Trump In The Great White North

When Trump flags showed up as part of the Truckers' Convoy in Ottawa, it was clear that the American Disease had drifted across our border. Michael Harris writes that Donald Trump has become part of our political conversation:

Not that the political arena was ever a monastery. There have always been politicians who couldn’t keep their zippers up, who telephoned judges on active cases, who told the occasional whopper, who drove their cars while over-refreshed, who did favours for friends, and who accepted favours in return.  

But there has never been a time when misogyny was effectively a platform in a major party’s policy playbook, as it is now in the GOP in the United States.  

There has never been a time when a United States president lied reflexively on everything from his tawdry dalliances, to his sleazy fundraising—also based on barefaced falsehoods. The 2020 U.S. election wasn’t stolen. But the money sent in by naive Trump supporters to fight the electoral results in court—all $200-million worth—apparently was. One can only wonder why wire fraud charges haven’t yet been laid.  

And who ever heard of an indicted defendant in a criminal case vowing to continue his bid for the presidency, even if he is convicted of felonies? That is exactly what Trump told fellow serial liar Tucker Carlson of Fox News in a recent interview. Spoken like a man who wants to dump the U.S. Constitution and defund the FBI and the Department of Justice. Trump has driven tribalism and iconoclasm in politics to such extremes that his supporters in Congress have even subpoenaed Alvin Bragg, the district attorney of Manhattan, to appear before the House Judiciary Committee.  

The problem is that Trump's middle finger to the world approach to things is showing up here:

Canadians have supported progressive parties at the polls federally. But there is growing evidence that some of the elements of Trumpian politics are creeping into our national conversation.  

For starters, the critiques of the current federal government have more to do with swiftboating than sober analysis. Pierre Poilievre and the Conservative Party of Canada have put the crosshairs on Justin Trudeau, highlighting his alleged unfitness to run the country in highly personal terms, as opposed to offering a counter vision of what a Conservative government would do differently.

The examples abound. Trudeau’s blackface of yesteryear is proof he is a racist. Trudeau’s use of the Emergencies Act to end the “Freedom Convoy” and its chaotic occupation of Ottawa is proof he is a dictator. Trudeau’s handling of alleged Chinese interference in the last federal election shows he is covering up for the Chinese and is perhaps a traitor. This from the party that sold a Canadian energy company to the Chinese communists for $15.1-billion, and bartered away Canadian sovereignty in the Canada-China Investment Promotion and Protection Agreement.  

That is tawdry politics. The invitation to voters is to personally dislike and reject Trudeau, rather than embrace a better candidate with better policies and a better vision. The public dialogue is not so much a contest of ideas between political parties, as it has traditionally been, but a kind of cage fight of the Texas death-match variety. Apart from being distressingly Trumpian, the approach taken by the official opposition is totally unnecessary.  

It's not that the Liberals are above criticism:

The Liberals are open to legitimate criticism on a number of policy fronts. Did the government get the balance right between prudent public health measures and civil liberties during the COVID-19 pandemic?  

Did the government react to the crisis of inflation quickly enough and with the right measures?  

Given the desperate problems facing many Canadians on the health-care front, did the government go far enough in its recent rescue package with hard pressed provincial governments?

But “Fuck Trudeau” signs, like “Fuck Biden” signs and “Fuck Ford” signs, put up by fanatical supporters incited by relentless personal attacks on political leaders, are not the way to conduct a democracy.  

And, for Trump and his supporters, it's democracy that is the enemy.

Image: The Hill Times