gatling gun. Ain't no zone defence for that.

In dropping Canadian tariffs, Carney is trying to placate the insufferable inmate of the White House daycare. So is most of the world. Ever since U.S. voters handed supreme power to a human sinkhole of fatuous drivel and degenerate malice, everyone has been scrambling for a strategy.

Just what the world is up against was on display this week at a televised Trump cabinet meeting that quickly turned into Grovelpalooza. It was a three-hour-plus event that consisted mostly of Team Trump taking turns licking every delicious morsel of dog shit from the presidential boots. Talk about chicken — one by one, Trump's servile lackeys publicly deboned and slathered themselves with honey mustard sauce like so many Minion McNuggets.

“Mr. President,” said Labour Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer, “I invite you to see your big, beautiful face on a banner in front of the Department of Labour, because you are really the transformational president of the American worker.”

Said special envoy Steve Witkoff: “There’s only one thing I wish for: that the Nobel committee finally gets its act together and realizes that you are the single finest candidate since the Nobel Peace, this Nobel award was ever talked about.”

“Thank you for saving college football,” said Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins.

“Thank you for saving little Timmy from the well,” said Lassie.

One cabinet member threw away his crutches and screamed, “I can walk!” Two proclaimed they had just experienced their first orgasms. Three virgins were sacrificed in a makeshift volcano. (Everything up to and including the college football statement was true, and the others probably would have happened, given another 20 minutes.)

As for the fraudulent realtor himself, he proclaimed at one point that he had “the right to do whatever I want. I'm the president of the United States.”

Trump has been compared to a lot of potentates before, but that particular line echoes a specific example. Thousands of years ago the historian Suetonius quoted a Roman emperor as saying: “Remember that I have the right to do anything to anybody.”

That emperor was Caligula. Suetonius recounts the many ways Caligula, reviled as a sexual pervert and a maestro of cruelty, delighted in humbling and humiliating subordinates. Trump's wars against both education and the rule of law also find parallels in Suetonius: “[Caligula] even thought of destroying the poems of Homer.... He all but removed the writings and the busts of Vergil and of Titus Livius from all the libraries.... With regard to lawyers too, as if intending to do away with any practice of their profession, he often threatened that he would see to it, by Heaven, that they could give no advice contrary to his wish.”

And anyone who has followed the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, wrongly deported by the Trump administration, which continues to baselessly insist he is a terrorist anyway, will recognize this anecdote: “When a different man than he had intended had been killed, through a mistake in the names, [Caligula] said that the victim too had deserved the same fate.”

So no, Dr. Steve does not really fault Carney for changing strategies. He is attempting to deal with a man who may one day rank with history's most reviled despotic dipshits, the perverse lunatic who put the “err” in “erratic.”

Carney leads a nation with a GDP of approximately US$2.24 trillion. The U.S. economy boasts a GDP of about $29.18 trillion. “Elbows up” is all very well, but when you see the Zamboni coming, you'd better skate.