Cathie from Canada: Canada says No to Trump’s Naked Man Doctrine

What happened on Friday night demonstrates that Canada is saying “NO!” to Trump’s Naked Man Doctrine.

…The “Naked Man” was first formally introduced on November 24, 2008, in Season Four, Episode Nine of How I Met Your Mother. But like many important developments in American foreign policy, nobody understood its significance at the time…
…if a date is going badly and [Mitch] suspects there is very little chance of sex, he waits until the woman leaves the room. Then he removes all his clothes.
Naturally, Ted asks the only reasonable question: Does that actually work?
According to Mitch, “two out of three times.”
To be clear, the Naked Man is not a pickup line. There is no seduction involved. Mitch simply eliminates several intermediate stages of human courtship and confronts his date with a radically altered set of facts. And nudity….
Mitch’s war/love strategy depends entirely upon scrambling the normal sequences of human interaction. Five minutes earlier, Robin was trying to decide whether she even liked Mitch. Now Robin must decide what to do about the naked man on her couch. Thus, Mitch’s brazenness collapses the normal sequence of female decision-making. Or so his theory goes.
And, stripped of the testicles, there is an actual theory of power buried in there. Mitch has created a new reality and left everyone else to respond to it…
Political scientists have a more respectable term for this: a fait accompli.
I prefer Naked Man.
Because once you recognize the maneuver, Donald Trump starts looking less like a deal maker and more like a man who has spent eighteen years taking foreign-policy advice from CBS reruns….
Action first.
Authority later.
Never ask permission.
This is an old philosophy wearing a very long red tie.
….But Naked Man Doctrine is not only a joke about impulsivity. It is power exercised through presumption.
The ballroom: I have already demolished it.
Venezuela: We have already bombed them.
Greenland: The equipment is already here.
The boundary has not technically disappeared. It has simply become everyone else’s responsibility to enforce it. And enforcement is tiring. It requires lawsuits, coalitions, votes, sanctions, diplomatic confrontations, and sometimes throwing a drink in a creepy naked man’s face…

Thus, in mid-July Trump suddenly threatens Canada with 50 per cent tariffs, and for the rest of the summer that’s the only thing Canada is talking about. Other CUSMA issues fade into the background as Canada sends a team to Washington for negotiations and the media breathlessly report on every scrum.
In addition, I also believe that America’s other last minute demands in the trade negotiations were aimed squarely at Carney, personally.
We all know Trump is a petty and vindictive man, and so are the people around him.

I wouldn’t be at all surprised to find out someday soon that Nutlick’s last-minute addendums to draft agreement were actually personal attacks on Carney, intended to jeopardize Carney’s leadership – shutting down Carney’s ability to make worldwide trade deals, undermining Carney’s Buy Canadian policies, infuriating Quebec if Carney had bargained away dairy and language protections.
But Carney didn’t take the bait. And now that Carney has taken his ball and gone home, the Naked Man isn’t going to work for Trump anymore either.

Again.

This time scheduling them for January 1, 2027. He’s the very definition of a one-trick pony.

Of course this led to a knee-jerk panic reaction from our media.

Listening to Canadian media covering the trade war, they give the impression Canadians are anxious that Carney restart negotiations ASAP.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
We could care less. We don’t give a fuck anymore.
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— Cathie from Canada🍁 (@cathiecanada.bsky.social) August 24, 2026 at 2:42 PM

Canadians just aren’t having it. Not anymore.
Over the weekend, I got a thousand reposts and 3,500 likes at Bluesky on my Friday post – I think because everyone loved the great Theo Moudakis cartoon from a year ago that I used to illustrate it, because it caught exactly why we respect Carney and hate Trump:

Canada is fed up. We have no respect for America now, and Carney dodged a bullet when he kiboshed that deal.

