Whimocracy Is No Way to Govern a Great Nation, or: Why I Am Moving to Canada
Donald Trump is what is called in governmental and military circles “a clear and present danger.” Tragically, half the American population and slightly more than half the Members of Congress do not act as though they realize this. If the elected Democrats in Congress were more gifted at persuasion, they would have convinced at least four non-MAGA traditional Republican Senators and four such House members that the President has turned America into a virtual autocracy in less than nine months. It is to our future sorrow that half the Members of Congress and millions of other American have not yet perceived that astonishing reality.
Many jurists on lower-level federal courts have done their best to alert the American electorate to the president’s dangerous unpredictability, but our head-of-state has a majority of 6-3 justices on the Supreme Court to bow to his bidding on most issues most of the time. Three of the nine he named to the SCOTUS himself in his first term, the only president in 250 years to have had that unusual opportunity and debatable distinction. However, one of the three became a Supreme courtesy of Mitch McConnell, who perhaps has painfully rued his brazen holdover ever since January 20.
Mr. Trump’s first term was deleterious but not disastrous. Nonetheless, from the January 20 until now, the president has done everything in his perverted power to move toward the totalitarian dictatorship he so clearly intends to create. He did not end the war in Ukraine in one day as he promised to do, but he immediately did pardon all of the nearly thousand people who were rightly convicted of crimes in the January 6 attack on the US capital in 2021. Since then, he has flagrantly issued well over two hundred executive orders that have completely overturned laws and political customs that have evolved over the past two and a half centuries.
In his third campaign for the presidency, Trump assured the American people they would not need to vote in 2028. It was an obvious implication that there would be no election in 2028, but few who opposed the president seemed to take that claim at face value. He was being honest in what he said, although it is obvious that honesty has never been his best policy. He and his oligarchic friends will provide enough money to Republican candidates in House and Senate swing districts and states to insure an even more pliable Republican Congress in 2026. He recently blandly declared that many Americans prefer a dictatorship, slyly hinting that he is in the process of giving them what they seem to want: a full-blown fascist autocracy.
Donald Trump is an extremely gifted and determined political novice for a man who held no political office prior to being elected to the presidency of the most powerful nation in the history of this planet. That is not an advisable shortcoming for any president other than the highest-ranking military officers, who for a lifetime at least have been fully engaged in high-stakes politics of a very different sort. Having a president with no political experience is like having a surgeon with no medical degree and no experience in surgery. Both types of persons may have the best of intentions, but their results are almost certain to be calamitous, both to themselves and to everyone whose welfare they are trying to protect.
A major reason for Trump’s overwhelming success in office is not that he was the CEO of a major real estate corporation that his father built, nor that being the CEO of a large company is a sufficient apprenticeship for someone to become the ostensible CEO of the USA. Rather it is that the Democratic Party and anti-Trump Americans have consistently thought him to be too much of a stupefied bumbler. He is anything but an inept man in the most powerful political office in the world. He is operating as the American head-of-state as has no one else in American history, including both Roosevelts, General Washington, and Messrs. Jefferson, General Jackson, Lincoln, and Reagan, none of whom would be considered presidential slouches.
On the other hand, neither is Trump the heaven-sent messiah millions of his followers imagine him to be, nor is he fundamentally a genuinely admirable or trustworthy president. He is Public Enemy No. One, although far too few Americans appear to have even an idle inkling of that thorny fact. Half of the American public seem to believe that the man can do no wrong, and the other half suppose that as bad as he is, he is not truly a cataclysmic threat. But he is the greatest internal threat to democracy the USA has ever encountered. As long as he lives, he always will be a totally unpredictable danger.
Our president is a mentally-ill liar. He is a sociopathic narcissist. You could look up the definition of a narcissist in the Diagnostic and Symptomatic Manual of Mental Disorders, (DMS), the very thick book that lengthily defines every mental illness known to the human race, Donald Trump is completely incapable of moderating his whims, decisions, ideas, or impulses. Either the president was born that way, or the environment of his silver-spoon youth turned him into a sociopath. In any event, he is mentally and psychologically unable to govern who he is and what he does, let alone to govern a complex and difficult-to-lead nation.
The president might be convinced to lighten up by his advisors on certain matters, but he cannot control himself by himself. That is an immensely sad condition and burden in which any humans might find themselves, but it frequently is beyond themselves to moderate themselves. Even more sadly, the American citizenry and especially our Congress and courts are supinely allowing the president to do almost everything his unhappily twisted heart desires.
