With the election over and Obama president for the first time twice, Donald Trump now threatens to move to Canada and encourages other patriotic Americans to do so.
I totally sympathize with The Trumpeter when he says to move to Canada. I have talked about moving to New Zealand for years, and if Romney had won you know this column today would be about Christchurch. But I can’t resist drawing attention to some subtle asymmetries between these notions.
First, when a rich guy like Trump talks about moving to a foreign country to get away from politics here, he doesn’t really mean move away. He means buy a house there and live in it when he feels like it, and then come back to his houses here when he feels like it. And you know that you’ll still hear from him when he’s using his tourist visa in Thunder Bay, because he has a slot on Fox News anytime he wants, by satellite, from anywhere. He probably pays them for it.
Not me. If I manage to move to New Zealand, I will actually move to New Zealand. My next door neighbors will be sheep. I might trade the cat in for a sheep. I’ll immediately begin calling for an end to the monarchy. I won’t be able to afford to come back.
But I digress. Those are not the most significant asymmetries. The asymmetries I need to single out have to do with the idea that conservatives would want to get away from commie socialist Muslim Kenyan Obama and his commie socialist government by moving to Canada, of all places.
I have even heard of a case in which a lawyer specializing in Canadian emigration was contacted by a Tea Partier about the possibility of relocating to Montreal, on the grounds the government here in the U.S. no longer speaks his language.
If you don’t like Obamacare, why would you move to a country that’s had universal health care since before they had loonies?
If you were opposed to abortion and thought you had to go to Canada to escape lax U.S. abortion laws and government funding of abortions, well, you’d just be an idiot in that case. They don’t have abortion laws. They’ll fund just about any abortion. The principle obstacle to getting an abortion in Canada is getting pregnant first. I would never be able to get a Canadian abortion, for example, not even if I switched citizenship.
Trump and friends just aren’t thinking this thing through. I do want them to leave, but I’d hate to see them go somewhere that they’d only be miserable and spread misery upon others. Surely there’s a better destination for them.
My first thought was send them all to the Cayman Islands. After all, their treasured free market corporations are already housed there in principle, why shouldn’t their backers go live there too? I support this idea for all the executive officers and major shareholders of corporations that use off-shore tax shelters. I think they should live where they claim their company resides, and then I think they should have their U.S.. citizenship revoked and be denied the right to do business here.
But sending Tea Partiers to the Caymans would be just mean. Sure, there’s no income tax, but they tax most imports at more than 25 percent. Ouch. That’s going to hurt on an island, where almost everything is an import, ha ha. Plus, they beat Obama in mandating health care by 11 years.
We need to think of a happy home somewhere in the world that makes as much sense for extreme right-wing conservatives as Sweden or New Zealand does for a guy like me. Someplace where health care is between a man and his wallet, where women do as they’re told, and where white people aren’t an oppressed race.
I’m thinking.