Beyond Trump.

• Author: Conniff, Ruth
• Position: OVER THE WALL - Column

One of the best things about living abroad for half of Donald Trump's first year in office has been getting away from the endless conversations that all lead back to the same subject--how terrible Trump is, what new damage he and the Republicans are doing to the country, whether anyone can control the rogue President, and how he ever won in the first place.

This same conversation, which never seems to lead anywhere, also comes up in Mexico when we get together with other Americans. But Mexicans are not obsessed with Donald Trump. They have other things to talk about. For one thing, the Mexican presidential election, likely to be the dirtiest in history, is coming up in July 2018.

President Enrique Peha Nieto has been tied to vote-buying, personal corruption, and plagiarism. His administration is accused of covering up the disappearance and alleged murder of forty-three student teachers who were protesting the government's education reforms. The Mexican president has faced steadily declining public approval since he took office in 2012. He is the target of mockery on social media. His approval rating is lower than Trump's.

But corruption, rigged elections, and politicians who abuse their offices to enrich themselves are old news in Mexico. People are more jaded about these subjects than are voters in the United States. And in that way, as exhausting and dispiriting as the first year of Trump has been, one thing it makes clear is that we Americans have not lost our capacity for outrage at the debasement of our democracy We are still relatively idealistic.

Recently, flagrant self-dealing, including the Trump family's financial entanglements and the passage of the Republican tax bill, which specifically enriches its authors, is bringing the United States closer to Mexican levels of cynicism.

Mexicans' shrugging attitude toward government corruption could be our future. Maybe we will become so inured to the bad acts of our politicians that we just give up. Smart, caring people who are otherwise engaged with the world and their own communities will simply tune out national politics, as do many people we know here in Mexico. But we are not there yet.

Writing about the fundamental differences between the United States and Mexico, the great Mexican writer Octavio Paz observed in his 1950 book, The Labyrinth of Solitude, that, unlike the United States, Mexico's constitutional democracy was a lie from the very beginning.

"We move about in this lie...