this is exactly my opinion on it. one of my main gripes was the text rendering. if i needed to change some text i basically had to redo all of the work on any shadow or stroke as well, not just correct a spelling mistake or whatever. very excited to check out the new version.
Trump’s Call to Annex Canada as a State Should Have Invoked the 25th Amendment
The president was clearly irrational. Instead, there was Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick seconding the motion.
By Charles P. PiercePublished: Mar 17, 2025 5:29 PM EDT bookmarksSave Article president trump signs executive orders in the oval office
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What has become plain this week is that the entire administration has committed itself to the president’s pipe dream of annexing Canada as the 51st state. It wasn’t just the president’s bizarre appearance with Mark Rutte, the NATO secretary general, in which the president took a short stroll around the Izonkosphere.
It is necessary at this point to mention that the so-called “artificial line” is usually referred to as a “border.” The president seems to grasp the concept when referring to the “artificial line” separating the United States and Mexico. Strange, that. The president went on.
Wonderful. He’s going to let them keep their national anthem, one of the world’s most stirring, but only as a state song, like “On the Banks of the Wabash,” “Georgia on My Mind,” or “On, Wisconsin.” I suppose he’ll let them keep their hockey teams, too.
The whole episode should have brought about an instantaneous Cabinet meeting at which the 25th Amendment was invoked. The president was clearly irrational. Instead, there was Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick seconding the motion. From the Hill:
It really is a cult, you know.
On the Bluesky app, journalist and author Garrett Epps shrewdly pointed out that in Fletcher Knebel’s Night of Camp David, one of the first manifestations of President Mark Hollenbach’s mental illness was his secret desire to merge the United States and Canada—as well as all of Scandanavia—into a single entity called “Aspen.” In fact, the book was reissued during the first Trump administration, and it was referenced on TV by both Rachel Maddow and Bob Woodward. Now, though, with the president’s grand design seeming to parallel the grandiose foreign-policy proposal of the fictional President Hollenbach, the book has taken on an even greater salience.
(By the way, the hero of the book is a young, ambitious first-term senator named James McVeagh with whom the crazy president shares his notions in the aforementioned night at Camp David. Maybe you can see J. Divan Vance in that role, but I can’t.)
In the novel, the crazy president sounds almost rational in explaining the irrational.
When Knebel wrote his classic Seven Days in May, about an attempted military junta in Washington, he was drawing on inside knowledge about the turmoil in the Kennedy administration between the president, the Joint Chiefs, and the intelligence community—turmoil that would do a lot to feed suspicions after the president’s murder in 1963. JFK was a big fan of the book, so much that he allowed director John Frankenheimer to photograph the White House so he could make the sets for his film adaptation.
In the case of Night of Camp David, Knebel was able to draw on American attempts to absorb Canada that dated back to the founding of the nation. In fact, Article XI of the original Articles of Confederation read as follows:
The American Revolution helped the new country break off those parts of British North America in and around the Great Lakes. We tried to seize the entire country in the War of 1812, but we failed, and we got Washington burned in the bargain. Through the years up to the American Civil War, there were annexation groups on both sides of the border.
In 1860, Secretary of State William Seward came close to annexing the territory from Washington state all the way up to Alaska, which at the time was owned by Russia. For a while, it looked like Great Britain might actually swing for the deal. But,when Seward bought Alaska in 1868, the people in the region began to feel uncomfortable with the U.S. closing in from both the north and south, so popular opinion shifted. Then, of course, there were the Fenians.
The Fenian Brotherhood was a product of one of the periodic risings in Ireland against British rule. It was the American wing of what was called in Ireland the Irish Republican Brotherhood. The American Fenians were a substantial force. They had money—upwards of $500,000—and weapons and an army made up of veterans of the American Civil War. (They were led by John O’Mahony, who’d fought with the 69th New York, part of the famed Irish Brigade.) After the war, the Fenians launched a series of raids into Canada. They came in two bursts—one in 1866 and another in 1870–71. They occurred all over Canada, from Manitoba to the Maritimes. None of them succeeded, and one of them, a raid around the Minnesota–Manitoba border, never even made it into Canada. The only real result was to strengthen Canadian nationalism; the raids were pivotal in the eventual development of the Canadian confederation in 1867, an arrangement that the current U.S. president believes would make a helluva 51st state. In the debate over forming the confederation, Sir John MacDonald said:
One of MacDonald’s primary concerns while forming the confederation was American meddling, especially in the rebellious western parts of Canada. He wrote to his minister of finance:
You always have to watch out for those Yankee wirepullers. Can’t trust them worth a damn.