RANDALL WHITE, NORTH AMERICAN NOTEBOOK, TORONTO. FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 25, 2026. Two recent Twitter/X postings by two eminent US commentators suggest some deeper rumblings in Donald Trump’s America in the early autumn of 2026.

The first comes from William “ Bill” Kristol. He currently describes himself as “Editor at large, The Bulwark ; Director, Defending Democracy Together ; Host, Conversations with Bill Kristol ; Never Trump.” He has only a few months ago been described by C. Douglas Golden in The Western Journal as a “neocon, publisher, and one-time Republican operative extraordinaire” who has now declared “today I’m a Democrat.”

I was first struck by a Kristol post from a few days ago : “I found watching Trump’s UN speech today deeply depressing. It is a matter of national shame and humiliation that he is our president. Every country in the world, friend and foe alike, sees we are governed by a vainglorious fool.”

From here I was intrigued to come across Bill Kristol’s eight-point policy for Democrats in the US midterm elections this November 3 — “1. Stop the data centers ; 2. Make AI safe ; 3. Protect your health care ; 4. Fix the rotten Supreme Court ; 5. Get us out of the Middle East ; 6. Renew our friendship with Canada ; 7. Hold the oligarchs accountable ; 8. Release the Epstein files.”

Sitting here in front of my still newish Dell PC, only a hundred yards or so from the northwest shore of Lake Ontario, I was particularly impressed by “6. Renew our friendship with Canada.” In contemplating the likelihhood of any such thing in any near future I was further impressed by a still more recent post from the more traditional left-wing, long-term Democrat (and former Bill Clinton labor secretary), Robert Reich.

Reich wrote : “I spent much of this week talking with foreign officials who are in the U.S. for United Nations meetings … Here’s what I learned:

“1. Most are thinking past Trump. They believe his influence is already waning … 2. They’re thinking in a timeframe of five to 10 years. They see Trump as a temporary phenomenon and assume the United States will ‘return to its senses’ … 3. But — and here’s the part that concerned me — they’re unsure they can ever again rely on the United States for world leadership …

“4. Even post-Trump, they see the United States as unstable and unpredictable … 5. As a result, they’re looking ahead to a world where another nation, or group of nations, will take leadership on global issues that need to be addressed, such as climate change, AI, migration, widening inequalities …
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“6. Which nation or group? Another official put it to me this way: ‘We don’t trust China, the U.N. doesn’t work because of its security council, but the EU isn’t strong enough yet. Several of us are hoping that over the next decade the EU will be joined by Canada, Japan, South Korea, Australia, and New Zealand, and that this new EU — really, a World Union — will devise a structure that enables it to work collaboratively and forcefully for the good of the world.’”

Whatever else, this seems to me to put the concept of Canada as first “associate member” of the European Union into at least some somewhat realistic longer-term perspective.

And according to a very recent Leger poll : “70% of Canadians support Canada becoming an “Associate Member” of the European Union; 13% oppose and 18% are unsure.”

For the moment my own concluding thought is just Why Not? And who knows? Maybe fostering this kind of broader “multilateral” expansion of the European Union is just what our Canadian PM Mark Carney (who was born in the Northwest Territories and grew up in Edmonton, Alberta) is trying to do!