At the time of this writing, the ballots in the US presidential election are still being counted. But early this morning, incumbent President Donald Trump had already falsely declared premature victory. On Wednesday afternoon, the White House claimed (again, falsely and prematurely) that Trump had won Pennsylvania, a race still too close to call.

Trump has vowed to challenge the results of the election (which he still may have won) in the Supreme Court. It’s the first steps in an attempted coup that experts have been predicting for days.

The Uniter has been warning about the local, Canadian and global repercussions of the fascist Trump movement since the president’s inauguration. In the nearly four years since, the president has defended the organizers of deadly Nazi rallies, enacted family separation and forced sterilization at ICE detention centres, stacked the Supreme Court with ultraconservative, unqualified judges and caused the deaths of 239,000 Americans through his willful mismanagement of the COVID-19 pandemic.

But on our side of the border, we’ve been feeling the Trump-like ripples in the water since day one, when local hate crimes surged in the weeks after Trump’s election. Since then, we’ve seen establishment right-wing political parties, media outlets and think-tanks adopting the far-right rhetoric and policies Trump has normalized.

We’ve seen it in our own provincial government’s Trump-like response to COVID-19, which has led to a massive spike in new local cases and deaths. We saw it when Premier Brian Pallister refused to attend a Justice4BlackLives rally by repeating the “all lives matter” dog whistle. We saw it with climate-denying right-wing think-tank the Frontier Centre for Public Policy employing the British neo-Nazi Jack Buckby. We’re seeing it right now in Nova Scotia, where racist commercial fishermen have violently attacked Indigenous fishers while the RCMP stood by.

Don't get on your high horses. I don’t want to hear another “at least it’s better here than in the States.” We’re not far off.

Published in Volume 75, Number 08 of The Uniter (November 5, 2020)