RUTHFULLY YOURS

Over the last year, I’ve met a growing number of fellow Canadians who have begun to yearn for a Donald to lead the country. They have belatedly recognized that they have a Ronald McDonald at the helm in Justin Trudeau, whose antics may delight children but who is quite incapable in any adult capacity.

Most recently, our dear leader in sensitive trade talks with the Japanese prime minister referred to the country as China. We recall that Trudeau wished the Canadian Olympic team in Seoul, South Korea, best of luck in Pyongyang, North Korea. We learn from an interview in The New York Times that Canada has no core identity—not how a sober statesman speaks of his country. This is the man who, as the beneficiary of a family trust fund, never had to run a household out of his own earnings, could say “The budget will balance itself,” while leading the country into astronomical debt. According to his way of thinking, the Boston Marathon bombers needed to be sympathetically understood, since they must have felt “completely excluded.” He sought a gender-balanced cabinet “because it’s 2015.” This is the zany who on a diplomatic visit to India can affect Bollywood and dress in a ceremonial costume to the bemusement of his hosts.

This is the man chronically embroiled in scandals after promising administrative transparency. This is the man who appointed as his attorney general a Kwak’wala woman who wants to break up the country—and who, in an instance of poetic justice, later accused him of bullying and malfeasance. This is the man who has no shame about his servile Muslim vote-pandering, switching into another exotic costume and praying at the Jamea Masjid mosque in Surrey, British Columbia.

Trudeau also visited the Al-Sunnah Al-Nabawiah mosque in  his Quebec riding, undeterred by its Al-Qaeda ties. He saw no discrepancy in later wearing Eid Mubarak socks at a Pride parade. The inappropriateness is startling. This is the man who cannot utter a non-scripted sentence without painfully stumbling over his phatics, who believes that the term “mankind” should be replaced by “peoplekind,” forgets to mention Alberta in his list of provinces during a Canada Day speech, and greets the Belgian royal family with German flags. And this is the man who was praised for his sincerity, intelligence, and well-stocked library by editor and journalist Jonathan Kay in an obsequious article for The Walrus. One wonders who is the greater embarrassment, a risible prime minister or a groveling journalist, our Liberal political establishment or the media conglomerate which serves it.

The string of capers and inanities beggars belief and seems pretty well endless. Ronald McTrudeau, however, is clearly no anomaly among the majority of Western leaders and deserves some degree of sympathy from his detractors, who claim to be embarrassed by his repeated harlequinades and imbecilities. He was and is in good company.

We recall that former President McBama was also regularly praised for his superior intelligence and poise, though he could be incoherent off-teleprompter. This was a president who famously thought that the union consisted of fifty-seven or possibly fifty-eight states, that Austrians spoke Austrian, that a corpsman was a corpse-man, that Israel was a strong friend of Israel, that the Falklands (Malvinas in Spanish) were the Maldives, that Hawaii was in Asia, and so on. This was a man who in his Cairo address got his historical calendar wrong by several hundred years and stated, ludicrously, that Islam had always been part of the American story—true in a sense if one considers Jefferson’s and Madison’s wars between 1801 and 1816 against the Barbary pirates. This was a president who doubled the national debt, regarded America as unexceptional, and could bow and scrape before a Saudi monarch. This was the man who chose as his vice president a sorry individual whose trail of gaffes is legendary and whose political legacy is catastrophic. This was the man who never met a scandal he didn’t covertly fall in love with—after promising transparency. This was the man who empowered and subsidized the nation’s most implacable enemy, favoring Iran as his Canadian sidekick favored China. Both were enamored of Castro’s Cuba.

The similarities are quite remarkable. McBama was no less a clown than McTrudeau, who is simply a lesser Canadian version of his American counterpart. They can both be found cavorting in the political simulacrum of the Golden Arches. Tucker Carlson said of our national numbskull, “Trudeau doesn’t get the credit he deserves for being a buffoon.” This is equally true of America’s dandiprat-in-chief, the former McPresident, whose passion for ice cream supersedes his passion for America.

There is nothing unique about these two. They are typical leftist leaders—you find them in England, France, Germany, Sweden, Norway, Australia, New Zealand (it’s a long list)—whose clownish nature is pro forma, whose lauded charm is meretricious, whose ignorance is off the charts, and whose policy enactments belong in the Theater of the Absurd or an Italian farce—were it not for the devastation they cause. A sorcerer’s apprentice at the levers of power is a recipe for social, political and economic disaster. As in Goethe’s poem, only a “master” can undo the damage unleashed by a goofball. Once there was a Ronald of stature at the helm, a masterful leader. Our current leaders on the left are Ronalds of a very different stamp, mere lightheaded apprentices.

The primary appeal of these unfinished specimens is to an infantile culture that cannot differentiate between responsibility and entertainment, dedication and performance, between a furrow on the brow and a crease in the pant leg. Unfortunately, many regard Donald Trump as a spoilsport who has come to puncture the enchantment and ruin the frivolous diversion from things as they are.

I don’t intend to diminish Ronald McDonald, who is justly beloved by actual kids. It is the two “Ronalds” examined here, representative of leftist Western leaders in general—if rather more preposterous—who commit an injustice by cloning his behavior in the political forum. The restaurant chain needs a “Ronald” to appeal to its clientele. The political world is in desperate need of a “Donald”—a Trump, a Netanyahu, an Orbán, a Wilders, a Salvini—if we can expect to enjoy what a nation has to offer.