Let's write more about German history after World War II and the Nazi devastation

How Germany Remade Itself after the Holocaust an echo essay two book reviews Christian Caryl published in The New York Review of Books:

After the Nazis: The Story of Culture in West Germany by Michael H. Kater (Yale)

Out of the Darkness: The Germans, 1942-2022 by Frank Trentmann (Knopf Doubleday)

A postwar history of Germany suggests that its progress toward democracy has not always been as stable or straightforward as modern-day observers might assume.

This essay/book review article (two books) is an excellent  brutally told refresher about the devastation Naziism wrought on the German people and their culture- and it all happened in plain sight. 

On February 23, Germany held a nationwide election. The results were disturbing, if not completely unexpected. The Christian Democratic Union (CDU), the conservative party that has served as a pillar of Germany’s democratic system for nearly eighty years, came in first with 28.5 percent of the vote, a relatively anemic result. Finishing second, with 20.8 percent, was the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), a revisionist far-right party that rejects migrants and has been implicated in an attempt to overthrow the federal government. The Social Democrats (SPD), who have long been one of the country’s leading mainstream parties, posted a dismal 16.4 percent. The outcome confirmed a long-standing trend: the assumptions that undergirded Germany’s democratic institutions after World War II are being upended. The CDU leader, Friedrich Merz, has already started talks with the SPD about the formation of a new ruling coalition. 

Whatever form it takes, though, Merz has categorically vowed to exclude the AfD.

Yet perhaps we should not be entirely surprised. A close look at the postwar history of Germany suggests that its progress toward democracy has not always been as stable or straightforward as modern-day observers might assume. Michael H. Kater offers an apt cautionary tale in After the Nazis, his history of post-1945 West German culture, which mingles a general chronicle of events with a few elements from his own biography.

In 1962, he writes, he came up with a provocative plan for his doctoral thesis: he would write about a little-examined pet project of Heinrich Himmler. In 1935, two years after the Nazi seizure of power, the SS leader created a pseudoscientific organization that aimed at providing a scholarly basis for Nazi theories about the “master race.” Himmler named it the Ahnenerbe (Ancestral Legacy), and it was soon dispatching researchers to record folk songs in Finland and conduct phrenological studies in Tibet (the presumptive ancient homeland of the Aryans). Even within Germany these efforts were openly ridiculed by serious scholars. Hitler seems to have regarded the Ahnenerbe with derision, and its real-world effects remained limited. Yet Kater grasped that examining its history could offer a useful perspective on Nazi ideology and how it was shaped.

Two weeks into his work in the West German Federal Archives, however, Kater ran into an unexpected obstacle. The deputy director, Wolfgang A. Mommsen, accused him of misplacing files and peremptorily cut off his access. Kater responded by borrowing money to travel to the National Archives in the US, which held a full copy of Ahnenerbe records that had been microfilmed by the Americans for use in the war crimes trials in Nuremberg. “As I had suspected,” he writes in After the Nazis,  "I had been thrown out of the Bundesarchiv on a pretext, for I found Mommsen’s name in the Ahnenerbe files repeatedly. A Nazi Party member since 1937, he had assisted it in the looting of archives in occupied eastern territories."

Kater discovered that the USSR (aka "Russia) considered prosecuting Mommsen for war crimes after the German surrender, but he had managed to evade charges by making himself useful to the Western occupation authorities: “Thereafter, he re-entered the archivist’s profession in 1952, becoming president of the Federal Archives in 1967. In 1972 he received the Federal Cross of Merit from Bonn.” Kater finished his dissertation on the Ahnenerbe, and it was published as a book in 1974.

In West Germany in the 1950s, and 1960s, the case of someone like Mommsen was at once scandalous, but also entirely routine. 

After 1945, the victorious powers had vowed to cleanse German officialdom of Nazi functionaries, but this was easier said than done. The Nazi (short for National Socialist German Workers) Party—a true mass organization—had had, at its peak, eight million members, a staggering one tenth of the Reich’s citizens. The Allied occupiers couldn’t run the country on their own, so they found themselves relying on the help of Germans who had the requisite technical and administrative experience—and the overwhelming majority of those were ex-Nazis.

In some ways, as Frank Trentmann points out in Out of the Darkness, his magisterial history of the “moral remaking” of postwar Germany, the Soviets had it easier in their zone of occupation, where they had a ready-made reservoir of leaders at hand: they installed German Communists, released from the concentration camps or repatriated from the USSR, in important positions. After the German Democratic Republic was formed in 1949, its leaders began incorporating lower-ranking ex-Nazis into their governing institutions, a process that required “political conversion” to the new socialist order. “Since ordinary Nazi Party members had simply been ‘betrayed’ by fascism,” Trentmann writes, “there was no need for atonement.”

Matters were more complicated in the West. “Communists had been among the Nazis’ first victims, and the German Democratic Republic (East Germany, or the GDR) saw itself as the fruit of their heroic victory,” Trentmann explains. “The Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany, or the FRG), meanwhile, defined itself as the lawful successor of the German Reich, which meant taking on its liabilities.” (While the division of their country was painful to many Germans, Trentmann notes that it effectively solved one big problem of the Weimar Republic, where right-wing and left-wing militias had battled each other in the streets. The East German Communist Party now had to focus its energies on building its new state, giving it little interest in promoting subversion across the border.)

The Americans, the British, and the French each took different approaches to denazification in their respective zones (which eventually were combined to form the Federal Republic). The British, for example, instructed German war crimes courts to follow an Allied guideline that specified that, as Trentmann relates, “[not having] himself pulled the trigger did not exempt [a person] from criminal conviction, nor did the fact that he was following orders.” The Americans, by contrast, allowed the courts in their zone “to follow the conventional criminal code” and to “judge [war criminals] according to the law at the time,” an approach that led to frequent acquittals. But in both the East and the West the initial urge to weed out former Nazis soon gave way to the exigencies of governance. Some eventually ascended to the Federal Republic’s highest positions. Kurt Georg Kiesinger, who had worked in Joachim von Ribbentrop’s Foreign Ministry, served as chancellor from 1966 to 1969; Karl Heinrich Lübke, who served as president for ten years starting in 1959, had worked during the Nazi era for Albert Speer’s Armaments Ministry, which made extensive use of slave labor.

In retrospect, none of this seems terribly surprising. During their time in power the Nazis had thoroughly “harmonized” (gleichgeschaltet) the country’s institutions, subordinating every administrative body and virtually every element of what we would today call “civil society” to the dictates of the party. Uprooting this pervasive presence was an enormous task.

