Our friends across the border woke up Wednesday morning to a new President. And depending upon your own circle of friends and acquaintances, that’s either a good thing or a bad thing.
There’s no getting around the fact that the new President of the United States is likely to have a lasting impact on not only his country, but his closest neighbours. How deeply that impact will be north of the 49th Parallel, remains to be seen.
It’s certainly hard to gauge whether anything Donald Trump said during the run up to Tuesday’s election will come to pass or simply be chalked up to campaign rhetoric.
And there was plenty of campaign rhetoric. We won’t get into it here — everything Trump said was blasted loudly across the U.S. and Canada as many of us sat glued to our TVs, computers or phones, trying to make heads or tails of what appeared to be a great deal of bombast and no real platform creation.
Despite that, his supporters ate it up. The question is, what were they eating? Was it the crunchy outer shell of a hot air biscuit or were they sinking their choppers into the makings of actual domestic and foreign policies? With the election over, the scrambling to form an actual government now takes place. Hopefully those running that country use more than bombast and fabrications as the basis for four years in the White House.
It’s easy to argue that Trump and Hilary Clinton played the rhetoric cards during this campaign — it’s what politicians do. Yes, even so-called anti-politicians like Trump claimed to be. But he shouldn’t have fooled anyone with his anti-establishment line. He played all the old tricks — more often and openly — and did it in a time when more people get their news and opinions from sources that tend to reinforce their own ideas, rather than challenge or expand their knowledge and understanding. Perhaps this is something that traditional journalism and election polling has failed to fully grasp.
Still, the sun came up Wednesday morning. And no matter who the President is, there’s an entire country to serve — and that includes those people who voted for the other person.
