Dystopia alert: it’s here — tell it like it is.

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 20/03/2025 (232 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The CBC radio commentator over the weekend chirped optimistically of the latest presidential perfidy, “Well, (U.S. President Donald) Trump won’t be around in four years, so…”

So, presumably, all will return to normal after that.

Well, it won’t.

We need to acknowledge the fact: the world has entered an unprecedented, unparalleled period in which a hugely important and influential nation has embraced an irreversible fascistic totalitarianism, and is about to do its level best to impose the consequences of that choice on the entire planet.

The grand American experiment has, within three months of his ascension, proved itself utterly incapable of controlling Trump. Their mainstream media, with the exception of MSNBC, a hint of rebellion over the American economy from the Wall Street Journal, and a few minor, determined, scrappy online sites, has lapsed into either unquestioning state-controlled propaganda or slackjawed amazement.

CNN now parades Republican politicians before the cameras where anchors lob gentle softball questions with no follow-ups or real-time fact-checks. “That’s a lie,” “that’s not true,” “that’s wrong,” are phrases you no longer routinely hear from Jake Tapper, Kaitlin Collins or Anderson Cooper, who will almost certainly have taken astute note of the fact that CNN anchors daring to confront the lies have been scrubbed from their jobs.

Yes, Rachel Maddow and Lawrence O’Donnell on MSNBC nightly shriek out fury over that day’s obscenities, as do their fellow non-prime-time commentators. The Guardian newspaper in the U.K. soldiers on daily, dripping solitary integrity, with thorough reporting and thought-through opinion. Reuters stolidly plods forward, painstakingly accurate. But they are largely alone.

Our Canadian mainstream media is little better. After all, he’ll be gone in four years. For now, we can focus on stories about personal tariff tribulations individual Canadians are experiencing, and covering the federal election in the usual who’s-gonna-win-the-horse-race fashion, soft-pedalling or ignoring the clear parallels between Pierre Poilievre’s take-no-factual-prisoners approach to campaigning (and presumably governing) and Trump’s insane, routine, spouting geyser of lies.

And who is left to stop him? The courts? He mocks and ignores their rulings. The judicial system? He owns it. The military, should it come to that? He owns that, too. And it’s a given that he owns Congress, the Senate, and the Supreme Court.

America, and to large extent, the rest of the world, still clings to the desperate fiction that this is all a temporary aberration. The Democrats are spinning their wheels, unable to wrap their heads around how to put a stop to the rapid, unscheduled, explosive disassembly of the American dream that’s happening before their eyes.

Mind you, there may not be a way to do that.

The Republicans are terrified of the monster they’ve unleashed, praying individually to stay under his retributive radar and hoping to grab at minor morsels of the power he’s accruing daily.

Trump will be around in four years, unless a cheeseburger-induced fatal heart attack takes him out, in which case Vice-President JD Vance is, scarily, an even worse prospect: a Trump clone (wearing eyeliner instead of orange bronzer) with actual intelligent cunning.

Midterm elections? If he doesn’t like the results, he’ll declare them invalid. That’s if he allows them to be held. A next term? Why run? Why not just declare himself president for life? Who’s gonna stop him? These thoughts are almost certainly rumbling around in the dark recesses of the commentators’ and politicians’ brains.

Giving voice to them, though, might make them real, so we frantically scramble to maintain a facade of normality, while the tsunami of insanity bears down on us.

But the media, both Canadian and American, need to grapple, as noisily as possible, with the unassailable facts. And they need to do it now. Right now. Maybe, just maybe, the media can awaken the comatose American public.

There is no time left. While commentators carefully and “objectively” report court challenges, mass firings, deportations, and wholesale raping of entire government agencies, the mess has already revealed its final shape; a petty, tinpot dictatorship run by a man either senile, demented — or both — with dreams of world grandeur.

He will take Greenland, Panama, and Canada, if he is not stopped militarily by an expanded NATO umbrella.

Or if he is not stopped by Americans themselves sparking civil war. But too many Americans are at this point, too ignorant, soft and self-absorbed to inconvenience themselves. The Democrats’ approval level has tanked: fewer than 30 per cent of voters view them favourably.

Trump’s approval rating is as high as it ever was in his first term, at 47 per cent. Though 51 per cent don’t approve of him, 44 per cent still think the country is on the right track.

On the right track?

To repeat: there. Is. No. Time. Left.

Judy Waytiuk is a retired Winnipeg journalist, and remains a news junkie. She is appalled by what she’s seeing now.