And yet despite this, the Germans were remarkably successful at disentangling themselves from their baleful past. “Over the course of the past eighty years, Germany has gone through a remarkable moral and material regeneration,” writes Trentmann. In After the Nazis, Kater quotes a political scientist who called the postwar Federal Republic “the most successful attempt at democracy in German history.” Today, Germany stands as an exemplar of the virtues of parliamentary democracy and is a pillar of the European Union. Rarely, though, does anyone consider what an extraordinary and hard-won achievement this is.

So how, precisely, did the Germans pull it off? The answers remain of interest not only to historians but also to other societies contemplating the transition from authoritarianism to liberal democracy. As both Trentmann and Kater show, the outcome was by no means assured.

On May 8, 1945, the Third Reich came to an end. Eighty million Germans confronted an apocalyptic scene. The economy lay in ruins, shattered by years of aerial bombing and months of ferocious ground combat; in many cities barely a building remained intact. Government-issued currency had lost so much of its value that it was supplanted as a primary medium of exchange by cigarettes. The victorious powers stripped the country of a quarter of its territory, and 14 million ethnic Germans from areas ceded to the USSR, Poland, and Czechoslovakia began a long trek to join their compatriots in the West.

Germans had spent the war years in comparatively privileged circumstances thanks to the Nazi regime’s exploitation of conquered territories. Now they faced starvation, epidemics, and homelessness. “In July 1946, the average German man in his twenties weighed 130 pounds,” according to Trentmann. “By February 1948, that had dropped to 114 pounds.”

In some ways, the moral and spiritual consequences of the defeat were even more devastating than the material ones. The Third Reich stood exposed in the eyes of the world as a criminal state. The systematic murder of six million European Jews led a long list of German sins. The gas chambers and the execution pits had also claimed Sinti and Roma, homosexuals, and disabled people; concentration camps housed dissidents across the political spectrum, from Communists to priests. Nazi Germany had conquered Europe and governed its conquests on the assumption that it could exploit defeated people and their resources without any legal or ethical constraint. In the course of the war, the Third Reich and its fascist allies had slaughtered countless Poles, Russians, Ukrainians, Belarusians, and Yugoslavs, often treating noncombatant civilians just as viciously as they did uniformed soldiers. Millions of slave laborers were taken from their home countries and subjected to lethal working conditions.

The sheer scale of German defeat underlined the moral failures of the Nazi regime. Six million soldiers were dead or missing. The combat veterans who managed to make it home were often physically and emotionally crippled. For many of them, their sense of emasculation was compounded by the fact that their wives had been empowered by the war, which had pushed them into jobs and responsibilities they now found hard to relinquish. In the East, the widespread rape of women by Soviet soldiers had dramatized the inability of their absent husbands to defend them. In the West, the swagger and wealth of GIs, boasting ample quantities of “nylon stockings, chocolate and cigarettes,” made for a different form of humiliation. (The actress Hildegard Knef called the Americans “taut soldiers with tight bottoms and fixed bayonets”; she later married one.)

Even on a purely emotional level, the vaunted “master race” was now irrefutably under the mastery of others in every sense that counted. As the Allies became occupiers, they braced themselves for partisan warfare by forces still loyal to the Führer—the infamous “werewolves.” Yet the anticipated guerrilla war never materialized—one more testimony to the finality of the regime’s collapse. After World War I many Germans had succumbed to conspiracy theories that absolved the military from defeat on the battlefield and blamed it instead on alleged Jewish intriguers in the government (the so-called stab-in-the-back myth). In 1945 it was hard to blame anyone for the catastrophe but the all-powerful leader who had so clearly led the country into the war. Indeed, in the ensuing decades, the unsurpassably evil Hitler offered a useful alibi to many Germans wishing to conceal their own complicity. As both Trentmann and Kater show, many sought refuge from the heavy weight of the past by trying to assert their own forms of victimhood.

Yet, even if most Germans didn’t believe that they bore personal responsibility for the crimes of the Hitler NAZI regime, there was still an inescapable sense of guilt. 

Trentmann offers ample evidence that many experienced Allied bombing raids as direct retribution for the atrocities committed against the Jews. Most ordinary Germans hadn’t known the precise details of the extermination program, which the Nazi government had tried to keep secret, but the scale of the crime precluded the complete ignorance that many later tried to claim. Modern scholarship concludes that at least 200,000 people were directly involved in implementing the Holocaust, and that number doesn’t include the many soldiers of the regular armed forces who also took part in genocidal actions. (Many Germans persisted for years in clinging to the idea that the regular German army, the Wehrmacht, had remained unsullied by the unspeakable crimes of the SS, but subsequent scholarship revealed this to be yet another myth.)

Too many had been involved in the savagery. Still, this morally compromised Germany gradually began to find its way forward. Denazification produced wildly different results in the two halves of the divided nation. The East, deeming itself free of any responsibility for the Nazi era, promoted a version of history in which Communists were the Nazis’ main victims and that gave little acknowledgment to the Holocaust. In its early years the West lurched between confronting the past and effacing it. 

Even so, the purge of the highest-ranking Nazis on both sides of the divide in the years immediately after the war did at least provide space for new elites—some of them former political prisoners or returning émigrés—to establish themselves.

There is no making sense of postwar Germany without considering Konrad Adenauer, who became chancellor of the new Federal Republic at its founding in 1949, and served for the next fourteen years. He was also the first leader of the CDU. Adenauer, a Catholic and former mayor of Cologne who had opposed the Nazis before their seizure of power and studiously avoided any political activity during their reign, was imprisoned after the failed plot to assassinate Hitler in 1944. When he assumed his new position as the leader of the West German government, he was seventy-three years old.

Kater only has a few lines about Adenauer and sticks mostly to the conventional view of him as a stuffy, somewhat authoritarian figure. Trentmann offers a much more interesting interpretation. While acknowledging the chancellor’s paternalism, he argues that Adenauer “oversaw an extraordinary transformation, in domestic as much as international policy.” It was Adenauer, known as der Alte (“the Old Man”), who oversaw the adoption of the Basic Law, a new constitution designed by leading legal scholars to overcome the institutional weaknesses of Weimar democracy. Among other things, it created a solidly federal structure and prevented political fragmentation by excluding from parliament parties that failed to win at least 5 percent of the vote (a provision later adopted by many of the postcommunist states in Central and Eastern Europe). When the Western Allies finally implemented a wide-ranging currency reform in 1948, Adenauer and his economics minister, Ludwig Erhard, seized the chance to pass a series of reforms that ushered in the much-vaunted “economic miracle” that ultimately transformed Germany into a champion of European growth. Adenauer believed firmly in what came to be called the “social market economy,” which combined free market economics with extensive social protections and strong labor union participation.

