Full Comment - Revenge of the normal people, from Trump to Canada

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00:01:06.260 The new sheriff in town is the old sheriff in town. Yes, you know the news by now. Donald Trump

00:01:12.000 won election on last Tuesday. About 312 electoral college votes. He basically took all the swing

00:01:19.180 states. They weren't even as close as we thought they were going to be. Now, we can break this down

00:01:24.340 multiple ways to figure out what happened. I guess one of the big questions is, what does all of this

00:01:28.860 mean to Canada? Hello. Welcome to the Full Comment Podcast. My name is Brian Lilly, your host. Joining

00:01:33.860 me today to examine this is someone who's not only a columnist at National Post and elsewhere, but

00:01:39.700 someone who has a deep understanding of American history. John Bromson is not only a columnist, but

00:01:45.680 also an academic with a PhD in American history. And he's just also an all-around good guy. John,

00:01:51.720 good to talk to you again. Pleasure to be here. So your initial take on this, I know that you have

00:01:59.680 stated many times you're not a fan of Donald Trump. Neither am I, but he's president. We have to take

00:02:05.800 him where he is and deal with him where he is. Your thoughts on how the election went in his way when

00:02:13.760 four years ago, the man was basically driven out of Washington. Now he's ridden back in on a

00:02:19.280 brilliant white steed of victory. What do you think? It's a very interesting reaction because

00:02:26.760 I remember my feeling on election night was very much the same as my feeling back in 2016 because

00:02:32.180 I've always said that Trump was unfit to be president, and I still think so. But when I

00:02:37.020 realized he was winning in 2016, I realized that I was elated. And the same thing happened to me again

00:02:43.120 in 2024. Despite my deep misgivings about his character and his ability to do the job,

00:02:49.940 it is such a necessary rebuke to the forces of wokeness and to a democratic party that has gotten

00:02:56.720 so out of touch with the American people as to become a real ideological danger to the Western

00:03:03.580 world. There's an old line from Whitaker Chambers. So he was talking about the 1940s, 1950s, and he said

00:03:09.260 that the American working class is Democratic, the middle class is Republican, and the upper class

00:03:14.500 is communist. Well, to some extent, there's something still true about that, but now the

00:03:19.660 Democrats represent the upper class, not the working class. And you see this in the very strong swing

00:03:25.280 toward Trump among young voters, among Latinos, I mean, again, men more than women. An astounding

00:03:31.960 statistic that you mentioned to me right before the program that 64% of Native American,

00:03:37.680 Aboriginal American males voted for Trump, that ought to be a real wake-up call to anybody who

00:03:44.120 thinks identity politics isn't, among other things, repulsive to normal people.

00:03:50.200 But Trump took the majority of white males, Hispanic males, American Indian males, as they identify in

00:03:58.160 the States, and he didn't win the majority of black males, but he did increase his popularity. In fact,

00:04:05.740 he increased pretty much all demographic groups in all areas, whereas Kamala Harris went down. It was an

00:04:15.620 astonishing loss for her. I had assumed that Trump would win, and I had said before the election,

00:04:25.120 if he wins small, it'll be 287 electoral college votes. If he wins big, it'll be 312. I didn't see him

00:04:31.500 going above that. He landed right at 312. So I wasn't shocked about that, but I was shocked that

00:04:38.780 he won the popular vote. I was shocked at how well he did among Hispanic males. When I was down south a

00:04:47.380 month ago, I was looking at local coverage. I was looking at local polls in Arizona, and in a state with

00:04:53.880 a large Hispanic population, depending on the poll, he was getting 40 to 47% of a demographic that you would

00:05:01.900 normally be told, no, absolutely votes Democrat. They did not this time.

00:05:06.460 Yes, and I've seen, you know, county by county maps of California, which of course, if California these days did not

00:05:12.820 go Democrat, they wouldn't win a single state. And yet you can see that more of the counties are going red. He did quite

00:05:19.400 well in New York, which again, has been a lost cause for the Republicans for a number of elections now.

00:05:24.260 44% of the vote in New York State, and there were boroughs where he got 35 to 40%.

00:05:30.620 Yeah, it's remarkable. And I also was thinking, because remember, there was a time when the

00:05:35.440 Republicans dominated the presidency without controlling Congress. From the first Richard Nixon

00:05:40.260 election to George Bush Sr.'s victory, the Republicans won five out of six elections, and four of them by

00:05:46.060 landslides, 400 or more electoral college votes, they lost one squeaker and won one squeaker.

00:05:51.200 But after Bush Sr. broke his no new taxes pledge, the Republicans didn't get 300 electoral college

00:05:56.720 votes again, until Trump. And Trump has not put back together the Reagan approach to government.

00:06:02.220 It's quite a different kind of coalition. And in some ways, I think from a policy point of view,

00:06:06.180 it's more troubling. But it obviously resonates with people. And this is where again, the Democrats need

00:06:12.760 to ask themselves, not just what was wrong with the messenger. I mean, I was seeing some news

00:06:17.620 stories saying, oh, Democrats blame Biden. It's like, oh, for heaven's sakes, take some responsibility,

00:06:22.240 including that you knew. Many top Democrats knew that Biden was no longer mentally capable of doing

00:06:28.180 the job. And they didn't tell us. But Kamala Harris, why did they anoint this person? You know,

00:06:33.640 she ran for the nomination four years ago and did terribly because voters didn't like her.

