Rex Murphy: I miss Donald Trump and the hypnotic hold he had on his

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I miss Donald Trump.

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Not so much in any personal sense, but in the sense that while his lively demeanour and super energetic style inhabited the White House all the world was fed a daily diary of his doings and sayings.

Some say Mr. Trump leveraged his years on The Apprentice ( a show I could not stand, it was worse than the Dragon’s Den, another 30 minutes offering a preview of Purgatory without the escape clause) to earn the fame that brought him to the Presidency.

This is an error. It is not so much that reality television brought Donald Trump to the White House, as that Donald Trump brought the White House to reality television. Whether the White House or reality TV suffered the more from this interesting collision will require history to determine.

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I miss Mr. Trump as well because of the fascination he exerted on almost everybody, and particularly the hypnotic power over those who radically despised him. His gift for disconcerting his enemies was something beyond biology: he had something like a Draculean hold over their spirits. He exhaled; they fretted madly.

The feral hosts of cable TV, the Lemons, the Cuomos, the Maddows — not the stoutest spars on the vessel of public enlightenment — could speak of no one else. They were enthralled.

During his tenure, here in Canada, even with Justin Trudeau as our prime minister, a charismatic magnet though of far less field strength than Mr. Trump, the CBC drank as fervidly and fulsomely at the Trump waterhole, as any of the mastodons in his own country, CBS, NBC, ABC and The New York Times.

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Trump news was evidently very Canadian news. We were deluged by reports of the most trivial and most serious aspects of the Trump presidency. As if it were crucial to know in Red Deer or Twillingate that Donald Trump was most likely a Russian plant in the service of Vladimir Putin. When Trump was president, American news was very much our news. Why, was never detailed.

What I find odd, is how with a Biden presidency our news networks have fully lost interest in the guy that won against him, the hapless, hopeless somnambulistic, “I’m not supposed to take…