By joining the European Coal and Steel Community (the forerunner of today’s European Union) in 1951, Adenauer signaled that henceforth the Federal Republic would side firmly with the West, breaking a long-standing German foreign policy orientation toward Central and Eastern Europe. This was not the only available option. Kurt Schumacher, the leader of the opposition SPD, long favored a course of neutrality that some believed might persuade the Soviets to allow East and West Germany to reunify. Many Germans were tempted by this vision, but Adenauer would have none of it. Instead he brought the Federal Republic into NATO in 1955, despite widespread popular resistance to rearmament. Yet voters validated the Old Man’s choice. In 1957 the CDU won a 50.2 percent majority under the slogan “No Experiments.” Trentmann describes this as one of the most famous mottoes in German election history—and also “one of the most misleading.” He views Adenauer, like the nineteenth-century Prussian chancellor Otto von Bismarck, who unified Germany, as a “white revolutionary,” a leader “who understood that to conserve required radical change, not standing still.”

Adenauer’s attitude toward the past was complex. He put an end to denazification procedures and defended an amnesty for ex-Nazis as the only option for maintaining governability. “You do not pour out dirty water,” he once declared, “if you do not have any that is clean.” Yet he also took an active part in the decision to pay huge sums to Israel as a form of compensation (Wiedergutmachung—literally “making good again”) for the Holocaust. “For Adenauer, Wiedergutmachung was about accountability,” Trentmann writes. “Once old accounts had been settled, forgiveness could follow.”

Adenauer’s strong hand had an unexpected side effect: it spurred many members of the younger generation into political activity. The 1950s and early 1960s are typically portrayed as a period of reactionary stagnation, but Germany’s postwar democracy was never solely a top-down project. Trentmann chronicles the myriad new paths that individual Germans began to seek. Volunteerism and civic activism swelled. Young people built ties to their counterparts in countries that the Third Reich had once occupied, accepting and demonstrating responsibility for Nazi-era crimes. By the late 1950s, he notes, many Germans were already expressing dissatisfaction with the short sentences handed out by domestic courts for Nazi-era atrocities. The 1958 trial in Ulm of men who had taken part in the mass shootings of Jewish civilians during the Nazi occupation of Eastern Europe resulted in appallingly mild verdicts—a pattern that was repeated in the 1963–1965 trials in Frankfurt of Auschwitz officials. German judges insisted that Nazi-era crimes could be tried only according to the standards of law valid at the time they were committed, which usually led to acquittals or minimal sentences. As the inadequacy of this approach became all too apparent, German courts began to accept that unprecedented crimes could only be tried according to broader humanitarian principles.

Kater’s sweeping account is unfortunately marred by dogmatic judgments and stylistic infelicities (aka, inappropriate expressions).

Nonetheless, it does an impressive job of chronicling how culture aided Germans’ gradual acknowledgment of these burdens of the past. One of my favorite figures in the book is Joseph Beuys, an elfin prankster who infused his conceptual art with a quirkily tactile sensibility. During the war his Luftwaffe plane was shot down over Crimea, and he was rescued by Tatars who brought him back to health by encasing him in lard and felt—or that, at least, was what Beuys claimed. These two materials later assumed a prominent place in his art, which combined elements of playfulness and mourning in weirdly resonant ways that seemed calculated to provoke the guardians of establishment culture. And that, of course, was very much the point. Throughout the postwar years, Kater shows, avant-garde artists and musicians contributed mightily to developing new tolerance for cultural experimentation, international influences, and liberal politics.

In 1947, the literary magazine editor Hans Werner Richter convened the first meeting of a group of mostly young writers united in their opposition to Nazism and its legacy. 

Several of the most important members of what came to be known as Group 47 had fought in the war. They included Martin Walser and the future Nobel Prize winners Heinrich Böll and Günter Grass, all of whom channeled their wartime experiences into works that defied the widespread determination to draw a veil over the past. Even these well-meaning efforts, however, had their limits. The poet Paul Celan, who wrote in German, was a Jewish Holocaust survivor from pre-war Romania whose hermetic (very rigid) writing tested the very notion of artistic communication after the murder of millions.

When he staged an eccentric reading of his work at a Group 47 meeting, his listeners reacted with condescension (though Kater insists that this was grounded in simple miscomprehension rather than antisemitism). Just because you had an anti-Nazi stance didn’t always mean that you could produce good literature—or that you could recognize it when you saw it.

Both Trentmann and Kater demonstrate that Germany’s progress toward today’s emphatically liberal democracy was often bumpy and ambivalent. (The Federal Republic only abolished long-established laws against homosexuality in 1969.) A crucial moment, Kater contends, came when university students began to rebel against the continuing ubiquity of ex-Nazis throughout institutions of higher education. The children of former Nazis were strikingly prominent in the rise of the Red Army Faction, the left-wing terrorist movement that set Germany on edge in the 1970s, prompting both tortured ambivalence and open approbation among some progressive intellectuals. Kater has an especially useful section on the Historikerstreit (the Historians’ Debate) that broke out in the 1980s when a group of conservative scholars began arguing against the uniqueness of the Holocaust (particularly in light of the millions of deaths for which Stalin was responsible) and against the need to embrace Germany’s responsibility for it.

It wasn’t only conservatives, however, who struggled to come to terms with the legacy of the Third Reich. In 1989, amid the collapse of the East German state, Grass was among the many cultural figures who declared that the two Germanies should remain separate in recompense for the magnitude of Nazi crimes—even though Germans on both sides of the Wall voted overwhelmingly for unification as soon as they got the chance. Grass’s dramatic stance appeared in a strikingly different light when he admitted in a 2006 interview—seven years after he was awarded the Nobel Prize—that he had served in the Waffen-SS near the end of the war.

It is a fitting measure of the success of the Federal Republic of Germany that we tend to take its prosperity and its pacifism for granted. Collective German remorse has been an especially important element in this rehabilitation. By 2015 attitudes toward the Nazi past had evolved to the point that President Joachim Gauck, a former civil rights activist from the GDR, could declare, “There is no German identity without Auschwitz.” No other country, Trentmann notes, has “turned past sins into a source of civic pride like Germany.”
This astonishing metamorphosis reminds us that collective cultural identities, which might appear to be stubbornly fixed, are in fact profoundly mutable. 

We shouldn’t necessarily take this as reassurance, as the rise of right-wing populist groups such as the AfD demonstrates. Germany will remain a model liberal democracy only if its leaders and its citizens continue working to keep it one*.

