The Time Justin Trudeau Gifted Trump A Picture Of His Grandpa's Brothel
That's some deep shade.
A recent campaign ad for Liberal leader Mark Carney showed him playing a word association game with celebrity compatriot Mike Myers that gives the naturalized American citizen a chance to show his street cred to the new prime minister’s satisfaction. (Sample Q&A: “Bud the?” Spud. “Howie?” Meeker. “Tragically?” Hip.) It’s a bit silly as the expat comedian is a Canadian icon who doesn’t need to prove his love of country to anyone, unlike similarly named axe-murderer Michael Myers, who never goes anywhere without wearing a painted William Shatner mask like a psycho version of sewing a maple leaf on a backpack.
But if the prompt was “Group of Seven,” I’m guessing Myers would’ve gone with the loose collection of important early 20th century landscape painters with a similar vision and technique.
Or maybe just panic at the reminder Canada is scheduled to host a G7 summit meeting in a few weeks and that the nutbag in charge of the gathering’s sole remaining superpower is worse than both Doctor Evil and the bad guy from Se7en.
The latest get-together of the leaders of Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the US is set for June 15-17 in Alberta’s Kananaskis Village. (The Cree word is pronounced ka-na-NAS-kis, and a handy mnemonic trick to remember is: “can an asskiss kiss ass in Kananaskis?”) It’s a weird coincidence the 51st G7 meeting will take place at a time when a neighboring member is threatening to turn the host into its 51st state, and the remote resort in the Rocky Mountains outside Calgary was also the staging ground for a G8 conference in 2002 before Russia got booted for bad behavior. I remember thinking it’s a good choice of location for this sort of shit as there’s only one road into town and the surrounding mountains would make it that much harder to fly a commercial airliner into it.
It’s hard to imagine how things could go worse than our turn seven years ago in Charlevoix, Quebec, where Dear Leader bitched about Putin’s recent disinvitation and failed to Hereby Decree the recognition of Crimea as part of Russia before departing early to hang with attractive North Korean strongman Kim Jong Un. You probably remember the famous photo of the dotard sitting at a table with his arms crossed as German Chancellor Angela Merkel and others stood over him in disbelief.
This time we don’t even know who the poor host of the party is going to be until after the April 28 election. Or if Carney or the increasingly unlikely Pierre Poilievre would be willing to make an exception for the 47th president of the United States to laws preventing convicted felons from entering the country. There’s always Zoom! Maybe not Signal though.
But it seems like a longshot for trade advisor Peter Navarro, who claimed there was “a special place in hell” awaiting Trudeau for not kissing enough ass at the previous meetup and later went on to spend four months in a federal lockup outside Miami for contempt of Congress. Word is the facility is close enough to a nearby zoo you can sometimes hear lions roar in the mornings, which must seem like either a blessing or a curse for occupants. A least the old bastard finally has a basis of comparison.
That’s assuming the sundowning senior is willing or able to show his face in two months time. Or if handlers would risk breathing the woke air of Kananaskis Valley, the location for Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain. (Insert your own ass-kissing joke accordingly.) If K-Country can turn both the Joker and Swayze from the Road House reboot gay, what chance could mere MAGA mortals have?
The Charlevoix summit was also the first indication of Trump’s personal dislike for Justin Trudeau, whom he called “very weak and dishonest” on Twitter from Air Force One shortly after the Irish goodbye. While the consensus is he got jealous after seeing photos of Melon and/or Ivanka looking at him all thirsty, there’s an argument to be made Trudeau might’ve made things worse by taunting him with an old photo reminding the world the dumb motherfucker only owes his wealth to his grandfather’s days of running a whorehouse in the lower Arctic.
Friedrich Drumpf, aka Frederick Trump, left his small village in what is now southwest Germany to try his fortune in America at age 16. The young barber eventually made it to the Yukon after gold was discovered, but was smart enough to see where the real money was to be made amid rampant gold fever. An estimated 100,000 prospectors set out north for the Klondike, with only a third of them actually making it, and only four percent hit paydirt. Drumpf saw better prospects in catering to their needs by opening the Arctic Restaurant in a since-abandoned town named Bennett, according to a deep dive by Bloomberg in 2016.
It was open around the clock with “private boxes for ladies and parties,” according to an advertisement in the Dec. 9, 1899 edition of the Bennett Sun newspaper. The boxes typically included a bed and scale for weighing gold dust used to pay for “services,” according to a three-generational biography by Gwenda Blair, who traced the origins of the Trump family’s wealth. Of course, in the rough-and-tumble frontier towns of that era, the Arctic’s business model built on food, booze and sex was common.
The Arctic sat a stone’s throw from Bennett Lake in the heart of the township, amid a row of similar establishments and a sea of white canvas tents set up by prospectors. It was constructed of milled lumber and stocked fresh oysters, extravagant luxuries in a place where supplies were brought over arduous overland routes.
“I would advise respectable women travelling alone, or with an escort, to be careful in their selection of hotels at Bennett,” according to a letter penned by “The Pirate” in the Yukon Sun on April 17, 1900. For single men, the Arctic offered excellent accommodations but women should avoid it “as they are liable to hear that which would be repugnant to their feelings and uttered, too, by the depraved of their own sex.”
He sounds a bit like the Wild West’s Al Swearengen, the owner of Deadwood’s infamous Gem Theater, although Fred looked more a Fredo.
Drumpf returned triumphantly to Germany after making his fortune but was denied entry because he’d skipped town in lieu of mandatory military service, and so returned to America and invested in New York real estate before dying at age 49 from the Spanish flu. The rest, sadly, is history.
It’s pure conjecture, just as we will probably never know with certainty if being humiliated by Barack Obama at the 2011 White House Correspondents’ Dinner is what prompted Trump’s revenge by seeking the presidency, but this might’ve been the beginning of the end of a functional relationship between the two. A normal man might feel a sentimental attraction for a country that made his life of unimaginable luxury possible rather than want to destroy it out of embarrassment.
But a normal man wouldn’t pretend his German grandfather was actually Swedish because it was better for business either. It’s still not half as bad as becoming rich from an apartheid-era emerald mine.
Just think. Only 10 years ago, having the White House trade advisor as someone who just got out of prison, and tanking the economy, would have been a huge scandal.
I miss the before times.
NYT headline - “Trump’s Tariffs Will Wound Free Trade, but the Blow May Not Be Fatal”
Free trade has been so beneficial to so many countries that the world may find a way to live without its biggest player.
So the headline promotes an optimistic future but then the subheadline mentions that it will only be fatal to us.