When right is wrong

After two years in office, what do we know about Donald Trump? We know he cheats on his wife. We know he cheats at golf. We know he tells lies at a prodigious rate. We know he’s a bully, a narcissist, and a demagogue. We know he supports and prefers other demagogues in Russia, North Korea, and Saudi Arabia, all of whom think nothing of killing their own people.

We know Trump’s impossible to work for as cabinet members and White House staffers get dumped almost daily. To date there has been no retribution for any of this. Yes, Trump lost the House in the midterms, but so did Bush II and Clinton, and still they recovered and were reelected at the next opportunity. So we can’t expect the mid-terms to be predictive of failure and the end of Trump.

Recently we were in New York and talked to a denizen of that city where there is a majority of Democrats. When she learned we were from Canada, she said, “I hear you’re building a wall.” That way, she opined, the toxin that is Trump would not flow north. At another recent occasion, someone declared the evening was “a Trump-free zone.” I think everyone was relieved we wouldn’t be discussing that day’s idiocies emanating from Washington, D.C.

The rightward tilt in the world today has been a long time coming. In the early 1980s, everyone with a profile was a small-l liberal. Barbara Amiel, who wrote a column in Maclean’s, was just about the only right-winger in the land. Now, it’s hard to find anyone in the media who’s on the left, the pendulum has swung so far. Waiting for it to swing back could take a long, long while. Meanwhile, hubris, that failing identified by the Bible as the pride that goeth before a fall, is our only hope. I can’t wait for that to play out.