*Like the American patriot Benjamin Franklin warned, "a Republic, if you can keep it!"  In other words, Republics are not merely founded upon the consent of the people, they are also absolutely dependent upon the active and informed involvement of the people. 

Immigrant abduction and roundups: Regardless of your political beliefs, this is not the nation I grew up in

Masked agents arresting innocent immigrants in the streets❓

Nazi tactics❗ Echo opinion letter published in The Winchester Star, a Virginia newspaper: 

Rumeysa Ozturk, 30, just left her home in Somerville , Massachusetts, to meet with friends when she was detained by U.S. Department of Homeland Security agents, lawyer Mahsa Khanbabai said in a petition filed in Boston federal court. Khanababai called the arrest by masked agents "terrifying."😱😳😈

Dear Editor: It is beyond belief that masked federal agents are arresting people on the streets of America. I understand protective gear if necessary, but last week masked agents arrested a woman and whisked her off into custody and transported her to isolation in Louisiana. 😡😢💢 Regardless of your political beliefs, this is not the direction our country should be headed. 

Holocaust Museum✡️Jewish sector street scene  in 1930s Paris France

If masked agents can arrest this woman, what stops masked agents from arresting any person in this country and sending them to an unknown location? Not the country I grew up in.

From Gary W. Baylis in Frederick County, Virginia

⚠️Kristi Noem’s disturbing failure of compassion — and of leadership- The Hill

SignalGate: Pete Hegseth gaslighting Americans because a security breach is dangerous regardless of how he tries to redefine the incident

Signal (SignalGage) incident is 'terrible'❗: Echo opinion letter published in The Winchester Star in Winchester, Virginia.

Signal group chats are now dead, but not before the breach of security of government secret military operations in Yemen. 

The National Intelligence Director, Tulsi Gabbard, appointed by Trump, admitted it was a “mistake." 

The results of this mistake could have been disastrous for U.S. military pilots but fortunately it was not. On the Signal chats there was also CIA Director John Ratcliffe, who has defended the use of Signal chats as “appropriate,” Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, Vice President JD Vance, and a nongovernmental journalist employed The Atlantic. 

Unfortunately, I think The Atlantic will soon be attacked by Trump, as he already has PBS and NPR.

These people on the Signal group chat were all people who had been appointed by Trump despite their overall lack of familiarity with government procedures. In the two months since the inauguration of Donald Trump, these government officials did not have time to understand the common-sense procedures of government employees. They had not attained the common-sense necessary to function well in extremely rapidly changing executive edicts.

The Democrats claim that the information exchanged with the journalist was “classified.” I believe them, but it will take time to prove since the government only claims it was “sensitive” information. Time will tell, but in the meantime I think it was terrible even if it was sensitive information- it was still a dangerous ⚠️security breach❗

From Andrew White in Winchester, Virginia

Security communications were available to Pete Hegseth but, instead, he used Signal- commercial text WWHT?

Letters: Donald Trump’s administration shows incompetence with SignalGate security breach leak. #WWHT❓

Echo opinion published in the Chicago Tribune:

Fire Hegseth NOW! 

Blatant incompetence and a complete disregard for America’s safety — how could so-called senior officials in President Donald Trump’s administration not check who was in the chat when discussing war plans? And why were they using a nongovernment, commercially available application like Signal instead of the numerous secure methods of communication readily available to them? 

The journalist, editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, from The Atlantic showed more concern for our national secrets than our Senate-confirmed so-called “experts.”

This is just another example of the misplaced confidence of the Trump administration. Consider Elon Musk’s unfocused fiscal chainsaw, ❗😱Trump’s constant flip-flopping on tariffs and the thinly veiled bribes from corporations that believe they will never receive fair treatment from this government without making payoffs. Even with the daily examples of ineptitude in the last 60 days, it’s absolutely outrageous that this security breach could happen.

This incompent administration is constantly trying to impress us, wrongminded, that it knows best and has all the answers, but its actions show just the opposite. 

Administration officials are absolutely clueless, sloppy and incompetent.  From Joe Szczepaniak, in Wheaton, Illinoia

SignalGate opinion letters: "US national security might have been compromised and Trump’s strongman shtick surely was"

Eccho opinion letters published in The New York Times:

SignalGate

To the Editor of The New York Times:  The egregious disclosure of classified information regarding the U.S. military strike in Yemen against Houthi rebels to Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor in chief of The Atlantic, via an commercial unauthorized group chat warrants an immediate investigation. The public and Congress need to know how such an unthinkable national security breach involving the highest-level administration officials, including the vice president and the secretary of defense, could have occurred.

The overriding question that needs to be answered is whether this breakdown is a one-off event, or reflective of a more systemic laxity within the administration. The latter would be in keeping with President Trump’s history of mishandling classified documents.

At a minimum, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and the national security adviser, Michael Waltz, should resign.

From Mark Godes in Chelsea, Massachusetts

To the Editor: The real harm of the intelligence breach in the group chat about the military operations in Yemen is in the content of the conversation itself. To a foreign adversary, this thread represents what could be considered the holy grail of intelligence. China, Russia and Iran now have direct insight into how defense and intelligence officials strategize and make decisions, revealing vulnerabilities that can be exploited.

This breach compromises national security in ways that could have long-lasting consequences. It is a serious lapse in safeguarding sensitive information. The C.I.A. spends thousands of hours of research in trying to ascertain exactly this type of behavior in the leaders of our adversaries.

This incident should serve as a clear wake-up call that the people currently running our intelligence and defense communities are wholly incompetent and should be replaced with professionals.

From Brian L. Tell in Palm Springs, California.

To the Editor: There is plenty of blame being aimed at the Trump administration officials who used a commercial text platform to discuss the nation’s planned military actions in Yemen. 

They should all be held accountable.

However, there is another group equally responsible for this dangerous lack of professionalism: the senators who confirmed individuals so clearly unqualified for their positions. 

Rather than insisting that Trump nominate experienced, competent candidates, the Republicans on Capitol Hill capitulated to pressure, putting a team of underprepared individuals in critical government roles. Unfortunately, this may not be the last on-the-job security breach we see from this group. I hope I am wrong.

From Anne Krick in Warrenville, Illinois

To the Editor:  The bungling of a text chat hosted by Michael Waltz, the national security adviser, that included Marco Rubio, the secretary of state; the defense secretary Pete Hegseth; and Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, clearly demonstrates that Elon Musk’s “government efficiency” efforts are focused on the wrong aspect of government. Instead of laying off thousands of dedicated hard-working government agency employees, he and his army of ax men should be examining the incompetence and inefficiency at the highest levels of government — in the form of the president’s appointees. The level of incompetence and inefficiency should keep them busy for quite a while.