00:06:38.380 And then instead of having an open convention, they just, they anointed her and said, she's the

00:06:44.260 savior. Look, black woman, and also Asian woman, right? She checks all the identity politics boxes,

00:06:51.560 but she could barely put together a coherent sentence. And this should have concerned them.

00:06:56.180 I mean, take Barack Obama, please. I wasn't a big fan of Barack Obama. But if you were to get

00:07:00.960 Barack Obama without a script, he made sense. He articulated ideas. He reasoned from premises to

00:07:06.860 conclusions. On the other hand, and the Democrats never really came to terms with this. After two

00:07:12.020 terms of Obama's hope and change, the voters were so mad they elected Donald Trump. That should tell

00:07:18.020 you something about your approach to governing that isn't just about ephemera. It's about something

00:07:23.400 rotten at the core of it. And maybe now, finally, they're going to realize if Trump is as bad as we

00:07:29.540 said he was, and if not, we're a bunch of raving lunatics, there must be something really wrong with us

00:07:34.880 if we're worse in the eyes of a lot of people. So in some sense, a cathartic election.

00:07:40.440 It's kind of the message that I gave to conservatives in this country who just kept saying

00:07:46.680 how awful Justin Trudeau was and how stupid he is and people hate him. And I said, well,

00:07:52.080 if he's that bad, you've lost three elections. What are you going to do to figure out why and how you can

00:07:58.680 turn things around? I mean, they appear to have done that with Pierre Polyev and voters have moved on

00:08:03.920 from Justin Trudeau. But I think that's good advice to the Democrats. You've lost to this guy

00:08:08.500 twice now. You came very close to losing to him in 2020. And there's all kinds of questions about

00:08:15.940 how that election went down. But obviously, a portion of the country has issues that they want

00:08:24.380 dealt with, and they see him as the guy who can deal with them, especially on working class and

00:08:31.760 middle class Americans, dealing with the economy. You mentioned states or counties in California.

00:08:38.680 One of the ones that went to Republican, at least it was last time I checked, was Riverside County.

00:08:44.860 Yeah, Riverside County. That stretches from Orange County, LA border in the West all the way to the

00:08:51.460 Arizona border in the East and takes up places like Coachella Valley, famous for its concerts and

00:08:56.780 celebrities and Palm Springs. I'm telling you, it wasn't the rich folks in Palm Springs or Palm Desert

00:09:01.960 who put Trump over the edge. Some of them may have voted for Trump. It was the working class people,

00:09:08.880 the barber who lives in India and has to commute to work, the trades people. It was them that voted

00:09:15.360 for Trump and turned Riverside County, a place the Democrats should control. They turned it red.

00:09:21.760 And when I was trying to get behind the initial things, though, significant things like that,

00:09:28.560 I think Trump won first-time voters by 10%. And that's the kind of thing that makes an election

00:09:33.020 pivotal because people frequently continue to vote the way they first voted. Back in 1980,

00:09:37.860 Ronald Reagan's strongest support was among people who first voted for Herbert Hoover.

00:09:42.720 And my mind went back to something Charles Murray said, it must be 30 years ago now,

00:09:48.100 that the shattering classes have built a world that is enormously complicated. The rules in America

00:09:56.580 used to be simple. Most of them were good. A few of them were terrible. But, you know, work hard and

00:10:01.620 you get ahead, that kind of thing. Now, this sort of symbolic landscape detached from daily realities,

00:10:10.520 it is enormously difficult to navigate the legal landscape, the social landscape,

00:10:16.520 the rules of political correctness. And so, a lot of people like Trump, I think, in part because Trump,

00:10:22.820 although, again, I'm not downplaying the fact that he is vulgar, offensive, has a feeble grasp of

00:10:28.200 policy and is a petulant narcissist, because he is. Now, all of this does need to be said. But Trump,

00:10:34.620 it looks like he sympathizes with people for whom the modern world is not working because the

00:10:39.900 clevers have rigged the game. And so, again, my old friend David Frummel, I don't know if he'd consider

00:10:45.480 me a friend at this point. So, my old acquaintance David Frummel, spent eight years sneering about how

00:10:50.240 much better he and his cohorts are than MAGA people, which has only helped elect Donald Trump.

