While extreme polarization is on everyone’s mind these days, what if that is just a distraction keeping people from seeing the real problem: that Americans are losing our ability to self-govern. And we don’t even realize it’s happening. Host Jennifer Thompson discusses with author Tony Woodlief in this episode of the Civil Squared podcast.
U.S. President Donald Trump welcomes Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney to the White House on Oct. 7, 2025 in Washington, D.C.
This summer, America played host to one of the biggest international events on the planet, the World Cup, drawing millions of foreigners to our cities and towns, our stadiums and our national parks, where many of them had never been before.
The consensus was, America is awesome — visitors from Bolivia, Scotland, Uzbekistan, and everywhere in between marveled at the sheer size of our great nation, the diversity of our topography, the deliciousness of our foodstuffs, and, perhaps most importantly, the kindness of our people. (Not to mention, our eighth wonder of the world — Buc-ee’s.)
What a difference a month makes.
Despite our friends in far-flung places singing our praises, now, to hear our closest neighbors tell it, America is nothing but a “ bully” and a “ thug.”
After trade negotiations with Canada collapsed this week, and President Trump announced a whopping 50% tariffs on $20 billion worth of Canadian goods — including Canadian whiskey and hockey sticks — it’s no surprise our friends to the north are less than pleased with their downstairs neighbors.
In our defense, not all of us are responsible for electing the bully and thug in question — and if polls are any indication, most Americans agree with Canada that Trump is doing a terrible job. But still, it’s hard to hear.
Especially since we love Canadians, and we very much want them to love us back.
But after spending years threatening to invade Canada and make it the “51st state,” and mocking its leaders with petty nicknames and school yard insults, Trump may have finally put Canadians’ famous politeness to the test.
“You’re at war when you’re attacked, and we got attacked,” said Prime Minister Mark Carney. “We’re going to hit back.”
Manitoba Premier Wab Kinew called Trump “erratic,” “irresponsible,” and “a bad person” who was “not to be trusted.”
And Ontario Premier Doug Ford wasn’t nearly as nice, calling Trump the “king of bankruptcies,” and telling him to “Kiss my ass.”
Again, these are our friends talking!
But their righteous indignation is justified — we are in the midst of an unpopular war that we can’t seem to end, our economy is in the toilet, we’re banning books, deporting children with cancer, shooting unarmed protesters, spreading measles, and covering up for one of our most notorious sex offenders. And we have the audacity to attack our nice and normal friends?
But it’s not just an issue of bad manners. Americans have long been accused of that.
It may be an election issue now.
States like Michigan, Maine, Alaska and Ohio, all of which border Canada and are important trade partners, also have another thing in common: highly competitive Senate races.
And despite all but Maine voting for Trump in the last election, Cook Political Report lists all four as a toss-up.
The Canada trade issue is real these voters; for auto workers in Michigan who rely on Canadian aluminum and steel; for 95% of Mainers who rely on Canada for home heating; for Ohioans who use Canadian metals and machinery; for Alaskans who need Canadian crude.
So Democratic Senate candidates like Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan and Mary Peltola in Alaska have yet another important talking point to add to their reservoirs — that Trump’s dumb trade war, much like his dumb actual war, is going to make voters’ lives worse.
Add it to the pile — a majority of voters already believe they are worse off under Trump, and this won’t help.
With fewer than 70 days until the midterm elections, the imprudence of picking a fight with important allies — who now seem prepared to unleash retaliatory economic pain on Americans in competitive states hardly seems debatable.
But Trump seems hell bent on totally destroying whatever good will we still had left on the world stage.
Talk about an own goal.
S.E. Cupp is the host of "S.E. Cupp Unfiltered" on CNN.
U.S. President Donald Trump speaks during a visit to the Fort Bragg U.S. Army base on February 13, 2026 in Fort Bragg, North Carolina.
How a country treats its allies and its adversaries says everything about what it believes strength means — a question that was already on my mind the night I sat in a movie theater watching "The Brink of War" when news broke.
