The End Won't Be The End
One day, the orange popsicle will melt like the Wicked Witch of the West. It will feel like the end, but until the United States completes its reckoning, Canada will need to resist the very Canadian instinct to open our arms and offer forgiveness.
Before the dust settles, much of the country — and much of the world — will breathe a sigh of relief. But his death alone will not end who he was, nor who the country was in choosing him and allowing him to continue until his end, without ever facing anything resembling justice for his innumerable crimes.
The national self-immolation south of the border was voluntary, foreseeable, and completely avoidable. A people knowingly elected the worst possible human being in their midst to lead them. Completely aside from his long track record of fraud and incompetence, the country saw a man who openly admitted to sexual assault, who has been found legally liable for rape, who has been credibly accused of penetrating then auctioning off children, who has had dozens of victims come forward. On seeing this man in action and offered an opportunity to relegate him to the trash heap of history, the country decided collectively: this man represents who we are and who we want to be as a nation.
When he dies, there will be premature dancing in the streets while, inside, there will be a brutal power struggle. The authoritarian structure he personified but did not build will attempt to recalibrate and hold on. It may be behind the scenes and largely invisible to the public or it may become violent, concluding with a Soviet-style purge. It is too early to tell for sure, but a whole organisation built on destroying the rule of law will not suddenly conform to it.
His successors may decide to vilify him to create a narrative of being somehow better than he was. They may instead beatify him as their leader even in the afterlife. One thing is certain: whichever way they go will be based on what they perceive will better allow them to hold onto power. It will have nothing to do with morals or justice.
The people of the United States of America will have to, in that moment, ask themselves the question: is this who we really are, who we really want to be? For those of us outside the country, the answer is already obvious.
The president of the United States, upon losing his bid for re-election in 2020, attempted a coup against the United States to nullify his election defeat and hold onto power using, among other things, mob violence. He is a convicted criminal, and was so before being elected to his second term in office. The American justice system refused to sentence him because he was running for office, and discharged him without penalty just over a week before his inauguration. This, we know.
He has turned an already morally bankrupt immigration enforcement agency into his personal army, which is using overt terrorist tactics and committing cold-blooded murder on American soil. This, too, we know.
He is ignoring laws, invading foreign countries, defying court orders, building a network of concentration camps, illegally appointing people to roles they cannot hold, accepting foreign bribes, suing his own government for $10 billion in a case where he has the power to settle with himself, and treating his office as a personal vending machine. More common knowledge.
What shocks me and so much of the world is how the United States is not doing anything tangible about it, letting him run amok with virtual impunity, even while citizens are marching in the streets.
Special Counsel Jack Smith built a legal case early enough for him to have been tried, convicted, and sentenced before ever getting back in the White House, but the justice department did not have the courage of their convictions to act on it. States are not prosecuting federal agents for state crimes they are so clearly committing, for which evidence is abundant. Their actions are largely limited to nice-sounding law suits against the federal government when the president has already shown that the law and court orders are irrelevant to him.
Opposition leaders are, for the most part, preparing for the mid-terms as if this is a normal election cycle, where the president will simply, quietly, and peacefully cede power when he presumably loses the House at the end of this year in a fair vote with no federal, partisan, or foreign interference. It is all a pipe dream not borne out by reality in a country where this week the Director of National Intelligence took part in an FBI raid on the voting office of a Georgia county Donald Trump lost in 2020.
Impeachment motions have been proposed, but are either languishing or have been tabled which, in US parlance, is to delay something indefinitely.
While the Democrats managed a discharge petition to force a vote on a bill to release the Epstein files, which passed and has mostly been ignored by the administration, they are not doing so toward an impeachment vote. Which suggests that there are too many Democrats who are not willing to impeach.
And that means the opposition is willing to let what is happening continue to happen. As they say, if there is a Nazi at the table and there are 10 other people sitting there talking to him, you have a table with 11 Nazis.
American institutions at all levels of government, including ones that are completely controlled by Democrats, are not taking what action they can already legally take to put the brakes on the authoritarian dictatorship systematically taking control of every aspect of the federal government.
So when the Wicked Witch finally melts, which given his declining mental and physical state is likely not far off, and Americans breathe a sigh of relief, it will be up to the rest of the world to hold the country as a whole to account.
Trump no longer being there will not end the system that allowed him to get there. He was a product of it, not its creator. It will not end the authoritarian régime built in his name. It will not undo any of the damage he and his sycophants have caused, either domestically or internationally.
But it will cause many Americans to tell the rest of the world: “he’s gone! You can come out now!”
Don’t believe it. Until their constitution is rewritten to remove inherent corruption like Citizens United, a free and fair new election is held, and every person involved in this mess from the billionaire financiers and media owners and manipulators to the corrupt justices to the front line ICE terrorists have been publicly, fairly, and effectively tried in court, the United States of America must be made to own its decisions, to own its history, and to own its responsibility.
Until then, when Americans come to Canada looking for our trademark sympathy for what they have put themselves through, we will remind them — as Swedish-designed fighter jets fly over our Chinese-designed electric vehicles — that they will have to earn it.