00:10:56.080 But people like David and people like you and I can navigate this world in ways that a lot of people

00:11:02.220 can't. We may not like it, and it may not always turn out well, but the Democrats have to understand

00:11:08.020 that they have built a world that is unfriendly to normal people. And if they want to try and make

00:11:14.520 normal people abnormal, fine, carry on, but you're going to wind up with Donald Trump and the White

00:11:18.760 House. But otherwise, they've got to come back to, their whole sensibility is off track. I mean,

00:11:26.880 again, they thought the big gender issue was abortion, but the big gender issue, I think,

00:11:31.200 was transgender, and particularly men in women's change rooms, and men playing against women in

00:11:36.900 sports. That's hugely unfair, and everybody can see that the guy who's six foot three outweighs the

00:11:45.900 women on the court by 50 pounds, towers over them, and there are many injuries resulting that this

00:11:53.140 isn't fair. And it's obviously not fair, and the Democrats clever their way around it, and people say,

00:11:58.480 you're all nuts. And they've got to get away from being the nuts party, or they're going to keep

00:12:03.040 losing elections, even to candidates as bad as Donald Trump. Here in Canada, you keep hearing that

00:12:11.800 anything related to gender is controversial, and that, you know, people that say men, biological

00:12:19.200 males shouldn't be playing in women's sports, that that is somehow controversial, or it's wrong, or that

00:12:26.820 allowing children to change their pronouns and their genders at school without informing mom and dad,

00:12:32.420 well, that's controversial. Not when you talk to average people, and poll after poll shows that.

00:12:39.400 Danielle Smith in Alberta came out with a policy, and she said, look, I'm not saying

00:12:44.240 that no transgendered women in women's sports, but, you know, we have to look at it, and maybe

00:12:50.260 that means that, you know, if it's a physical sport, maybe there's a weight or a height class or

00:12:57.040 something, but using examples like you did, a big six foot three, 250 pound person against a small

00:13:03.900 woman is unfair. Well, she put that forward, and the public in Alberta said, thank you. But the rest

00:13:10.640 of the media and the chattering classes denounce it as outrageous. Yeah, and she's, and she put it

00:13:16.860 forward so timidly, too. I mean, again, Pierre Polliver is kind of playing Trudeau's game,

00:13:20.800 uh, and doing it well, but he's not what you'd call a kind of Reagan principled conservative,

00:13:26.280 and I think if they were to be bolder on this, they would do better. Let's say we could have a

00:13:30.720 special category for transgender competitors. There was a piece in a British paper about a, uh,

00:13:36.240 golfer who had transitioned male to female, and then said, I'm going to stop playing professionally.

00:13:41.800 It's not fair. He said, I'd be up there on the tee, and I would actually deliberately hold back on my

00:13:46.340 drives because I could just hit the ball so much further that it wasn't a fair contest, and I think

00:13:52.180 most people's sense of fair play recognizes that we should be tolerant of people, and we should

00:13:57.060 accommodate a free society has room for those who are not, uh, don't fit the standard template, but it

00:14:03.420 also does have to uphold these simple rules of fairness and decency and protection from harm,

00:14:08.580 and the Democrats have gotten away from that in the U.S., and I think that the whole Canadian political

00:14:12.820 class, they don't understand how far they are from the sensibilities of the common people,

00:14:17.460 and of course, one of the problems we've had, and the Americans have had it too with this rampages

00:14:21.740 on campus and so on, the anti-Semitism, virulent, violent, flagrant anti-Semitism has gotten loose,

00:14:28.660 and it came into the woke portal, and if you can't understand that when that's the sort of thing you

00:14:33.980 let loose in the world, there's something really wrong with your approach. It isn't a tactical issue.

00:14:38.880 Again, it's a philosophical problem with your worldview. Then you're going to wind up pushing

00:14:45.440 voters in directions that fill you with horror. I mean, again, I don't want to pick on David

00:14:50.020 Trump too much, but for eight years, he has been totally unable to understand how anybody could

00:14:54.660 vote for Donald Trump, and I remember after the 2016 election, some liberal writer had said,

00:15:00.620 after looking at this result, I realized that I really needed to talk to some of my friends who

00:15:04.460 are Trump supporters to understand their point of view, and then I realized I had no friends who

00:15:08.620 were Trump supporters, that I was living in a bubble, and most people like that writer still

00:15:13.380 lived in a bubble for another eight years. It's not a matter of saying, yes, you should vote for

00:15:17.840 Donald Trump, but it's a matter of understanding why somebody might do it without being either evil

00:15:24.260 or moronic, and they've got to come around to that because the world is changing. The leftist

00:15:29.220 was running the table, as Andrew Coyne put it, on every issue, especially in Canada for decades,

00:15:35.000 but I think that them days is done because people are fed up, and they're rightly fed up.

00:15:41.760 When I looked at Harris's campaign, I saw one that I felt was leaning too heavy on issues that

00:15:53.680 weren't core. They were core to Democrats, which means they were core to her base, but

00:15:59.660 one of my sayings I'm fond of using is that politics is about addition, not subtraction,

00:16:07.260 and if you're not adding to your coalition, you're not going to win, and so she leaned heavy

00:16:14.080 on abortion and democracy, that Donald Trump was a threat to democracy. If those are your motivating

00:16:22.600 issues, you were already backing Kamala Harris, but when it came to the economy, which everyday

00:16:30.500 Americans felt was not working for them, the Democrats just leaned back and said, well,

00:16:37.680 the GDP is great. Okay, I can't eat GDP, but I do have to pay for groceries that are much more expensive

00:16:45.840 than they were four years ago. She just had no answer on the economy, and of course, given her

00:16:53.580 position as borders are, she obviously had no answer on immigration. Yes, and on the economy,