When Charlie Kirk was shot, Trump’s first response was to castigate the “Radical Left.” Is that the pot calling the kettle black, or what? Who, specifically, are the Radical Left? In the President’s mind, they seem to be anyone to his “political left,” of whom there are countless millions of Americans.
Despite all of the above, and despite the mental state that was thrust on him by nature and not by his choosing, President Trump has made several important and noteworthy decisions on behalf of his fellow citizens.
The first Big Beautiful Thing he may have chosen to accomplish in his second term as chief executive is eventually to order the extinction of the Lincoln penny. He is not doing that because he is trying to save copper or because it has Lincoln’s head imprinted on one side and the Lincoln Memorial on the other, and it makes him feel inferior. I assume he made that early decision because it is a penny. After many years of inflation, it makes no sense to have a one-cent coin anymore.
While he is at it, he might order the dollar to be sensibly devalued, so that ten dollars becomes one dollar. The French wisely made a similar political and economic gamble many years ago. When our national debt rose to a trillion dollars under President Reagan forty years ago, now it is certainly time to lower it from $37,000,000,000,000 (thirty-seven-trillion dollars) to $37,000,000,000 [thirty-seven-billion dollars]). Whatever is the value of the dollar, it is too mind-bending for most Americans to get very exercised over a thirty-seven-trillion-dollar national debt. Billions we can grasp, sort of; trillions are far beyond our ken, unless we are billionaires.
A very few of the items in the Big Beautiful Bill were good, such as shrinking some obvious examples of government waste. Still, most of Elon Musk’s recommendations were anathematic surgical strikes that cut into the heart of the first democracy in the world to last two and a half centuries under one-fatally flawed Constitution. It is astonishing that we lasted as long as we did with a foundational document which has badly needed to be amended in many sections, but has succeeded in goning through that herculean process only 27 times in the 238 years since the Constitution was adopted in 1787. Unfortunately, the Founding Fathers intentionally made it exceptionally challenging to amend their hard-won handiwork. It just goes to show that nobody’s perfect.
Convincing NATO countries to raise their ante to combat Russia (and perhaps China, North Korea, and Iran as well) was no small feat for Mr. Trump. He is to be commended for coercing recalcitrant NATO signatories from doing what they should have been doing for the past 74 years.
The president has accomplished some other worthy things, but you are not to imagine this is an even-handed summary of the Trump second term, because it isn’t. Mr. Trump is still Public Enemy No. One, even if too few of the public recognize it. Never in his whim-driven narcissistic mind did he intend to be that, but he IS that all the same.
The whimsical nature of the Trump presidency is perhaps the most damaging aspect of his attitude toward governance. He flits from one bizarre choice to another at lightning speed, turning his actions into a frenzied chaos of unvetted personal preferences. For example, changing the title of the Department of Defense into the Department of War potentially sends a strong warning to every American city or state or any nation on earth; might they be his next target?
In his thinking, the Gulf of Mexico should be re-named the Gulf of America, reversing five centuries of history. He directs ICE agents to stop anyone whom they think might be a foreigner to learn whether they have proper citizenship documentation. He sends Republican states’ National Guardsmen into cities that are governed by Democratic mayors, ostensibly “to fight crime,” usually without seeking approval for their deployment. A boat he suspects is carrying drugs after it has been turned back with a warning from our military is nonetheless blown out of the water at his command, killing its civilian passengers, who may or may not have carrying drugs. Tariffs for scores of nations are determined at the whim of the sole tariff designator.
Whimocracy inevitably undermines rational planning. We have surrendered carefully crafted policies to the erratic predilections of an unpredictable political neophyte, and he often upends the Constitution with his unplanned and unpredictable whims. We are in a huge crisis, but as citizens we are for too unconcerned and apathetic.
Why I Am Moving to Canada
Short of a coup, autocracies take time to germinate. A chain of vital steps is necessary to complete the takeover.
Hitler and the Nazis won the leadership of the German parliament in 1933. In the following six years, they seized control of the economy, the military, the police, the courts, and the press. The German people knew only what the Nazi government wanted them to know. The Treaty of Versailles that ended World War I had exacted great financial and political burdens on Germany. The enormous inflation of the 1920s added to the bitterness the people felt. This led to a powerful wave of nationalism among the German people. Hitler did not call it “the National Socialist Party” for no reason. As we shall see, had the term been invented, the movement could have been called “the Christian Nationalist Party.” Hitler, anything but a Christian, adroitly exploited understandable German resentments to strengthen his autocratic instincts.
