Trump may go away, but his supporters won’t
During its heyday in the early 2000s, “The West Wing” was required viewing for political junkies in Canada.
With the big U.S. vote looming Tuesday, the TV show’s 2020 reunion special is worth Canadians getting hooked again too — maybe while waiting for the polls to close.
Long before he became prime minister, Justin Trudeau was one of the show’s fans. In 2017, Trudeau did a guest turn on a U.S. podcast called “The West Wing Weekly” and spoke about how he had been inspired by the democratic idealism of the presidential drama.
Trudeau hasn’t said whether he has yet had a chance to see the new “West Wing” special, which features most of the old cast reunited on stage in a bid to coax Americans to vote in Tuesday’s historic election. Up until a few days ago, the show wasn’t available to Canadian audiences.
But there’s one small scene in the special that should be of concern to Canadians, especially those who are getting all idealistic again about the prospect of Donald Trump’s defeat. It serves as a warning that it will take more than Trump moving out of the White House to put Canadian-U. S. relations on an even keel. To borrow from a more recent TV title: Curb your enthusiasm.
The new special is actually a theatrically staged reprise of an episode that aired in February 2002, when George W. Bush was in his first term as president and Jean Chrétien was in his final couple of years as prime minister. Neither Trump nor Trudeau were yet in elected politics.
In the episode, primary season is just kicking off in New Hampshire and President Jed Bartlett’s staff is intent on a symbolic win in the tiny town of Hartsfield’s Landing, where all 42 registered voters cast their ballots at one minute after midnight.
But there are two holdouts — the Flenders — who aren’t all that impressed with Bartlett, and one of the reasons revolves around how the president’s Democratic administration has handled Canada. Their local pulp mill has closed and they blame free trade with this country.
Bartlett’s staff fires back a few glib answers and some standard talking points about the importance of free trade.
Here, in addition to the noble, idealistic tone of the whole show, is where that episode shows its age. In 2002, Democrats and Canadians treated these aggrieved Americans as out of the loop. Since 2016, they’ve been called “Trump’s base.”
One surefire conversation starter since 2016 is to ask Trump-averse Canadians which is scarier: Trump himself or his supporters? It is not precisely a chicken and egg question because while the two feed off each other, Trump didn’t create American grievances; he merely gave them a voice. The Democrats’ mistake was in giving glib, abstract answers to those voices, just like Josh Lyman does in the “Hartfield’s Landing” episode.
“Tell them the president’s been good for the economy overall,” Josh tells his assistant, Donna Moss.
“They say he’s been bad for the economy,” she replies.
“We’re for affordable health care,” Josh says.
“What’s affordable if you’ve lost your job at the pulp mill?” Donna shoots back.
Whether or not you believed “The West Wing” was real life, in this little snippet, reality did imitate art. Canada was forced into renegotiating free trade when Trump came to office in 2017 because of citizens like the Flenders, who have had a couple of decades to let their resentment sink in and dream of making America great again and putting America first.
A Joe Biden presidency, if it is the result of Tuesday’s vote, will have to contend with these grievances more effectively than Democrats, real or fictional, did in the past. So will Canada.
Canada did get a couple of shout-outs on the Democratic campaign trail over the weekend. Former president Barack Obama joked that, by mismanaging COVID-19 to the point that the Canada-U. S. border was closed, Trump had actually built a wall to keep Americans in. Biden, without naming Trudeau, reminded his audiences that world leaders — including our prime minister — had been caught laughing at Trump at last year’s NATO summit.
Most Canadians, apart from Bobby Orr and the odd Conservative senator, will be watching the U.S. election results on Tuesday night hoping the next occupant of the real West Wing is more like Jed Bartlett and less like Donald Trump. But it’s never been just Trump causing problems for the Canada-U. S. relationship; it’s the base he represents, which was real enough in 2002 to earn a cameo in a popular TV show. It will still exist, no matter who wins on Tuesday, and Canadians are wise to remember that storylines this big only get neat, tidy conclusions in fiction.