00:17:00.380 I think one of the mistakes the Democrats made was to say, oh, well, look, inflation is coming down,

00:17:04.760 there's GDP growth. These very short-term numbers look positive. They didn't understand, again,

00:17:10.060 Murray's point, that the people who think the economy is not working for them feel that the whole

00:17:14.940 system is one from which they are excluded more or less on purpose, and again, some of it's the

00:17:19.800 identity politics. If you're a white male, you're told you're an evil colonial oppressor. 300 years

00:17:24.300 ago, you ripped everybody off, and now we're going to put the boots in, and many of these guys are

00:17:28.480 saying, well, I'm not 300 years old, and I'm also not the president of a bank. I'm somebody who's

00:17:33.860 struggling to make a living, but the Democrats, they never connected with the notion that ordinary

00:17:40.340 people feel that the last 30 or 40 years have been bad times for ordinary people, that the economy has

00:17:46.820 gotten away from them, and if you have two university degrees and talk loudly at cocktail parties, you're

00:17:52.320 probably doing fine, but if you work with your hands, if you actually make things, if you're the

00:17:59.140 person that somebody calls when their plumbing busts, you're going to get laughed at, you're going to

00:18:05.120 have job insecurity, your community is falling apart, and they sneer at you for it. They're not

00:18:10.420 even sympathetic. Even when the remedies were wrong, I always think for, you know, for the New Deal, I

00:18:14.660 think was a very bad idea, but everybody thought Roosevelt was on their side. He thought he understood

00:18:19.780 them. His fireside chats, people couldn't get enough of them. Bill Clinton. People felt that Bill Clinton

00:18:26.160 was on their side and understood him. You know, he was successful. It's not that the Democrats can't do

00:18:33.360 it. They've obviously, you know, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, they have held the White House.

00:18:38.620 Harris was just unable to, and I'm not sure who else could have, perhaps a Gavin Newsom, but,

00:18:44.380 you know, the entire political class in North America has for too long been of this idea that,

00:18:53.300 well, we're in a knowledge economy now, so we don't need those people who work with their hands

00:18:57.520 and make things. Some politicians have figured it out. Trump has been their champion,

00:19:02.620 and so they feel like, finally, someone hasn't forgotten who I am.

00:19:09.140 Yeah, and doesn't regard me with unbridled contempt that they would only let me into their house to fix

00:19:14.880 the toilet because they'd absolutely have to, and then they'd spray some sort of essential oil as soon

00:19:21.020 as I was done. And I have to mention, the Daily Show did this spoof thing on the people behind the

00:19:27.180 people. It was Kamala Harris's holistic thought advisor, and it is side-splittingly funny, and it's

00:19:35.000 all, I mean, as G.K. Chesterton said, the opposite of funny isn't serious. It's not funny, and the

00:19:40.140 Democrats needed to watch that and understand why somebody might think this was a devastating send-up

00:19:45.820 of their approach. It's one of the Robbie Burns thing about the gift to see ourselves as others

00:19:49.880 see us. If you can understand why people might dislike you, if you can see what people might

00:19:56.000 object to about you, and some of the MAGA crowd has trouble with that too, but the Democrats have

00:20:00.400 got to be able to say, without losing faith that they're basically right, to say, why might people

00:20:05.600 think we're wrong? What are we doing that isn't just the fault of somebody else? And also, you talk

00:20:13.160 about the political class. If you think of the last three elections, the best people the Democrats

00:20:17.340 have been able to come up with, and remember, this is a party with hundreds of congresspersons,

00:20:21.660 thousands of state legislators, dozens of state governors. The best three people they could come up

00:20:27.420 with were Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, and Kamala Harris. And the Republicans, the best three people

00:20:32.540 they could come up with were Donald Trump, Donald Trump, and Donald Trump. And here in Canada,

00:20:36.660 what have we got? You know, we've got Elizabeth May the Greens can't get rid of, Jagmeet Singh leading

00:20:41.180 the NDP. Hopeless case. We've got Justin Trudeau, and Pierre Polliver maybe is better, but he's not

00:20:47.740 exactly Winston Churchill. And yet they don't understand that the people have good reason to

00:20:52.960 be disgusted with the quality of the choices they're being offered. You mentioned being able

00:20:58.340 to laugh at yourself. You know, it was interesting to see comedians taking on Harris in ways that I

00:21:05.360 didn't expect, including Saturday Night Live, portraying her as someone walking around drunk with a

00:21:10.940 glass of wine in her hand all the time. Because sometimes she'd listen to her speak. And, you

00:21:15.740 know, it's not just the, now we can be unburdened from what has been. She'd give answers on puffball

00:21:22.960 interviews with Oprah. And you're staring at the screen and saying, what is she talking about? Is

00:21:28.880 she drunk? Is she high? This makes no sense. Yes. And you attempt to say, well, that is gutter

00:21:35.080 politics to suggest a substance abuse problem. But we know the Democrats knew Biden was sent out,

00:21:40.440 and they didn't tell us. And so if Kamala Harris did have a drinking problem, they would not have

