King Charles warns Canada is facing a ‘critical moment'
In his address, Charles highlighted that Canada is facing a critical moment with threats to democracy, pluralism, and the rule of law.
The King noted the changing global trade system and the need for Canada to strengthen relationships with reliable allies.
Charles mentioned the Canadian government's plans to protect its sovereignty by reinvesting in the armed forces and participating in the 'ReArm Europe' plan.
The King's visit and speech are seen by many Canadians as a symbol of support amid concerns about potential annexation threats and trade disputes with the U.S.
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The Guardian
an hour ago
- The Guardian
The key to understanding Trump? It's not what you think
Donald Trump embodies dealmaking as the essence of a particular form of entrepreneurship. Every deal begins with his needs and every deal feeds his wants. He thus appears to be like other super-rich people: seemingly bottomlessly greedy, chasing the next buck as if it is the last buck, even when they have met every criterion of satiation. But Trump is different, because his brand of greed harks back to an idea of leadership that is primarily about adversarial dealmaking, rather than about innovation or improved managerial techniques. Trump's entire career is built on deals, and his own narcissism is tied up with dealmaking. This is because of his early socialization into his father's real-estate dealings in and around New York. Real estate in the United States, unlike the money-making modes of super-rich individuals in other countries, relies on deals based on personal reputation, speculation on future asset values, and the ability to launder spotty career records. Profits and losses over time can be hard to identify and quantify precisely, as Trump's auditors and opponents have often confirmed, since profits, which depend on speculation and unknown future value, are by definition uncertain. Trump's incessant boasts about being an apex dealmaker cast light on almost every aspect of his approach to his presidential decision-making. Numerous observers have long cast doubt on Trump's image as a consummate dealmaker, pointing to his many failures in his long real-estate career, his abortive political and diplomatic deals, his backsliding and reversals, and his overblown claims about deals in progress. But these criticisms miss the point. Deals, whether in finance, real estate, or in any other part of the economy, are just one step in the process of reaching full-fledged, binding agreements subject to the force of law. They are a stage in the negotiation process that has no force until it is finalized as a contract. It is, at best, an agreement to agree, which can turn out to be premature, poorly conceived or unacceptable to one or other party. Put another way, it is an engagement, not a wedding. A deal allows a negotiator like Trump to claim victory and blame the other party or some other contextual variable if things do not work out. In fact, in the hands of someone like Trump, deals are ways to evade, postpone or subvert the efficient work of markets. Trump does not like markets, precisely because they are impersonal and invisible. Their results – for corporations, entrepreneurs, investors and shareholders – are subject to clear measures of success and failure. Because deals are personal, adversarial and incomplete, they are perfect grist for Trump's relentless publicity machine, and allow him to polish his brand, massage his ego and signal his prowess to opponents – without the regulations and measurable consequences of regular market risks. The downside risk for an aborted or interrupted deal is negligible, and the upside is guaranteed by the legal power of fully completed contracts. Trump has figured out to an exceptional degree that dealmaking does not need to be successful in order to massively increase his wealth. Whether or not true, his claims to successful deals are the key to his brand and profitmaking worldwide, either directly or through the business endeavors of his sons. These range from his latest Trump perfume and Trump mobile telephone services, his Maga accessories, Trump golf courses around the world, his real estate and resorts, and of course his highly profitable cryptocurrency holdings. In every case, his deals either lead to further deals, which service his branding machine, or they lead to direct increases in his personal and corporate wealth. Deals, successful or not, are Trump's magic means to amass money and feed his avarice. Avarice is a vice with a long history in Christian theology. It is widely defined as an excess of greed, an inordinate level of greed, an insatiable greed. It has been viewed by economic historians as a passion that must be curbed and replaced by calculated, moderated self-interest in order for the rationality of the modern market to function as a dominant economic principle. From this perspective, greed can have numerous objects – such as food, sex and power – whereas avarice is single-minded in its focus on money. Trump exemplifies this focus. Though he has to function in a world where avarice is meant to be regulated