I don’t know how USians aren’t more bothered — even humiliated — by watching Canadians resist Trump more coherently than the United States itself.

And I don’t mean that Americans aren’t resisting. They are. People protest, states sue the federal government, judges block illegal decisions, Trump’s approval is collapsing.

But look at Canada.

Canadian consumers are boycotting American products. Businesses are finding new suppliers. Travel to the United States remains dramatically below 2024 levels. The Canadian government now has an explicit strategy to double exports outside the United States. And Canada is moving closer to Europe economically, strategically and militarily — to the point that Mark Carney is reportedly exploring some kind of unprecedented “associate” relationship with the EU.

That’s not just anger anymore.

That’s adaptation.

And I think this is the part Americans haven’t fully reckoned with yet.

The United States hasn’t lost its military power. It hasn’t stopped being one of the largest economies on Earth. It hasn’t magically ceased to matter.

What it is losing is something much harder to rebuild: trust.

The assumption that the United States is a reasonably predictable ally, a stable trading partner and a country whose commitments will survive the next election.

That assumption is dying.

International polling already shows an extraordinary deterioration in America’s reputation. Even indexes that still rank the United States first in global soft power recorded the largest decline of any country in 2026.

And once countries start reorganizing themselves around the possibility that America cannot be trusted, replacing Trump with another president doesn’t simply reset the clock.

Supply chains get rebuilt. Trade goes elsewhere. Defence industries develop alternatives. Alliances deepen. Infrastructure gets constructed. Companies learn how to operate without American suppliers. Governments discover that strategic autonomy is not merely an ideological slogan but insurance against Washington.

That is the extraordinary self-harm of Trumpism.

Trump promised to make America so powerful that everyone would have to bend to it.

Instead, he is teaching everyone how to live without it.

Canada is doing it. Europe is doing it. Other countries will do it in their own ways — sometimes because they want to, sometimes because they have no choice.

And that may ultimately be healthy.

A world less dependent on a single country is potentially more resilient. Europe should have developed greater autonomy decades ago. Canada probably should never have allowed such overwhelming dependence on one trading partner. Countries in Africa and Latin America have every reason to diversify relationships rather than constantly choose between great powers.

The irony is brutal.

No terrorist organization, foreign adversary or grassroots revolutionary movement could realistically have inflicted this kind of strategic damage on the United States.

It required the United States itself.

There is something almost Brexit-like about it: external enemies can hurt you, but self-harm has a completely different scale. You know where your institutions are. You know which alliances matter. You know which foundations are load-bearing.

And then you dismantle them yourself.

The United States will survive Trump. Of course it will.

But the world that existed before Trump may not return.

Because the rest of us are learning a lesson that will survive him:

never again build a world in which so much depends on the political sanity of one country.

It’s over.