RANDALL WHITE, FERNWOOD PARK, TORONTO. THURSDAY, JULY 24, 2025. Some say the present president of the USA’s “swagger is GONE.” At the same time, he retains a “degree of feral cunning about things that can endanger him personally, politically, legally.”

Still others urge : “The president is trying to concoct a fantasy world in which prices are ‘all down’ … and his opponents are liars for correctly pointing out that federal data shows prices continue to rise.”

Still others again argue that Trump’s recent unmitigated lying on how “Obama and a group of thugs cheated on the elections” is just the latest evidence that “he’s mentally disturbed.”

And then, to ice the cake as it were, FactPost@factpostnews has noted “Pollster: Trump’s net approval rating has dropped nearly 20 points since the beginning of his presidency.”

From our particular vantage point just north of the North American Great Lakes (and in our own case just across the lake from upstate New York), all this yet again raises the question of how Donald Trump actually managed to get elected as president of the USA a second time (or a first time for that matter).

Two different answers to this increasingly fascinating if not exactly urgent question have lately come across my desk, at the edge of the beach in the middle of the summer of 2025.

(1) Too many ignorant voters ????

The first was an Xpost by a gentleman called Tim Russ, who has been “working as an actor, director, musician, and voice-over artist for the past 39 years here in Los Angeles.” It commented on a poll which asked “Should American schools teach Arabic Numerals as part of their curriculum?”

This is of course a trick question. The term “Arabic Numerals” is just what those in the know (as most of us should be?) call 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, and 10 — the“decimal numeral system”commonly used around the world today.

In deepest fact these Arabic Numerals should (as Wikipedia explains eg) most properly be called “Hindu–Arabic” or “Indo-Arabic.” The system is much more mathematically sophisticated than the “Roman Numerals” which prevailed in the old Roman Empire and its early European Christian successor states. It was “invented between the 1st and 4th centuries [CE or AD] by Indian mathematicians.”

By the 9th century this mathematically sophisticated decimal numeral system “was adopted by Arabic mathematicians,” and then “gradually adopted in Europe starting around the 10th century, probably transmitted by Arab merchants.” As a result 1, 2, 3, 4, and so forth “came to be generally known as ‘Arabic numerals’ in Europe.”

This history, it seems, is less and less understood in the still strongly European-influenced United States (and Canada) today. In any case when asked “Should American schools teach Arabic Numerals as part of their curriculum?” 14% of a particular group of representative Americans answered No Opinion, 29% said Yes, and a clear majority 57% said No.

On a strict view of this reading, in other words, a majority of American respondents to the poll do not believe than the decimal numeral system 1, 2, 3, 4, and so forth should be taught in US schools. And Tim Russ laconically observes : “This is why we are stuck with Trump.”

This judgment may be a little harsh. My very clever 82-year-old wife with a BA from the University of Western Ontario , eg, was not entirely clear at first about just what “Arabic Numerals” means.

From the start, however, she did sense a trick question. As a fierce opponent of Donald Trump, she did soon enough warm to Tim Russ’s joke. And I am quite certain that if she had taken the poll herself she would never have answered No!

(2) Reacting against indoctrination of youth by American education systems

The main thrust of Tim Russ’s comment “This is why we are stuck with Trump” is that a majority of present-day American voters are just as ignorant as Donald Trump himself. They just do not understand how altogether impossible it is for such an ignorant person to lead the USA successfully in the 21st century.

There probably is at least something to this explanation. But of course it suffers from the counter-argument that half the US electorate (to say nothing of 57%) cannot be seriously understood as just too ignorant to make Democracy in America work in the 2020s.

Here I alternatively turn to what has struck me as an almost astounding expression of contemporary “conservatism” in the USA today. It comes from a gentleman who calls himself “Resist57 … Patriot, Pureblood, Political. No pithy slogans or life advice to offer you. Searching for and appreciating respectful and factual discourse.”

This sounds sensible enough generally to me (for a conservative). But I have quite different particular feelings about some comments from Resist57, in response to remarks from a Joe Dan Gorman about recent Mitch McConnell adventures :

“Joe Dan, this is again how indoctrinated our youth is. These are adults that for the past 16 years have been subjected to teaching of, ‘Your parents are dumb, they hold views that oppress deserving people just because of their melatonin, or their origin or orientation.’ ‘Your parents won’t advance these people, so we had to first start with Critical Race Theory, then DEI, then Sexual equality, then Anti- Semitism now it is complete anti-conservatism.’ Conservatives do not realize that all this hatred is directed from the corporate and halls of higher education daily. The Bolsheviks are here and they now wield the last bulwark of our Republic, judicial jurisprudence.”

There is just enough (limited and misleadingly apprehended) plain truth to these remarks to give them some traction. North American higher education has worked hard enough to deliver a progressive cultural critique of the Anglo-American political and economic world invented by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, that remains influential in both the UK and USA.

Yet in my experience as an 80-year-old now largely just watching the world go by (with a PhD in political science, for reasons I no longer understand), university professors have always tried to shape their students’ political minds. But “our youth” have never been as gullible as Resist57 imagines. The deepest plain truth is that the professors themselves have broad and varied views. And to talk about “Bolsheviks” in the USA today is quite absurd.

Moreover, I personally find it reassuring that progressive and even some conservative intellectual advocates of the free and democratic rule of law “now wield the last bulwark of our Republic, judicial jurisprudence.”

At the moment it does seem to be the courts that are placing at least some limits on the destructive impulses of Donald Trump and MAGA Republicanism — as in “BREAKING: Appeals court panel finds President Trump’s order ending birthright citizenship unconstitutional.”

Of course there is also John Roberts’s almost Trumpian Supreme Court at the top of the heap. But the USA is a big country with assorted nooks and crannies where the free and democratic society still lives in the real world. (Los Angeles eg, even with federal troops serving no serious purpose.) I’d personally urge at least two and a half cheers for American judicial jurisprudence in the long hot summer of 2025.