00:21:47.080 dealt with it. They would have lied about it. And again, the breach of faith, it's like with the

00:21:52.480 whole thing about COVID and this draconian overreaction and the insistence that the

00:21:57.300 science was settled on the vaccines. And then when it's time to do a postmortem and look into this,

00:22:03.120 they won't do it. And this is the kind of thing that sows distrust, inclines them toward conspiracy

00:22:08.440 theories and then points in the direction of Donald Trump. And again, I don't think that Trump

00:22:12.580 is healthy for democracy, but he's healthier than the alternative. So that's why I'm pleased with the

00:22:17.920 result, even though I'm also afraid of it, because it may shake up the elites and have them think to

00:22:22.700 themselves, maybe if we talked less about evidence-based decision-making and did a bit more

00:22:27.860 of it, maybe if we had a little bit of humility, maybe if we were more honest, because again,

00:22:34.280 we haven't even touched on the Hunter Biden laptop thing, but there's another case where

00:22:38.260 the elite institutions knew something they didn't want the voters to know, and they deliberately

00:22:44.060 hid it. And they would, if it had been Trump's kid, it would have been all over the front pages.

00:22:49.640 And that doesn't, you know, excuse Trump's failings, but it does help explain why people

00:22:54.860 think the system is rigged, that it looks after its own. It's like the things you see in Canada all the

00:22:59.280 time, the president of the CBC and won't say if she'll take a, you know, get a bonus and all this

00:23:03.920 kind of stuff. And the system just looks after its own and ordinary voters understand it's us

00:23:09.560 against them and they despise us and they're ripping us off and they don't feel any sense

00:23:14.940 of guilt. They think they're practically a master race. And when you, when you govern like that,

00:23:20.360 you create a populist backlash and it can be ugly, but if you don't want that, stop it before it gets

00:23:28.020 out of control. We need to take a quick break, John, but when we come back, let's talk about

00:23:33.280 billionaires, the impact of money on the race and to get down to what I said off the top. Let's get

00:23:38.420 down to what this means for Canada, because there's a few things making me scared and it's not so much

00:23:45.680 Donald Trump. It's has to do with how Justin Trudeau will react more in moments. A lot of discussion

00:23:52.860 about the impact of money in politics. Of course, you've got the political action committees. This

00:23:58.400 election, you also had high profile billionaires, Mark Cuban outstumping for Kamala Harris. And of

00:24:04.040 course, Elon Musk, owner of X, stumping for Trump. But here's an interesting thought, John.

00:24:12.460 The billion, most of the billionaires were backing Harris and she raised more money. This is from

00:24:18.220 an ex post that Elon Musk put out worth noting that far more billionaires backed Harris than Trump

00:24:24.540 and she raised almost 50% more money. Here's the details. Harris had the backing. So Ford Forbes

00:24:32.580 counted 83 billionaires backing Vice President Kamala Harris, 52 backing Donald Trump. But as Musk pointed

00:24:40.760 out, she raised 50% more money, spent incredibly amounts of more money. In fact, in Pennsylvania,

00:24:51.240 she outspent Trump vastly outspent him $81 million to about $18 million in Michigan, $55 million to Trump's

00:25:00.720 $29 million in Georgia, $49 million to his $15 million in Wisconsin. And the results are still in

00:25:10.420 his favor. What are your thoughts on Musk and Cuban and the big money people getting involved?

00:25:17.120 That's a lot of billionaires. I don't know very many billionaires, unfortunately. But I think that

00:25:23.880 the thing that really stands out to me about this, it's another example of this notion of the system

00:25:28.960 being rigged in that for decades, we've been told that money in politics is bad. And why is it bad?

00:25:35.160 Because right wingers have it. And with it, they can buy the brains of the hapless sheep who vote.

00:25:40.280 And so in Canada, we have restrictions on campaign finance and so on. And I've always disliked those.

00:25:44.800 Stephen Harper hated them until he became prime minister, and then he kept them.

00:25:48.540 Well, in fairness to Harper, the Supreme Court had ruled that they had to stay.

00:25:53.720 Phooey. He could have done something about it, and he didn't. Stephen Harper is a great

00:25:59.180 missed opportunity in this country. But when the Democrats outspend the Republicans,

00:26:04.500 it's not just that it didn't work. So it proves that all that yapping about money in politics was

00:26:08.320 just another excuse for not connecting with the common people. But it's okay when it's Democrats,

00:26:13.560 but it's terrible when it's Republicans. And this is an example of these complex kind of

00:26:17.580 rigged setup, where if Donald Trump had outspent Kamala Harris, there'd be endless cries to restrict

00:26:22.880 spending, almost whether he'd won or lost. But when she outspends him, it's like, yeah, whatever, man.

