[URBAN NOTE] "The main difference between Trump and Ford? Ford couldn’t start a war"

[rfmcdonald]

I cannot think of any reason to disagree with Edward Keenan's article in today's Toronto Star. Trump very much does evoke Rbo Ford to Canadians, especially Torontonians. Where Ford's election was a matter of embarrassment, Trump's election would be a catastrophe for the United States, and for the world.

There are significant differences between Trump and late Toronto mayor Rob Ford, obviously: Trump is far richer and prone to ostentatious displays of cartoonishly poor taste, while a black Cadillac SUV given to him by his brothers is as show-offy as Ford ever got. Ford had a common touch and genuine love for retail face-to-face constituent service that Trump shows no evidence of even pretending to. Ford suffered very sadly and famously from addiction problems of a kind that are apparently not among Trump’s long list of vices. And for all the displays of oblivious racism, sexism, and homophobia Ford forced Toronto to endure, he never whipped up open white nationalist racism quite so proudly and transparently as Trump has.

But oh, the similarities: the wealthy son of a wealthy man who somehow successfully presents himself as the avatar of the downtrodden; the war against the mainstream media and the burn-it-all-down flame-throwing at virtually everyone, left and right, in the established system; the apparently pathological habit of saying untrue things — even small, easily checked, seemingly irrelevant things — and of having those errors and lies fact-checked by the Star’s Daniel Dale.

And you have both men, despite their long, obvious records of dishonesty, wielding reputations among supporters as bold truth-tellers, for the apparently simple reason that they frequently say vulgar and offensive things, express out loud the usually verboten id of the electorate. It has been called “authenticity” in both men, but it is precisely their disregard for factual precision that is being labelled by the word: This is corruption and skullduggery! These Orientals are taking over! She should go to jail! We should ban refugees! Those immigrants are rapists! The constituency for this stuff does not give a crap to check the footnoted sources or parse its literal accuracy, they see truth in the wild howl of resentment, expressed plainly and forcefully.

With both Trump and Ford, there’s the belligerent indifference to the viability of proposals or any policy nuance or the potential consequences of ignorantly thinking out loud. The contempt for expertise. The hostility not just to stuffy protocol but to the basic institutions and practices that govern and protect the integrity of the democratic system. The pettiness, the seeming inability to resist impulsively lashing out, the insistent black-and-white dividing of society into us and them.

[. . .]

And here is where people in Toronto could be the voice of experience, having learned that such a thing would never cause public support to crumble. Certainly, prominent politicians and civic leaders would back away and condemn, but that only causes the diehard regular folks to dig in their heels, convinced all the more that their man is being persecuted by a rigged system. And eventually, the endurance of the grassroots fervour draws the politicos back toward the fold, like flies unable to resist the allure of a dung heap. And soon, the bad craziness seems normal — indeed it has become normal.

What happened in Toronto is that you had this figure who was so simultaneously compelling and unpredictable — so bizarrely dramatic a character — that you could not stop watching or talking about him, and yet also a man so fundamentally and uniquely unsuited to the job at hand, that all other political debate seemed to become of relatively low importance. His tendency to make everything a reflection of himself became a universally shared trait, and suddenly the only issue, in the eyes of supporters and opponents alike, became with-him-or-against-him.