Here’s a survey of Monday’s events:

Explaining to Canadians

Carney’s lengthy press conference today

CTV News covers Carney’s press conference

And if you don’t want to listen for 90 minutes, here are some clips:

PM Carney: “The United States has a handful, and I’m being generous, of ice breakers, we have 20. 1 yeah, I was being generous. I rounded up. They have a habit of doing that there”
PM Carney entered his no fucks left to give era and I’m here for it. 🔥
🎥 Credit CPAC Live
❤️🍁🇨🇦TEAM CANADA FOREVER🇨🇦🍁❤️
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— 🍁🇨🇦Team Canada Forever🇨🇦🍁 (@teamcanadaforever.bsky.social) August 24, 2026 at 1:07 PM

Mark Carney: “It’s not a surprise that the US would take some form of reprisal to our response to their unjustified tariffs, which was on top of other unjustified tariffs. But what message does that send to the workers in Michigan and Ohio and Kentucky and Alabama who rely on Canadian demand?”
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— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) August 24, 2026 at 11:36 AM

PM Carney: “We are seeking reliable partners around the world, and we’re finding them, except in the U.S. and Russia.”
Daaaaammmmnnn. PM Carney is on 🔥🔥🔥
🎥 Credit CPAC Live / YouTube
❤️🍁🇨🇦TEAM CANADA FOREVER🇨🇦🍁❤️
❤️🍁🇨🇦VIVE LE CANADA🇨🇦🍁❤️
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— 🍁🇨🇦Team Canada Forever🇨🇦🍁 (@teamcanadaforever.bsky.social) August 24, 2026 at 11:57 AM

On CNN, LeBlanc said we’re not waiting around

Rob Ford has entered the Chat

🚨 BREAKING: “Canadian Premier Doug Ford just threatened to shut off electricity to the US following Trump’s 50% tariffs on Canada”
“We power 1.5 million homes and businesses… I’ll do whatever it takes.”
🔗 Source: apnews.com/article/cana…
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— 🍁🇨🇦Team Canada Forever🇨🇦🍁 (@teamcanadaforever.bsky.social) August 24, 2026 at 10:00 AM

Ontario Premier Doug Ford: “The red states we’re gonna hit hard … you think an insult from him [Trump] hurts me? Bring it on, buddy. You’re a loser.”
🎥 Credit Aaron.rupar via 𝕏
❤️🍁🇨🇦TEAM CANADA FOREVER🇨🇦🍁❤️
❤️🍁🇨🇦VIVE LE CANADA🇨🇦🍁❤️
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— 🍁🇨🇦Team Canada Forever🇨🇦🍁 (@teamcanadaforever.bsky.social) August 24, 2026 at 1:15 PM

I despise Doug Ford because he is a corrupt a$$ hat. But I gotta admit, that was funny. 😂😂😂
Doug Ford on Trump: “I have a real estate on my ass, so he has a lot of room to kiss my ass”
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— 🍁🇨🇦Team Canada Forever🇨🇦🍁 (@teamcanadaforever.bsky.social) August 24, 2026 at 1:13 PM

Here is CBC At Issue on Monday night

TLDW (Too Long Didn’t Watch) notes: Coyne says Trump never seriously wanted a trade deal anyway, and Raj notes Carney has regained his Captain Canada rep. Hebert says the economic consequences of the draft deal would have been dire over the long term – this deal now would have been like going to a strip poker game in a bathing suit. Coyne says we shouldn’t concede anything because we’re getting nothing in return. We are already winning the PR war in the States.

Explaining to Conservatives:

Explaining to Americans:

In The New York Times, Stephen Marche writes Canada Said No to America. It Will Reverberate Far Beyond Its Borders. [gift link]