From Ken Lefkowitz in Medford, New Jersey

To the Editor: If Trump truly were a strong leader, he would demand the resignations of Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and the national security adviser, Michael Waltz, for their involvement in the Signal affair. This move would demonstrate an unwavering commitment to the security of the nation and zero tolerance for incompetence and bad behavior among his senior leadership team. But instead the president has exposed his inherent weakness by responding with his usual denial, name-calling and bluster.

Our national security might have been compromised. Trump’s strongman shtick surely was.

From Steve Nelson in Williamstown, Massachusetts

To the Editor:  Well, it didn’t take long for the wheels to start coming off the Trump administration’s clown car. Will this be enough for the supine Republican Congress to finally begin putting country over self?  And then there is the incompetent defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, calling Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor of  The Atlantic, a “so-called journalist.” This so-called journalist had more integrity and concern for our country than the Republicans who were on the security breached Signal group chat!

From:  MacKenzie Allen in St.-Clement-Rancoudray, France

Trump pulled the rug out from under the ambitious Elise Sefanik

Awwww 😊😉😄❗ It's tough to be Elise Stefanik❗

An New York Intelligencer report by Ed Kilgore:

You have to figure Elise Stefanik has been getting pretty antsy lately. She announced way back on November 10 — so long ago that DOGE was just an evil glimmer in Elon Musk’s eyes — that Donald Trump had offered her the Cabinet-level position of U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. It must have seemed like a pretty sweet gig: no management responsibilities at all, but a lot of public attention (just like her predecessor Nikki Haley), and the chance to please The Boss by attacking his growing list of global enemies.

"Right Now, the U.S. Is Ceasing to Be a Democracy"

Spiegel Magazine International 

There was one catch, though: Stefanik’s confirmation by the Senate (expected to be a breeze) was postgponed until after April 1, when two House vacancies in Florida created by earlier Trump appointments (Matt Gaetz as attorney general, briefly, and Michael Waltz as White House national security adviser) would be filled by a special election. Before then, the fragile GOP majority in the House meant Stefanik had to stay in that chamber to supply her vote on big measures like the House budget resolution and the continuing resolution that kept the federal government running.

Once those were out of the way, and two new Floridians sworn in, Stefanik would finally be able to head to the U.N. building and take the next step up the ladder that some figured would eventually make her a presidential possibility herself.

But just a few days before the Florida special elections, lightning struck, via a Trump post on Truth Social:

So instead of strutting her stuff on the international stage and burnishing her “rising star” image, Stefanik will be stuck in the House as just another slave to Trump’s every whim.

What happened❓ Well, if Trump is telling the truth 🤥(never a given😧), there remains the fear that even with fresh troops from Florida, the margin in the House is too narrow for comfort with the “one big, beautiful bill” implementing the president’s legislative agenda still on tap and not sure to reach the House floor until late spring or even summer. 

With Stefanik’s seat vacated and with a Democratic governor of New York able to delay filling it for some time, all it would take is two or three defections (depending on absences) to screw everything up and derail tax cuts, budget cuts, a debt-limit increase, and all the other weighty items planned for the budget reconciliation bill.

What you have to wonder is why this situation wasn’t evident before Stefanik was nominated, as GOP senator Lisa Murkowski remarked shortly: "They just figured that out NOW❓"

The perilous situation of House Republicans was actually worse at the beginning of this Congress, before two House Democrats died. 

Are there new jitters about Mike Johnson’s ability to manage his troops? Is it possible Republicans are afraid they’ll lose one of those Florida special elections, or perhaps the New York special election Stefanik’s departure would have triggered? Is the myth of Trump 2.0 as a fast-moving and irresistible force crushing all opposition perhaps slightly hollow? Or is this all a ruse and the extremely ambitious House Republican Conference chair said or did something to displease the man upstairs (meaning Trump, not God)?

That’s unclear, but for the moment it sucks to be Elise Stefanik. Not that long ago she was on the shortlist to become Trump’s running mate and presumptive political heir. Now she’s a prisoner of the House, a body that is determined to surrender all its power to Russell Vought and Elon Musk.

It’s true that Trump’s thunderbolt, by taking away her nice new job, included an explicit suggestion that she will “join my administration in the future,” and that’s no small thing, particularly given the high likelihood that the GOP will lose control of the House in 2026, making House Republicans even less significant than they are today.

But who knows what the future will bring and which jobs will be open when Stefanik’s mere floor vote stops being essential? Nah, it would have been better if the New York representative had arranged to be first in line to quit her House seat after the election.

Donald Trump was obviously not briefed about the purpose of "Signal": White House is swarming with incompetence

Echo editorial board published in the Toledo, Ohio newspaper The Blade.

Donald Trump's failed Administration is spinning furiously to pretend that the security failure of a high-level discussion about a planned bombing attack in Yemen was no big deal. 💢😡

The discussion involving the secretary of defense, the vice president, and other high-level security figures allowed secret and important war plans to be disclosed to someone without high-level security clearance. That person was a journalist.

What’s inappropriate about this situation is that Trump, and just about everyone down the line, on cue, has likewise attempted to inappropriately smear that journalist, the Atlantic magazine editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg.

National Security Adviser Mike Waltz included Mr. Goldberg in a text message chain on an encrypted app called Signal. Goldberg was part of a group that received from Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth detailed action plans for a U.S. military assault on Iran-backed Houthi forces firing missiles on cargo ships in the Red Sea.

Trump's first reaction to the news was not disappointment and shock that high-level classified information was carelessly bandied about on the internet, but to remark that the Atlantic is likely to go out of business, an observation that was utterly irrelevant. (Not only is the statement a gaslighting of the high level of alarm this security breach set off, but the fact is, the Atlantic is owned by Mrs. Steve Jobs, Laurene Powell Jobs, the super wealthy widow of the Apple billionaire - $14.9 billion US.)

The Atlantic is a venerated publication that has been in existence since before the Civil War. Trump also ventured the opinion, without evidence, that Signal is “defective.” (Because, Trump obviously had zero understanding about what "Signal" is.....nobody had briefed him. OMG❗)

Then, Mr. Waltz went on Fox (Fake❗)News with Laura Ingraham and strongly implied that Mr. Goldberg had somehow inserted himself into the Signal chat.

Mr. Waltz, Mr. Hegseth, and White House spokesman Karoline Leavitt then spent the next 24 hours disparaging Mr. Goldberg. Trump called him a “sleazebag.”

Mr. Goldberg is the one who alerted Trump and the rest of the White House to the fact that their chat group about a planned bombing campaign was shared with him, a fact that he kept quiet until about 10 days later.

