Eleven boys and four guides from a YMCA camp got stranded by wildfires in Wabakimi Provincial Park, Ontario — 175 miles north of the Minnesota border, deep inside sovereign Canadian territory. Before you get anxious about the outcome know that all of the children and guides made it out ok. The Royal Canadian Air Force flew in and rescued them.
So naturally, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz blamed President Trump for not being the ones to invade Canada's borders and perform the rescue.
Walz posted, "When a group of YMCA campers needed to be rescued during the wildfires on our northern border, it was Canada who immediately helped. Not a word from Trump."
On our northern border. The campers were 175 miles inside Canada. That's not the northern border. That's Canada. The country with its own military, its own government, and its own air force — which is the air force that actually performed the rescue, because that's how national sovereignty works.
Walz is the sitting Governor of Minnesota. He presumably has access to a map. He definitely has access to staff who could have pulled up the location of Wabakimi Provincial Park before he hit send. The park isn't some ambiguous border-straddling territory. It's deep in the Ontario interior. You'd have to drive three hours north from the nearest U.S. crossing to get there.
But the geography isn't really the point. The point is what Walz was actually asking for. Think about it for a second. He wanted the President of the United States to send American military assets into Canadian territory — uninvited — to conduct a rescue operation that Canada was already handling. That's not presidential negligence. That's called an invasion.
The Royal Canadian Air Force doesn't need Donald Trump's permission to rescue people inside Canada. Canada rescued the campers because the campers were in Canada. That's the whole story. There is no federal failure here. There is no dereliction. There is a governor who saw an opportunity to score a political point and didn't bother checking whether the point made any sense.
Some on the left tried to frame this as Trump being indifferent to Americans in danger. Interesting framing — except the Americans were rescued, promptly and safely, by the country they were in. The system worked exactly as it's supposed to work. An ally responded to an emergency on its own soil. No one was hurt. No one was left behind. The only thing missing was a press conference where Trump personally took credit, which apparently is what Walz wanted so he could complain about it.
This is the same Tim Walz who spent most of 2024 running for Vice President on the theory that he was the normal, competent Midwestern dad in the room. The guy who could read a map, change a tire, coach a football team. The regular American. Now he's publicly suggesting the U.S. military should have crossed into a NATO ally's airspace to duplicate a rescue that was already complete.