Donald Trump did not win the White House because Americans longed to annex Greenland or wanted Canada to become the 51st state. These are not issues Trump campaigned on, nor do Americans spend much time thinking of either place. Many Americans, I suspect, spend years, decades, or even lifetimes without ever thinking about Greenland at all. 

Americans are grateful that Canada has been a peaceful neighbor, and thankful to the many Canadians who offered a helping hand when one was needed, including that awful September day, a quarter century ago, when Americans jetting to and from the glamorous Mother Continent found themselves instead enjoying all the hospitality that could be mustered in remote Labrador. Some Canadians have even become important parts of American life: Guy Lombardo on New Year’s Eve, the great John Candy and his performance for the ages in Planes, Trains & Automobiles at Thanksgiving, and William Shatner in Star Trek and more all the year round. 

But Americans really don’t know all that much about Canada either and regard it as much of a threat as Greenland is.

So, despite many swift and significant actions that justly won universal acclaim from conservatives, it was a signal that Donald Trump and JD Vance might want to slow things down just a bit when acquiring the Great White North unexpectedly became a matter of first importance. This could have been avoided if Trump and Vance had simply remembered that it is often easier to advance American interests through quiet diplomacy than public ultimatums, generally wise to discuss issues of importance with allies before making strong public statements concerning them, and seldom wise to publicly humiliate an ally, even one in the process of becoming a former ally. America First should not mean America Alone, much less America contra mundum. 

Trump and Vance are seeking to effect a peaceful, lawful revolution, similar to “the Reagan Revolution,” but far more ambitious and absolutely necessary. For decades, an unqualified elite has destroyed thousands of lives and squandered trillions of dollars in needless foreign wars, sent millions of manufacturing jobs abroad, and imported millions of foreigners. They jeered at the Americans hurt by all this and tried to cement their chokehold on power by promoting a pseudo-religion, wokeism, that teaches Americans to hate themselves, each other, and their past. 

Even peaceful revolutions impose real harms on real people, and Trump and Vance would do well to acknowledge those harms and ameliorate them. Some federal employees undoubtedly deserve to be fired, and many more do not deserve the higher pay, better benefits, and greater job security that generally come with federal employment. However, no one is helped by turning federal workplaces into replicas of the fear-filled, demeaning private sector workplaces satirized in Mike Judge’s brilliant and still relevant film Office Space. 

Instead, we should direct federal employees to use their expertise and talents to assist private-sector employers in creating a myriad of hope-filled, team-oriented workplaces, with profits flowing, as they used to, from creating superior products for a largely domestic market, rather than downsizing, offshoring, and Wall Street legerdemain. The wise use of the tariff remains an indispensable part of a process designed to end reliance on unreliable foreign nations for anything of importance, to return prosperity and pride to the forgotten regions of America, and to rebuild a sense of unity between all Americans. 

Unfortunately, all of this may now be in jeopardy. After the Trump tariff schedule was announced in a manner reminiscent of the administration’s handling of Greenland and Canada, signs of panic began emerging in the financial markets. To the delight of the media, the panic is spreading. Everything now rides on the success of those tariffs.

As of this writing, the person best positioned to quell that panic is JD Vance, who does his best work alone, outnumbered, and taking incoming fire. Vance can remind reporters that economists predicted Trump’s first-term tariffs would lead to recession. They didn’t. He can explain that Britain’s rigorous adherence to free trade made the island nation vulnerable to starvation by World War I and a virtual dependency of the United States by World War II. He knows tariffs enabled the United States to surpass Britain in industrial power, and how quickly we became the indispensable “arsenal of democracy,” despite many factories and workers being idle for a decade during the Depression. 

Vance might suggest that the media focus on reminding other nations that retaliatory tariffs will only hurt them, since they have bought into the idea that free trade is an unqualified economic good. Why does that idea only apply to the U.S.? With a spoonful of sugar, we can still get the much-needed medicine down. ◆