Larry Wilson: How in the world to talk about Trump

Traveling outside the U.S., it used to be enough to disassociate yourself from the danger to the world posed by Donald Trump by saying you’re from California.

Now, as he sows chaos that will upset generations of international order, the American embarrassment is too profound for that. You can proudly claim your home state, but you still come from the country that twice elected a Caesarian tyrant, and there’s no hiding from that. Who does the world imagine we will elect next? If the answer is the acolyte JD Vance, that’s very cold comfort for the nation and the globe.

Embarrassment isn’t the worst thing. Living unembarrassed ranks below shelter, food, family, friends, love. And traveling is a privilege, one that I’ve been lucky enough to pursue in the half-century since I graduated college and headed to Europe with a backpack for five months, on the very cheap, before coming home to create a career and a real life.

Now, summers, I get to stay in real hotels, instead of under bridges or on beaches or in youth hostels.

What to say to the people encountered in restaurants and bars? Sorry? In the 1970s, during the Vietnam war, American kids in Europe used to put Canadian flags on their knapsacks when hitchhiking to increase the likelihood of being picked up.

Canada’s a nice option.

Prime Minister Mark Carney was speaking truth to power when he said last week: “The world has changed, Washington has changed. There is almost nothing normal now in the United States. That is the truth.”

In Davos, he told the other, perfectly normal leaders of the world that the manic insanity of the president of the United States means that they have to accept the fact that we have reached the end of the rules-based global order that our nation once championed. He got a standing ovation, which the assembled business and political bigwigs almost never give to anyone at the annual meeting. Well, bully for him, and them. The ovation drove Trump nuts. And meanwhile, we are stuck with him, for three more years of awful folly.

It’s too overwhelming, the totality of the ways in which the current president has destroyed our place in the world in a long-short single year. Threatening to take Greenland, to make our northern neighbor the 51st state, to take military action against our southern neighbor, to take the Panama Canal.