Friday, Aug. 21, may go down in history as Canada’s Liberation Day. It was the day America came for us, and we said no….
…For Canada, the choice came down to either accepting severe but temporary economic instability or binding itself to a pseudodemocratic fiscal basket case of a nation whose only apparent foreign policy objective has become domination for the gratification of its president’s slapdash vanity.
But Mr. Carney did not simply reject a trade offer on Friday. He was openly defiant of the new breed of American aggression. “We will not allow any nation to determine our future,” he said.
It was a unique statement for any leader in Canada to make…
While the decision to tough it out is iconically Canadian, Mr. Carney’s gesture will resonate far beyond Canada’s borders. A gray banker — and not just any banker but one of the leading bankers in the world — has stood up and said that there’s more to life than a little bit of money. The power of that recognition alone, at this moment in history, cannot be overstated. Mr. Trump’s world, a world of transaction and submission, is not the only world we all have to live in.
The economic impacts of Mr. Trump’s tariff regime remain to be seen, especially given his history of reversing tariff policies on a whim. But we will suffer. America remains Canada’s leading trading partner. Mr. Carney has chosen suffering, but he did what Canadians elected him to do: stand up for Canada. It’s funny to wake up relieved that you’re about to take a beating. We will not go along to get along.
The American president clearly did not know whom he was dealing with. He is following in the grand tradition of American leaders starting wars with people they don’t understand, then wondering what went wrong.

And you wonder why Canada is pissed?

This is the political equivalent of spitting on the guy who runs your most-frequented restaurant, because it makes you feel tough and you figure he needs your money and can’t do anything about it.
It’s repulsive behavior AND you may well quickly discover he’s less helpless than you think.
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— Will Stancil (@whstancil.bsky.social) August 24, 2026 at 12:54 PM

Hans Casteels writes Murica May Have Finally Accomplished What Canada Never Could

…Canada has always been a federation held together partly by conviction and partly by everyone agreeing not to examine the plumbing too closely. Alberta resents Ottawa. Quebec distrusts Ottawa. Ontario periodically believes it is Ottawa. The Atlantic provinces would like everyone to remember they exist. British Columbia occasionally behaves as though the Rocky Mountains constitute an international border. Then there are the territories, which the rest of us solemnly discuss whenever a map is displayed. We argue because that is what federations do. But external pressure changes internal arguments.
There is an enormous difference between complaining about your country and having somebody else threaten it. Canadians can spend decades calling Confederation dysfunctional, bureaucratic and ridiculous. The moment somebody outside Canada suggests perhaps the country shouldn’t exist at all, something rather ancient kicks in.
Excuse me? That is our dysfunctional, bureaucratic and ridiculous country.
The annexation rhetoric from Donald Trump may therefore prove to be one of the greatest political miscalculations of this entire episode. Academic research published this year found Canadian support for American annexation below 10 percent. Instead of persuading Canadians that integration with the United States is inevitable, Washington appears to have reminded many Canadians that independence is valuable precisely because somebody powerful thinks it is negotiable. That matters. …

Paul Krugman writes The Moose That Roared Why Trump will lose his war with Canada

….The point is not that Canada has “escalation dominance” — the ability to retaliate to every U.S. action with an even more damaging counterreaction — in a trade conflict with the United States. Rather, the point is that an all-out trade war would create a lot of pain in the U.S. in addition to inflicting severe damage to the Canadian economy. And all indications are that the Canadians will be much more willing to bear the pain of a trade war than Americans will – especially given that the great majority of Americans are already dissatisfied with Trump’s economic management….
So, does Trump have any chance of winning his trade war with Canada?
The truth is that it’s hard even to figure out what a Trump win would mean in this context. Would it mean Canada agreeing to become the 51st state? That’s not going to happen.
Would it mean, as Carney suggested in his remarks after the talks broke down, Canada giving up on its promotion of French as a co-equal language with English? That also won’t happen.
Or would it mean Canada making enough concessions that Trump can at least claim victory? That’s also tricky, because until Trump went on the attack Canada wasn’t doing anything wrong. So it can’t promise to end its unfair policies when there basically weren’t any such policies.
The bottom line is that Trump is going to lose his trade war with Canada as thoroughly as he has lost his shooting war with Iran. But because he won’t face reality, trade with our northern neighbor will probably be disrupted until the narcissistic bully in the White House no longer controls trade policy.

Some funny reactions