The view of an octogenarian Canadian looking south over the border…. January 25, 2025

 A Facebook message with the question: ‘Do you agree that Trump has effectively staged a ‘political coup’ in the United States?’ evokes this response from Ian Bremmer of Gzero, ‘Hi, no I don’t.’

I wonder about the difference in perception between an American geopolitical scholar, researcher, executive and prophetic voice in international affairs (Bremner) and this octogenarian Canadian English teacher, free-lance journalist, clergy….the short answer to the difference is ‘Bremner knows’ and this scribe ‘doesn’t’!

As I posed the question, I have been moving toward the word ‘coup’ for several years, as I surveyed the various public, political, scholarly and ethical/legal responses on both news and social media platforms. The phrase, ‘the whole is greater than the sum of the parts’ rumbles through the corridors of this cranium, not in derision of the many accurate, detailed, specific and literal reports of the Trump decade. The obvious, indisputable, intractable and also deflected and disavowed plethora of injustices, abrogation of laws, defiance of human rights, commandeering and seducing of loyalists from the Republican establishment to the Proud Boys, the Oak Boys and the succumbing of highly respected, credentialed and legitimate voices on cable news, not to mention the complete ‘take-over’ of Fox whatever it is, all of it covered over in a highly toxic, sugar-coated veneer or sauce of deception, propaganda, seduction and manipulation paints a picture that, for this non-scholar, of an intended political and gestating political coup. Britannica defines a coup d’etat this way:

a sudden, violent overthrow of an existing government by a small group. The chief prerequisite for a coup is control of all or part of the armed forces, the police, and other military elements. Unlike a revolution which is usually achieved by large  numbers of people working for basic social, economic and political change, a coup is a change in power from the top that merely results in the abrupt replacement of leading government personnel. A coup rarely alters a nation’s fundamental social and economic policies, nor does it significantly redistribute power among competing political groups.

Hybrids are a sign of the times, in cars, and perhaps in government take-overs. Hybrids conventionally bring together different traits, or features to generate a model of Hegel’s synthesis (out of thesis, anti-thesis)…examples such as gas/electric, and genetic hybrids such as hinny, a cross between a female donkey and a male horse. Paradoxically, in the U.S. at least viewed from a perch on the 49^th parallel, on the north shore of the St. Lawrence, a hybrid (coup/revolution) has evoked a contrarian ‘rush to the edges of the extremes. Perhaps, (read, it surely might be!), we have lost the intellectual capacity or willingness in our public discourse and debate, to recognize, respect and accept perceptions that embrace paradox, irony, and metaphor. Locked as we are in a literal, empirical, scientific universe of binary opposites, Trump’s cult (coup?) may have bested the American electorate on our own petard….blindness to a complex, complicated even irreconcilable juxtaposition of opposites. It is just such an ever-spiraling, unpredictable, green-broke horse that has taken over the pasture, not merely a fox in the hen-house.

Literalisms, legalisms, medical diagnoses, and empirical data are not either amenable to imaginative metaphors, nor do they embrace what James Hillman dubs a ‘soul history’ as compared with a ‘case history.’ The case history details the events, degrees, marriages, divorces, titles, awards, rewards etc. of the individual. When applied to a nation, a similar catalogue spills over into the annals of the history books and the nationalists’ ceremonies of celebration, remembrance and honouring. A soul focuses on the inner/interior/emotional/shame-filled/crisis moments of that chronological history. As applied to a nation, it identifies the most difficult and painful, pivotal perhaps unresolved episodes of the soul of the nation. And while it may differ from a case history, it is not necessarily completely different from it.

Politicians have always coloured the facts with their ‘spin’ on them. Serious divisive and even irreconcilable and perhaps existential crises, including the many interpretations and iterations that observers, both professional and lay, have cast over those ‘soul’ moments, help to tease out some of the more penetrating and indelible and inescapable, if hidden or unconscious, or denied or even defied truths of that soul. A nation that has succumbed to the ‘salesmanship’ (or as Donny Deutsch puts it, ‘marketing’) template as the method of achieving whatever it considers success, stands inevitably to see that template triumph in that history.

