Author’s Note: I rewrote this blog after the US Supreme Court decision this week which gave Donald Trump sweeping immunity protection for criminal acts during his presidency. He is widely expected to win the US presidential election this November.

As with many of us I am troubled by what I see in this fractious world, a world which is teetering on the precipice of catastrophic conflict. I’m seventy-four now so I worry less for myself than I do for my children and grandchildren. We spend time as parents shielding our children from the worst of the news and for good reason. It can be overwhelming. I’m not talking about the ‘manageable and predictable don’t be so uptight, things never stay the same’ kind of change. I’m talking about those moments in history when the pace accelerates and the change is frenetic, violent, threatening, unnerving and out of control. For my generation it was the 60’s.

The ’60’s exploded into view catching us all off guard. Forces were unleashed that would change everything. Baby Boomers, now a majority and coming of age, found their voice and reached out for their power. It would unnerve our parents and rattle all the trusted conventions of the time. Even as I was living through it I could feel that everything I knew, all that I trusted was shifting beneath me. I just didn’t know how and I didn’t know my place in all of it. I was young but I was about to be thrown into the boiling political and social cauldron of the 1960’s. Unstoppable forces of change were about to collide.

And here we are again.

What for me is so troubling is that when I lay the tracing paper of history over the America of today, little if anything has changed. If anything, it is a country that has embraced extremism; once without dispute the most powerful country in the world, now weakened from within. Once again as it was in the 60’s, the pace of change is frenetic, violent, threatening, unnerving and out of control.

America is today what it was during the Civil War, and the 1st World War, and the 2nd World War, Korean War, Vietnam War and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, what it has always been. America is a country bitterly divided by racial hatred and other forces. History shows us that great powers, great empires aren’t defeated in battle by foreign enemies, they are defeated from within. As with any cancer. From within the battle rages.

Racial hatred, police killings, mass killings, school shootings, four hundred million weapons in civilian hands, standing militias sworn to overthrow the government, voting rights, civil rights, income inequality, poverty, homelessness, unaffordable health care, widespread distrust of government, the courts, police, the Department of Justice, the FBI, the US Supreme Court, the rule of law and science, books being banned. All of it fueled by a nationalist bigotry emboldened to create a Christian nation.

Now, add to this toxic mix one other thing, the one thing that has always been missing. A leader.

Donald Trump is that man. A truly dangerous leader but a leader nonetheless and a more flawed man there could not be. Morally bankrupt, idealogically barren and armed with a natural understanding of our most base instincts, gleefully fueling the fires that will burn his nation to the ground. He is a narcissistic, nihilist bowing his head to his one True God, the God of Money, the God of Wealth, the God of Power. Loyal neither to his country, his family nor his followers, he seeks one thing only. He seeks power, he seeks the presidency of the most powerful country in the world, Revenge and Retribution driving his political agenda.

Surely to God we don’t need to learn again what history has already taught us!

And now all the guardrails are off. The US Supreme Court has vested Trump with unstoppable authority. If he becomes the 47th president as is now expected he will be free to do as he pleases without fear of consequence. It is terrifying to think about it.

I have been a keen observer of the US all my life. My politics are liberal in Canada (I think I’d be called a socialist’ in the US) and I have always been worried about our southern neighbours, unsure of this country riven to it’s core with cancerous divides but a country which through it all remained unwaveringly confident in itself.

Americans of all political stripes have always taken comfort in their belief in American Exceptionalism, playing their part in the grand experiment of nation building the United States of America has always been. It is though, an experiment no more. It is at best a failed experiment, now marching headlong to the cliff’s edge, mindlessly following a dangerous messianic leader hell bent on imposing a nationalist ideology.

It must be confusing to all Americans, a nation once so sure of itself, now unsure and full of doubt. The most powerful nation on earth, cancered within, places us all in peril and we can do nothing about it.

It is an exceptional country, of that there can be little doubt, just not in the way they have always been told. America is unwell and torn asunder but it is a country too powerful to ignore and too weak to do the right thing.