“Perspectives,” by Gerry Warner

Op-Ed Commentary

Oh, how the giants are falling!

Trust me. Before the year is over, we may no longer have Donald J. Trump and Justin Trudeau to kick around anymore echoing the infamous comment made by Richard Nixon after his bitter loss to Democratic governor Pat Brown in the 1962 California gubernatorial race.

Would I lie to you, gentle reader? Of course not. Then again, politics is nothing but a pack of lies and it’s possible to make wrong predictions. But I don’t think I’m wrong on this one. Time will tell and the clock is ticking down for both Trudeau and Trump.

Let’s deal first with the lightweight first. That, of course, is Justin Trudeau, ironically the spawn of one of the greatest politicians in Canadian history – Pierre Elliot Trudeau – three times elected prime minister of Canada and the saviour of the Canadian federation during the notorious FLQ crisis of 1970 when real terrorists stalked the streets of Montreal killing several innocent people with letter box bombs and kidnapping and killing former Quebec cabinet minister Pierre LaPorte. “Just watch me,” said a decisive Trudeau when a breathless CBC reporter asked if he was really going to impose the War Measures Act and send tanks into Montreal.

The tanks rolled in. Order was restored and the Great White North was saved, though even to this day, millions of Canadians are unwilling to credit Trudeau for his courage and prescience when Canada could easily have been torn asunder.

Fast forward to 2020 and we have pathetic Justin proroguing Parliament, the ultimate act of political cowardice, in the face of the political scandals swirling around him and the emaciated opposition screaming for him to step down as Liberal leader or call an election. Clearly rattled, Trudeau of course will do neither.

Meanwhile the rats desert the sinking ship with former Finance Minister Bill Morneau resigning his post and giving up his cushy parliamentary seat to pursue some nebulous project in the private sector and Chrystia Freeland named finance minister in addition to being Deputy Prime Minister already and putting out political bush fires for Trudeau like the local fire chief. At the rate she’s going, Trudeau might as well name her “Empress of Canada” and be done with it.

Then there’s Trump, or should I say Nero, playing his fiddle while Washington burns.

Even before Democratic Presidential Candidate Joe Biden gave what most people consider a brilliant nomination speech Thursday that hit all the right notes, Washington DC was shaken to its very core by the bombshell announcement that Steve Bannon, the man named a few years ago by Bloomberg Business Week Magazine as “the most dangerous political operative in America,” and the self-styled leader of the Alt Right and darling of the most extreme conservatives in the US had just been charged by the US Justice Department with fraud and money laundering in connection with $25 million of purloined funds that he is alleged to have diverted to himself and three others to build The Wall that Trump had promised to build on the US/Mexican border to keep all those starving and unemployed coloured folk from emigrating to the US for a better life.

And if all this wasn’t enough Bannon, Trump’s former chief strategist and top campaign manager in the 2016 election, is usually given the lion’s share of credit for Trump winning the election no one thought he could win. Not even Stephen King writes stuff as incendiary as this. And if he did nobody would have believed him. Now, please, give me a second while I rest to let my blood pressure drop.

Anyway, the stage is now set for the most fantastical US election in history. And I’ll tell you flat out that there’s not a politician in the world who can defeat Donald Trump and that includes Joe Biden. But hold on. Trump has an implacable enemy that he in part created himself then twisted himself into knots trying to deny its very existence. That enemy is currently killing a thousand Americans a day and many more in the rest of the world and to date almost 10,000 in Canada.

I’m talking, of course, about COVID-19, the silver bullet that’s going to bring Trump down for blatantly and disastrously mishandling the pandemic. But unlike Trump, I wouldn’t lie to you. Honestly.

– Gerry Warner is a retired journalist and blogger, who hasn’t made a right prediction about Trump yet. But this time he thinks he has.

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