In a widely disseminated photo, Alberta’s nutbar petrostate premier Danielle Smith and Canadian MAGA-foghorn-fanboy Kevin O’Leary are seen smiling beside the American president-elect, whose ring they’ve journeyed to Florida to kiss. That their host—adorned in the red cap that, since 2016, has come to symbolize low IQ, avarice and uninformed mendacity—is also a convicted felon, adjudicated sexual abuser, dishonest businessman, insurrection instigator and serial liar of unheralded magnitude makes you wonder what they’re smiling about.
But grin they do, as if gifting shimmering teeth to the archcriminal they flank will somehow immunize them from malign imperium. Unlikely, it turns out. Whatever desperate favour they’d hoped to curry now seems (at least publicly—who knows what kind of greasy secret deals were made) dust in the wind after this week’s punitive executive orders and statements from a president who, the literal minute he was sworn in, showed himself to be as vicious, vindictive and vengeful as he is vain, vacuous and volatile. The decrees seemed almost biblical. Yea verily the earth was scorched and darkness did descend. In an instant, thousands of Americans lost their jobs, hopes, dreams. It wasn’t as bad for Canada, where we lost only the innocence of presumed friendship with a neighbour.
None of this is a surprise. Or shouldn’t be—unless you’re a conservative voter with a power to self-delude on par with those anti-vaxxers who genuinely believed Bill Gates was injecting us with trackable microchips back in 2021. It doesn’t matter to O’Leary who, living stateside, will get even richer no matter what decisions are cast by his Oberste Führer. Smith is a different story. Especially now that Trump declared his intent to force down global oil prices and put enough pressure on Canada to literally collapse its economy, at which point, presumably, he’ll loot the nation of all those things “America doesn’t need.” As Argus-eyed National Observer columnist Max Fawcett noted in November’s “Alberta Oil is About to Get Trumped,” the province is likely in for a world of hurt. Indeed, its sycophantic MAGA-gaga premier’s blindness to the precarious Jenga game she has been playing with the province’s future is second only to the visionless citizens cheering her on.
But forget about Canada. I’ll get back to that and the slow-motion, right-wing coup that forced out our lame-duck prime minister in another column. Besides, machinations in America are more informative of the nightmarish reversal-of-progress to expect if we make the grave error of voting Pierre Poilievre’s MAGA-wannabe CPC into power.
If it seems Trump learned the lessons of his shambolic, twice-impeached first term in taking proper steps to bulldoze away unopposed this time, take heart. There’s actually staunch opposition. Many states took prophylactic pains to strengthen jurisdictional bulwarks and launch legal challenges. In just two days, the new U.S. government was staring down hundreds of lawsuits from states, organizations and institutions. A judge has already declared the attempt to end birthright citizenship unconstitutional; others have decried Trump’s blanket pardoning of convicted Jan. 6 Capitol rioters. In a traditional post-inauguration sermon on Jan. 23, to the humiliation of Trump’s entire Addams Family entourage, a bishop begged he consider the many cast into fear by his mean-spirited proclamations. And congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, pestered by journalists about attending the inauguration, cleared the air for many in saying, “I don’t celebrate rapists, so no, I’m not going to the inauguration tomorrow.” (There are, thankfully, many Americans who’d like no one to forget that in addition to installing a first convicted felon in its highest office, the country now has a President Rapist In Chief—which makes for a nice acronym).
Yes, the inauguration. What fun! Melania, dressed for the funeral she has wishfully envisioned forever. And, of course, the Bootlick Broligarchy. Funny, in a not-so-funny way if you recall that on election day—long before his Nazi salutes, “over-enthusiastic waves” or whatever he was doing—Marvel Comic bad-guy-in-the-making Elon Musk posted on his swirling-toilet platform X, “Novus Ordo Seclorum”—a scary AF Latin phrase for New World Order. (For a truly hilarious take on the day see: https://shorturl.at/cn6J9.)
Speaking of hilarity (no, not Trump’s risible parade of highly unfit cabinet picks), Americans who once joked about Trump 1.0’s much-publicized “shithole” meme in reference to their own country now fear it’s official—an unchecked, oligarch-funded theocracy of science-denying, conspiracy-adjacent greedmongers sleepwalking its citizens toward genuine fascism. Agnotologists—who study deliberate, culturally induced ignorance and doubt used to sell a product, influence opinion, or win favour through disinformation—are going to have a field day. (Doubtless they’ll also come across the name Pierre Poilievre.)
As for corporate media sanewashing Trump’s every move, Substack political columnist Scott Dworkin noted: “Nothing you are seeing or hearing regarding Trump or his cult members is normal. These pathological liars are woefully unhinged and unqualified, which puts our country at risk.” At risk enough to unleash a wave of transphobia and enact KGB-style spying on DEIA hires and activities complete with a snitch-line and ominous threats to “non-reporters.”
Oh, and that drop in egg prices Trump promised as if he could wave a magic wand? Sadly, the price of eggs in the U.S. is currently spiking due to avian flu. Solving this requires urgent intervention by the Centers for Disease Control and Food and Drug Administration—both currently shuttered—as well as rapid research by the National Institutes of Health, whose grant review process was cancelled along with “devastating” freezes on meetings, travel, communications, and hiring, leaving the country’s scientists in “uncertainty, fear, and panic.”
So where does this leave us?
In his searing Substack essay “We failed to stop the rise of fascism. What comes next?” Robert Evans cites the need to throw out the resistance playbook and try something completely different (not Luigi Mangione-level different, but equally disruptive to the mental well-being of our current oligarch captors). “The dark days have come again because they never really left. All the battles and street-fighting and organizing from 2017–2020 bought us four years of badly negotiated peace while the rot continued unabated,” he writes. “Hope, as George Miller reminded us, is a mistake. If you don’t fix what’s broken, you’ll go crazy. That’s where we are now, going crazy.”
Leslie Anthony is a science/environment writer and author who holds a doctorate in reversing political spin.
