Not even Europe's tumult can distract from what's happening in Trump's America

But the laurels for the most amazing political spectacles mounted by an important country are not to be wrested from the United States that easily. The debacle of health-care reform has shamed almost the whole political class and has opened up for all to see the stark dysfunctionalism of the American system. The president did not lead effectively, never showed a thorough grasp of the complex issues, and has been partially off balance throughout his term because of the obsessive mudslinging of the Democrats and most of the media, especially over the monstrous canard of collusion with the Russians in the last election. There is not a shred of evidence to support any of it, and the Bushes, Clintons, and Obamas have gone, but the rest of the swamp-life Trump assaulted abides. The desperate struggle with the Democratic and many of the Republican legislators and 80 per cent of the traditional national media continues.

The conduct of the Republican senators and congressmen, who screamed from the roof-tops for seven years that they would repeal Obamacare, is sickening. Obama vastly expanded Medicaid (medical care for people of modest means), and the Republicans choked in the clutch, having neither the political will to roll it back and properly reform the system, nor the courage to impose the revenue collection necessary to pay for it. The Democrats and their jackal media just continued to fabricate malicious bunk about Trump and the Russians (Obama caved everywhere to Russia: Ukraine, Syria, missile defence; Trump hasn’t). The United States is strung out between the single-payer health-care system Obama wanted, but which Americans don’t want, and an elusive alternative that improves health care for low income people, without strangling private medicine and making doctors de facto state employees. No one in the U.S. wants to emulate the Canadian system, which remains a sacred cow in this country, but most Americans are dissatisfied with the very uneven and expensive health-care system they have now, including Obamacare’s coercion and rigidity.