by the market mechanisms of price and competition, he has managed to successfully pursue his avarice with little obstacle. This driving desire defines Trump's 'egonomics' – the intimate connection between his narcissistic urges and his wish for increasing his stock of money. The governing principles of his economic policy have nothing to do with America getting its due, as his messaging about tariffs argues, or about restoring dignity to the working class, as he signals to his Maga base. Nor are they about power or prestige. The object of everything he does is money, and in the service of the boundlessness of money, which Trump has made the defining object of his desire. Other commodities are of interest to him only insofar as they serve his desire to acquire, hoard and increase his stock – of money. The first – and most soothing – theory is that Trump wants money to buy power – more of it, perhaps all of it. More power than China, than his generals, than Harvard. We all know power – via our parents, our teachers, our bosses, our police. It is a force we understand, a pull we recognize. If Trump only wants more of something that many people have, and even more want, he is legible, he is like us. But power for what? To do what? To get what? Perhaps he is chasing an unassailable place in history, both human and eternal. So then it is not just power he endlessly chases, but glory. For this we have some evidence in the clownish thesaurus of words that he uses to describe his achievements, his looks, his wit, his wisdom, his all-round superhumanity: best, most, only, incredible, ever, more. In this orgy of superlatives, he is always curled high up in the clouds, like a Maurice Sendak toddler. But since Trump, from his perspective, brooks no real competition in life, in politics, in real estate, or even in history, there can be no glory for him which is not tainted by the mediocrity of his competitors. And true glory usually requires some form of self-sacrifice, some sense of compassion, some ability to transcend oneself. Given his woeful deficits in these areas, the glory game cannot be the key to understanding Trump. And so we go to a more familiar space: the realm of prestige, status and stardom. This realm is wired into competitions, tournaments and casinos of every sort, where winning is well-defined, losing is for losers and there is usually only one survivor and one winner who takes all. The competition for status is as old as recorded human history and accompanies every human society that has had leaders and followers, more and less skilled competitors for food, shelter and sexual partners. It begins with simple rules for coming out on top and evolves over time into the most elaborate forms of status competition, often driven by males – including wartime exploits, trophy wives, palatial homes and bottomless conspicuous consumption. These tournaments of value can be observed in settings as disparate as auctions, horse races, philanthropic gifts and corporate mergers and acquisitions. There is widespread consensus among thinkers from many eras and regions that status is a limited good, which has its own economics of supply and demand, distinct from those of pecuniary gain. This insight looks, at first, like the key to Trump. But attractive as this argument may seem, it too is a red herring. Among Trump's own tactics, the one he loves to use most is tariffs. Trump's obstinate insistence on tariffs as the key to restoring American manufacturing, swelling the US treasury and reducing American consumer prices has flummoxed most mainstream economists. Tariffs are for Trump the ideal way to combine dealmaking, status-grabbing and his penchant for money as its own bottomless value. It is evident that Trump's understanding of the trade-offs of globalization is rudimentary and often internally contradictory. Indeed, he shows signs of believing that making deals of any sort requires only outsize confidence, charismatic force and bottomless access to financial backing. In fact, Trump's view of himself as an incomparable dealmaker (a claim at odds with his many entrepreneurial disasters) conceals his deep distaste of real markets – in which a large apparatus of binding promises, the tendency to stable price equilibria, and the connection of supply and demand through pricing – can frustrate his brand of deal-making, which is always oriented to maximizing his personal prestige. Trump's deep-seated desire to be the winner who takes all in the global prestige economy sheds some light on his weaponization of tariffs. We can catch a glimpse of this logic in a most unlikely context. It was captured in detail by one of the fathers of British social anthropology, Bronisław Malinowski, in his 1922 book on a unique trading system that he found in the Trobriand Islands of Oceania, on several trips there in the years between 1915 and 1917. This anthropological classic, Argonauts of the Western Pacific, casts new light on Trump's tariff mania. What Malinowski described is a system of trading across about 18 coral islands within a 175 sq mile (453 sq km) area, between 'big men', leaders of lineages who exchanged highly specific valuables (such as decorated