True North Strong, America, Not So Much

Canada mobilizes a citizen army to defend democracy, Bondi Beach faces terror with courage, and the U.S. responds to rising violence by attacking the Affordable Care Act.

Good morning! Now, under Trump, Sundays begin the same: global crisis, weak authoritarians, valiant heroes, and the president tweeting falsehoods about a shooter, as if briefings are something you can just manifest like a coupon code. We are a nation held hostage by a man who can’t distinguish between real-time emergency updates and whatever floated past him on the internet at 2 a.m., and somehow that’s still only the second-worst thing he did this weekend.

Sadly, we begin in Providence, where Brown University students trying to finish finals were thrown into terror as a gunman opened fire inside an economics study group. Two people are dead, nine wounded, and the campus was crawling with police searching hallways, attics, and alleyways for a shooter Donald Trump insisted had already been captured. Untrue. The President of the United States was posting false information during the crisis, and Providence’s mayor was forced, forced!, to tell the public to ignore the White House and follow local authorities instead. This is where we are: the mayor of a midsize American city telling residents, politely, not to let the president get them killed.

On the other side of the world, Budapest was convulsing with mass protests against Viktor Orbán, Trump’s favorite authoritarian pen pal and Putin’s most loyal European mouthpiece. Tens of thousands took to the streets after Hungary’s own Epstein-style juvenile-abuse scandal blew open, exposing a pipeline of exploitation under a government that, just like MAGA, screams about trafficking while cozying up to the very networks that facilitate it. Turns out the strongmen of our age all shop from the same playbook: accuse, deflect, project, repeat. When the walls close in, insist you’re the only one who can save the children.

While Hungarians were rising up against their homegrown despot, Donald Trump was spray-tanning his ego in the back of a plane, posting fake ceasefires he never negotiated and fake arrests that never happened. He’s become a one-man misinformation geyser, insisting wars are over that have barely begun, insisting peace agreements exist that no government on earth has signed, and insisting he personally resolved conflicts between nations whose names he can’t pronounce without spraining something. Thailand and Cambodia had to correct him. Syria had to correct him. Even the United Nations had to correct him after he cast the lone vote, 153 to 1, against protecting humanitarian workers. America, under Trump, is now the drunk uncle at the global dinner table, shouting at the soup.

Perhaps no one sees the danger more clearly than the people who share a continent with us. Enter Charlie Angus, broadcasting from snowy northern Canada with the energy of a man who has spent the last year watching his neighbor dismantle itself with a blowtorch. Angus lays out what Canadians are now openly admitting: the Trump doctrine is a threat to Western democracy, to Canadian sovereignty, and to the basic assumption that the world’s largest military power is not supposed to behave like a rogue state. Ottawa has now announced a 300,000-person citizen volunteer army, and the response across Canada has been a tidal wave, First Nations communities, pacifists, retirees, former special forces, cybersecurity experts, vegans with gun licenses, and Americans peering north from collapsing states saying, essentially, “If this turns into a continental fight for democracy, we know where we’re standing.”

Canada is not saber-rattling. Canada is preparing. They’ve seen what happens when democracies assume the autocrats next door are “just talking.” They watched Ukraine learn the hard way. And they are quietly, fiercely determined that no MAGA-led United States will ever make them a vassal state. When Angus says a Texan touched his Canadian flag at a NATO event and he instinctively snapped, “You’ll die before you ever touch the Canadian flag”, and when Finland, Sweden, Latvia, and Estonia immediately stepped to his side, you understand just how far the ground has shifted. The world is not confused about what America is becoming, and so it is adapting.

We come to Bondi Beach, where adaptation meant something much more immediate: survival. A Hanukkah celebration by the sea, more than a thousand people gathered for food, music, community, became a scene of horror as two gunmen opened fire with semi-automatic rifles, killing at least 11 and injuring nearly thirty. Police later uncovered improvised explosive devices in a nearby vehicle. It was planned and targeted. Pure terrorism steeped in antisemitism.

In the middle of that carnage, a 43-year-old fruit shop owner named Ahmed saw a gunman standing on a footpath firing into the distance and made a decision most of us only hope we would make: he charged. The footage is astonishing, Ahmed crouched behind a car, then sprinting full-force at a man with a long gun, tackling him, wrenching the weapon away, and then, with almost surreal calm, setting it against a tree before raising his empty hands as officers closed in. Shot twice and bleeding, he still chose restraint after an act of raw, instinctive heroism.

There is something profoundly symbolic in this: a Muslim Australian father of two running toward gunfire to protect Jewish families celebrating Hanukkah. While extremists tried to manufacture hatred between communities, Ahmed enacted its opposite, a moment of human solidarity so undeniable it exposes how hollow and manipulative the politics of division truly are.

Which is why it was especially jarring to watch Benjamin Netanyahu immediately insinuate that Australia had somehow “fomented” antisemitism in the lead-up to the attack. The accusation rang hollow, even crass, when the most decisive act of protection that night came from a Muslim man who risked, and nearly lost, his life to save Jewish strangers. In a moment of profound grief, Ahmed’s courage punctured the cynicism of those who try to turn tragedy into talking points.

This is what courage looks like without a press team or a geopolitical agenda. It’s what courage looks like when it belongs to the public, not the powerful. Prime Minister Albanese said it plainly: “Australians ran toward danger to save others.” And while Netanyahu rushed to assign blame before the dust had even settled, a reflexive maneuver from a government more comfortable pointing fingers than confronting its own failures, the truth is both simpler and more devastating: the Bondi attack sits within a rising global wave of extremism, fueled by fractured institutions and political leaders who find chaos useful, profitable, or both.

As the world contends with authoritarian strongmen, antisemitic terror, and grassroots resistance movements, the United States is once again trapped in its most reliable recurring nightmare: Republicans trying to dismantle the Affordable Care Act. A decade of rage, dozens of repeal attempts, and the GOP is still unable to explain to their own voters why they should lose their cancer treatments just so some think tank can feel ideologically pure again. This week, their latest attempt to replace ACA subsidies with a sad little health-savings-account coupon died in the Senate. Democrats’ competing bill also failed because this government can’t even agree on keeping people from going bankrupt over broken bones, but Democrats know exactly what to do with this heading into the midterms.

Republicans now fight a war on two fronts: their donors demand austerity, and their voters demand to see a doctor. When Josh Hawley is the voice of reason muttering, “I just want to do something here,” you know the party has fully entered its hostage-video era. The GOP’s HSA plan would toss maybe $1,500 into an account for families staring down $10,000 deductibles. It’s not a healthcare system; it’s a slot machine with a co-pay.

This is the essence of the modern Republican project: while the world braces against extremist violence, MAGA is out here trying to take away your diabetes medication. While Canada organizes civilian brigades to preserve democracy, Republicans can’t figure out how to keep your premiums from doubling. While a man in Bondi runs toward a gunman to save strangers, Donald Trump is on his phone inventing ceasefires and posting fake updates about shootings he knows nothing about.

We are a country full of people who would tackle an armed terrorist without hesitation, and yet saddled with a government run by men who couldn’t tackle a policy problem with a 20-yard head start.

The world is telling us something. Canada is telling us something. Budapest is telling us something. Bondi Beach is screaming it at us. We are neither privileged nor invulnerable. Neither geography, nostalgia nor the “it can’t happen here” myth will protect us.

It is happening here, and the only people who seem ready to fight for the living are the ones running toward danger while our “leaders” run from reality.