The film reconstructs the 1986 Reykjavik summit, where President Ronald Reagan and General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union Mikhail Gorbachev spent a tense weekend negotiating over the fate of the world's nuclear arsenals.
The movie is a portrait of an American president who believed peace was earned through strength and credibility because he understood that American reliability was the asset that guaranteed every other negotiation possible.
I checked my phone on the way out and read that President Trump had just ordered the Pentagon to "substantially reduce" the joint military exercises the United States runs each year with South Korea — hours before those drills were set to begin.
Trump’s stated reasons: the cost and Seoul's refusal to help with actions against Iran. He also took the opportunity to note his "very good relationship" with Kim Jong Un, the leader of a nuclear-armed regime still technically at war with the ally whose defense drills he'd just gutted.
The contrast was hard to shake.
Reagan's version of "peace through strength" is often reduced to a slogan. It wasn't. At Reykjavik, he was willing to walk away from a historic deal rather than trade away missile defense, because he believed a president's word — to allies and adversaries alike — had to mean the same thing on a good day as on a bad one.
In the two weeks before Trump gutted the drills meant to deter it, North Korea tested ballistic missiles at least twice — its ninth and tenth launches of the year, part of a pace that includes Kim Jong Un ordering a two-and-a-half-fold increase in missile production back in June.
Pyongyang has said openly that the tests are a protest against the joint exercises, which it calls an invasion rehearsal. The sequence isn't ambiguous: North Korea escalates, and the American response is to scale back the training designed to counter it.
That wasn't a response to reduced danger. It was a response to something else entirely — cost, grievance, a president's stated fondness for a dictator personally.
Kim Jong Un isn't managing a regional standoff on the Korean Peninsula anymore. He's a partner in two wars that are actively threatening American interests. That's who the administration just called "unthreatening and respectful."
Mark Montgomery, a retired Navy rear admiral now at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, has named the pattern directly: "President Trump does not seem to understand that North Korea is part of the 'bad guys' team – a member of the ‘Axis of Aggressors’ alongside Russia, Iran, and China.”
Montgomery went on to say, "Kim Jong Un has backed Putin's illegal war against Ukraine with ammunition, troops, and missiles." And the danger isn't confined to a European battlefield: "North Korea threatens key American allies and trade partners — South Korea and Japan — daily. Kim Jong Un is not America's friend; he cannot be reasoned with, and he won't give up his nuclear weapons."
Pyongyang has sent an estimated 11,000-plus troops to fight for Russia against Ukraine, supplies roughly half of Russia's artillery ammunition, and has shipped ballistic missiles Moscow now fires into Ukrainian cities.
It has spent decades as Iran's missile supplier — the technical lineage of Iran's Shahab and Khorramshahr missiles traces straight back to North Korean designs — and analysts expect that cooperation to deepen now that Iran needs to rebuild what the 2026 war destroyed.
Deterrence is thinning at the same time. The USS George Washington, the Navy's only forward-deployed carrier and until recently on station near the South China Sea, has pulled out of the Indo-Pacific to cover a Middle East gap, leaving the region without a home-based American carrier for the foreseeable future.
Montgomery has also flagged what that gap means in practice: a carrier permanently based in the Indo-Pacific cuts response time to a regional threat by more than two weeks compared to one that must sail in from elsewhere. That's exactly the kind of gap a rival power plans around.
When a president alienates a treaty ally over a war that the ally never signed onto, while publicly courting the goodwill of a regime that is simultaneously arming Russia and rebuilding Iran's missile program — the message isn't fiscal discipline. It's that American commitments are conditional, revocable, and personal to whoever happens to be in the Oval Office.
Reagan walked away from Gorbachev to protect American credibility. This administration is giving away its trustworthiness— to Kim Jong Un, for free.
Lynn Schmidt is a columnist and Editorial Board member with the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. She holds a master's of science in political science as well as a bachelor's of science in nursing.
