VANCOUVER – The way to figure out reality, the Greek philosopher Protogoras once said, was: “homo mensura.”

Meaning, essentially, that humans are the measure of all things, and how we measure existence. Not God, us.

For the past two years – and for four long years four years before that – Donald J. Trump upended Protogoras’ formulation. Trump was The Everything. He was the scale on which all politics was measured.

Unless you were in a coma in 2016-2020 (and for a timely reoccurrence in 2025-2026), you knew that. There was nothing, nowhere, that was not affected by the presidencies of Donald Trump.

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Trump got Carney elected PM

In Canada, we were supposed to have a big Conservative majority government led by Pierre Poilievre. Remember that? Didn’t happen: it was in all the papers.

Justin Trudeau finally departed the scene, Mark Carney appeared, yes. But the biggest change was wrought by Donald Trump . He elected Mark Carney, and made Carney one of the most popular prime ministers in history by saying and doing stupid things.

In Ontario, Doug Ford had been granted successive majorities by the desire for change, then the pandemic. The third time around, he won a majority solely because of Donald Trump – Mark Carney hadn’t appeared on the scene yet, so Ford became the nation’s designated anti-Trump guy .

Because Trump was wildly, excessively Right-wing, the pendulum swung wildly to the Left in America, of all places. Zohran Mamdani , a crypto-Islamist democratic socialist, was elected mayor of the city with the biggest Jewish diaspora in the world – Trump’s hometown – because he was the anti-Trump.

In Australia, in Hungary, in Poland, in the Netherlands, everywhere else, too: Trump’s second-round bullying and bluster shocked and angered much of the world. Policies were passed, and parties elected – or un-elected, as in Israel this month – partly in reaction to Donald Trump. Trumpa mensura.

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Midterms will render Trump the lamest of lame ducks

Well, as they say, that was then, this is now.

On Tuesday night, the Democratic Party oversaw the biggest Congressional landslide in half a Century . The Iran war, the corruption, the cost of everything all were factors, yes. But none so much as Donald Trump. The midterms weren’t an election as much as a ritual exorcism of the President of the United States.

When the vote-counting is done, Trump will have been rendered the lamest of lame ducks. All of his grand project – the insane tariffs, the bloody immigration policing, the coddling of enemies and the alienation of allies – will sputter to an ignominious end.

People everywhere, in their wisdom, have already factored this in. The pundits may not have known it, but the people sure saw it coming.

So, here in British Columbia, the bleating and braying of the NDP about Trump threat came to naught. Lorne Doerksen, a genuinely nice fellow – and a Conservative! – is about to become a majority premier, aided and abetted by some brilliant true-blue Conservative (!) operatives: Katy Merrifield, Angelo Isidorou, Dimitri Pantazopoulos.

Out here, the Trump boogeyman was no longer that scary.

Doug Ford now most unpopular premier in Canada?

Likewise in Quebec, the CAQ government of Christine Frechette raised the spectre of Donald Trump at every opportunity on the election trail, and warned that Trump would take full advantage of a naïve separatist Parti Quebecois (PQ) government. The PQ won government anyway – and Frechette’s party was wiped off the map.

In Ontario, meanwhile, Ford’s tilting at the Trump windmill isn’t garnering support like it used to. The Abacus pollsters reported this week that seven in ten Ontario residents want a change in government. And Angus Reid, for its part, says Ford is the most unpopular Premier in Canada, the Trump-bashing notwithstanding.

Nationally, we see Mark Carney’s Liberals now puzzling about how to react to the disappearance of Trump’s power. It seems likely that tariffs will fade away, along with our anxiety about Trump’s 51st state fulminations.

Carney’s budget this week reflected Ottawa’s uncertainty about the post-Trump era: it was 511 pages long, single-spaced, but nowhere did it clearly reveal Carney’s plans for a Trump-less America. It was long on words, but short on a specific vision .

That said, all of us – Americans, Canadians, Europeans, the world – now enter a brave new world, one in which Donald Trump is (blessedly, gloriously) going to be a private citizen again. It’s going to better for lots of us.

But for those who owe much of their political success to opposing Trump – Messrs. Carney, Ford, Eby, Mamdani et al. – maybe not so much.

Soon enough, you’re not going to have Donald Trump to kick around anymore, boy and girls.

A new reality is almost here.