COUNTERWEIGHTS EDITORS. GANATSEKWYAGON, ON. SATURDAY, JANUARY 24/SUNDAY, JANUARY25, 2026. This is a crazy weekend on the northwest shore of Lake Ontario, at the eastern beginning of the North American Great Lakes.

For one thing it’s unusually cold outside, even for late January. (As we look out on a snowy yard from our back boardroom, which we’re temporarily inhabiting on a Canadian winter Saturday — and then again on Sunday.)

From another far deeper and more important perspective the boardroom TV and other online sources have been full of (especially for us in Canada) extremely annoying and alarming news from the increasingly dementia-driven mind of President Donald Trump.

For us again two broad clusters of issues have dominated the TV and online news this weekend on the early 2026 Trumpian front.

The first cluster involves Donald Trump with special reference to our own home and native land in Canada.

Eg : (1) “Trump dominated Davos. But Canada’s Carney was the star” (Washington Post) ; (2) “Canadian prime minister fires back at Trump after Davos speeches” (Associated Press) ; (3) “Trump withdraws Carney’s invitation to Board of Peace” (Washington Post) ; (4) “Trump calls Carney ‘governor’ and threatens 100% tariffs” (CTV News) ; (5) “Trump threatens Canada with 100% tariffs if Carney ‘makes a deal with China’”(Toronto Star) ; and (6) “Trump threatens Canada with 100% tariffs over China trade deal” (BBC News).

The second cluster of this weekend’s Trumpian TV madness involves the appalling behaviour of “Trump’s Gestapo”, faced with massive public protests against the US federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency on the streets of Minneapolis, Minnesota. (Now in the midst of its old very cold Great Lakes northern winter.)

See these four TwitterX gleanings as a sample of the rising insanity here : (1) “Really American@ReallyAmerican1, “BREAKING: ICE just shot and killed another … person in Minneapolis. ‘It was an execution,’ witness says” (It has subsequently been reported that ICE agents say they found a registered pistol on the quickly shot-dead man.) ; (2) Governor Tim Walz@GovTimWalz, “I just spoke with the White House after another horrific shooting by federal agents this morning. Minnesota has had it … The President must end this operation … Now” ; (3) David Frum@davidfrum, “Minnesota is turning into Trump’s Vietnam” ; and finally (4) Bernie Sanders@BernieSanders, “What happened in Minneapolis was not an accident… join the movement.”

Driven by such alarming information, what we finally agreed in our two boardroom sessions this weekend was that the time has come for us, in our small and unimportant universe (that nonetheless still means something to us), to start telling the increasingly unavoidable plain truth about the Donald Trump who belongs in the hospital not the White House.

As we perceive President Trump on TV, he sometimes still does seem coherent and in command of his current circumstances.

More and more on other occasions, however, he appears quite clearly in the midst of a too-aging mind. (Which we do understand first hand, since most of we counterweights editors are also too old to run what is still the world’s largest economy, embedded in the still much widely valued and not-quite- dead- yet Democracy in America. Confusing such things as ”Greenland” and “Iceland” is in our own experience one of the tell-tale symptoms.)

Similarly, Trump’s growing crazy story with Canada — where eg he was (logically enough) saying not long ago that a China trade agreement for Canada was a good thing but now says the opposite — seems almost designed to show the deep underlying nonsense of his broad public policy views. His 51st state rhetoric embraces an old American folk cause that finally seemed to have died forever with the late 20th century trade agreement between Canada, the United States, and Mexico. And this end seemed not altogether unlike the vanquished cause of the Southern Confederacy in the middle of the 1860s. (Which it might be said Trump’s MAGA America has still not altogether accepted — as in his own back-then challenge to President Barack Obama’s US birth certificate!)

In the early hours of Sunday, January 25, 2026, having returned to our office boardroom late Saturday night to agree on some “Saturday Night and Sunday Morning” conclusion, we arrived at two immediate thoughts.

First, as Trump himself might say, we are 1,000% behind Prime Minister Mark Carney. His government remains Canada’s salvation in 2026.

Second, Donald Trump really does belong in the hospital not the White House. And we are somewhat encouraged by the recent words of former Ohio Republican Governor and presidential candidate John Kasich: “What’s happening in Minnesota is waking up the whole country. It’s bothering us because we don’t see justice and fairness … It’s tearing the country apart but it’s also raising the consciousness of Americans who are saying enough is enough … Republicans may pay a HUGE price for this.”

Our current hopes and prayers are that (former) Governor Kasich’s “enough is enough” comes true, and Democracy in America at long last rides again. One way or another, the longer Donald Trump remains president the more the USA, USA will be continuing to commit the superpower suicide that Max Boot warned about last year.