American Social Unrest
When Graham Platner’s senate campaign imploded last month, the first thing that came to mind was a comment by one of his campaign strategists, who also advises many other major political figures today. They said, “Part of our thesis here is that people do not want their candidates grown in vats… they want people who do not look and sound like the vat-grown people who’ve been leading this country off the cliff for the past century.”
Meanwhile, the Democratic primary for a Michigan Senate seat has been defined by candidates endlessly taking shots and hurling insults at each another. If recent history is a guide, things will only get nastier and more divisive in Michigan and elsewhere from here until November.
It’s all playing out against a backdrop of voices claiming Americans want a different kind of politician right now: “fighters.” Indeed, the Platner campaign staffer also said many Americans are willing to overlook personal integrity and other key values if they think their “fighter” can win.
It’s a dangerous bargain. It’s also dead wrong.
I’ve written before how I believe Americans are stuck in a fight or flight mode. They’re disgusted that their concerns are being ignored. They’re angry, exhausted, even disoriented by all the acrimony, division, and noise engulfing politics right now. When you're in that headspace, it’s natural to gravitate toward candidates who come out swinging and embrace a “take no prisoners” approach.
It is leading candidates and their consultants to raise money off of fear, stoke Americans’ anxieties for their own gain, and seek to win at all costs. We can’t go on like this.
Some will no doubt note how today’s political fights pale in comparison to the kind of campaigns that riddle American history right back to our founding. The elections of 1800 and 1828 must rank as some of the nastiest and most divisive elections in history. But history isn’t destiny. Nor did earlier campaigns contend with 24/7 news, social media, and AI.
Part of being American is having aspirations and striving toward ideals. It can seem that Americans have given up on those ideals and are giving in to an “anything goes” approach. But based on my travels across the country, they have not.
There’s a better way.
Some two decades ago, The Harwood Institute, with support from the Pew Charitable Trusts, deeply engaged Americans nationwide—from Baltimore to Louisville to Fresno—around the question, “What are your aspirations for our politics?” When it came to political candidates, Americans named these five factors:
These are different from simply saying we need more civility in public discourse; and no one should confuse them with the kind of kumbayah politics that some groups promote. Americans told us they wanted tough-minded, give-and-take campaigns, but ones that focused on what matters to them and strengthened our civic culture.
We turned these aspirations into a “Political Conduct Barometer” that people all across the country used as a type of scorecard to measure whether or not candidates were meeting their aspirations and contributing to a more productive culture.
Let me be clear: the vast majority of politicians today would fail the political conduct test on every measure. The thing is, as I’ve crisscrossed the country engaging Americans of all political persuasions, these five factors, while being obscured by all the current noise, remain people’s aspirations for political conduct today.
Platner’s strategist was right about one thing: people are looking for something different. They just deserve better than swapping one kind of inauthenticity for another.
Now is not the time to surrender to a politics that further destroys hope and will indeed lead us off the cliff. People’s yearning for a different political culture in this country grows by the day. We cannot let politicians and their consultants take our politics hostage. Americans want something better.
Rich Harwood is the president and founder of The Harwood Institute.
USS Abraham Lincoln (CVN 72) conducts U.S. blockade operations related to the Strait of Hormuz on April 16, 2026 in the Arabian Sea.
The crew of the USS Abraham Lincoln has been at sea for over 265 days, and over 200 days without a port call. The aircraft carrier left San Diego on November 21, 202 for a routine Pacific deployment, only to be redirected to the Middle East instead for a war Congress never declared and voted not to authorize. Carriers are supposed to pull in every 30 to 45 days for resupply, maintenance, and something resembling a break; the Lincoln has gone nearly five times that long without one–a modern record for a warship.
