14 July—You’ve got to hand it to Donald Trump. He’s even wormed his way from golf into bridge and today he made the headline of the bridge column in the Hearst Republican-American: “Trump manipulation.” So what else is new?

While not new, on this date in 1789, hundreds of anti-monarchist Parisians, rather than wasting their time demonstrating with signs that read “PAS DE ROIS EN FRANCE” (“NO KINGS IN FRANCE”), stormed the Bastille, a mediaeval fortress and armory that at the time was being used to incarcerate lots of political prisoners. The insurrectionists freed the prisoners, stole weapons and gunpowder, and murdered the warden after he had surrendered. Almost a hundred insurrectionists got killed, by the way.

And on this date in 1933, Adolf Hitler’s flunky government outlawed all political parties except the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (National Socialist German Workers’ Party), also known by the initialism NSDAP, and unpopularly known as the Nazi Party.

Of course, such a thing could never happen here. Of course. Because America has a strong constitution that the incumbent king and his flunky government revere and whose precepts they’d never even think of not following, let alone abusing cavalierly. And there’s absolutely no chance that the masked blackshirts who persecute and otherwise abuse only people who look like they might just possibly be illegal immigrants will ever persecute and otherwise abuse anybody else. Like critics of their Führer.

On the subject of Führers, then, it appears that Donald Trump also has wormed his way into wildlife. Probably not with Jeffrey Epstein, mind you, because underage women don’t appear to be his style, with or without consent. But even the local vulpine community can’t hold back on Trump. Just this morning, as I was checking out the Spanish radishes and carrots, I noticed a slender red fox smiling at me from the meadow. So I greeted him and sought his opinion of Donald Trump. Just to be sociable, of course.

So the fox didn’t hesitate to respond concisely and, as it happens, right on the mark. But evidently the fox still has some questions about Trump. Don’t we all?