Mark Carney was right.
The Canadian Prime Minister called it early during the second administration of Donald Trump, saying the unsayable thing that every other world leader seemed too naïve, disbelieving, corrupted, or cowardly to acknowledge.
And it had to break your heart a little to hear it so bluntly spoken. Remember?
“Our old relationship with the United States, a relationship based on steadily increasing integration, is over,” Carney declared in his victory speech after the April 2025 Canadian elections. “The system of open global trade anchored by the United States, a system that Canada has relied on since the Second World War, a system that well not perfect has helped deliver prosperity for a country for decades, is over.”
And then: “We are over the shock of the American betrayal, but we should never forget the lessons.”
The shock is over for us, too.
Over this past week, two words kept surfacing in my mind.
Watching what Trump was saying, doing and posting during the dog days of a summer of increasing discontent with his presidency, I thought:
He is like a mad king.
I am not offering a clinical diagnosis; I have zero qualifications to say whether Trump is actually mentally ill or not. Lots of people like to offer medical assessments from afar, and sometimes I learn from their analyses. But, in general, I think its unwise and unfair to do that.
More important—that’s not the real problem. (Though it may be some of the problem; as we get older, we can lose control over our inhibitions: Our “Golden Years” are often also our “DGAF” years.)
The real problem is not mental illness. It’s character. It’s always been character.
We are governed by the grievances, vanities, appetites, and whims of a man of profoundly low character. And we are living under the rule of this man’s bizarrely arbitrary exercises of the immense powers of the American presidency.
It’s so random and cruel and uncertain, these abuses of power—somehow laughable and terrifying at the same time—that feels like those tales from history have come alive, and we are now in the grip of the rule of a mad king.
And this week, once again, we felt it:
Trump ordered the government to rename Lake Ontario to “Lake America.”
He demanded that NBC’s Kristen Welker be punished by the FCC.
He suggested that pollsters who publish numbers he doesn’t like should face the power of the law.
And on and on it went: presidential power exercised with the malice and recklessness of a man who scorns any and all of the traditions, customs, dignities and restraints that have accumulated around the presidential office over nearly two and a half centuries.
Some of it is ridiculous. How could it not be? A president renaming a Great Lake because he is angry at Canada has the quality of bad satire.
But then people obey.
Google changed their maps, bowing to the madness of the Ruler.
The Ruler pointed. The courtiers at Google scurried to make his wish their command.
Look at Interior Secretary Doug Burgum smirking as Trump spews his demands about “Lake America.” He’s just another toady going along with what he knows is nonsense, and malicious nonsense at that. Burgum knows better; he was once a serious man.
Every day this is happening, at some level of our government and public life. Trump pops off—and officials scramble. Corporations accommodate. Lawyers search for authorities and precedents to twist and manipulate so as to please the Ruler. Everyone around Trump—and far beyond—begins calculating what he wants and what might happen if they cross him.
And they drink the strange brew of secret contempt and shame and—above all—fear.
Our poem this week got its author killed.
It’s by Osip Mandelstam, a great Russian poet of the 20th Century. His subject is Stalin. (I am NOT saying Trump is Stalin, or the USA the USSR.)
Stalin heard of this poem. Mandelstam did not see his 48th year.
—Terry
The Stalin Epigram
by Osip Mandelstam (translated by W.S. Merwin and Clarence Brown)
Our lives no longer feel ground under them.
At ten paces you can’t hear our words.
But whenever there’s a snatch of talk
it turns to the Kremlin mountaineer,
the ten thick worms his fingers,
his words like measures of weight,
the huge laughing cockroach on his top lip,
the glitter of his boot rims.
Ringed with a scum of chicken-necked bosses
he toys with the tributes of half-men.
One whistles, another meows, a third snivels.
He pokes his finger and he alone goes boom.
He forges decrees in a line like horseshoes,
One for the groin, one the forehead, temple, eye.
He rolls the executions on his tongue like berries.
He wishes he could hug them like big friends from home.