Merry Christmas, Dear Readers!
I bring you tidings of great joy!
Our neighbour to the south is about to reach Peak Trump, if it hasn’t occurred already. It’s all downhill for The Donald from there.
From reports that redacted portions of the Epstein files are legible if you highlight, copy and paste, to the news of the president’s plan for a Golden Fleet (golden fleece, more like) led by Trump Class battleships, to the temporary new name of the Kennedy Center make it clear: that flushing sound you hear from the south is more than just a golden toilet.
The prevailing explanation for the unexpectedly legible state of the redacted portion of the Epstein Files is, according to The New York Times, because they were too hastily censored. It’s more likely, it’s said here, that the “error” was deliberate, yet fully compliant with the order to redact all mentions of Donald Trump.
Almost everyone except President Trump understands that battleships are obsolete and why – it costs a hell of a lot less to make ’em than to sink ’em. When it comes to targets, bigger is not always better, in other words. Peak Battleship, by the way, was in 1918.
As for the Kennedy Center, even Mr. Trump’s thickest fanboys are surely starting to see this as evidence that the man’s not quite right in the noggin.
The president’s senility, after all, is on full display. A lot of people have concluded that he’ll have to go if the United States is to survive as the world’s predominant power. So go he will – probably sooner than later, likely discreetly and gently into a quality old folks’ home. He may even be able to continue to believe he’s the president of the United States and has full access to social media.
One certainly hopes so. After all, Mr. Trump still has lots of supporters within the borders of the United States, some of them powerful in their own right, and it would be foolish to rile them up too much, which, for example, an impeachment and conviction would tend to do, let alone something harsher, as happened to another problematic dictator on this day in 1989.
But the state of his dementia is so obvious and unhinged that more Americans by the day become nostalgic for the Deep State – as competent economic, government and military managers have come to be disparaged by the MAGA movement.
Here’s a bet that one way or another Mr. Trump will be out of a job by the start of 2027. If the smart money’s not on that now, it soon will be.
When that happens, some bad things about American will stay the same, but many will seem a lot more normal, no matter who is sitting in what’s left of the half-demolished White House. In the meantime, likely as a result of Mr. Trump’s increasingly obvious incapacity, his MAGA movement itself is beginning to fracture even as his ugly style endures.
But this is a blog about Alberta politics, so the related question we need to be asking is: Has Alberta reached Peak Danielle Smith yet?
Perhaps not. Still, in a few days it will be a New Year, traditionally an opportunity to start fresh on old problems.
The news has not been particularly good of late for Ms. Smith. There was a Christmas Eve story in The Globe and Mail, which readers need to read for themselves given the propensity of some of Premier Smith’s supporters to strategically litigate against unsupportive commentary even when it’s just quoting other media.
Unfortunately, the story headlined “Former AHS board member obtains rare court order, alleging intimidation by podcasters,” is behind a paywall. But readers can be assured that there is a connection to Ms. Smith’s separatist and MAGA government.
Unlike her political hero south of the Medicine Line, Ms. Smith has the advantage of not being senile quite yet, although she’s not certainly the cheerful culture warrior she was not so long ago.
Nevertheless, she still has the ability to make her terrible and often destructive ideas sound sensible – at least as long as she keeps yakking. In Alberta, throughout 2025, almost every day was a master class in gaslighting, and there’s no reason to suspect that is going to change much any time soon.
Nor are we blessed to have an Opposition party that is actually prepared to act like a government in waiting.
There are grounds for hope, just the same. The MAGA movement south of the Medicine Line has been a deep well of bad ideas to inspire Ms. Smith. If Mr. Trump goes soon, so will a lot of the worst ideas we see inspiring the premier and her party.
However, now that Ms. Smith’s libertarian mask has dropped and her authoritarian face is clearly revealed, this won’t change her willingness to defy democratic norms at the drop of the Notwithstanding Clause to get her way.
The Edmonton Journal noted in a Christmas Eve report that Ms. Smith no longer even pretends reluctance to use the Notwithstanding Clause to get her unconstitutional way as she did back in 2022. She’s ready to use it any old time on any old bill that encounters resistance now.
Her eyes remain firmly fixed on what would be the biggest grift in Canadian history – getting control of Albertans’ share of the Canada Pension Plan so she can play Santa Claus for the fossil fuel industry – and she’s willing to risk the future of the country by opening the door to a foreign-funded separatist movement if that’s what it takes to make that happen.
Obviously, Peak Dani can’t come soon enough.