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EDITOR’S NOTE: We’ve been sharing Marc C. Johnson’s Substack columns periodically, and now we’ll be sharing them on a regular basis under his “Many Things Considered” column. You can always find Marc on Substack as well. We appreciate his historical and political perspective. This one really hit the mark. After Canadian Prime Minster Mark Carney’s speech at Davos, I made a note to share the speech. Then, here is Marc’s column featuring Carney and Pope Leo … Marc includes a link to Carney’s full speech, and as he says, it’s definitely worth reading the full text. Thanks Marc for sharing your thoughts and insights. Look forward to more “Many Things Considered”.
U.S. leadership – not to mention competence – is now a fiction. Time to move on to real leaders.
By Marc C. Johnson
Donald Trump stepped out on a very public world stage this week and confirmed what many of us have known for a very long time – he’s a joke, but a dangerous joke. A demented man, but a dangerous demented man.
The Trumpy performance at the annual Davos Economic Conference in Switzerland was in equal measure unhinged, dripping with lies, completely dismissive of historic and contemporary reality and, like so much from the Mad King, devoid of, among other things, impulse control.
We’ve all seen a four year old in front of a plate of chocolate cupcakes who controls himself better than the physically and mentally diminished president of what was once the very respected United States.
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The ranting performance in Davos gave way late Wednesday to one of Trump’s magical deals, a “brilliant” solution after days of bluster that saves Greenland and NATO and Makes America Questionable Again.
Or if you prefer it’s another TACO – Trump Always Chickens Out. But has he?
As the Independent reported, if you can believe it:
“This solution, if consummated, will be a great one for the United States of America, and all Nato Nations,” Trump said. “Based upon this understanding, I will not be imposing the tariffs that were scheduled to go into effect on 1 February.”
Trump’s announcement comes just hours after he lashed out at Nato and Europe during an extraordinary speech at Davos and doubled down on his threats to secure Greenland, arguing that the US was the “only country” that could do so, although he did rule out the use of force.
Do not place any real money on any of this.
In any event it’s all too late and all too stupid. The rest of the world has moved along from Trump and increasingly is moving along from the United States.
Having said that, I frankly never, even during the wildest nightmare, would have thought the country of my birth would tolerate, as the Brits say, such a tosser – ie: “someone who doesn’t have it all together.”
An analogy for Trump’s Davos performance this week and an earlier White House “news conference” would be trying to imagine Franklin Roosevelt showing up for a meeting with Winston Churchill during World War II and having FDR spend time bragging about his success as a Little League baseball player.
Trump did actually did just that.
Watch it if you can stand to do so. Trump, in the same rant where he mentioned his baseball career, quite appropriately, riffed on mental institutions.
Trump’s depravity, of course, goes well beyond the cognitive decline the whole world saw this week. And it must continue to be said that any Republican office holder who clings to the fiction that Donald Trump is OK between the ears is in need of their own behavioral health check.
But what I really want to highlight today are two men beginning to fill the void left by the contemptible collapse of American moral leadership and the disappearance of basic decency, what you might call the “rule of reason.”
The first is Canadian prime minister Mark Carney whose splendid speech at the Davos gathering stands in STARK contrast to Trump’s rantings.
Calmly, carefully and persuasively Carney made a case that U.S. leadership in the world must now be spoken of in the past tense.
As Mark Shanahan wrote in a piece for The Conversation (I highly recommend the work of this academic website):
Carney’s quiet, measured and evocative case-making demonstrated his ability to be the leader France’s Emmanuel Macron would like to be and the UK’s Keir Starmer is too cautious to be. He was clear, unequivocal and unafraid of the bully below his southern border. In standing up to the US president, Donald Trump, he appeared every inch the statesperson.
The Guardian said Carney is the world’s “unflinching realist” who sees Trump clearly, just as clearly as he sees the challenge Trump presents to global order:
“Leaders in other western capitals have alluded to ‘dangerous departures’ Trump has taken from norms, but they always return to the possibility that he can be appeased or accommodated. Mr. Carney has exposed that as simply inaccurate,” said Jack Cunningham, a professor of international relations at the University of Toronto.
Leaders increasingly realize they will not be able to “manage” Trump for the remainder of his term, says Cunningham, and are reckoning with the fact that the systems of international order that the US helped craft are crumbling.
