Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is meeting with Donald Trump on Wednesday and maybe he’ll get some insight into the question he asked on Tuesday: “The United States launched a trade war against Canada — their closest partner and ally, the closest friend. At the same time, they’re talking about working positively with Russia, appeasing Vladimir Putin, a lying, murderous dictator. Make that make sense.”

I mean, it isn’t that complicated. When Trump made a widely suspected Russian agent the head of the U.S. intelligence community, it sent a pretty strong signal. What came next should have surprised no one:

The C.I.A. director John Ratcliffe said on Wednesday that intelligence sharing with Ukraine had been paused alongside military aid to pressure its government to cooperate with the Trump administration’s plans to end the country’s war with Russia.

As we discussed on our latest podcast, Putin and Trump are allied against the liberal democracies of the West. That very much includes Canada. Trudeau openly speculates that Trump’s tariffs are intended to “collapse the Canadian economy in order to make it easier to annex the country” and make it  “the U.S.′ 51st state.” At the very least, the intent is to weaken Canada and has nothing to do with the fascist regime’s stated purpose, which is to prevent the importation of fentanyl.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection seized a miniscule 0.03 pounds of fentanyl at the northern border in January, according to the agency’s own data.

And the amount of fentanyl seized there has consistently been a small fraction of what is intercepted by CBP agents at the U.S. border with Mexico.

For instance, 43 pounds of the drug were seized at the northern border in fiscal year 2024, versus 21,148 pounds taken at the U.S. southwest border in the same period, CBP data show.

Ever since big investors realized that Trump’s tariffs would actually go into effect and were not mere negotiating tools, the financial markets have been in free-fall, wiping out trillions of dollars of value since Election Day. As a result, the regime is looking for some kind of fig leaf it can use as an excuse to walk things back and stabilize the markets, and I expect that some announcement toward that end will follow the Trudeau-Trump meeting.

Whether Canada offers something that can be twisted as a victory for Trump’s strategy or not, I expect there will be new exemptions to the tariffs, perhaps including the auto industry.

In the larger picture, Trump and Putin’s shared agenda includes partitioning Ukraine, preventing it from joining NATO or the European Union, and splitting its mineral wealth. It includes promoting fascist, anti-Democratic white nationalist parties in Europe, particularly France, Germany and the United Kingdom. It includes the destruction of NATO and the removal of American troops and umbrella of protection. In this way, both the United States and Russia can function in a similar manner as massive petrochemical states run by champions of white civilization.

This is a recipe not only for a revival of Nazism but for vast theft. It’s not just Putin’s ideology that Trump wants to emulate but his strategy for personal wealth accumulation.

The Kremlin claims that Putin earns an annual salary of $140,000. His publicly disclosed assets include an 800-square foot apartment, a trailer, and three cars.

But according to some experts, he may be the wealthiest man in the world with assets totaling up to $200 billion.

Putin has amassed his fortune surreptitiously over decades, using a network of shell companies and opaque transactions. But as Casey Michel of The New Republic reports Trump has a plan to speed along Putin’s path without worrying so much about scrutiny.

The past month has seen an unprecedented deluge of bad news on the anti-corruption front in the United States. President Donald Trump announced the U.S. would no longer enforce the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, or FCPA, which prohibited Americans from bribing foreign officials. Trump’s new attorney general, Pam Bondi, dissolved all of the kleptocracy-related task forces at the Department of Justice…

…But on Sunday night, it got even worse: In a press release from the Treasury Department, and a related screed from Trump on Truth Social, the new administration announced it was doing away with the most important piece of America’s counter-kleptocracy tool kit. According to the Treasury Department, the U.S. will no longer be enforcing its Beneficial Ownership Registry, a new database that identifies those behind the flood of shell companies saturating the U.S. As Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said, the move to implode the new shell company registry was a “victory for common sense.” Trump followed on, claiming that the shell company register was not only an “absolute disaster” but an “economic menace” that had to be gutted.

Trump is, in his way, right about one thing: The shell company registry was supposed to be a menace. But not to small-business owners, or even to the great swath of Americans about to watch their country once more become the leading shell company purveyor. It was an existential threat to the money launderers, oligarchs, and kleptocrats who spent years using shell companies to hide their ill-gotten boodle, keeping it safe from prying eyes and injecting it directly into the American economy: in other words, exactly the sort of folks who need menacing. Unfortunately, in this new order, these scofflaws are the very people who stand to be enriched by Donald Trump—while the American people, by contrast, are stuck bearing the high costs of his wealth-destroying tariff war.

Michel calls this “kleptocracy,” which it is, And the term also fits here because Putin and Trump are both kleptomaniacs. So, in answer to Trudeau’s question, I think it was quite easy to make Trump’s actions make sense. The only reason it seems like a difficult question to answer is because the answer sounds like some unhinged conspiracy theory.

But this is what fascists do and these things will continue until the fascist regime is defeated.

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