U.S. doesn't need our help in election

`He haunts us still” was how a well-known biography of Pierre Trudeau began, one written while he was still alive, actually. Donald Trump doesn't haunt us yet. He's very much alive. But many of us feel he stalks us still. He certainly obsesses us still, a kind of brain worm, you might say, for many of us.

Last month CNN ran Trump's duelling court cases on a split screen: on the right, audio of the Supreme Court hearing his claim of presidential immunity for his Jan. 6 crowd-mongering and, on the left, texted updates from his Stormy Daniels hush money case. And worst of all: dummies like me were watching. And, unlike Trump, we didn't have to be there.

As someone said, half of Americans will vote for Trump in November, which will appall and enrage the other half. As Saturday Night Live's Colin Jost lamented, perplexed, in his set before the White House correspondents' dinner: “This race is tied!” It would probably still be tied, he continued, even if Trump chose accused sex abuser and rap star Diddy, formerly known as P. Diddy, as his running mate (now that South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem has jettisoned her chances by shooting North Korean Leader Kim Jong Un. Sorry, I've got that wrong: She shot her dog, Cricket, and in fact never met Kim Jong Un, though her autobiography said she had. But as soon as she read it she immediately corrected that.)

Current polling says that if Trump is convicted, his vote will drop off, possibly by enough to finally turn the election to Joe Biden. It probably depends what he's convicted of, though. The hush money trial is sleazy, seedy, seamy, squalid — choose any s-word you like connoting sliminess — but voters have been familiar with Trump's character and milieu for some time now. And the criminal charges are novel and creative, the kind would-be legal martyrs love best. Pressuring election officials and ginning up mobs to storm the capital are more serious allegations, but Trump's trials for these charges may not get decided in the 179 days left before the election — which is almost four years after the alleged crimes took place (a delay all Americans should agree is scandalous).

In view of the possibility Trump may win, what should Canadians do — apart from waking up to that fact and trying to understand what's behind it, which isn't actually as simple as the default view of too many of us that Americans are simply dumb? The temptation will be overwhelming for the prime minister to engage in foreign interference and let the world know we prefer Biden. Opposing Trump, quite apart from the merits, is de rigueur on the left. Remember “the Resistance,” the anti-Trump crusade organized just days after the free and fair democratic election that put him in office in 2016? And some scholars argue that where the effects of decisions cross borders, cross-border politicking, maybe even voting, should be allowed.

But we wouldn't want an American president taking sides in our elections. And, beyond the principle of the thing, there's the very real chance Trump may win. If he does, we will have to deal with him again. With anyone else a little pre-election partisan backand-forth across the border might not hurt: “You're a liberal and I'm a conservative,” a new president might say, “but that's just politics and now we have to work together to do what's best for our two countries.” That sound like Donald Trump? (Not that Joe Biden seems any less grudge-prone.)

If you think Canadian opposition could help defeat Trump, maybe you figure it's better to say something now rather than hold your peace and regret it through Trump's entire second term. But really: how many U.S. voters are thinking “I can't make up my mind on Trump vs. Biden until I hear what Justin Trudeau and Pierre Poilievre think”?

Scrupulous non-comment should be our policy, even if it means forgoing base-pleasing denunciations of candidates your base abominates, or endorsements of those it loves. There's the good of the country to think of. Not keeping quiet and instead putting self above the national interest would be totally Trumpian.

In the latest issue of Sutherland Quarterly, Paul Wells quotes Trudeau as telling his stunned advisers the night of Trump's 2016 election that “We're Canadians. We can get along with anyone.” That turns out not to be true. We don't get along very well anymore with the Chinese or Indians. And after a chummy start, relations with Trump himself deteriorated. “Very dishonest & weak,” Trump tweeted of Trudeau while flying home from the G7 meeting in Quebec in 2018.

But we did survive renegotiation of NAFTA. Wells argues this was because of a full-court press in which for two years Canadian officials at all levels contacted “absolutely anyone in the U.S. who could be made aware of the value of the bilateral trading relationship.” This “generated a pro-Canada lobby the likes of which America had never seen.”

That should be the recipe for the next six months and whatever follows: strict neutrality at the top backed up by facts on the ground.

SCRUPULOUS NON-COMMENT SHOULD BE OUR POLICY.