It may now join the propositions of Euclid, as impregnable to rebuttal, that Donald Trump or any news that alludes to him, unhinges the minds of those who oppose him. Trump, in this respect, is like global warming. He is the universal key to every phenomenon. Any statement about Trump, so long as it is in any way condemnatory, dismissive, insulting or condescending, requires neither proof, consistency, logic or (and especially) decency.

Just as enlisting in the grand cause of global warming invests the recruit with the immeasurable gifts of infallibility, moral superiority and boundless righteousness, so too does opposition, even to hatred, of Trump free the mind from all obligation to moderation, custom, or articulate argument. It is the ultimate pass to be as nasty and crude as anyone could wish, and — with rarely noted irony — even to be more nasty and crude than the great boorish Trump himself. How odd: to oppose Trump is to become a more clangorous version of him. 

As a corollary to the axiom, the greatest Trump-a-phobes also assign themselves the power to label anyone inconvenient to their view of the world as Trump-like, any opponent as Trumpian. Poor President Trump has become such a convenient touchstone that merely to drop his name while savaging an antagonist — under the cranium of any incensed Trump-a-phobe — is to close the sale, end the argument, and consign the victim to the red-hot hell of pariahdom.

The dark halo of Trumpism gets painted over many an innocent head. One minute it is, of all people, Andrew Sheer who is adopting Trump-like tactics. Pause a moment. If Andrew Scheer is Donald Trump, I am Hulk Hogan. In Ontario, the freshly invested premier, Doug Ford, is also Donald Trump. He’s really Donald Trump. For is not Doug Ford that most contemptible of practicing politicians, a dreaded populist? ( Swiftly — “weave a circle round him thrice.”)

I reach for the fat, full, multi-volume Oxford English Dictionary to plumb the meaning of this vile Trump trope. I find on its Delphic leaves: “populist — one who seeks to represent the views of the mass of ordinary people.”

Very, very rarely in the elegant forum of the National Post that all know and love as Full Comment do I dip into the demotic mode, but this is such a moment. “Doug Ford, you are a heartless bastard. Representing the mass of ordinary people — you fiendish tribune.” His brother — the late, dear, troubled, lovely Rob (peace be to his shade) — was even worse. He actually (shudder) liked them as well.

Now it is one thing to be called a Trump wannabe. It is quite another to actually work for Mr. Trump. Sarah Huckabee Sanders, an articulate, tough, poised woman, is his press secretary, who with seven of her friends went far out of Washington to have supper at a restaurant, The Red Hen. Two minutes after placing the order, the zealous owner, Stephanie Wilkinson, asked/told Sanders to leave. (No free-range chickens for you!) The obliging, polite, still esurient Sanders did, without demur or protest.

The locust swarm of anti-Trumpers soon hit the high clouds of Twitter to cheer Wilkinson’s “resistance.” She was the Bonhoeffer of Today’s Specials. Those who spoke a word or two in Sarah Sanders’ favour were mauled mercilessly. An enlightened mind which sparkles under our very own Canadian skies, an academic no less, if political science can be said to partake in that category, enlarged the Twitter mindscape with this aperçu: “It’s 1934 and pundits are complaining that a restaurant refused to serve Goebbels.” (He neglected to send out a warning to Poland though.)

Sarah Huckabee Sanders — Goebbels?! Back to the Euclid formula that introduced this aria. It is a chief glory of being “anti-Trump” that having adopted that position as a surrogate for thought, one is, by equally demented analogy, free to write and say the first ripe idiocy that springs to mind, however crude and misplaced.

Now I know I do not need to explicate this further, but in case there’s a cat of unambitious intellect in your household, I will offer this primer.

Trump is Hitler, see? And so, by ever so witty extension, those who work for him are variously Himmler, Goering, Hess, Mengele, Heydrich etc … all down the infamously barbarous, genocidal line. Is your cat following this? And so, by logical extension, Sanders being Mr. Trump’s press person, from the acute mind of a Twitter sage comes the bell-ringer: Sarah Huckabee Sanders is Joseph Goebbels. QED, as they say in all the better thought-cocoons these days.

And so it goes. Even the 20-million-a picture-boys, mainstays of the sexual cesspool of high Hollywood, “secret-sharers” of all its many depravities and predations, who for years rubbed shoulders and god knows what else with Harvey Weinstein or shared the table and god knows what else with Charlie Rose, are liberated to declaim against The Donald. It cleanses them … “Come now ….Though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they be red like crimson, they shall be as wool.”

F–k Trump” cried braveheart Robert De Niro to a roomful of dim bulbs and radiant egos at the Tony Awards. Two days later this St. Paul of the red carpet travelled to Yorkville, Toronto, another Warsaw of Trump “resistance,” to bleat again “F–k Trump” — to the applause of nearly everyone from the mount of Forest Hill to the pleasant valley of Rosedale (there is, the exception, the formidable Lord Black, also of these esteemed pages) who flee the fierce Toronto winters (before NATO is summoned to polish Bloor Street) for Palm Springs.

Do you hate and despise Trump? Why then, you are virtue itself and a vessel of perfect probity. When the day comes, and the greeting at the Gate is done, the following dialogue will ensue:

St. Peter: “Were you against Trump and all his works and pomps? Did you call him Hitler?”

Red Hen devotee: “Yes, I was. Yes, I did.”

St. Peter: “Will that be one harp, or two?” (with thanks to Ambrose Bierce. RM)