Of the leaders of the world’s important countries, only Trump and France’s Emmanuel Macron in the West, and Shinzo Abe in Japan (in lockstep with the U.S. out of fear of North Korea, as America’s allies customarily are when they are frightened by anything) are rather purposeful. Germany and Britain are dithering and there is some danger of the disintegration of the governing coalitions; Italy is politically in shambles even by its unusual standards, and the electoral jury has begun its deliberations about Justin Trudeau. Trump will get no credit from his “allies” and other foreigners for doing it, but he has saved us from the self-impoverishing insanity of the Paris Climate accord chimera, and an unholy coalition of old-time Greenpeace-type conservationists with Marxist wolves in sheep’s clothing like Naomi Klein. He has bullied and enticed the North Korean leader (Kim Jong Un) into contemplating whether he wants respectability, prosperity and security, or the U.S. Navy to smash his military sites, including everything relevant to his nuclear military program. Despite the cavils of the Trumpophobes, including formerly serious political publications like the now unrelievedly slipshod Economist of London, and despite his liberties with the truth, President Trump has amassed the most faithful record of modern American presidents in doing what he promised to do. His record is impressive, even if his public utterances sometimes are not: tax cuts, deregulation, surging economic growth, reducing oil imports, and a foreign policy that is assertive but not reckless. Apart from my friend Adrienne Batra, editor of the Toronto Sun, and some of my readers, I appear to be practically the only person in Canada who recognizes that.

I commend to skeptical Canadians the comments in a recent London interview of the greatest foreign minister of any Great Power in the 20th century, Henry Kissinger. He said that President Trump “is a phenomenon that foreign countries haven’t seen before … Liberals and all those who favour (Hillary) Clinton will never admit that he is … a true leader … After eight years of tyranny (of declinists and willful fantasy), … every country now has to consider two things: One, their perception that the previous president, or the outgoing president, basically withdrew America from international politics, so that they had to make their own assessments of their necessities. And secondly, that there is a new president who’s asking a lot of unfamiliar questions. And because of the combination of the partial vacuum and the new questions, one could imagine that something remarkable and new emerges out of it … Trump puts America and its people first … When he boasts that he has a ‘bigger red button’ than Kim Jung Un does, he transcends the mealy-mouthed rhetoric of the past, thereby forcing a new recognition of American power.”