Smearing Mr. Goldberg is a tawdry attempt to escape accountability for a national security mistake that should simply have been acknowledged as such.

Most likely, the Trump Administration is trying to deflect because of the Republican freakout nine years ago over the protocol violations of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Trump’s reaction to Ms. Clinton’s use of a private server at that time for classified emails was to “lock her up.” So, what now❓

It reflects negatively on this White House that its instinctive reaction to a mistake, which could have been acknowledged and corrected with fortunately little harm done, was to disparage the journalist who discovered it and acted responsibly to bring it to the government’s and the public’s attention. The response has been instructive.

This largely inexperienced new administration needs to get its act together fast.  First Published March 29, 2025, 12:01 a.m

#FirePeteHegseth❗

Donald Trump making "dumb" the dangerous new normal

It’s not the hypocrisy that bothers me; it’s the stupidity. 

Echo oped published in The New York Times by Hillary Clinton

How Much Dumber Will This Get❓

We’re all shocked — shocked❗ 😧— that Donald Trump and his team don’t actually care about protecting classified information or federal record retention laws. But we knew that already. 

What’s much worse is that top Trump administration officials put our troops in jeopardy by sharing military plans on a commercial messaging app and unwittingly invited a journalist into the chat. That’s dangerous. And it’s just dumb❗

This is the latest in a string of self-inflicted wounds by the new administration that are squandering America’s strength and threatening our national security. 

Firing hundreds of federal workers charged with protecting our nation’s nuclear weapons is also dumb. So is shutting down efforts to fight pandemics just asa deadly Ebola outbreak is spreading in Africa. It makes no sense to purge talented generals, diplomats and spies at a time when rivals like China and Russia are trying to expand their global reach.

In a dangerous and complex world, it’s not enough to be strong. You must also be smart. As secretary of state during the President Obama administration, I argued for smart power, integrating the hard power of our military with the soft power of our diplomacy, development assistance, economic might and cultural influence. None of those tools can do the job alone. Together, they make America a superpower. The Trump approach is dumb power. Instead of a strong America using all our strengths to lead the world and confront our adversaries, Mr. Trump’s America will be increasingly blind and blundering, feeble and friendless.

Let’s start with the military, because that’s what he claims to care about. Don’t let the swagger fool you. Trump and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth (of group chat fame) are apparently more focused on performative fights over wokeness than preparing for real fights with America’s adversaries. 

Does anyone really think deleting tributes to the Tuskegee Airmen makes us more safe❓ The Trump Pentagon purged images of the plane that dropped the atomic bomb that ended World War II because its name is the Enola Gay. Dumb.

Instead of working with Congress to modernize the military’s budget to reflect changing threats, the president is firing top generals without credible justification. Five former secretaries of defense, Republicans and Democrats, rightly warned that this would “undermine our all-volunteer force and weaken our national security.” 

Mass layoffs are also hitting the intelligence agencies. As one former senior spy put it, “We’re shooting ourselves in the head, not the foot.” Not smart.

If they’re this reckless with America’s hard power, it’s no surprise that they’re shredding our soft power. 

As a former secretary of state, I am particularly alarmed by the administration’s plan to close embassies and consulates, fire diplomats and destroy the U.S.

Agency for International Development. Let me explain why this matters, because it’s less widely understood than the importance of tanks and fighter jets.

I visited 112 countries and traveled nearly one million miles as America’s top diplomat, and I have seen how valuable it is for our country to be represented on the ground in far-flung places. The U.S. military has long understood that our forces must be forward deployed in order to project American power and respond quickly to crises. The same is true of our diplomats. Our embassies are our eyes and ears informing policy decisions back home. They are launchpads for operations that keep us safe and prosperous, from training foreign counterterrorism forces to helping U.S. companies enter new markets.

China understands the value of forward-deployed diplomacy, which is why it has opened new embassies and consulates around the world and now has more than the United States. The Trump administration’s retreat will leave the field open for Beijing to spread its influence, uncontested. Dumb❗

Diplomats win America friends so we don’t have to go it alone in a competitive world. That’s how my colleagues and I were able to rally the United Nations to impose crippling sanctions against Iran’s nuclear program and ultimately force Tehran to stop its progress toward a bomb — something Mr. Trump’s bluster has failed to do. (He actually defunded inspectors keeping an eye on Iranian research sites. Dumb❗)

Diplomacy is cost-effective, especially when compared with the consequences of taking military action. Preventing wars is cheaper than fighting them. Trump’s own former secretary of defense Jim Mattis, a retired Marine Corps four-star general, told Congress, “If you don’t fund the State Department fully, then I need to buy more ammunition.”

Our development assistance has always been a small portion of the federal budget, but it also has an outsize impact on international stability, especially paired with effective diplomacy. 

When American aid dollars help stop a famine or an outbreak, when we respond to a natural disaster or open schools, we win hearts and minds that might otherwise go to terrorists or rivals like China. We reduce the flow of migrants and refugees. We strengthen friendly governments that might otherwise collapse.

I don’t want to pretend that any of this is easy or that American foreign policy hasn’t been plagued by mistakes. 

Leadership is hard. But our best chance to get it right and to keep our country safe is to strengthen our government, not weaken it. We should invest in the patriots who serve our nation, not insult them.

Smart reforms could make federal agencies, including the State Department and U.S.A.I.D., more efficient and effective. During the Clinton administration, my husband’s Reinventing Government initiative, led by Vice President Al Gore, worked with Congress to thoughtfully streamline bureaucracy, modernize the work force and save billions of dollars. In many ways it was the opposite of the Trump administration’s slash-and-burn approach. Today, the Trump cult are not reinventing government; they’re wrecking it.

All of this is both dumb and dangerous. ⚠️ And I haven’t even gotten to the damage Trump is doing by cozying up to dictators like Russia’s Vladimir Putin, blowing up our alliances — force multipliers that extend our reach and share our burdens — and trashing our moral influence by undermining the rule of law at home. Or how he’s tanking our economy and blowing up our national debt. Propagandists in Beijing and Moscow know we are in a global debate about competing systems of governance. People and leaders around the world are watching to see if democracy can still deliver peace and prosperity or even function. If America is ruled like a banana republic, with flagrant corruption and a leader who puts himself above the law, we lose that argument. We also lose the qualities that have made America exceptional and indispensable.

If there’s a grand strategy at work here, I don’t know what it is. Maybe Trump wants to return to 19th-century spheres of influence. Maybe he’s just driven by personal grudges and is in way over his head. As a businessman, he bankrupted his Atlantic City casinos. Now he’s gambling with the national security of the United States. 

