What needs to happen for U.S. to reject Trump?
What do people worry about when they worry about Donald Trump? There are three pools of dread. They talk about the two or three daily events (in any other presidency, they’d be catastrophes) that astound them, and then extrapolate.
For instance, given the news that Trump thug Rudy Giuliani’s thugs may have sought to have the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine shadowed by a gunman, it is not beyond belief that Trump might assassinate someone if they blocked his re-election. Or worse.
Second, they question each other intensely about whether he will or will not win re-election. Whichever, there’s no hostility. There are no bad ideas in brainstorming. We’re all in this together.
They approach the third pool cautiously. What would a re-elected Trump do? Obviously, there are subcategories. We know what he’ll do to Americans. We wonder where he’ll wage war and on how many fronts. China? The famous sh--hole countries of Africa?
But more realistically, what would he do to Canada that would be worse than what he has already done, damaging us economically and dooming 86 Canadian citizens and permanent residents to a horrible death? This is the deep end of the dread pool and that’s where I’ll be drowning.
Here’s a better, healthier question. What could happen that would change American minds, put an end to the
Trump mixed martial arts presidency and ensure that Republican voters would never allow such a thing again?
Early in December, I read a minor interview in the Guardian with the U.S. journalist Michael Lewis that went unnoticed. Lewis had written a book, “The Fifth Risk,” that didn’t win the attention that his more alarming books had, but that was deliberate. He was interested in a risk as yet untested in the U.S.: “a loss of faith in the mission of effective governance.”
It drilled into the more boring departments of the U.S. government, energy, agriculture and commerce, the ones where public servants do essential unseen work. They are scientists, statisticians, weather-mappers, risk-assessors, nutritionists, measurers and regulators, medical specialists, data collectors and data explorers. Trump is laying waste to them and anti-government, anti-facts, anti-science Republicans are thrilled.
The Guardian asked Lewis, “Do you think there will come a point when people demand leaders who understand the importance of scientific knowledge?”
And Lewis, casual as always, said this: “For people to suddenly start to value what good government does, I think there will have to be something that threatens a lot of people at once. The problem with a wildfire in California, or a hurricane in Florida, is that for most people it is happening to someone else. I think a pandemic might do it, something that could affect millions of people indiscriminately and from which you could not insulate yourself, even if you were rich.”
He may be right. Without a draft, a U.S. war isn’t collective. But a pandemic would be an equalizer, where no one is less terrified than anyone else because everyone is stiff with fear. Death would lavishly and randomly lay waste to millions, who would already be aware that every single human act from blowing a toddler’s nose to spreading butter on bread might be for the last time.
In the first terrible week, Americans would discover that death is not special. It is randomized and par for the course, like mass layoffs.
The U.S. would need the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to gather data and narrow the hunt for salvation, the diplomatic corps to communicate internationally, co-ordination of medical services and supplies, numbers to call, mass flight to organize, police to try to control widespread shootings by a “well-ordered militia” comprising millions of panic-stricken men with guns, global scientific investigation, quarantine, flight regulation, a co-ordinated quest for a safe zone, a trusted source of public information, and the sight of a bureaucracy enabling science to be a saviour.
As for Trump, Lewis said he wasn’t expecting the decline and fall of the American nation.
“It could be that. But my gut says don’t bet against the country. It has this incredible capacity for self-reinvention. I think something will come along that will finally induce the requisite state of terror — and it will regenerate the place.”