U.S. President Donald Trump during a cabinet meeting at the White House on Thursday.BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AFP/Getty Images
This is a true story. When I was in junior high, my friends and I were bullied by someone in our social circle. This person would pretend to be our best friend one day, reject us the next, and instruct everyone else to gang up in shunning the rejected-person-du-jour. After years of fear and desperation, our little group finally said: Enough.
It took a couple of courageous 14-year-olds to lead the charge. And the rest of us followed, walking away from the toxicity that had engulfed our lives. With our former friend out of our lives, our world became easy, positive, light. We were free.
I carry the weight of these events still – particularly the regret of standing by and allowing this person to bully others, in one case so brutally that the young teenaged girl left the school.
I’m calling this person a bully, even though their own life was complicated, and they needed help – but we didn’t understand that then; we were kids. We pretended what they were doing was fine. We pretended not to notice the cruelty. Or worse, convinced ourselves that it wasn’t cruel at all. It was just normal.
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In 2026, what is somehow becoming normal is alarming. Apologies for dumbing down this moment in American – and world – history to a schoolyard analogy, but dumb seems to be the order of the day. Along with cruel.
Enough. The world needs to stand up.
Prime Minister Mark Carney did it in Davos, using a bunch of words Donald Trump could not possibly have understood. Then when U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent tried to tell the world that Mr. Carney “very aggressively” walked back his remarks in a call with Mr. Trump, Mr. Carney stood his ground. And continued to speak the truth. “Almost nothing is normal in the United States,” he said. That’s leadership. Not just of this country. That’s leadership at an international level.
The people of Minnesota are standing up – for their neighbours, for democracy, for decency. They’re doing it in the freezing cold, under threat of arrest – or worse.
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Alex Pretti, protesting against and filming the ICE operation, was helping a woman who had been shoved to the ground just before he was killed. Renee Nicole Macklin Good was trying to support her neighbours, with ICE agents combing the residential area. She was killed in the vehicle in which she had just dropped her six-year-old off at school.
Bruce Springsteen wrote a protest song. Neil Young gifted his music to the people of Greenland, who are again under threat.
Timothy Snyder, world-renowned historian, left Yale for the University of Toronto – one of several high-profile academics who have gotten out and are telling the world why from the safety of Canada.
Many Canadians, also under threat and feeling powerless – we didn’t get a vote – are avoiding the United States, finding a different way to snowbird, in spite of efforts to lure us back. Take your Canadian dollar at par, Vegas, and shove it up your coin slot.
Mr. Trump is a would-be despot who is not just guided by ideology, but by vengeance, pettiness, ego and his bank account. He’s not only a fool, but a mean one – with an atrocious amount of power. Bad combo.
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Fast forward to whatever the U.S. looks like a couple of generations from now: what did you do, grandma, to stand up to the bully? When innocent people started being jailed? Killed? Sovereign countries invaded? Punished with debilitating tariffs?
There are a lot of delusional MAGA fanatics surrounding Mr. Trump, but there must be some Republicans who go home at the end of the day and say to their families: Can you believe this guy? They keep their concerns under their red ballcaps maybe because they’re in too deep, or know the bully will come for them next if they speak out.
We’re walking around in a Margaret Atwood dystopia and nobody within a mile of the President has the guts to call it.
It’s time. Enough.
What’s the moment when it becomes just too much? Is it five-year-old Liam Ramos with his little backpack being loaded into an ICE vehicle? Is it Josh Miranda, the Minnesota teenager who told The Globe and Mail that he had lost his mother? Literally lost her. “She went to the bank one day and never came home,” reporter Joe Friesen explains.
Is it Mr. Pretti? Ms. Macklin Good?
No, it’s none of these. Because it’s still happening.
Mr. Trump, staring down his 80th birthday, wants a Nobel Peace Prize before he leaves this Earth. His true legacy? Long after he’s gone, his name will send visceral shivers of repugnance through generations, like the names of other horrible men who came before him.