If this continues, a group chat foul will be the least of our concerns, and all the fist and flag emojis in the world won’t save us.

Donald Trump is a terrible creature creating leadership by fear- creating terror for all Americans

Trump is a failed leader

Echo opinion letter published in the News-Gazette 

in Central Illinois:

Donald Trump is a failed (fake❗) leader. 

Effective leaders marshal resources to enable teams to do their work. To get that work done, they must engage the energies and good will of the people who do it.

But, Trump’s agenda tears down government’s ability to do its work. Abolishing departments, firing workers, shutting down computers, encouraging snitches and cutting funds cripples government’s ability to function. That is what Trump wants to do: stop government from doing the work Congress has authorized. Legally, he can only do so with Congress’ consent. So he end-runs the law by giving his campaign donor, Elon Musk, the burglary tools to ransack agencies.

Moreover, Trump has made fear his way to corral and intimidate workers who run government agencies’ programs. Fear is no way to engage the energies and creativity of employees. Management by fear, punishing first and asking later, alienates them. It encourages backlash, subterfuge and rebellion — destroying efficiency and morale. Abused people won’t feel obligated to support the mission, nor to perform on their jobs. The result is dereliction of duty and waste.

Trump calls on us to despair, not to hope. To withdraw, not to advance. To quit, not to persist. Who wants to sacrifice time and energy to tear things down instead of to build and succeed? No wonder Trump failed so often in the private sector. His mismanagement will spawn dozens of case studies on how not to lead. He’s eroding the presidency by personalizing it as a tool for pathological revenge.

From David Leslie in Urbana, Illinois

SignalGate! Donald Trump obviously never learned the President Truman lesson "The buck stops here!"

The Signal group chat, and the dangers of a president who believes his administration is beyond accountability.

Echo opinion published in the Boston Globe by Globe Opinion columnist Renée Graham.

SignalGate❗

Donald Trump could have tamped down the roiling scandal now being called “Signalgate.” (Yes, it’s a gate.)

Its facts are unassailable. In fact, Mike Waltz, Trump’s national security adviser, accidentally added Jeffrey Goldberg, The Atlantic’s editor in chief, to a text chat session with several high-level Cabinet members — including Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, CIA Director John Ratcliffe, and Vice President JD Vance — to hash out plans to bomb Houthi targets in Yemen.

In a jawdropper of a story, Goldberg wrote that he knew two hours before the rest of the world when the first bombs would drop on March 15 because Hegseth “had texted me the war plan at 11:44 a.m. The plan included precise information about weapons packages, targets, and timing.” All of this, inexplicably, unfolded on Signal, an encrypted phone app.

On Wednesday, Goldberg and Shane Harris, a staff writer for The Atlantic, published even more damning details with additional text messages that starkly contradict Hegseth’s snippy denial, “Nobody was texting war plans.” 🤥

Morover, the security breach story also burns the administration’s false claims — including those made by Gabbard and Ratcliffe under oath at a Senate Intelligence Committee ❗hearing on Tuesday — that the text chain did not reveal classified information. 🤥

Jeffrey Goldberg and Harris wrote: “The statements by Hegseth, Gabbard, Ratcliffe, and Trump — combined with the assertions made by numerous administration officials that we are lying🤥 about the content of the Signal texts — have led us to believe that people should see the texts in order to reach their own conclusions.”

Here’s another conclusion.

Trump should have admitted that *egregious* mistakes were made by Waltz and Hegseth. 

Trump should have demanded the resignation of at least one of them. That would have given the public some sense that the administration was treating this colossal security breach with the gravity it warrants. Perhaps Goldberg and Harris would not have felt compelled to write another bombshell story to counter the administration’s ridiculous narrative.

"the closest Trump ever comes to admitting a mistake is when he rips a former appointee who balked at doing whatever terrible thing he commanded them to do"

That’s why Trump spent the days since The Atlantic story dropped trashing Goldberg, a journalist Trump has despised since his first White House term for writing things that Trump did not like. 

Clearly, that’s the administration’s (failed defensive) strategy, with Vance claiming on X/ that Goldberg “oversold what he had,” Waltz calling Goldberg a “loser” and a liar, and Karoline Leavitt, Trump’s press secretary, dismissing the stories as “another hoax written by a Trump-hater who is well-known for his sensationalist spin.”

“Hoax” is MAGA code for “attention must not be paid.”

Even as evidence mounts against the confederacy of dunces who used a commercial app to conduct classified business about an imminent bombing attack on a foreign country, Trump has shown no inclination toward removing those responsible because that would be akin to admitting that he was wrong in nominating them in the first place.

The closest Trump ever comes to admitting a mistake is when he rips a former appointee who balked at doing whatever terrible thing he commanded them to do — and then it’s not about his lack of judgment but that someone, in his view, turned out to be disloyal.

This time Trump took no chances with critical thinkers or anyone with a shred of a conscience. He’s surrounded himself with loyalists whose only qualification is their deathless deference to him. In doing so, he has assembled the least qualified Cabinet in history, and the fallout from his arrogant miscalculation is unfolding in boldface headlines. Despite Trump’s many attempts to downplay the story, it clearly isn’t going away.

But, as a genetic serial liar, Trump is even more emboldened in his second term. After dodging any accountability for the deadly January 6, 2021, insurrection, postelection interference to overturn his losing outcome in the 2020, presidential race, and his mishandling of classified documents, he believes that he is untouchable and owes no explanations to anyone about anything.

A leader who won’t own a wrong decision or immediately act to correct it is too dangerous to lead. Trump being Trump, he’ll probably stick with Waltz and Hegseth no matter how much Signalgate continues to metastasize. But it’s this nation and the world that will continue to pay an impossibly high price for having a president who will always favor obedience and sycophancy over competence and accountability.

This is an excerpt from Outtakes, a Globe Opinion newsletter from columnist Renée Graham.

Canadians united in determination to protect their sovereignty from Trump political agression caused by tariffs

Excerpts from a Conversation published in the Boston Globe by 
Shirley Leung and Anna Kusmer :

Canadian journalist Stephen Marche says he’s experiencing the most powerful moment of Canadian politics in his lifetime.

The trigger was Donald Trump’s presidency, and his antagonistic stance towards Canada, one of the nation’s closest historic allies and trading partners. On this episode of “Say More,” host Shirley Leung talks to Marche about the ways Canadians are reacting to Trump’s aggression, their fear and heartbreak, and what the future holds for Canada in a new political world order.

Canadians are really upset❗ Americans must pay attention.
Canada has never been a flag-waving country, but Trump made it into one.

