An Alternate Reality

With a pathological liar as its president, it probably does not come as a shock that many Americans live in an alternate reality. Promoted and cultivated endlessly by Donald Trump, their master, and spread wide by pernicious social media and house organs like Fox 'News' and One American News Network, it is a version of things that until recently would have been deemed credible only to the uneducated, cognitively challenged, or the completely unhinged. Sadly, many more appear to be regularly drinking from these poisoned waters.

Bruce Anderson writes:

Knowledge of the world seems to be deteriorating in America, abetted by a president—ignorant of the world himself—whose formula for political success depends on more people becoming less informed.

Despite all that has been responsibly reported about Russian interference, Trumpian malfeasance and his daily record of gross incompetence, a recent Abacus poll yielded some disheartening results:

If Trump loses, most Republican voters say they will believe the election was rigged. If he tries to stay in office after losing, they wouldn’t want the military to enforce the election results. In other words, their trust in or need for him is so powerful they don’t stop to think what sort of precedent it would set to leave the country in a state of impasse.

As many Americans think Russia is America’s best friend as think France, Italy or Germany is. This despite America having spent decades in a military alliance with France, Italy and Germany to protect against Russian military ambition, despite proven Russian use of cyberwarfare to disrupt American social peace and elections.

It would appear that those polled have little insight into their country's relations with the rest of the world:

Under Trump’s time in office, Republicans are four times more likely to say relations with Canada have improved (41 per cent), than think they have worsened (8 per cent). This is mindless partisanship—the facts of the last few years were almost constant tension around NAFTA, dairy subsidies, steel and aluminum tariffs, the idea of Canada as a security risk, the G7 Charlevoix summit friction. But for Republican voters everything seems to be going swimmingly.

Less than 12 per cent of Republican voters think U.S. relations have soured with Great Britain, France or Germany. This despite almost constant friction in these relationships, on topics from trade to NATO to climate change to refugee and immigration policy. Trump has by all accounts a terrible relationship with President Emmanuel Macron of France and Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany. He was on bad terms with U.K. Conservative Prime Minister Teresa May and launched scathing attacks on London’s Mayor.

In a time when the world sees the U.S. for what it has become, 80 per cent of Republicans think Trump has made America greater.

Canada has good reason to worry about living next door to an unhinged giant:

Half of Republican voters would go along with abandoning NORAD, roughly a third would support building a wall and putting troops along the Canadian border. Happily, most Americans are against invading Canada to get at our resources. But stop and think about the fact that only 56 per cent of Americans strongly oppose the idea.

As children, almost all of us indulged in fantasies of one kind or another. It now appears that many Americans have entered a second, much darker childhood.

Let us not be in any hurry to reopen our borders to such a diseased nation.