Close to four years the world has been mired in the Fear of the Unknown, as the United States took its democracy to the brink.

Bit-by-bit, American’s rights and freedoms slowly eroded with a tweet or the stroke of a Sharpie pen upon an errant Executive Order, edging the nation ever closer to an autocracy through the consequential decision to vote Donald Trump in as president. The days of America being a shining democratic beacon upon the North American hill along with Canada were fading fast, and the world watched helplessly as the U.S.’s global strength slowly ebbed away.

On that dark November night in 2016, all rational souls felt the air leave their lungs after the Trump presidency was called, and since then, we have held what was left of our breath, fearing what terrible, despicable, irreparable damage that man could wreak.

And Trump’s words and deeds have been horrendous.

Each and every day for the last four years, the world has woken up, scrolled their new feeds, and groaned at the latest embarrassing or dangerous act of a dysfunctional and deranged man.

To sum up the experience in one word — exhausting.

And that exhaustion existed before Trump managed to kill a quarter million of his fellow citizens from an out of control pandemic. The utterly sad fact is that some Americans who voted for this man, who wore the red MAGA hat and stood shoulder-to-shoulder at his zero policy rallies were now dead. Stone-cold dead. Piled up in freezer trucks, waiting to be buried, never having had the chance to be held by their loved ones before they took their final breath.

Trump is not responsible for Covid.

Trump IS responsible for instituting no cohesive federal plan to fight Covid.

While the free world feared terrorist bombs falling from the sky thanks to Trump’s loose lips with world dictators, Americans had a far greater in-house threat. Trump’s narcissistic mind and his profound inability to govern killed off 80 times the number of Americans who died on 9/11, and that death toll soars up and continues to rage on.

The American genocide took up virtually no space in Trump’s mind.

His goals for being president still lived on…

• ·         Be a quasi-king/dictator, snuggling up to the idea of a never-ending term.

• ·         Romp around in the White House — sleeping in, watching FOX, abusing staff, and not reading the Presidential Daily Brief.

• ·         Soar in the heady skies via the overuse of the taxpayer funded Air Force One.

• ·         Make grandiose rally speeches riddled with lies and disinformation, while...

• ·         Pooh-poohing legitimate news sources as fake.

• ·         Threaten career assassination to anyone who dare question his words or deeds.

• ·         And slowly, but with zest and determination, swap out every ally the U.S. has ever had for every foe they’ve ever made because that’s what it takes to be a Kompromat in Putin’s and Erdogan’s armies.
  

It’s not like his psychological dysfunctions and leadership inabilities and mobster mentality weren’t already known… ask any New Yorker, any contractor, who has been threatened or stiffed. And then there’s the whole, I can’t go back to ordering hotel windows after being the President thing… yeah, where would the fun be in that?

The Art of Losing Deals is the book that should have been written about the gold-plated grifter. He knew nothing about property development unless you count arm-wrestling City Hall, kicking out coloured tenants or selling the Trump name on buildings he didn’t even own. And the ne’er-do-well still managed to go bankrupt six times on Daddy’s multi-million dollar dime.

It’s funny that, having Fred constantly bail out his loser kid. Daddy finally died, as fathers eventually do, and the screw ups Don makes now can’t be cleaned up by another round of dough, especially since Don had already stolen the lion’s share of Fred’s estate, robbing his relatives of their inheritance.

Yet, somehow, irrespective of the private and public nightmare that has been Trump, millions of Americans thought Don was the right choice. 

This is key.

Until an answer is found to explain why this voter mindset exists, Trump and his cookie-cutter minions — who if left unchecked, will procreate like bunnies — will never ebb from American politics.

That thought should send a chill down everyone’s spine.

To date, the Democrats haven’t accepted there is a NEED UNFULFILLED in half of the American electorate, and they are afraid to face the MAGAmites, to ask the question: Why?

When all is said and done, and the proverbial milk has spilled, it usually takes an historian — Jon Meacham to be exact — to shine light on and remind us of the obvious, for it seems only those who study the past recognize its potential to e’er repeat.

As Meacham pointed out on an MSNBC interview, Trumpism is the culmination of all the darkest American “isms” combined;

• ·         Isolationism – you only have to examine the late arrival to both world wars to see America’s inherent inclination to hunker down and only care within and not without, that is until the bombs or sea mines literally explode on their doorstep.

• ·         Racism – antebellum plantation slaves, 60s race riots, Black Lives Matter protests, anyone?

• ·         Nationalism – an overzealous belief that American ways are always the best, no matter how far the bar is lowered.

Trumpism – my definition – an alt Right mélange of all the above with an Old Boys School mindset — old white men with money and power refusing to let The Others in on the deal —  baked in. 

If you agree with that political evolution, there shouldn’t have been any shock as to Trump’s kingship. The greedy Wall Street ‘80s and the birth of the raging Newt Gingrich/alt Right mindset started this elitist ball rolling. Add to that Islamic terrorism and a declining manufacturing base with no plans to retool the industry or retrain the workforce, and you have the lower educated blue collar workers swimming in a Fear and Rage soup that happily boiled over in 2016.

Yet, I’ll be the first to admit I was slack-jawed when I witnessed the Blue Wall of Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania turn red. Being a Canadian, I knew our country’s moderate Left belief to lift all boats in a higher social benefits tide bled into those northern states. And yet, here I was, watching our cousins to the south march ever further to a nationalist Right.

It was impossible to not see similarities from the starving Germans post WWI, and how Fear and Rage drew them ever further Right with the help of their own ill-educated, psychologically dysfunctional guru. Some say this comparison is hyperbole, and yet the similarities are there in the timeline and motivation, and they are striking…

Uneducated, unemployed labourers, desperate to feed their families, seeing an outlier promising a return to better times, as long as they kept The Others out of the country and away from their jobs…

Any historian can see the parallel. The starving Germans needed not to starve. The jobless Americans needed no foreigner to take what little manufacturing jobs remained. Fear and Hate > MAGA > Trump.

The question becomes: If half of the electorate still managed to vote for Trumpism even after their leader made a colossal international, domestic and cultural mess out of these last four years, doesn’t that beg for a political reckoning on the Left?