00:26:28.380 But again, also the fact that so many of these billionaires, like, you know, God bless America,

00:26:32.800 that it has so many billionaires, if only we did too. But that this is more proof that the upper

00:26:38.260 class is communist, right? All these people who've done so well in America's free enterprise

00:26:42.600 system, and then shown ingratitude on a massive scale. The elite is far to the left. I keep,

00:26:49.460 well, I don't know what to call it, I would say I X'd out, right? But I keep X'ing out,

00:26:53.720 the revolt of the elites continues. Because this is one of the strange things happening to Western

00:26:58.020 civilization right now, is that it is not a revolution from below. It's this popular

00:27:03.520 civilization, a counter-revolution from below, trying to get back to normalcy. The revolution's

00:27:08.180 coming from above. And the real crazies are the people at the top. The people who most hate Western

00:27:13.560 civilization are those who've received the greatest benefits from it. And Justin Trudeau is a case in

00:27:17.880 point. Who has been handed more on a silver platter by Western society than him? And who hates Western

00:27:26.560 society more than Justin Trudeau? It's just inexplicable. But there it is. And it really annoys

00:27:33.440 people, and then they go and vote populist, and the elite says, ew, how there are baskets of

00:27:37.760 deplorables. They offend me. They smell. Do not allow them into the house.

00:27:42.020 He was handed his life on a silver Mercedes, just to be clear.

00:27:47.500 Yeah, he's enjoyed so much. You'd think he'd feel some sense that there's something good about a

00:27:53.000 system in which things like this could happen. Or again, even someone like Kamala Harris is saying,

00:27:58.500 wow, compared to how America would have treated a person like me 50 or 100 years ago,

00:28:03.180 surely we should be celebrating what a great country this is. But you don't have any sense

00:28:08.620 that she loves America. And if you look back again, you look back at the New Deal, say the

00:28:12.920 Democrats and Republicans sharply divided on all kinds of issues. But they were arguing about which

00:28:18.000 represented the true greatness of America. They were not. And when Trump said make America great

00:28:22.960 again, the reaction was America was never great. Well, thank you very much.

00:28:26.820 Let me ask you about the the impact on Canada, because I have some grave concerns. First off,

00:28:33.600 Trump has promised mass deportation of illegal immigrants. Now, there's an estimated 11 million

00:28:39.680 illegal immigrants in the United States. There's no way that he's going to remove all 11 million.

00:28:45.340 But he has said he'll start with the violent criminals and and go from there. But sounds like a

00:28:50.820 sane policy to me. If you've let violent criminals just come across your border illegally, maybe you

00:28:57.900 want to get rid of them. But we know based on he just threatened to do this last time. And in 2017,

00:29:05.340 we started seeing an influx of people coming across at Roxham Road. The Trudeau government did nothing.

00:29:11.600 At one point, we had thirty nine thousand people coming across at Roxham Road. The Trudeau government

00:29:16.720 did nothing until the Biden administration kind of forced their hand. We now have forty four thousand

00:29:24.340 people coming into our airports so far this year and declaring asylum. I don't have any hope that

00:29:32.680 despite the assurances of Mark Miller this week, despite the assurances of Chrystia Freeland this week,

00:29:38.880 I don't have any hope that the Trudeau government will deal with this if we see a giant surge in people

00:29:45.700 walking across the border again and declaring asylum from America. I don't think they'll do

00:29:51.160 anything other than use it for political gain. Yes, because ideas have consequences and their view

00:29:58.040 from Donald Trump is a fascist to so-called Canada is an illegitimate settler colonial state.

00:30:05.200 They don't think that we have any right to control our borders. They have no intention of trying to

00:30:10.480 control our borders. And they think the kind of people Donald Trump wants out of America are probably

00:30:14.580 precisely the kind of people we want in Canada. And this is a classic revolt of the elites kind of

00:30:20.140 situation. When you start every public event with an acknowledgement that we're on stolen land,

00:30:25.600 then you're not liable to take a robust approach to preventing someone else from coming and stealing

00:30:31.080 it from us. So it starts with bad ideas and it translates down to bad policies. Or in the case of the

00:30:41.100 Trudeau administration also, they have shown themselves singularly inept when they do try and

00:30:46.000 do something. So even if they attempted to get a handle on it, I don't think they'd succeed. I mean,

00:30:50.340 you always think to yourself, well, somewhere in the RCMP and the security apparatus, there are a bunch

00:30:54.280 of frustrated adults just waiting for permission to do their jobs the way they're meant to. But

00:30:58.520 increasingly, nobody is capable of minding the store. The bigger the bureaucracy gets, the more

00:31:03.820 incompetent it gets. So that is one of those situations in which Trump is liable to hand us a policy

00:31:11.100 won't even try to solve. And if we did try, we'd mangle it. And more generally, we've seen Trudeau

00:31:16.660 already mangle immigration in this country. We've gone from a country that broadly speaking was fine

00:31:23.520 with high levels of immigration. And he said, Oh, you think those are high? Let me really ramp them

00:31:27.860 up to the point where even he admitted we're bringing in people faster than we can absorb them

00:31:32.880 adds to the healthcare crisis, adds to the housing crisis. It's being seen by many economists as

00:31:38.540 a wage reducing move, like a wage suppression move by the Trudeau government, and they still

00:31:46.240 haven't fixed it. They've talked about it. And of course, this is a classic example. People think

00:31:50.380 capitalism is right wing, but the big companies are happy to have cheap labor. It's extraordinary