shell necklaces and bracelets) and their counterparts in this network of islands. Called the kula system, it had a highly codified set of rules to hedge voyagers against oceanic weather dangers and hostile groups in other islands, some of whom were cannibals. The goods appropriate to kula exchange could never be hoarded, marketed or bartered like normal utilitarian goods. This was a strictly ceremonial system geared to enhancing the prestige of male elites, of moving these well-known objects in a circuit which could last for years. The diplomatic rituals of these exchanges were ensconced in an atmosphere of pretend hostility between the parties, often because other groups in these islands were real enemies, always poised for real warfare. Hanging on the knife-edge between trade and war, these exchange circuits were strictly distinguished from barter or money transactions (what we would today call market transactions). The kula system was a way of organizing exchange, averting war, signaling prestige and making allies through a tightly regulated flow of valuables outside market exchange circuits. Trump does not care about Malinowski, the Trobriand Islands, non-capitalist exchange systems or 'big man' politics in kinship-based polities. But his operating system belongs in this type of diplomatic world, one that requires nothing except a non-negotiable interest in winning deals. Trump's onslaught of tariffs, falling on everyone like nuclear ash, is meant to make him the king of the global prestige market, no matter the cost to diplomatic traditions, financial markets, customer capacities or fair balances of trade. Trump appears to be undistracted by any other economic priority outside the aim to be the apex dealmaker. The kula system is grounded in a non-monetary system of honor, prestige and reciprocity, which helps us understand Trump's tariff strategy but does not fit his narcissist drive to crush all his fellow players. Even the kula system is about relationships. Trump is strictly about winning deals. So we must beware of seeing the urge to dominate all prestige markets as Trump's bottom line. Trump's bottom line is money. Being an avaricious man, Trump worships money – both its power and its pomp – and he seeks it through his extensive networks of children, clients, tax lawyers and cronies, all devoted to the increase of his wealth. This pecuniary drive has a transcendent, epic and unquenchable force which cannot be explained by reference to the other things that money can buy. Even his quest for prestige through arm-twisting tariff deals is primarily about positioning himself to secure future deals in his individual capacity. His is a special brand of avarice. There is no better way to explore the ways in which Trump's various egonomic strategies come together than in the recent invention and propagation of cryptocurrency, which has spawned a shadow world of speculators, fraudsters, legal hucksters, elected and unelected lobbyists. Their usual victims are vulnerable citizens, low-level grifters, pensioners, badly informed investors and other natural prey. The entire industry lives in a gray economy, attached to mainstream markets, assets and regulators like the tiny remora fish that feast off sharks. It survives in a legal twilight zone, where its currency is accepted only by some businesses as legal tender, and where smart players use pump-and-dump tactics to make fast profits with short-lived 'coins' of various kinds. Whatever the utility of cryptocurrency in the real world of goods and services, it is mainly a tool for amassing wealth by gambling on its future convertibility to real money in specialized currency exchanges. Cryptocurrency puts Trump in the position of being a player and the owner of a casino-like system at the same time, so that he always wins, if not in one role, then in the other. The outrageous self-enrichment schemes of Trump and his family in the crypto industry, which have been carefully exposed in several media outlets recently, establish new frontiers for Trump's shameless violation of even the simplest norms about conflict of interest. The best example of these ventures is his memecoin, $Trump, which has made him and his close associates a fortune by selling access to Trump through a barely regulated crypto mechanism. By some estimates, Trump has gained several billions of dollars in his net worth through his crypto ventures, which combine nepotism, influence-peddling and dealmaking in a unique package. Through cryptocurrency, Trump has found the ultimate way to attach his core impulse – avarice – to the larger machinery of the markets. There is some truth to the argument that Trump wants more of everything he can get, including power, glory and prestige. But what he wants more than anything else is money, which is just a temporary token of more money, and more money for ever more. The unique instinct behind Trump's avarice, which sets him apart from other billionaires who continue to chase wealth, is that he has found a way to build his fortune through deals – whether deals that make him money by inflating the value of his brand, which can then make him more money through more deals, or through the enforceability of completed contracts. Through his dealmaking, Trump has managed to triumph over the market, making it work for him to amass greater and greater sums of money, whether his deals are seen through to fruition or not. We can summarize Trump's approach to markets by adapting a famous sentence, spoken by him, about how he grabs women: Trump grabs markets by the deal. Illustrations by Joao Fazenda
