by Larry Powell
I hope we Canadians are resisting feelings of superiority while watching the horror show unfold before our eyes that is the U.S. election. If we haven’t done it ourselves, I’m sure we’ve seen others wag their fingers or click their tongues at that pitiful excuse for a “Commander-in-Chief,” Donald Trump. And rightly so. But make no mistake, he has his supporters right here in Canada, too. I just read a letter-to-the-editor from a fellow Manitoban, for example, which loudly proclaims “I think we desperately need a Donald Trump here in Canada!”
Odd, isn’t it? Those words are eerily similar to these. “I think Donald Trump would be best for the job.” Who said that? That was the Imperial Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan in the U.S.
Beating the drum, as Trump does, for a wall on the US-Mexico border and a ban on Muslims, he wears his racism on his sleeve like a badge of honour. How this hateful, lying demagogue can attract supporters here in my country, or anywhere for that matter, leaves me truly gobsmacked.
Trump is immune to evidence, facts or truth. Up 'til today, at least, he has clung to the lie he helped manufacture, that President Obama is a Muslim who was not even born in the ‘States. After sowing those toxic seeds (fuelled, no doubt by the fact that Obama is black) and unleashing the kind of harm only such conspiracy theories can do, he's had a death-bed repentance. Yes, Obama was US-born, Donald proclaims! I guess, just because Trump has now said it, Obama is finally qualified to carry on in his post! But Trump followed up immediately by launching another bald-faced lie: that Hillary Clinton had started the whole, ugly "birther" controversy. This man does not know when to quit. He is pathological.
And Canada, of course, once “belonged to the U.S” and ought to be returned! Trump actually said that? He sure did!
He has also labelled the now well-founded science of manmade climate change as a hoax, having been “created by & for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive.” He actually promises to dismantle the Environmental Protection Agency, the last bastion shielding the American people, their health and their environment, from unbridled destruction by soulless corporations bent on mining and polluting the Earth (and its oceans) to death.
While Trump may have dreamed up his own personal, perverted brand of climate denial, he has plenty of company right here in my country, too. Trust me, that denial, in one form or another, runs deep. It’s even ingrained to some degree in our educational, journalistic and faith communities.
Not many may come out publicly, as that letter-writer did, to proclaim their support for this “wart on the rump of history.” But I fear they still privately share way too many of his dangerous, misguided beliefs.
Please don’t let another Donald Trump slither into a position of power in Canada. If we do, we should all be afraid. Very afraid.
