Did I get your attention with that? It’s an overstatement of course – even if he wins this year’s election, he won’t be inaugurated until next year, and his murderousness won’t fully flower quite that fast. But I stand by the substance: in a second age of Trump, the philosophy and promise of IFRS, and of much else, will be kicked into mortal peril. Actually, as I set out to write this entry, I’d initially forgotten that I’d written something very similar in 2020, on the eve of the last election:

• … if Trump wins on Tuesday, this might be the last (blog entry). Because there’s no point maintaining a blog on IFRS, if IFRS is dead. Oh, of course the death of IFRS, just like that of so many things, won’t be immediately apparent; probably not for decades. But if Trump wins, it will only be because of an abject mass surrender to blindly ugly short-termism, a rejection of science and governance and of rationality itself, aided by a malfunctioning democracy and widespread mendacity, and after four more years of that, I don’t believe there will be a way back, nor a way of containing Trump’s poison within America’s ignorance-splattered borders. As the poison and its consequences spread, any concept of informed long-term decision-making will be increasingly futile – the only game remaining, as David Attenborough’s grimmest projections come to pass, will be to grab whatever piece of the shrinking spoils one can get, and sophisticated financial reporting will hardly be necessary for that. So IFRS will be doomed, and those of us who continue to make a living out of it during its dying days might as well be zombies, lurching through a degraded landscape…

After that I went on to talk about movies, just for escapism I guess, and then Trump lost, and it was over, and now, unimaginably, it’s all happening again. Let me say that I bring forward and stand by every word I wrote above (notwithstanding the floweriness). In a second age of Trump, even the most basic aspects of settled law and practice will be up for reassessment: he’s mused about terminating the Constitution, vowed to be a dictator at least for a day; he rants about being an instrument of retribution and vengeance. His core aspiration seems to be to embody pure wrath; you never hear him say anything meaningfully forward-looking or hopeful. One of the greatest Trumpian tragedies (if one were making a futile attempt to rank them) is his utter lack of affinity for beauty, his incapacity to feel delight at something delicate or natural or true (one of the few movies he’s ever praised is Bloodsport). This is a profound sickness: someone who only perceives the ugliness and brutality in the world will only succeed in adding to it. We may not rush to call IFRS “beautiful” exactly, but it’s rooted in a desire for greater harmony, meaning, enlightenment; it’s an assertion of possibility and faith.

But Trump ingests and grows on hatred as the rest of us crave water. In 1989 he took out a pro-death penalty ad focused on the so-called Central Park Five (all of whom were later exonerated of course). Addressing the then-New York Mayor, he wrote: ““Mayor Koch has stated that hate and rancor should be removed from our hearts. I do not think so. I want to hate these muggers and murderers. They should be forced to suffer and, when they kill, they should be executed for their crimes….Yes, Mayor Koch, I want to hate these murderers and I always will. I am not looking to psychoanalyze or understand them, I am looking to punish them.” The emblematic Trumpian line: I want to hate. An incomplete list of things Trump hates and will duly make suffer include Ukraine; diversity, equity and inclusion in all their forms; educational standards; public health; welfare support; rational immigration policy; women’s reproductive health and self-determination more generally; any concept of privileged foreign intervention; independent news media, and on and on. In terms of corporate reporting, the threat to the work of the ISSB is even more obvious than that to the IASB: one of the top Trump priorities will be to roll back environmental regulations and targets and to liberate drilling and pillage; the momentum toward sustainable investing, already faltering, will go into flat-out reverse. Canada, with its fragmented regulatory environment and experiencing its own right-wing drift, is just one jurisdiction that will very possibly allow its own disclosure and other initiatives to wither for the sake of “competitive” considerations…

When I say that this may be the year that Trump kills IFRS, what I’m really saying is that this may be the year when we all die a little. I’ll admit to you, although I’m not American and not particularly mystical by nature, I feel personally complicit in this atrocity, preoccupied by the thought that there must have been something we could have done better. If nothing else, we can hope that every tiny expression of resistance amounts to something, as a contribution to an electoral and cultural environment in which America steps back from the brink. As I’ve said before, I believe the IFRS Foundation should speak out against Trump; as should the Chairs, the individual board members (especially the Americans), the accounting firms, the regulators: it’s time to set aside normal notions of staying outside politics, of not alienating potential constituencies, of remaining seemingly objective and even-handed, to realize that this is a definitional, foundational moment, that to remain silent is a capitulation, a form of multi-faceted suicide….

The opinions expressed are solely those of the author.