A Canadian Tells Us Like It Is

 

I had intended to take Thanksgiving week off, then I realized I had to have a piece ready for the World Cup Draw, which, you may have noticed, turned out to be just as embarrassing and horrifying as I predicted last week. Being right comforts me no more than it does you. Regardless, I’m taking this week off instead.

But rather than rerun one of my oldies, I thought I’d direct you to what I consider a must-read article, coming to us from a Canadian, Andrew Coyne, who has a knack for saying what the entire mainstream media of this country refuses to say.

I apologize in advance that this piece is behind the paywall of the Globe & Mail, so some of you might be frustrated. But I urge you to find it, however you can (Apple News is one way). The article is titled “Donald Trump – and American democracy – is getting exponentially worse.” 

Here’s an excerpt, with a brief commentary afterward, then I promise to shut up until at least next week:

…On a most basic level, Mr. Trump’s mental and physical state has noticeably deteriorated. He now openly sleeps through cabinet meetings and public gatherings. He posts on social media at a hysterical pace, in increasingly agitated tones, on ever more lunatic themes. He boasts of having “aced” a cognitive test that is only administered when there are real doubts about a patient’s acuity, and cannot explain why he was given an MRI – or even what body part was screened.

All of which might be cause for sympathy, even pity – as, in a way, does his vast insecurity, his desperate need for praise and affirmation, symptoms of a childhood deprived, it seems, of everything but money – were it not for the consequences. His multiple emotional and psychological issues – the malignant narcissism, the pathological lying, the utter, sociopathic absence of empathy, and yet also an almost childlike manipulability – would be disturbing enough in an unemployed drifter. Manifested by the most powerful man on Earth, they amount to a global emergency.

I point you to this piece, not so much for its frank content — which is extraordinarily thorough and unblinking — as for the sad fact that everything Coyne points out is both well known and intuitively understood by absolutely everybody, or at least everybody who doesn’t have a stake in perpetuating it. And that includes the mainstream media.

But there is no way you would see an article like this in the New York Times. Some unfathomable code of silence prevails, giving Trump the benefit of every doubt, and pretending he’s almost normal, when he is clearly, and dangerously, off his rocker. Global emergency indeed.