“It’s dark and I’m cold,” I said. “Is this the nuclear winter?”
“No,” she said. “The sun rose this morning. Come out from under the bed.”
“Has he built the wall yet?”
“No.”
“The Russians haven’t taken over the White House?”
“No.”
“Women can still vote?”
“For now, but we have to start fetching your coffee again.”
“Really?”
“Oh god, my mother was right about you.”
One day down and the Trumpocalypse has been slow to get off the ground. He hasn’t started a nuclear war yet. Hasn’t crippled the global economy. Minimal crotch-grabbing.
Maybe it won’t be as bad as we fear.
Maybe it will be like that time Hannibal Lecter took your sister on a dinner date (“I’d like to have you for supper”) but just nibbled on her ear.
Maybe expectations of Donald Trump are so low that anything other than a full-blown Mad Max dsytopian nightmare will come as a relief.
Not much enthusiasm as the U.S. falls into Trump’s tiny-handed clutches. Polls give him the lowest approval rating of any incoming president in modern times. His Make American Great Again concert at the Lincoln Memorial offered less of a who’s who of musicians than a who’s that; we have seen more star-studded lineups at Vancouver Island’s Sunfest, playing before larger crowds (in fact, this year’s event will feature Trump’s headliner, Toby Keith). CFAX began Inauguration Day by playing It’s the End of the World as We Know It. “Do you think Donald Trump will serve four full years as president?” asked CHEK News’s online survey. (Majority answer: No.)
At least Trump got through his inaugural address without doing too much damage (other than the bit where he told America’s historical allies that they’re on their own). He did paint a picture of the U.S. as a massive, apocalyptic dumpster fire, but at least he didn’t unleash his birthers/bikers on Obama or yell “Lock her up!” at Hillary.
This will come as a relief to Republicans who had been frustrated during the campaign by Trump’s unwillingness or inability to keep his train on the tracks, to come across as a decent human being for more than a few minutes before going off his nut. (“Everybody says, ‘Look, he’s so civilized, he eats with a knife and fork,’ ” the New York Times quoted a senior Republican as saying. “And then an hour later, he takes the fork and stabs somebody in the eye with it.”)
Not that being a little loopy is necessarily an impediment for a politician. The diary of Canada’s longest-serving prime minister, William Lyon Mackenzie King, revealed that his advisers included his dead mother and his live dog. Amor de Cosmos, the founder of this newspaper and the second premier of B.C., was barking mad: His fear of electricity left him unwilling to ride streetcars, and he periodically picked fist fights in public. Jean Chrétien throttled a protester and went up in the polls. Ditto for Gordon Campbell after he got caught driving drunk. Toronto’s Rob Ford admitted lying about smoking crack with gangstas and got re-elected. And we survived.
Still, can’t shake the gloom that comes with the Obama-to-Trump transition. It’s like when the Canucks shoved Trevor Linden out the door to make way for Mark Messier and three lost years.
The bar has been set so low that the uneventful transition of power has itself become news, with television commentators repeatedly congratulating America for a peaceful handover of power, as if this wasn’t routine in every country in the developed world, including the U.S. It was like going to a wedding and coming home happy that bat-crap crazy Uncle Larry, the unwanted guest you felt obliged to invite, didn’t punch out the priest again. Well done, Larry! Same goes for Trump, whose slow, grim victory parade looked an awful lot like a funeral procession.
On the other hand, no use turning our low expectations into a self-fulfilling prophesy.
“You can’t spend four years hiding under the bed,” she said. “Time to come out.”
I wormed my way toward the light, groping through the dust bunnies. “Hey, I found my missing watch.”
“What time does it say?”
“1938.”