00:31:55.320 if you get out of your ivory tower and go out and deal with people who are making coffee and,

00:32:00.980 you know, staffing hotels and so on. It seems like you deal with nothing but temporary foreign

00:32:05.500 workers. So never mind the corporations being the right wing force for good or evil. But also,

00:32:13.820 if you let in too many people who don't share our values, your society disintegrates. Again,

00:32:18.880 you look at all these pro Hamas rallies in the streets of our major cities, you think these are

00:32:23.860 the grandchildren of people who came to Canada gratefully after the Second World War? No, these

00:32:29.200 are the recent arrivals from places where Jew hate is just on the breakfast cereal. And it should

00:32:35.200 have been foreseeable. It's also people who were born and raised here who were just crazy anti-Semites

00:32:41.440 of the far left. Yeah, there certainly is some of that. But the foot soldiers of this by and large

00:32:46.820 are recent immigrants who are just, again, the blood libel to them is taken for granted. And nobody in

00:32:55.060 authority and academia and so on seem to think that this would be a problem because they think that

00:33:00.820 it's Western civilization that is the root of all evil. So again, it comes back to ideas.

00:33:05.660 And part of Trump's appeal is that he doesn't think that. And Kamala Harris probably did. There

00:33:12.440 are going to be other ways in which Trump is a problem for Canada. I mean, he represents a

00:33:16.060 half wholesome capacity in the American political system. When they get too extended abroad,

00:33:21.140 you do get isolationist movements in politics that are going to retrench. And Trump is not going to be

00:33:26.280 the world's policeman. And of course, we are exposed in that we spend such a pitiful amount on defense

00:33:31.160 because we don't think Canada is worth defending. On the other hand, the Americans can't neglect North

00:33:35.360 American security. So we'll get some protection. But Trump is also inclined to tariffs. We'll have

00:33:41.640 to see what Republicans in Congress want to do. But the other point, which I'm sure you were working

00:33:47.220 your way around to, is that Trudeau has been so rude about Trump that it's going to be a little bit

00:33:52.040 hard to make nice with him now. Of course, Trump isn't polite either. And if I was prime minister,

00:33:57.100 the things I'd have said about Trump, the phone would melt if he tried to talk to me.

00:34:01.600 But at the same time, as prime minister, you're meant to be able to get along, especially with

00:34:07.860 the leaders of our allies, even if they're not your favorite people in this world. And Trudeau is just,

00:34:12.660 again, he has none of the skills that are needed for a leader. And so it's not going to go well.

00:34:18.000 Let me show or play you for you what I think is going to be part of the problem. Trudeau using

00:34:24.900 MAGA to attack his political opponent in this country, Pierre Polyef.

00:34:28.640 It has become glaringly obvious to everyone, except for certain MAGA conservatives, that the

00:34:35.100 fight against climate change is a fight for the future. Ideologically driven MAGA conservatives are

00:34:42.700 calling for pollution to be free again. Unlike these MAGA conservatives, that there is no choice

00:34:48.820 anymore between protecting the environment. He chose to play partisan games last night in trying

00:34:55.020 to shut down this house through a MAGA inspired approach. There is no debate around support in

00:35:01.480 Ukraine, in Canada, like there is in other countries where MAGA inspired far right movements

00:35:07.260 are undermining supports for Ukraine. So John, there's countless examples of Trudeau using MAGA

00:35:12.960 as a slur. There are liberal fundraising emails, social media videos attacking Donald Trump,

00:35:20.160 saying he's unelectable. And that's what Pierre Polyef is. So how do you work with him? I mean,

00:35:26.960 I was writing columns a year ago, telling the Trudeau liberals, you need to stop this,

00:35:34.740 this guy could win. And I had people scoff, Donald Trump will never be president again.

00:35:40.220 Here we are. Now we're in trouble as we head towards renegotiating NAFTA yet again.

00:35:45.660 On the other hand, Trump has probably used liberal as an insult quite freely. So to some extent,

00:35:51.100 you ought to be able to laugh it off and say, well, it's possible that neither of us would have

00:35:55.780 voted for the other. But now that we find ourselves as respectively as leaders of our executive

00:36:00.840 branches, we'll get along because we're going to put the national interest first. But we've seen

00:36:05.480 with Trudeau, for instance, when the Freedom Convoy was coming to Ottawa, that he doesn't have that

00:36:10.300 capacity to reach out. He doesn't have a sense of humor about himself. He doesn't have perspective on

00:36:15.080 himself. He's not the kind of guy who can smooth it over with a self-deprecating joke. I remember when

00:36:21.480 George Bush Jr. came up here and he talked about the crowds and it was so nice that they were waving

00:36:26.880 and using all five fingers. I was in the room for that. That was funny.

00:36:31.840 Defusing the fact, it's a bit of a cliched line actually, but it defused the fact that a lot of

00:36:37.120 Canadians didn't care for his style or his policies and recognizing there was in Bush Jr. a certain

00:36:44.620 degree of genuine humility, which of course Trump possesses about as much of as Trudeau. So it's going

00:36:50.220 to be a bit awkward, but you also just have to recognize the United States is bigger than us

00:36:54.200 and they actually spend on their military, not enough, but way more than we do.

