Donald Trump is not an aberration. He is America

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George Elliott Clarke is the E.J. Pratt Professor of Canadian Literature at the University of Toronto and the author of Whiteout: How Canada Cancels Blackness. Jason Stanley is the Bissell-Heyd-Associates Chair in American Studies at the Munk School, and the author of Erasing History: How Fascists Rewrite the Past to Control the Future.

In the United States, mass protests against authoritarianism are gathering under the banner “No Kings.” These rebukes allege that Donald Trump is something “un-American”: a king.

Supposedly, America is the land that does not have kings. America is said to represent freedom, opposing the authoritarian oppression that monarchs can signify. The protesters’ thinking goes like this: Get rid of Mr. Trump, America’s King, and the United States would again become “the land of the free,” because America is freedom and kings are tyrants.

Canadians should back this protest movement. But they must also maintain suspicion of its very framing, given that it cuts to the heart of Canada’s history and identity, too. After all, many Canadians scruple to maintain their monarchy, in part, as a bulwark against an America that has seldom eschewed imperialist ambitions. As the CanLit critic Northrop Frye put it, “A Canadian is an American who rejects the American Revolution” – which is not to say that Canadians see themselves as subjects of a monarch, but rather that many rightly maintain historically informed worries about the threat posed to their existence by the United States, and see the Crown as a kind of protection. Thus, Canadians are the world’s longest-standing critics of the American Revolution and the republic it birthed, as they should remain.

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From the viewpoint of many in the British North American colonies that would eventually coalesce into Canada, all the American Revolution did was free masses of white, male, pro-slavery, self-declared “libertarians” to enact enterprises of mass oppression – a system that colonial Canadian intellectuals such as Thomas Chandler Haliburton described as “mobocracy.” Black Americans also recognized the blatant hypocrisy of too many U.S. revolutionaries, which is why many were thus eager to accept the British promise of land and liberty in British North America if they would support the King. Although Black Americans fleeing to Canada did not find the Canaan that the enslaved population sang about, nor the utopia sketched for them by the Crown, they did find something closer to freedom (not to mention, safety from mob violence) than was possible for them in the United States.

The Black people who fought for Britain against the white Yankee rebels had an inkling that, were their (ex) masters truly interested in freedom, the first thing they would have done was to free those they enslaved, so that Black and white could unite to fight the “monstrous” British. But the real purpose of the revolution for many was merely to replace British (royal) power with their own. For all of its high-minded claims, the American Revolution was not about freedom for all, but only for those made wealthy by slave labour on plantations – lands that were themselves often wrested from Indigenous people in triumphalist massacres. Ultimately, U.S. “democracy” was built upon racist oppression.

From these perspectives, Donald Trump is not some foreign aberration in American politics. He is in fact the personification of America‘s history of racial fascism – of its “mobocracy” – which Canadians have long defined themselves against. As the American Nobel laureate in literature Toni Morrison wrote, “There is quite a lot of juice to be extracted from plummy reminiscences of ‘individualism’ and ‘freedom’ if the tree upon which such fruit hangs is a black population forced to serve as freedom’s polar opposite.” This is the embedded wisdom of the Black Canadians who fought for the Crown and found their new homes mainly in Nova Scotia (and later, for arrivals via the Underground Railroad, in Ontario). Canada would do well to draw on this wisdom now.

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Germany’s Nuremberg laws, which legally segregated Jewish people from German society, ended with the Nazi regime’s defeat in 1945. America’s own homegrown version of racist thou-shalt-nots – the Jim Crow regime that legally segregated many Black people from exercising civil liberties and enjoying creature comforts that whites could take for granted – did not end until the mid-1960s. Black Americans in the South were only allowed to vote in 1965, and state bans on interracial marriage only ended in 1967. Progress? Yes, but America simply swapped out the Jim Crow regime for mass incarceration. A 2024 study found that the U.S. had an incarceration rate of 614 per 100,000 – seven times higher than Canada’s incarceration rate, of 88 per 100,000. And since the Second World War, the U.S. has toppled democracies and waged quasi-genocidal wars across the Global South.

Many Canadian politicians have suggested, over the last year, that they are surprised that the U.S. is acting like a racist imperial hegemon, and that this “city on the hill” would humiliate or insult Canadian leaders. If that is the case, it is a sign that Canadians have become so integrated with the United States that Canada’s fundamental raison d’être – which, as defined in 1988 by Canada’s second Black MP, Howard McCurdy, is that it must reject ever becoming “part of the continental divine mission of the United States” – has come under existential threat. Worse, when some Canadian MPs go stateside, whistling Dixie as it were, to echo and amplify Trump attack lines against this true liberal democracy, they are not just shameless quislings, they also shed every scrap of self-respect.

Canada now faces an emergency. It needs to awaken to the threat the United States poses – actively, again – to its national sovereignty. There may not be a third American military invasion, though if Canada does not prepare for a military invasion, it invites it, and so it should heed the lessons of 1775 and the War of 1812. National sovereignty can wither economically, and even more importantly, it can be stripped away culturally. The spread of American racial fascism could erase Canadian sovereignty as much as a military invasion could, whether it is assisted by a swastika-flag-waving, self-proclaimed “freedom convoy” blockading Ottawa, or “close-the-borders” xenophobia.

Canada needs to reactivate its well-earned suspicion of American mobocracy, particularly the rabidly racist core of American Firstism that has always camouflaged itself with the bellicose rhetoric of “Give me liberty or give me death!” This suspicion of Uncle Sam’s forked-tongue, libertarian malarkey, this incisive skepticism so central to the Canadian national project, is necessary for both affirming defensive nationalism and supporting the positive multicultural national identity that the world needs today.

Donald Trump is not a king. He is something far worse: an embodiment of the America that Canada has always warned the world against. Now, it’s time for all Canadians to stand on guard, again.