What a difference eight years make

Eight years ago, when Barack Obama was the newly-minted president of the United States, we here in this country were getting more than a little antsy about where the new prez would head for his first international visit.

“It’s a tradition that the new president comes to Canada first,” we were told those who like to importantly tell us things that aren’t really important. It would be a blow to our national psyche that we, as a nation, likely wouldn’t recover from, we were led to believe. It just had to happen.

It did, and everything was fine.

Eight years later, Donald Trump is the newly-minted U.S. president and his first international visit was to Saudi Arabia earlier this week.

Here in Canada? A collective sigh of relief with the realization that we’ve dodged a bullet … at least for now.

Ramblings of a recovering newspaper editor

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