As I write my last regular column for the Guardian, my thoughts turn to the lessons and hope we can take from history

From Greenland’s icy mountains, from India’s coral strand, as the old hymn has it, we seem to inhabit a world that is more seriously troubled in more places than many can ever remember. In the UK, national morale feels all but shot. Politics commands little faith. Ditto the media. The idea that, as a country, we still have enough in common to carry us through – the idea embedded in Britain’s once potent Churchillian myth – feels increasingly threadbare.

Welcome, in short, to the Britain of the mid-1980s. That Britain often felt like a broken nation in a broken world, very much as Britain often does in the mid-2020s. The breakages were of course very different. And on one important level, misery is the river of the world. But, for those who can still recall them, the 1980s moods of crisis and uncertainty have things in common with those of today.

Martin Kettle is a Guardian columnist

The president is lashing out before the supreme court’s impending decision on his absurd policy

Halloween came early for Donald Trump. Ronald Reagan spooked him. Trump had a startled reaction to the TV ad that appeared during the first game of the World Series, placed by the provincial government of Ontario, featuring excerpts from President Reagan’s radio talk in April 1987 in which he explained the danger of trade wars. “Their Advertisement was to be taken down, IMMEDIATELY, but they let it run last night during the World Series, knowing that it was a FRAUD,” Trump posted. It was, he falsely claimed, a “serious misrepresentation of the facts, and hostile act”. In retaliation, he slapped an additional 10% tariff on Canada.

Trump was apparently horrified at the sudden presence of the ghost of conservatism past, who had kept the outlandish bounder at arm’s length and whom Trump regarded warily if not nervously. Reagan was the original, bigger and more successful performer, whose appeal was as the harbinger of morning in America, not the grim reaper of a zombie nightfall. Canada is being punished for Trump’s fright.

Sidney Blumenthal, former senior adviser to Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton, has published three books of a projected five-volume political life of Abraham Lincoln: A Self-Made Man, Wrestling With His Angel and All the Powers of Earth. He is a Guardian US columnist