The Independent
2 hours ago
- The Independent
Oklahoma's MAGA superintendent who demanded Bibles in class faces investigation after TV in his office shows naked women
Oklahoma's Trump-loving top school official, known for mandating Bibles in every classroom, is now facing an investigation after naked women were seen on TVs in his office, according to reports. What should have been a mundane Oklahoma State Board of Education executive session Thursday turned shocking after board members saw naked women appear on a TV screen behind Ryan Walters, the Oklahoma State Superintendent of Public Instruction and board chair, in his office, according to The Oklahoman. The Independent has reached out to Walters for comment. A spokesperson for Walters branded the incident as a "junk tabloid lie' to the outlet. Now, the state's Senate has launched a porn probe. Senate President Pro Tempore Lonnie Paxton told the Oklahoma Voice that 'leadership at the agency is working through proper channels to initiate the investigation.' 'This is a bizarre and troubling situation that raises serious questions about the events and what took place during yesterday's executive session at the Oklahoma State Board of Education meeting,' Paxton told the outlet in a statement. 'The accounts made public by board members paint a strange, unsettling scene that demands clarity and transparency.' It's not immediately clear who was responsible for showing the women. Some board members said Walters was facing away from the TV during the meeting. His spokesperson told The Oklahoman: "Any number of people have access to these offices. You have a hostile board who will say and do anything except tell the truth, and now, the Wokelahoman is reporting on an alleged random TV cable image.' Becky Carson, a board member who attended the meeting, said she was "disturbed" by what she saw on TV. 'I saw them just walking across the screen, and I'm like, 'no.' I'm sorry I even have to use this language, but I'm like, 'Those are her nipples.' And then I'm like, 'That's pubic hair.'...I was so disturbed by it…I was very stern, like I'd been a mother or a classroom teacher. And I said, 'What am I watching? Turn it off now!'' she told The Oklahoman. Walters then promptly shut it off, Carson told the outlet. She added: "It looked like it was made in the '60s, maybe.' Fellow board member Ryan Deatherage, who also attended the meeting, said the TV was on throughout the session but the volume was turned down. 'Quite frankly, I didn't know how to handle it. I was just in shock. I was being human and I didn't know what to think. … I kept thinking that it was just going to go away and so I quit watching it,' he told the outlet. He told The Oklahoma Voice that Walters should be held to account. 'We hold educators to the strictest of standards when it comes to explicit material,' Deatherage told the outlet. 'The standard for the superintendent should be no different.' Walters has argued strictly against showing what he deemed 'pornography' in schools. Last year, Walters advocated for banning books that he claims contain 'pornography,' such as the novel The Kite Runner, which contains sexual content. He threatened to lower the accreditation of a school district if it didn't remove such books from libraries' shelves. Edmond Public Schools then filed a lawsuit against Walters. "Edmond Public Schools not only allows kids to access porn in schools, they are doubling down to keep pornography on the bookshelves," Walters said in a statement. The Oklahoma Supreme Court ruled in favor of the school district last June, determining Walters and the state's department of education overstepped. Walters has also touted the teachings of the Bible. Last June, he issued a mandate requiring the historic text be a fixture in classrooms and curriculum— for grades 5 through 12 — across the state. 'The left is upset, but one cannot rewrite history,' he said last June. Faith leaders and parents then sued Walters last October. 'The Mandate interferes with the parents' ability to direct the religious and moral upbringing of their children. The children themselves face coercive instruction on religion in their public schools that is contrary to their own beliefs,' the plaintiffs argued. The state supreme court temporarily blocked the mandate in March. Last week, however, he filed a motion with the state's highest court, demanding it lift the stay. 'The Left has launched an all-out assault on Christianity in this country and will stop at nothing to destroy the Bible's significance in our country and the principles that shaped this country,' Walters said in a statement Tuesday. 'Students cannot fully understand American History without understanding the Bible's role in it, despite the liberal hysteria we continue to see.'
