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Canadian
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, left, and U.S. President Barack Obama
listen to speakers during the Leader's Summit on Refugees during the
71st session of the United Nations General Assembly, Tuesday, Sept. 20,
2016, at U.N. headquarters. (AP Photo/Julie Jacobson)
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.
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