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Dramatic finale for season 1 of Trump Show

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Today marks the first anniversary of the inauguration of Donald Trump, the day when the world held its breath, hoping for the best but bracing for the worst. How bad is this 45th American president going to be, we wondered?

It’s fair to say the people of Hawaii have earned a gold star for having survived, however unintentionally, the outer regions of the badlands we were most worried about this time last year. The nukes, the button, the Donald: the three amigos whose terrifying acquaintance most reasonable men and women might have postponed indefinitely.

Last Saturday morning, while Canadians were layering up to shovel, grumbling about the calamitous snowplumps punctuating our driveways, Hawaiians were walking through the fires of Mordor in their Aloha shirts thanks to this accidental Emergency Alert text message: “BALLISTIC MISSILE THREAT INBOUND TO HAWAII. SEEK IMMEDIATE SHELTER. THIS IS NOT A DRILL.”

According to first-person accounts, in addition to seeking shelter, islanders spent their utterly frantic 38 minutes of impending doom filling bathtubs, calling loved ones, crying, amassing chocolate bars and other non-perishables, accessing pornography — a full 50 per cent increase in traffic to certain pornographic sites, according to some reports — and “finding God.”

Between prayer and pornography (stay tuned for America’s Final Choice: Will it be one final act of self congress with a computer or cramming for the exam at the pearly gates?), one name more than any other was on people’s lips. An online commentator to the Honolulu Star Advertiser put it best, perhaps (all-caps are the writers’ own):

“We stared at our own mortality ... So many I have talked to ACCEPTED that it was OVER. If you BELIEVED it was actually happening, then you’ve thought about what the minutes, hours, days and weeks afterward would be like. And you may have seen your death, brought along by the policies and behavior of POTUS. Or, you may have seen misery and pain in survival. THAT is the future Trump is building for us.”

Death. Misery. Pain. When does the making America great again segment begin? Is it in the final season? Can we fast-forward?

Trump supporters have, not surprisingly, eviscerated anyone who dares to connect him to the emotional fallout — the sobering “What if” scenarios — from this unfortunate incident, accusing them of opportunistic politicizing. They lay the world’s nuclear anxieties, in their entirety, on North Korea’s doorstep.

Maybe it’s naive, but my mother always taught me it takes two to tango: when a fight is big and bad, no one is blameless. In the event of a nuclear war, there will likely be two nations on the dance floor the night missiles light up the sky. The rogue nation will be answerable, but so, too, will that head of state who fails to fulfil even the most basic diplomatic duty.

The lesson from Hawaii is that a presidency marked by haste, provocation and the obliteration of long-established rules of political engagement — which do not and should not include social media — has added to the world’s, and indeed America’s own, baseline nuclear anxiety plausibility levels.

Sadly, the very idea of diplomacy in the Trump era has become synonymous with old-fashioned, namby-pamby wussy stuff for which an audience trained for maximum amusement — one that has conflated politics with entertainment — has very little patience or understanding.

When the helmsman of the world’s most powerful nuclear arsenal seeks to toss out the rule book, he must accept that his actions will absolutely, and necessarily, terrify people. The hot head in chief is only heroic in the movies and, as the people of Hawaii discovered last Saturday, the Trump Show is for real.

“You need to think of it like a dark comedy and laugh.” This is what a friend said to me earlier this week when we shared our Trump coping strategies. With one year down and three more to go (I don’t even say the words “eight” and “years” in the same sentence anymore), it’s worth a little time and effort to beef up my Trump Survival Toolkit, which, at present, consists of avoiding cable television at all costs, skimming print headlines and being grateful for every day that goes by that I don’t own a smartphone.

The truth is the idea that I might learn to laugh at Trump scares me. I worry it means I will have fundamentally changed, somehow — that like the cellular degradation associated with radiation sickness, my DNA will be forever altered, unable to return to the old normal of responsible citizenship, before this Bart Simpson fiction became a painful reality.

I don’t have time to laugh because I’m too busy believing in the restoration of the art and science of diplomacy and that some measure of careful political wisdom will re-emerge when the Trump era eventually, and mercifully, comes to a conclusion.

During those harrowing 38 minutes in Hawaii, the quiet saving grace that is diplomacy — its power to prevent catastrophe and its apparent absence in the White House — was on people’s minds. When the balance of a life comes down to minutes, it doesn’t take long to see what’s missing.

Michelle Hauser is a freelance writer who lives in Napanee with her husband, Mark, and their son, Joseph. She can be reached at mhauser@hotmail.ca. 

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