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There are the usual fussings about confirmation processes — it is all atonal whistling past the graveyard which is about to receive for interment the much discussed legacy of the Obushtons — Obamas, Bushes, Clintons. Donald Trump is right to call his narrow and numerically minority victory a “landslide.” He ran against all the Republicans and all the Democrats, the hackneyed Bush-McCain-Romney also-rans, the Cruz loopy-right, the Clinton-Obama incumbency, and the Sanders left, almost all the Washington media and almost all the polls, and the entire pay-to-play casino of lobbyists in the great Washington sleaze factory. He stormed Babylon and put them all to fire and sword. There were stylistic lapses in the campaign to be sure, but they were almost all designed to pull out the Archie Bunker votes and win Trump the Republican nomination with the votes of millions of people who had not been in the habit of voting. Since the nomination, there were relatively few gaucheries, and since the election almost none.

Taxes, spending, education, environment, campaign finance reform, health care, trade, and immigration are all about to receive as swingeing a stroke as Franklin D. Roosevelt gave the economy in 1933, and Trump has the mandate and the congressional majorities to do it. And the Democrats are still grumbling about Russian influence in the election and the electoral college system, mindless of their fate as Trump drives a mighty bulldozer toward them at 60 miles per hour. And in Canada, in the same spirit as the CBC radio panel that two weeks ago felt Canada was necessary to advise him that not all of the world’s 1.4 billion Muslims were at war with America, this week we had Lawrence Martin advise Brian Mulroney to “rein in” Trump, “protectionist, jingoistic, boorish, heapingly erratic” as he is. There is no dispute about Brian Mulroney’s diplomatic skills in dealing with the American presidents he’s known, and other world leaders, but he performed those feats as prime minister of a country that pulled its weight in the Western Alliance and contributed importantly to the satisfactory end of the Cold War.