Trump has underestimated the power of patriotic sentiment in countries besides the U.S.
When Donald Trump won a new term in the White House, Danielle Smith joined the parade of foreign leaders visiting Mar-a-Lago to honor the president-elect. The populist premier of Alberta, Smith enjoyed lively relationships across the American right, even hosting Tucker Carlson in Western Canada in 2024.
Yet when I asked Smith last fall, at a policy summit in Toronto, how she’d feel about Trump potentially intervening in Alberta’s fragile politics, her MAGA stripes vanished.
“I don’t want any foreign influence in our politics here,” Smith told me.
Admiring Trump from afar is one thing. But sovereignty is sovereignty, and borders are borders.
Trump used to understand that.
A decade ago, Trump waged his first-ever political campaign as a nationalist crusader, demanding harder borders and more muscular American sovereignty. When the United Kingdom held its 2016 referendum on leaving the European Union — the 10-year anniversary is in a few days — Trump cheered it on and crowned himself “Mr. Brexit.”
In his second term, Trump’s grasp of nationalist politics has slipped. He has underestimated the power of patriotism and national pride in countries other than his own.
This serial miscalculation has undermined Trump’s trade wars and military adventures, aggravated the cost-of-living crisis, weakened the Republican Party and battered Trump’s bonds with the global right.
It began even before Trump’s inauguration in 2025, with his campaign of bullying against Canada.
The belittling taunts and tariff threats he aimed at Justin Trudeau that winter did not scare America’s neighbor into prostration. They inspired a patriotic backlash and created a new prime minister, Mark Carney, who preaches middle-power resistance to American economic domination.
In Ukraine, Trump’s bid to push the country into a flimsy peace deal — while dressing down Volodymyr Zelenskyy in the Oval Office and grabbing for a share of Ukraine’s mineral wealth — was such an insult to Ukrainian sovereignty that Zelenskyy, even at a political low ebb, faced no consequences for rejecting the terms.
Attempts to meddle with judicial decisions in Brazil, commandeer British and Spanish airfields and dictate military strategy to Israel have gone no better. Dispatching Vice President JD Vance to campaign in Hungary’s election did not save Viktor Orbán from a landslide defeat.
Perhaps most damaging to Trump, his expectation that he could decapitate Iran’s leadership, blast the country into submission and install a compliant proxy — all without using ground troops — led to a monthslong stalemate that spiked energy prices and sapped the global economy. [Continue reading…]