Auchtoon!

A trade war with …Canada? How? Why? And what the actual eff?

The answer, of course is quite simple: Donald Trump. He thinks the US/Canada trade relationship (like all relationships) is exactly like a 1970s New York City real estate deal and must be treated as such — lie, bluster, threaten, flatter, cajole, schmooze, lie, backstab, crime, belittle, complain, lie, stiff anybody who does actual work, and lie. And then ultimately create a “deal” that you have every intention of breaking at first convenience.

Now to understand why Trump sees the whole world this way, that answer is also quite simple: Roy Cohn. Cohn was Trump’s mentor/lawyer/fixer in his formative years of pulling himself up by the bootstraps of daddy’s fortune. Cohn is the thread that connects McCarthyism to Trumpism. May I suggest:

• Where’s My Roy Cohn? (documentary): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ucOtZEu-SKw
• The Mentor: How Roy Cohn taught Donald Trump everything (article): https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2026/08/10/roy-cohn-profile (paywall)
• American Scoundrel: Roy Cohn’s Dark Journey from Joe McCarthy to Donald Trump (book): https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/American-Scoundrel/Kai-Bird/9781668031575

So before anybody comes at me about Canada possibly being the bad guy, tell me whether you know who Roy Cohn is and if you’re fine with the way he did business. If yes and yes, don’t expect a reply.

Honestly, I don’t think I’ll ever understand how some people who purport to be Christian so thoroughly miss the actual teachings of Jesus Christ.

In my freshman Chemistry class at Michigan Tech, the introduction exercise was to have all us engineers-to-be look to our left, then look to our right and be told that one of us was likely no longer going to be there come the end of the term. Chemistry was famously a “weed-out” class.

In a way, it was somewhat humane. Many kids showed up at Tech lured by the starting salary that you could get with a degree, so it was better to figure out sooner rather than later whether you wanted to invest the 4+ years. (And actually, there were far more weeded out by the UP isolation and cruel winters than academic rigor — my freshman year we had well over 300 inches of snow.)

I was able to survive all that and graduate. Hurray for me! And also, who cares? It certainly doesn’t mean that a student today needs to have that exact same experience I did in order to succeed. We’ve learned a lot about mental health since then. (Educated people learn things. That’s how education works.)

The University of Michigan will start a pilot program in 2027 where many first-semester students will no longer receive letter grades on their transcripts — final letter grades will be replaced with a designation of either “pass” or “no credit.” The idea is to lessen the stress of starting college.

That was not my experience, but I am neither angry nor jealous. Quite the contrary — considering the current cost of a four-year degree, I’m happy for any help that students get.

Last week I was on vacation in New York City, and I finally got the chance to visit Ellis Island. Wow. Just wow. I wish that everybody, but especially my fellow Americans, would get the opportunity to experience it.

So, yeah, I’m probably a little more juiced than I normally would be about the whole melting pot thing. It’s hard not to be seeing my father-in-law’s name — his different, weird Italian name — on the wall of honor. He, his mother, and two brothers got out of Italy in 1938 just before the war. He grew up in Flint, went to GMI, worked as an engineer at Buick for 41 years, married, raised six children, and is still walking his two miles and enjoying life every day.

It’s quite a story. But if you visit Ellis Island, you are reminded that there are millions of those amazing stories.

This week, voters here in Michigan chose a man named Abdul El-Sayed to be Michigan’s Democratic Senate candidate. Like him, don’t like him. Like his policies, don’t like his policies. Vote for him in November, don’t vote for him. Your choice. But don’t fall for the BS and demonize him because of his name.