Hillman’s The Soul’s Code, (p.225) contains these words penned in 1996:

Our republic should learn this lesson from Hitler, for we might one day vote into power a hero who wins a giant TV trivia contest and educated our children to believe the information Superhighway is the road to knowledge. If one clue to psychopathy is a trivial mind expressing itself in high-sounding phrases, then an education emphasizing facts rather than thinking, and patriotic, politically or religiously correct ‘values’ rather than critical judgement may produce a nation of achieving high school graduates who are also psychopaths.

Psychiatric Times says this about psychopathy:

(It) is characterized by diagnostic features such as superficial charm, high intelligence, poor judgement and failure to learn from experience, pathological egocentricity and incapacity for love, lack of remorse, or shame, impulsivity, grandiose sense of self-worth, pathological lying, manipulative behavior, poor self-control, promiscuous sexual behavior, juvenile delinquency, and criminal versatility, among others. As a consequence of these criteria, the image of the psychopath is that of a cold, heartless, inhuman being…Like healthy people, many psychopaths love their parents, spouse children and pets in their own way, but they have difficulty in loving and trusting the rest of the world. Furthermore psychopaths suffer emotionally as a consequence of separation, divorce, death of a beloved person or dissatisfaction with their own deviant behavior.

And while I despise throwing around psychiatric diagnoses as if to say we all have the credentials, training and privilege of using those labels, and their complexity is rarely contained in their vernacular use, it might be appropriate to borrow from one observer:

Lloyd Farrel (on, Facebook Group Posts under the title, James Hillman-Archetypal Psychology) writes:

The successful psychopath pleases the crowd and wins elections. The thick glass of the TV tube and its chameleon-like versatility in displaying whatever is wanted favors distance, coldness, and the front of charm, as do many of the sleek accoutrements of high station in the political, legal, religious and corporate structures. Anyone who rises in a world that worships success should be suspect, for this is an age of psychopathy. The psychopath today no longer slinks like a dirty rat through the dark alleys of black-and-white 1930’s crime films, but parades through the boulevards in a bullet-proof limo on state visits, runs entire nations, and sends delegates to the U.N.

Neither a coup nor a revolution, in the traditional terms, perhaps. Nevertheless, in a world metaphorically dystopian, disorienting and dangerous, in so many ways, we might want to listen to Michael Wolff, from two occasions. First, from 1918, as part of a School of Public Policy & Governance public event at the University of Toronto. Quoting Noreen Ahmed-Ullah, U of T News, on March 9, 2018:

Speaking to a packed crowd at Convocation Hall, Wolff recalled a moment when Donald Trump was still on the campaign trail. ‘I asked him, what’s your goal here?’ Wolff said. ‘He said in a very straightforward way, to be the most famous man on Earth.’  

Wolff appearing on the BBC shortly after the inauguration in 2025, in a memorable and insightful moment, said, ‘We have to be much more imaginative when looking at President Trump!’

Imagination, however, to a schooled reporter, is anathema to the work, Accuracy, verifiability, and second-and-third-sourced and validated facts are the stuff of the reporter’s oxygen. The image of accuracy and timeliness flows in his or her veins. From a little distance, we may be getting lost in the literal, empirical technical, verifiable details of hourly, if not instantly recorded X-quips, while the “X-quipper” skips merrily along laughing at us in our blind, yet honorable and ethical diligence of fact-checking, word-parsing, and political and professional anxiety of the most self-sabotaging sort.

Governments (especially Canada, Mexico, Greenland, Panama for now) and corporations, mayors, and even foreign governments like those in the U.K. and in Germany are fending off slanderous insults from the most high-profile Trump marionette (Musk) as the knights of the psychopathic ‘round table continue to wreak havoc with our individual and our collective lives.

Are we becoming impaled on the horns of our own determination to look down the telescope backwards?