Image: Demonstration in Montreal, October 18, 2025. photo: Frances Boylston

I write as a Canadian with a long relationship with the United States, going back to the late 1960s when I spent a year in Washington. I was fully accepted by my comrades in our 22nd Street NW New Left commune, several of whom remained friends for many years. Nevertheless, I was an outsider simply by virtue of the fact that, as a Canadian, I could not be drafted and sent to Vietnam like Jody Palmour’s brother Evans, who stayed with us over several months, or, like Bob Labaree, put to work cleaning hospitals as alternative service.

Our commune was only a two-minute walk along Connecticut Avenue to Dupont Circle and the Institute for Policy Studies. The IPS had been founded in 1963 by Marcus Raskin and Dick Barnet, progressive intellectuals from the Kennedy administration. Both had come to Washington with hopes of “changing the system,” but after coming up against the reality of high-powered State Department meetings, they concluded that what was missing was a counterinstitution, a place where the “best and the brightest” could “speak truth to power,” drawing inspiration from the actions of our generation on campuses and in the streets.

The year I arrived, Raskin and his IPS colleague Arthur Waskow’s “Call to Resist Illegitimate Authority,” endorsed by dozens of well-known scholars and religious leaders, helped launch the draft resistance movement. A few years later, one of the IPS fellows, Gar Alperovitz, played a key role in the leaking of the Pentagon Papers.

Back in Canada by that time, I was saddened in the following years to observe the liberal sixties and seventies give way to Ronald Reagan and the Tea Party. These developments paralleled my research findings that levels of political knowledge in the United States were consistently below those of comparable countries. Yet nothing prepared me – or foreign observers generally – for Trump.

Trump takes on the world

So now I follow what is going on in the United States even more closely, but I consciously do so from a distance. Like most Canadians, I have no illusions about what is going on in Washington now. Before assessing the prospects for the coming U.S. midterms given the resounding success of Democratic candidates in November’s off-year elections, I place recent developments in a wider context.

Starting early this century, the proportion of democracies compared to autocracies and hybrid regimes declined almost every year. With the many elections that took place in established democracies in 2024, this was especially the case that year. Apparently for the first time, the incumbent party lost vote share in every election – and more often than not, it was far-right parties that benefited.

Election results in 2025 have been more mixed, beginning in Canada, where – as a result of Trump’s threats – the populist right was, unexpectedly, unsuccessful. More ambiguously, something similar has happened in the Netherlands . Overall, the current picture is uncertain: a counterexample is the Czech Republic, which elected populist Andrej Babis president in October.

In Europe, overall, it appears that Trump’s pro-Putin stance, along with threats by his Vice President and his former buddy Elon Musk and Putin’s own declarations, have led to greater cohesion in the EU’s response to Trump, though nothing to compare to Canada’s overwhelming reaction in the form of a reduced market for U.S. products and for travel south of the border. Under the headline “Canadians Made Three Million Fewer Trips to the U.S. During Summer Travel Boycott,” Jason Kirby wrote in the Globe and Mail on September 10,

Canadian travellers held strong to their boycott of travel to the United States right to the end of the summer, blowing a sizable hole in the U.S. tourism sector, the latest numbers from Statistics Canada show.

In August, the number of Canadian residents returning by vehicle from the U.S. plunged 33.9 per cent year-over-year to 1.9 million, while the number of residents returning by air fell 25.4 per cent to 423,000, the agency said.

Taken together across the peak summer travel period of June to August, Canadians made three million fewer trips to the U.S., a 33.1-per-cent year-over-year decline.

In light of what we have seen, it is fair to predict less than happy outcomes for erratic U.S. foreign policy, notably Trump’s gunboats in the south and his irrational tariffs on allies, which have driven them to seek alternate trading partners, starting with China. Canada is a case in point, with Prime Minister Mark Carney having accepted an invitation to visit China extended by President Xi.