The transformation of Germany into a totalitarian police state appeared to take most of its people by surprise. Few could imagine that an advanced and cultured nation could fall prey to an Austrian corporal who had fought in the German Army during the Great War. Nevertheless, by duplicity and visible sabotage, Hitler managed to turn Germany into a militarist force eager to attack the free world in September of 1939.
Europe’s Jews were the ethnic group most opposed by Hitler, as everyone remembers. Yet there was no mass flight of Jews or anyone else during the early 1930s. Few people believed he would act on his public promises to arrest and imprison many whom he considered to be enemies of the state. Only on Krystsallnacht did Jews recognize it was time to leave Germany, but by then the Gestapo prevented most of them from escaping the coming genocide.
Curiously, some of Hitler’s most ardent admirers were members of the Protestant and Roman Catholic branches of German Christendom. This cohort became known as the “German Christians.” They provided a large part of Der Fuehrer’s support during his meteoric rise to power.
A much smaller number of Germans called themselves the “Confessing Church.” These democracy defenders spoke out against the Nazi regime before and during World War II. Some of the Confessing Christians were even involved in plots to overthrow Hitler. The most famous of these conspiracies was the failed attempt to assassinate him that was led by Colonel Klaus Von Stauffenberg in July of 1944.
The United States of America in 2025 is not Germany from 1933 to 1945, and Donald Trump is not Adolf Hitler. Still, Ivana Trump, the president’s first wife, reported that for years her husband kept a copy of Hitler’s Mein Kampf on his bedside table. If that is true, it should not be surprising that Donald Trump may be trying to reenact the machinations of the master 20th century totalitarian.
It is also curious that according to post-election polls in 2016, 2020, and 2024, about 85% of American Evangelical Christians said they voted for Donald Trump in all three elections. As a Christian minister, I find that both appalling and alarming.
The 2010s and 2020s are not a repeat of the 1930s and 1940s, but there are striking parallels in these two twenty-year epochs. No one can know now what will happen in the near future, In my view, things are going to get much worse before they get better, if they do get better.
Both of my parents were born in Canada. When I recently crossed the Canadian border, I asked immigration officials about details for becoming a Canadian citizen. I was astonished to learn that because my parents were born in Canada, I am automatically a Canadian citizen, even though I must officially apply to be granted full citizenship.
Throughout my childhood and youth, our family visited Canada for two weeks every summer to visit relatives. Canada has always seemed to me like the “kinder, gentler nation” President George H.W. Bush wanted the USA to be. It may be that the most powerful nation-state on earth cannot ever be sufficiently kind or gentle to suit anyone.
It is ethically challenging to be an American under current circumstances for someone such as I. I feel abashed to be complicit in observing the termination of the vast amounts of food and medicine that were formerly provided by America to the neediest nations in the world through USAID. It is alarming that recent American citizens who came here as legal immigrants are being arrested and sent back to their home countries or to other countries that are being paid to imprison them far away from here. Further, it is totally un-biblical that millions of Americans are being removed from the Medicaid rolls and from food stamps.
The USA is far more rough-edged than it was many decades ago. Gang members attack one another on the streets, and people are shot in attempted robberies. The USA has been involved in more wars since the end of World War II than any other nation. We seem to like to do battle, and too often we feel it is necessary to do battle for our own good.
Most people who believe in the providence of God think that concept means that God directly breaks into human events to accomplish His will. I believe God’s providence is made available only through human, not divine, action. God causes us to do what He wants done, but for reasons known only to Himself, he never intervenes on His own.
Last year a radical young man tried to assassinate President Trump. Earlier this year another radical extremist killed a Minnesota lawmaker and her husband. Recently another young man shot and killed Charlie Kirk, a conservative young activist who had a wife and two young children.
The United States is the most violent country in the world. Violence has been an undeniable feature in our national history from the time the Puritans stepped off the Mayflower in 1620. To evolve into what we have become, an accepted level of violence and oppression was likely inevitable. It is the step a people think they must take to become a strong national force.
The common understanding of prophets is that they believe it is their duty to predict the future. The biblical prophets and the prophet Jesus of Nazareth sometimes did “prophesy” what they thought was going to happen in the future. However, they did that on the basis of what they perceived was happening in the then-present. Sometimes they were right, and sometimes they were wrong. Yet all along they attempted to proclaim what they believed was God’s word to those who were open to listening to listen to them.
In early January, I retired from the Christian ministry after sixty years. As a preacher, I always perceived myself to be more prophetic than pastoral, if such a distinction can legitimately be made.
For several of the last years of my ministry I wrote essays, obsequiously calling myself The OLD Philosopher. That was primarily because I am old, but also because I admire and love wisdom, which is what “philosopher” means in Greek, and because I aspire to impart any wisdom I may have acquired in the long span of an 86-year-old life.
