Why some Canadians are pro-trump
THE ONLY JUSTICE NOT TO HAVE GONE TO HARVARD OR YALE. — RAYMOND DE SOUZA
Léger Marketing and 338Canada released a poll this week that finds Conservative voters would be far more likely than other Canadians to vote for Donald Trump over Joe Biden, if they had the chance: 36 per cent of Conservatives chose Trump, versus eight per cent of Bloc Québécois supporters, six per cent of Liberals and five per cent of New Democrats. ( Twelve per cent didn’t have an answer; voting for a thirdparty candidate, or not voting at all, wasn’t offered as a choice.) Fifty- three per cent of Conservative voters, and 72 per cent overall, chose Biden.
A few pearls have been clutched. “This proportion is such that it simply cannot be ignored by new CPC leader Erin O’toole,” 338Canada’s Philippe J. Fournier wrote for Maclean’s, referring to a purely hypothetical question about another country. “Will he actually manage to convince centrist and Red Tory voters to join pro-trump conservatives under the same banner before the next federal election?”
He will. They’re already under the banner, enjoying hors d’oeuvres. This simply isn’t a surprising result. In 2016, Abacus Data had Trump losing 39- 61 among Canadian conservative voters to Hillary Clinton; in 2008, Harris- Decima had John Mccain losing to Barack Obama 27-55 among Tories. In 2000, Environics found George W. Bush was trailing Al Gore 39- 44 even among Canadian Alliance voters.
It’s not necessarily a “proTrump” result, either. Just as the vast majority of American Republicans and Democrats vote Republican or Democrat no matter who’s on the ticket — essentially leaving elections to be decided by a few wacky swingers and independents, barring mass defections like Clinton’s rust-belt debacle — a reliable minority of Canadian conservatives, presumably the most conservative ones, will support the rightmost of the two major American parties. The rest, were they American, would likely wind up as centrist to centre-right Democrats, and they seem to realize it.
Trump is no Bush or Mccain or Mitt Romney, you might say, and you would be right. (Hell, he has slagged off all three of them!) The reasons I could never vote for Trump the human being are many, and too conventional to bother boring you with. Conveniently, however, I also happen to disagree with him on a giant stack of policy files: on immigration, on free trade, on his conception of “law and order,” on abortion, on the wearing of face masks to combat the spread of coronaviruses, and on and on and on.
If I did agree with Trump on some or all of those files, however, and if I cared very deeply about those issues, it might be a different story ( if I were American, that is, such that my opinion actually mattered). A vote for Biden can’t just be a protest vote; it’s a vote for a specific agenda with which tens of millions of Americans, and some Canadian right-wingers and left-wingers, disagree. That is not to their discredit.
Canadians are obsessed with authenticity in their politicians, to the extent that what candidates believe sometimes seems more important than what they do. In part this is likely because so few really big, bold things get done in this country, and most of us seem to like it that way. Since no party is likely to take the massive transformational steps necessary to slash carbon emissions, for example, their partisans must sustain themselves bickering over which leader is purest of heart.
Trump is in many ways the antithesis of that. He was known to be pro- choice, for instance, then conveniently “evolved” just in time to run for the GOP nomination and woo the evangelical vote. A recent POLITICO/MORNING Consult poll found only 60 per cent of Republicans believed he was really a “man of faith,” and just 40 per cent of evangelicals do.
If that’s a deluded 40 per cent, it’s at least a motivated delusion. For the most devout American Christians, there is almost nothing more important than who sits on the Supreme Court. Regardless of what ( if anything) Trump believes in his heart, when he commits to appointing Antonin Scalia’s ideological successors, no one doubts the sincerity of his commitment. It seems pretty clear the man loves being president, loves rubbing the fact of his presidency in his opponents’ faces, more than he relishes any particular policy outcome. If you have a big gang of Republican voters with an agenda, you have his ear.
Indeed, Democrats are making a similarly transactional pitch to voters about Biden: OK, look, he’s 78 in November, he’s notoriously handsy with women, he’s one of the craziest plagiarists ever known to politics, he was leading commander in the catastrophic War on Drugs. He’s not great, but for God’s sake he’s not Donald Trump! What do we have to do to get you on board? Trump, meanwhile, warned during this week’s debate that Biden would “destroy this country.”
It’s the worst elements of a two- party system on display. But Canada, ostensibly a multiparty system, has nothing to boast about. As each greasy layer of artifice has peeled away from Justin Trudeau, Liberal partisans have made more and more a virtue of the fact that he’s not the other guy: Stephen Harper, Andrew Scheer, Erin O’toole — doesn’t matter who, but trust us, he’ll lay waste everything you hold dear.
No one envies the insane COVID-19 culture war in the United States, which saw Trump test positive just hours after mocking Biden for assiduously wearing a mask. The president likely convinced very few with his anti- lockdown rhetoric during the debate: “Look at what’s going on with divorce, look at what’s going on with alcoholism and drugs,” he said. “It’s a very, very sad thing.”
But he’s not wrong. Despite the mounting and entirely intuitive evidence that restricting social activities comes with enormous socioeconomic costs both short- term and long, despite all the success we have had in keeping COVID-19 patients out of hospitals and ICUS and mortuaries, Canadian conservatives seem to struggle to present and defend a real alternative. Where they are in opposition, they mostly complain about the costs — which are entirely justifiable if lockdowns are as essential as their proponents claim. In provinces where conservatives are in government, they behave not much differently than one imagines Liberals or New Democrats would.
Americans face a daunting, unenviable choice — but it’s not surprising a few Canadians envy it nonetheless. We barely even have a choice at all. There must be a happy medium.