November’s off-year election results suggest that Trump is in even more trouble with U.S. voters than previously thought. Much of the discontent is economic: rising prices, fewer new jobs. But it also is affected by Trump’s authoritarian/monarchical proclivities, symbolized by his turning the people’s house on Pennsylvania Avenue into a palace fit for a despot. L’etat, c’est moi. Trump is upset with Canada for not pulling down an Ontario ad about Reagan and free trade sooner? Slap on an extra 10 per cent tariff.

His niece Mary has called him “the only person I’ve ever met who’s never evolved.” It is time to acknowledge that Americans chose to give power to a manchild. A male manchild who, if in a position to do so, becomes a bully. The choice was perhaps understandable the first time (who knew?), but unforgivable the second. A child knows none of the nuances of the grown-up world. There is no sense of humour, no perception that others have feelings, no sense of things evolving over time. Everything is about him. I will dress up like a king and everyone will give me presents. Give it to me because I want it. If you don’t I will hit you.

What the numbers say

G. Elliott Morris (author of the highly recommended Strength In Numbers newsletter), among others, finds that though Trump claims the support of 65 per cent, his real support is not much more than half that number. Trump has the unique problem that he started off a lot lower than other presidents. So as he loses ground – and he has lost ground at about the normal historical clip – he just continues to be worse and worse than every other president before him. Morris reported on September 30,

What I’ve done is combine all 7,000 interviews Verasight has conducted for Strength In Numbers over the last 5 months into one big poll.

33% of U.S. adults who did not vote in the 2024 election currently say they approve of the job Trump is doing as president, versus 59% who say they disapprove.

And on socio-economic status, poorer voters have swung much harder than richer voters against the president …

“Young, Hispanic” is the intersection of two groups that were very sensitive to price increases during Joe Biden’s term, but were not necessarily super conservative or on board with Trump’s policy agenda. Here, I mean especially tariffs and mass deportations, which are also both inflationary and highly visible to young people and Hispanics …

Trump’s net approval among young people (18–29) in our survey data is -38 today, which is about ~35 points lower than his estimated vote margin among the group in 2024 … There are a lot of Trump voters out there who regret their choice in 2024. In our polling data, just 82% of Trump’s 2024 voters approve of the job he’s doing as president today (plus 33% of non-voters and 3% of Harris voters). For comparison, 95% of Harris voters (plus 59% of non-voters and 15% of Trump voters) disapprove of his presidency.

And here are some numbers from “Perceptions of Trump and Democratic commitments to personal freedoms, free elections and a fair criminal justice system,” a Washington Post–ABC News–Ipsos poll of U.S. adults conducted between October 24 and 28 (the poll has an error margin of +/- 2.8 percentage points). Respondents were asked whether Trump is or is not committed to each of a list of issues, and whether the Democrats are or are not committed to the same issues. Only on “Protecting freedom to own firearms” did Trump come out ahead. The Democrats came out well ahead on the rest, sharing the position of voters on key issues much more than Trump does:

• Free and fair elections: 8.5 per cent lead for Democrats
• A fair criminal justice system: 6 per cent lead for Democrats
• Protecting freedom of speech: 11.5 per cent lead for Democrats
• Protecting freedom of the press: 17 per cent lead for Democrats
• Protecting freedom of religion: 3.5 per cent lead for Democrats.

And now the midterms?

Some are asking whether Trump will even allow the midterms to take place, if he expects to lose the House and perhaps the Senate as well. And under what conditions? Pundits are asking what Trump will do faced with the prospect of having to deal with a Congress run by his opponents: will Trump allow the election to go ahead, or act to try to create justification for cancelling it? As I write, he is building up resources for a military intervention in Venezuela, as if he cared in the slightest about the people of Venezuela – or anywhere else. Can it be that he is warmongering to justify putting off the midterms if he is sure to lose?

As I have argued in Inroads and elsewhere, America’s decentralized pure two-party system is dysfunctional in many ways. In this case, however, the fact that even national elections are run by the states may prove to be its saving grace.

Stay tuned.