When I retired, I even more obsequiously started to identify myself as A Retired Prophetpastor. Now I shall evolve into A Retired Refugee Prophetpastor.
Many people, I included, believe that Martin Luther King, Jr. was the greatest prophet of the twentieth century. He powerfully decried the injustices and inequities that Black people have endured in this country for centuries. Yet his “I Have a Dream” speech and his uncannily prescient speech in Memphis the night before he was gunned down were filled with hope, both for the oppressors and the oppressed.
America is being led by a mentally ill person who must not be blamed for his disease. Nevertheless, he will do his best to render himself far more of a dictator than he already is. He literally cannot stop himself in his madly-driven quest.
Why does Trump insist he is a “great friend” of Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin, but that he is not close to Volodymyr Zelenskyy or Sir Keir Starmer or other heads of state? It is because the first two men are adept dictators with years of experience, which is what Trump clearly intends to become, and the second two men are trying to maintain democracy in their two countries.
Lest anyone imagine it, I am not moving to Canada because I personally fear Donald Trump, although I greatly fear what he is doing. Should he be threatened by a codger parson, it would certify beyond doubt his tragic mental condition. But as the newscaster said in the movie Network (more or less), “I’m mad as all get-out, and I’m not putting up with it anymore.”
Untold numbers of American evangelicals and others believe God’s providence saved Donald Trump from being killed in Butler, Pennsylvania last October. Presumably, had he not instantaneously turned slightly to his left as the would-be assassin pulled the trigger, he might have died in that exact moment. It was not providence that saved him.
Was it God’s providence that prevented another presidential assassination? Did God choose not to prevent the deaths of Presidents Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley, and Kennedy, but He providentially decided to spare Presidents Theodore Roosevelt, Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan, and Donald Trump? Should God exercise such theologically ungodly power? If Trump were to have been assassinated, who then would think it to be providential and who would term it the evil act of a radical leftist? Or might it be correct to think that God’s providence is enacted either by nature itself or otherwise by human hands?
Up until the past several years, I felt content to be an American. Americans thought that we won World War II. We did not. The Allies, along with the Americans won the war, but we paid a relatively small price in doing so compared to our comrades at arms, particularly Russia and the United Kingdom. America became the envy of the world. Under the Trump administration, we are becoming the ogre of the world.
Is it cowardly to emigrate from a polarized and deeply troubled country? Is it disloyal or dishonorable or disgusting? Is it improper at present to feel abashed and ashamed to be an American? Perhaps so Nevertheless, I feel deeply melancholy to witness the land of my birth quickly allowing itself to be turned into a dangerously totalitarian state.
A just God could not possibly approve the 180-degree turnabout of the United States of America, particularly when essentially it is because of the erratic decisions of one tragically-afflicted human being. The origin of this situation is because of “nature, red in tooth and claw,” and surely not because of a benevolent, loving Creator.
I hope I am entirely wrong in my assessment of our national reality. I hope everything turns out well. I hope that four Republican Senators and four Republican House members will set aside their gnawing fear of Donald Trump’s wrath and start to vote against his dangerous whims. I hope the Democrats will win both houses of Congress in the 2026 election --- not because they are Democrats, but because they then could overturn most of the President’s executive orders and ideological notions --- but I suspect Trump will extract enough money from his billionaire chums to win every swing seat in the House and Senate, courtesy of a 5-4 decision in the Supreme Court Citizens United case several years ago.
I feel in 2025 like Jews must have felt leaving Germany in 1935, but I hope everything many optimistic Americans think will happen will happen. Without an extremely well-coordinated and executed resistance, however, I doubt such a fairytale ending will occur.
God cannot be pleased with the plunge into autocracy that is swallowing America. To claim that it is His will is an assault on His everlasting and unchanging nature.
I am fearful that our nation has passed a perilous crossroad, and that we have taken the wrong turn. We think we know where we are going, but we may be too lost to find our way back to where we once were. I just don’t want to be there at the point of no return.
We all have no choice other than to live in hope, whatever side of whatever border we live on. But well-planned actions must accompany hope in this grave matter, or all hope will be lost. As the irascible apostle Paul said, “Now hope that is seen is not hope. Who hopes for what he sees? But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience.”
Sola Dei Gloria: To God alone be the glory. – September 25, 2025
John Miller is a recently retired Presbyterian minister who has lived on Hilton Head Island, South Carolina, for over forty years. More of his writings can be found at www.chapelwithoutwallshhi.com.