It helps that Carney, a former central bank leader in both Canada and the United Kingdom, has his ego in check, speaks in complete and logical sentences, has a sense of humor and displays real political courage to go along with his political realism.
The conclusion of Carney’s Davos speech will, I suspect, be remembered for a long time:
The powerful have their power. But we have something too: the capacity to stop pretending, to name realities, to build our strength at home and to act together.
That is Canada’s path. We choose it openly and confidently, and it is a path wide open to any country willing to take it with us.
The entire speech is worth your time. ¹
Carney made his reputation in Canada during the 2008 economic crisis, turned to politics to replace the slumping Justin Trudeau and led the Liberal Party to an unprecedented electoral comeback.
You can get to know Carney by watching this rather remarkable interview with Jon Stewart from early last year. The interview was conducted before Carney became prime minister. His substance and humor were on full display.
The interview as well as Stewart’s questions were astoundingly prescient about the last year right down to Stewart quipping that the U.S., in addition to taking over Canada, would be taking over Venezuela.
Carney is the real deal, which is why Donald Trump dislikes and fears him.
And if Carney’s speech and the broad pushback from other European leaders caused Trump to sober up even for a few minutes on his Greenland fantasy it only shows that strength, resolve and calling out his BS works with the world’s neediest man.
Pope Leo – The world’s other genuine leader at the moment is the first American Pope.
Here’s the National Catholic Reporter on Trump and Pope Leo from Chicago:
Though both are still within the first year of their leadership — Trump reached the first year of his second term Jan. 20, Leo was elected pope May 8 — the contrast in style and substance is already unmistakable. It is not simply a contrast of temperament or rhetoric, but of vision: different understandings of power and of what it means to lead wounded people in a fractured world. One model of leadership gravitates toward dominance, spectacle and the consolidation of personal authority: The other gestures towards humility, restraint, synodal listening and the slow, demanding work of accompaniment. In the widening space between these two figures lies a deeper question pressing upon our age: What kind of leadership does the world need if it is to be repaired rather than further torn apart?
In less than a year at the helm of the church of Rome, Leo has quietly — but decisively — reframed the papal office through gentleness, reverence for tradition and proclamation of the Gospel. President Trump, by contrast, has brought into the presidency his familiar traits: a commitment to nativism, an apocalyptic “America First” ideology and a renewed pursuit of American power through transactional, coercive and often unilateral means. From Venezuela to Nigeria, from Greenland to Taiwan, Trump’s foreign policy signals not partnership but dominance. In this sense, Trump’s first year has rendered painfully vivid the warning of Alexis de Tocqueville — that by watching America, the world can discern both the promise and the peril of democracy.
The rare – very rare – public critique of Trump foreign policy by three American Cardinals this week unmistakably carries the Pope’s imprint:
“The sovereign rights of nations to self-determination appear all too fragile in a world of ever greater conflagrations,” the cardinals wrote. “The building of just and sustainable peace, so crucial to humanity’s well-being now and in the future, is being reduced to partisan categories that encourage polarization and destructive policies.”
One of the Cardinals, Joseph Tobin the archbishop of Newark, said in an interview with the New York Times.
… that he had been struck by voices in the Trump administration who seemed to be advancing a moral framework that he described as “almost a Darwinian calculus that the powerful survive and the weak don’t deserve to.”
He added, “I would say that’s less than human.”
The Vatican recently announced that Pope Leo will visit Spain this year in part to underscore his concern for the treatment of immigrants and refuges.
The plan calls for Leo to also visit the Canary Islands, a Spanish archipelago off northwest Africa. The islands experience large numbers of migrant arrivals from West Africa. While Francis had long declined to visit the Spanish mainland, he had had hoped to visit the Canary Islands as part of his longstanding outreach to migrants and refugees.
Leo has echoed Francis’ concern … telling the Vatican’s diplomatic corps in his annual foreign policy speech that migrants enjoy inalienable rights. He said he hoped that countries’ efforts to crack down on human trafficking “will not become a pretext for undermining the dignity of migrants and refugees.”
Two leaders for a fraught time in a troubled world. The rest of the world is moving on from Trump or trying to find a way to co-opt him.
Americans should listen.
1 – Journalist and former speechwriter James Fallows called Carney’s speech “one for the history books.” Good piece here