You never take a friend for granted. I’m afraid that’s what’s happening between the US and Canada right now. It all started with Trump talking about imposing big tariffs on Canadian goods.

Then there was talk of Canada becoming our 51st state. In the US, late night comedy talk hosts have been having a field day…

But the longer this tiff with Canada drags on, the less funny it gets. What does it mean for the US to be alienating its closest ally?

People I know have been going to protests at US embassies and bringing their kids. I get a lot of texts from my Canadian friends saying things like, “What is wrong with your country❓” Or like, “What’s going on over there❓”

And to be honest, when they send those texts, I don’t even know what they’re referring to. I’m like, “Can you just specify what news item you’re referring to?” Because when I look at the news, there’s probably at least four or five headlines they could be reacting to.

We have a Canadian colleague here who says her family won’t come to visit her. They won’t even cross the border to come see her. If you dare to go into Canadian social media, you will be surprised about how passionately people feel about this and all the memes being shared among Canadians. There’s a classic 2000, Molson beer ad, which is a Canadian beer, that’s all about Canadian pride.

2000 Molson beer ad (clip): Hey, I’m not a lumberjack or a fur trader. And I don’t live in any igloo or eat blubber or own a dog sled, and I don’t know Jimmy, Sally or Suzy from Canada, although I’m certain they’re really, really nice. I have a prime minister, not a president. I speak English and French, not American…

Jeff Douglas, re-released the ad with new language, which is entirely directed at the US.

“We Are Canadian” 2025, videoan (clip): They mistake our modesty for meekness, our kindness for consent…and ends with this extremely dramatic moment.

“We Are Canadian” 2025, video (clip): We’re not the 51st anything. We’re the first to unite a crisis, the first to build bridges not walls, and the first to stand on guard for the, my name is Jeff and ‘We are Canadian.’

Then, there’s all this kind of hockey talk. There’s this term, “elbows up.” Have you heard this? It’s a term in hockey that’s used to describe this defensive move that a player will do if they’re being attacked.

Now “elbows up” is this slogan that Canadians are embracing, directed at the US. It’s like, ‘Okay, Canadians, let’s get in formation here, elbows up, let’s defend ourselves.’ Even though a lot of Canadians are able to create these kinds of funny memes, I think we should not discount how deadly serious people are about this.

Another thing that is very real is the economy. What Trump is doing, threatening these tariffs. It could really send Canada into a recession, right? That could also hurt the New England economy as well, because Canada is its largest trading partner. So what do you think of the impact on us here?

New England's economy is extremely reliant on imports from Canada. It’s New England’s largest trading partner. Things like fuel, oil, seafood, precious metals and natural gas could be affected. And there are a lot of products like airplanes, seafood products, and wood products that cross back and forth across the border.

So there’s one phase of manufacturing that’s in Canada, one in the US. There are all these industries that could potentially be extremely disrupted by that border becoming less easy to cross or expensive to cross. The Canadian consulate says that 90 percent of Logan airport’s jet fuel comes from Canada.

You can only imagine what the potential impact could be. Are prices gonna go up? Right now the plan is 10 percent tariffs on energy imports from Canada.

Also, the Canadian tourists. Massachusetts relies on tourism from Canada. I think this year Massachusetts had expected a record number of tourists, 880,000, but they’re probably not gonna hit a record this year because you have leaders in Canada telling Canadians ‘Don’t come to the US.’

Hotels in the US and a lot of tourist attractions, they’re bracing for what could potentially be an unexpected slowdown.

And it’s gonna be very location specific. there’s all this kind of hockey talk. There’s this term, “elbows up.” Have you heard this, Shirley?

Leung: I’m only learning this now through this fight between the US and Canada.

Kusmer: Yeah, so it’s a term in hockey that’s used to describe this defensive move that a player will do if they’re being attacked.

Now “elbows up” is this slogan that Canadians are embracing, directed at the US. It’s like, ‘Okay, Canadians, let’s get in formation here, elbows up, let’s defend ourselves.’ Even though a lot of Canadians are able to create these kinds of funny memes, I think we should not discount how deadly serious people are about this.

Leung: Another thing that is very real is the economy. What Trump is doing, threatening these tariffs. It could really send Canada into a recession, right? That could also hurt the New England economy as well, because Canada is its largest trading partner. So what do you think of the impact on us here?

Kusmer: Yeah, the New England economy is extremely reliant on imports from Canada. It’s New England’s largest trading partner. Things like fuel, oil, seafood, precious metals and natural gas could be affected. And there are a lot of products like airplanes, seafood products, and wood products that cross back and forth across the border.

So there’s one phase of manufacturing that’s in Canada, one in the US. There are all these industries that could potentially be extremely disrupted by that border becoming less easy to cross or expensive to cross. The Canadian consulate says that 90 percent of Logan airport’s jet fuel comes from Canada.

You can only imagine what the potential impact could be. Are prices gonna go up? Right now the plan is 10 percent tariffs on energy imports from Canada.

Also, Canadian tourists. Massachusetts relies on tourism from Canada. I think this year Massachusetts had expected a record number of tourists, 880,000, but they’re probably not gonna hit a record this year because you have leaders in Canada telling Canadians ‘Don’t come to the US.’

Hotels in the US and a lot of tourist attractions, they’re bracing for what could potentially be an unexpected slowdown.

And it’s gonna be very location specific. Thousands of Canadians will go to a town in Maine called Old Orchard Beach.

I saw a recent interview, I think it was a hotel owner, who said that he went from being entirely booked over the summer to having like hundreds and hundreds of cancellations. Very specific places are gonna be hit extremely hard because either they’re very integrated with Canada or there are bad vibes from the Canadians to the US.

Will this just be a short term thing or will Canadians leave us for a long time?  It’s embarrassing to imagine that one US president could fumble such a long term, good relationship. 

If relations are not good, that’s just very sad for the US.

Keep your chin up on US-Canada relations. Maybe we’ll all come around. Not only keep my chin up, I’ll also in solidarity, be keeping my elbows up because I stand with my Canadian brothers and sisters.

So, talk about this moment in 2025, US-Canada relations. How big of a deal is it?

It’s probably the largest moment in Canadian identity since the founding of the country. I don’t think it would be an exaggeration to say that I think the entire nature of the relationship with America has been basically altered overnight.

And because of that, it’s going to have profound changes to our entire economic, political, military, geopolitical structure. These things are all being negotiated incredibly quickly in a frankly shocking degree of unity and solidarity by the Canadian people. There’s really never been anything like it in my lifetime. because either they’re very integrated with Canada or there are bad vibes from the Canadians to the US.