Telegraph
2 hours ago
- Telegraph
Trump attacks ‘probably illegal' payment to Beyoncé over support for Kamala
Donald Trump has called for Beyoncé's prosecution, accusing the singer of accepting millions of dollars to endorse the Democrats' 2024 campaign. The US president claimed the superstar was among a number of celebrities, including Oprah Winfrey and activist Al Sharpton, to 'probably illegally' receive millions of dollars in exchange for their backing of Kamala Harris at last year's election. There is no evidence that any of those named in the president's social media post were paid to endorse the Democratic campaign. 'I'm looking at the large amount of money owed by the Democrats, after the presidential election,' Mr Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform. 'The fact that they admit to paying, probably illegally, eleven million dollars [£8.2 million] to singer Beyoncé for an ENDORSEMENT (she never sang, not one note, and left the stage to a booing and angry audience!),' he added. Mr Trump also claimed Ms Winfrey had received 3 million dollars and Mr Sharpton had been given 600,000 dollars in exchange for their support. 'Kamala, and all of those that received endorsement money, broke the law. They should all be prosecuted!' he added, writing in partial capitals. Responding to the accusations, a spokesman for Obama said: 'These bizarre allegations are ridiculous and a weak attempt at distraction.' The allegations come as Mr Trump raises a series of unfounded claims about the Democrats and pressure mounts on him to release more details about Jeffrey Epstein, the paedophile and financier with whom Mr Trump was friends. The Republican leader has been plagued by allegations that the White House is withholding information linked to the convicted paedophile, despite promises to release them to the public. Earlier this week, Mr Trump hit out at Barack Obama, posting an AI-generated clip of the former US president being arrested in the Oval Office and claiming there had been Russian interference in the 2016 US election. He also demanded the Washington NFL team change its name back to the 'Redskins', saying it was 'what our Indian people' wanted and that he would block its attempt to build a new stadium in the city if it did not. The Harris campaign has previously denied that Beyoncé was paid for her endorsement, with Federal Commission records showing they gave her production company 165,000 dollars to cover costs. Tina Knowles, Beyoncé's mother, said in November that the accusations being made against her daughter were a 'lie' and the singer had also covered the cost of flying her team to and from the 2024 event in Houston. Writing on social media at the time, Ms Knowles said: 'Beyoncé did not receive a penny.' The pop star appeared alongside the then vice-president at a campaign rally in Houston last October, where she spoke out in favour of reproductive rights and said it was 'time for America to sing a new song'. Ms Winfrey has also hit back at accusations that she received money to endorse Ms Harris's political campaign, saying in November that she was not 'paid a dime'. The television show host made a surprise speech at the Democratic National Convention in August 2024 before joining Ms Harris onstage at her 'Unite for America' event a month later. Ms Harris's campaign team paid Ms Winfrey's production company 1 million dollars to cover the cost of the live-streamed rally. Posting on social media at the time, Ms Winfrey said: 'My production company Harpo was asked to bring in set design, lights, cameras, microphones, crew, producers… to put on a live production. I did not take any personal fee. 'However, the people who worked on that production needed to be paid. And were. End of story.' Shortly after levelling accusations at the talk show host, Mr Trump claimed several television networking companies were also 'political pawns of the Democrat party' and called for their licenses to be revoked. He said: 'NBC is down in viewership almost 28 per cent this year… They are an arm of the Democrat party, and should be held accountable for that. Likewise, Fake News ABC!!!' Mr Trump's comments came during a five-day trip to Scotland, during which he is visiting his golf courses and meeting with Sir Keir Starmer, the prime minister, and Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission. The White House has played down the significance of the meeting with the prime minister, saying the two leaders are unlikely to announce any policy breakthroughs. The meeting is instead being framed as a relationship-building opportunity before Mr Trump's official state visit in September.