Consider what that actually means for a human being. You’re living at work, on a ship, with your coworkers, away from your family and friends, and now the ship is starting to fall apart: the water fountains are broken, the water is contaminated, sometimes water needs to be rationed so showers and laundry are secured, the showers are moldy, the toilets are clogged, and the food is rationed, rotten, and can be, as Congressman Mike Levin described, as meager as a half a cup of rice and two tortillas. These are horrible working conditions. Whether or not you believe sailors signed up for this when they joined the military, you must admit, it’s a brutal job.
I’ve deployed to the South China Sea and the Persian Gulf as a Navy helicopter pilot. I know what months at sea do to a person, even when the ship has hot chow and working plumbing. It is unclear what their mission is and how they hope to achieve it, and now negotiations have stalled, and finding a diplomatic solution seems like a fantasy under this administration. Conditions have gotten so bad that the members of the crew are increasingly suicidal.
Some of them have managed to report back to their families. About 200 family members showed up to a town hall in San Diego this month to give acting Navy Secretary Hung Cao a message: that the Pentagon has broken their trust. Back in April, Secretary Hegseth called similar reporting “fake news.” Now, Navy Times and Stars and Stripes have both reported multiple attempted man overboard incidents aboard the Lincoln. One wife told reporters her husband texted her that he “hopes he doesn't wake up tomorrow.” The Navy's official response is that it hasn't “identified an increase in reported suicidal ideation or suicide attempts,” and that sailors have “continuous access to clean water, functional AC and healthy meal options.” The magnitude of the difference between official information from the Pentagon and firsthand reports from the crew should be troubling. The Department is either being intentionally deceptive or is just that out-of-touch.
Some critics may hear these reports and argue that troops had it way worse in Vietnam. Or in Iraq. But those were wars. If this administration continues to ballerina around calling this conflict a war in order to circumvent the Constitution, then they don’t get to use “war” to justify why our service members are being forced to ration food. Even if this were called a war, the forever wars in Iraq and Afghanistan already taught this country, at enormous cost, what repeated extended deployments do to a force. Veterans came home broken at a rate this country still hasn't fully grasped. How many missions can we accomplish if we keep forgetting to take care of our personnel along the way?
Meanwhile, for all his chest-beating, Secretary Hegseth sure likes to take his eye off the ball of war. He wants to make sure sailors have enough testosterone, but can’t ensure they have enough food. Since the Lincoln left San Diego, Hegseth has found time to pick fights with the Ivy League over military fellowships, threaten to sever the Pentagon's relationship with the Boy Scouts over wokeness, and, in an unprecedented move, personally blocked the promotions of more than a dozen senior officers (a disproportionate number of them Black or women). That's where his energy has gone, while sailors half a world away are jumping off his ships to escape.
Hegseth says he makes these decisions in the name of lethality. He believes the warrior ethos will save the military. But you don't get lethality out of a crew running on a rationed dinner for months on end. And the warrior ethos shouldn’t have to include bravely facing water contamination on your own ship. Even warfighters need basic care. The Department of Defense needs a leader who is up to the job of providing that care. Perhaps Secretary Hegseth could start by prioritizing the needs of the active-duty service members deployed to the Middle East over his beef with the Boy Scouts.
There are strategic reasons for us to take care of these sailors: their operational capacity depends on it, and not doing so could have negative consequences on retention and recruitment, which adds up to readiness, which is essential to national security. But there’s another reason: compassion. Leadership should mean looking out for your people. As my old Command Master Chief used to say, “it’s about heads in beds, too.” It’s time Secretary Hegseth realized that’s part of his job, fixed the plumbing, and got these sailors home to their families. And if he isn’t up to the task, then it’s high time he stepped aside.
I believe we can achieve lethality without sacrificing humanity. If we can’t, then let’s decide it’s not worth it.
Julie Roland was a Naval Officer for ten years, deploying to both the South China Sea and the Persian Gulf as a helicopter pilot before separating in June 2025 as a Lieutenant Commander. She has a law degree from the University of San Diego, a Master of Laws from Columbia University, and is a member of the Truman National Security Project.
