Canada’s Prime Minister made a remarkable speech at the WEF:
Transcript
A link to the recording of the speech can be found on the transcript webpage.
Personally I thought it was an excellent speech
Absolutely agree. And I hope that our European leaders will take inspiration and begin growing a spine.
Seems that they must have since Trump has said he’s rescinding his tariffs on EU products because they came to some agreement about Greenland
The Greenland Defence Agreement from 1951, between Denmark and the United States, is still in place. No need for annexing Greenland for matters of national security. It is all about natural resources.
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You dont actually think that Trump & cabinet & advisors KNOW this exists do you ?
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- His calmness about that tweet suggests the EU gave in, not that they grew a spine.
- TACO
really dont know what to expect
either 1 or 2 is plausible
Of course they know.
They probably know NOW after Rutte explained their own US relationship with Greenland to them. 
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One year after Trump’s return, American democracy is bleeding. The people who study collapse for a living say this is how it ends. Three hundred and sixty-five days after Donald Trump swore his second oath of office, scholars who study democratic collapse for a living are using language once reserved for coups and strongmen abroad.
Not “backsliding.” Not “stress.” COLLAPSE.
Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, the Harvard scholars behind How Democracies Die, now say the United States no longer functions as a full democracy. Their conclusion: America has crossed into “competitive authoritarianism.” Elections still happen, but the ruling party rigs the system, crushes dissent, and tilts the field so far that democracy becomes theater.
This isn’t chaos. It’s consolidation.
In just one year, Trump has moved with a speed that stunned even longtime observers of authoritarian regimes. Federal agencies gutted. Independent watchdogs fired. The civil service purged. Congress sidelined. Courts challenged and ignored. Federal force deployed in blue cities. Protest criminalized. Immigrants targeted. Universities intimidated. The press attacked. Political enemies hunted. The presidency openly leveraged for profit.
And the data backs it up.
Nonpartisan democracy monitors show U.S. democratic health plunging at a rate usually seen after coups or national shocks. One index found a 28% collapse in a single year, an almost unheard-of freefall. Political scientists now rate the U.S. closer to hybrid regimes than to countries like Canada or the U.K.
Trump himself has stopped pretending to believe in limits. Asked what restrains his power, he answered: “My own morality.” That’s not a slip. That’s a confession.
What makes this moment different from Trump’s first term isn’t just intent, it’s insulation. Internal critics have been driven out or silenced. Republicans who remain admit they fear retaliation. Congress is bypassed. Allies are bullied. Even NATO is treated like a suggestion, not a commitment.
And looming over all of it is the merger of state power and billionaire power. Tech oligarchs weren’t whispering from the shadows, they were standing at the inauguration. Elon Musk was handed the keys to government infrastructure and took a chainsaw to it, triggering the largest federal workforce exodus in modern history.
This isn’t deregulation. It’s capture.
The White House insists this is “democracy in action.” That winning an election means anything that follows is justified. That law, norms, and limits are optional.
History says otherwise.
Democracy doesn’t usually die in one dramatic moment. It erodes unevenly. Some people feel it first. Others feel nothing, until suddenly they do. And by the time elections are threatened outright, the groundwork has already been laid.
Trump even joked recently that maybe we “shouldn’t even have an election” in 2026. The White House called it a joke. Autocrats always do.
The experts agree on one thing: decline isn’t inevitable, but denial accelerates it. Democracies survive when people recognize the danger before it’s irreversible, not after.
The warning lights are flashing.
The question now isn’t whether American democracy is under attack. It’s whether enough people are willing to fight for it before the next year makes this one look tame.
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TBH the hyperbole IS warranted
The USA has quickly become an autocracy.
With a new King.
The Administration ignores laws and enriches itself at every turn
Convince me I’m wrong ?
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Wouldn’t dream of it. I agree.
It’s terrifying
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I’m not even going to try.
The far right is really trotting out the old chestnut, “we’re a republic, not a democracy” these days. This, of course, is a straw man, because no one is saying that we are a democracy in the Athenian sense. But even North Korea counts as a “republic”–which, in the broadest sense, is anything that is not a hereditary monarchy. We might be working on that part as you say. 
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The images I see from the US show me some parallels to what happened in Germany between 1933 and 1945. It is not Jews who are being persecuted and hunted like cattle. It is Hispanics who are currently being denied their human dignity in the US by the federal authorities.
The extent to which Donald Trump is disregarding the Constitution and ignoring the autonomy of the states is inconceivable. All this because the Supreme Court has made it clear to him that he cannot be punished for things he does as President of the United States.
It is also the Constitution in the US that guarantees US citizens non-prosecution by the authorities. This is no longer the case either. Pictures in American newspapers show extreme violence by federal authorities against demonstrators. Regardless of whether they are demonstrating peacefully or not, all those who demonstrate are terrorists in the eyes of the federal authorities.
At first, I wondered whether this form of oppression and persecution was similar to Hitler’s SA. But fundamentally, the comparison here is more with the secret state police. Ignoring the Constitution, ICE, like the Gestapo and the Stasi in the GDR, is allowed to search homes without a warrant and act as it pleases.
The massive encroachment on civil rights is a warning to everyone else that cannot be ignored: obey us, or you will become the target of our fight against this terror. This is a form of Gleichschaltung (enforced conformity) that also existed in the Third Reich.
Another parallel between the Trump administration and the NSDAP regime can be seen: the desire to kill opposition politicians, in Trump’s case the Democrats, in Hitler’s case the SPD and the Communists. Trump would like to see a one-party landscape.
He already realizes that the midterms are a threat to him. “They will impeach me,” Trump said in the event that the Democrats win the midterms. Hitler was also aware that he had to have sole power so that he could not be pushed off his throne.
Together with the propaganda and statements made by members of his administration, the picture that emerges is the same as that under Hitler in the early days of the NSDAP government. For Hitler, this was a very important tool. From degenerate art to journalists who were called scribblers (including Freisler, Goebbels, Göhring, and most recently the White House spokeswoman in the US), a consistent picture emerges of a government completely removed from democracy. Donald Trump is trying to end democracy.
If Hitler had had the atomic bomb at his disposal, he would have been as powerful as Trump is today. He did not. Nevertheless, he was able to plunge the world into the abyss and some even deeper. Let us hope that American democracy finds a way out of this. Otherwise, the beautiful America will, unfortunately, become an authoritarian regime with a penchant for blackmailing states.
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From the City on the Hill now to the .. I truly do not know what to call it
Jut another shit hole country ?
Amazing how far and fast things have fallen
The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.
whether this is or isnt correctly attributed the sentiment is so true
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It was like this also in Germany 1933. Nobody was doing anything in the beginning against. Later it was: to late to do anything. Why? While the NSDAP was getting all power on one person: Adolf Hitler. Now in America the government is bringing all power to one Person: Donald Trump.
You can call it not working constitution, you can call it corruption. But the entire GOP is not running against Trump.
I remember there was a film called the wave. It describes the social experiment of Ron Jones which wanted to know if this could be happened even in USA. And yes, it can. And today we know: it definitely can. This is now proven.
This America will fall one day. Trump had to learn that he can’t tell european state leaders what to do and when. If the four big ones starting to sell their US bonds Trumps financial problems may become bigger than the ones Putin has. And he should be aware of it: they will do it and they can.
The best is his UNO alternative. States have to pay him money to be a member and he personally is the chief as long as he lives. That shows that this guy believes that he will have poer until he is dead. And thak could even be so when and if he would start to ignory the constitution. What he is already doing.
There is no way back. After Greenland everybody knows that this guy is a second Hitler with an own Gestapo and with an own SS. Simply. Dangerous.