00:36:58.620 So you need to have a certain amount of geopolitical common sense and just a certain amount of human

00:37:04.380 warmth. Again, the thing about Reagan though, many people despised Reagan until they met him,

00:37:08.900 but it was hard to despise Reagan once he was in the room. I mean, a classic Reagan story,

00:37:13.420 he famously had jelly beans in a cabinet meeting and if the conversation got tense, he'd pass them

00:37:18.000 around because he thought it was hard to be really surly while eating jelly beans. And that was a

00:37:22.600 profound insight looking like complete corn. But you can't imagine Justin Trudeau having these kind

00:37:29.000 of little effective tension diffusing and imagine you the president of the United States, you got one

00:37:34.300 finger on the button and the other nine on a bowl of jelly beans. But to Reagan, that was fine. He

00:37:39.020 wasn't, but Trudeau's not like that. Economically, I think we could be in trouble and this won't matter

00:37:47.240 about the relationship between Trump and Trudeau. But I think that Trump will unleash the American

00:37:54.460 economy again. He's already said he's going to lift the ban on exporting LNG to Asian countries that

00:38:01.260 Biden put in. The American oil and gas sector is already booming compared to Canada's. He's going to

00:38:07.400 make that happen to an even larger degree. And the investment that we might be getting in

00:38:14.980 our oil and gas sector is going to move south because what's our government doing? They're

00:38:21.920 bringing in an emissions cap, which the industry and the province of Alberta and the province of

00:38:26.620 Saskatchewan say amounts to a production cap. So Trudeau is making it more difficult to do business

00:38:32.200 and Trump is going to make it easier to do business. They are going to flourish and we're going to be

00:38:38.800 by the way, one last point before I let you react to that. There was just a report from Statscan showing

00:38:46.720 that there's only two growth areas of significance in the Canadian economy lately, the oil and gas

00:38:52.240 sector and the public sector. One pays for the other. Yes. And again, Justin Trudeau and the people

00:39:00.000 around him have no grasp of economics whatsoever. It's sort of a point of pride in the Canadian

00:39:04.760 political system. The old story about Joe Clark having an opportunity to study either French or

00:39:10.720 economics, but not time to do both. And he thought that he would study French to further his ambitions

00:39:15.080 rather than actually trying to figure out how the world works. But Donald Trump has an instinctive

00:39:20.320 sympathy with the people who actually make stuff. And Trudeau doesn't have any of that. And our economy

00:39:25.480 is more dependent on oil and gas than the American economy. But we're both, at least they are,

00:39:29.820 and we could be an energy superpower. But they've got a lot more diversity in their economy even than

00:39:35.220 we do, though we have a pretty diverse economy. It is critical. But you can't do it because the

00:39:41.000 Trudeau administration are true believers on climate change. They really honestly think all the things

00:39:46.120 they say about, oh, the weather's getting worse and the sky's going to burst into flames and everything

00:39:49.600 will die. And they also think if we stop it, the world will follow us. This obsession they have

00:39:55.240 with that everybody's looking to Canada to see what to do next. And nobody's looking to Canada to see

00:39:59.720 We're the only major oil and gas producing nation in the world that has put in an emissions cap on

00:40:06.660 the industry. And they're bragging about that. And meanwhile, the Americans have been lowering

00:40:14.380 their emissions while increasing oil and gas production. And they don't have a carbon tax.

00:40:18.560 And they don't have the crazy regulations that we do. We have a carbon tax. We have crazy regulations.

00:40:23.220 We have the clean fuel standard. We have the incoming emissions cap. On and on it goes.

00:40:28.720 Our emissions have either been stable or going up during Trudeau's time in office. And the Americans

00:40:33.880 have been able to drop theirs. So your policies clearly aren't working except to kill off the

00:40:40.180 economy that helps pay for your largesse. Yes. And our liberals, like the Democrats in the United

00:40:45.280 States, both many of them from personal experience, but also as a matter of conviction,

00:40:49.400 think that wealth just generates itself. It just falls from the sky. You know, Freeland's always saying,

00:40:54.860 Christia Freeland, we can't afford not to spend more money. You look at the huge increase in the

00:40:59.360 public sector. And even Pierre Polliver is not talking about getting it back to where it was in

00:41:02.980 2015. Somehow or other, it'll pay for itself. You don't need that grubby production, that sticky,

00:41:09.640 messy oil. All you need is a whole bunch of people trading memos about DEI. And this is one of the

00:41:14.960 things that cost the Democrats the election, is this feeling that their people were going to come out

00:41:19.380 because they're at the public trough no matter what happens. But the average working stiff is in a

00:41:25.240 heap of trouble. And here in Canada, too, you think of what kind of people Trudeau knows are all working

00:41:29.260 for the government. And he doesn't grasp that you need somebody to pay the bills. We could just print

00:41:35.360 the money, you know, quantitative easing of all those terrible ideas that a long name didn't make

00:41:40.620 better. And so we are governed by people who have no idea where wealth comes from. And we let them

00:41:45.620 govern us. Again, it's the picture of Dorian voter. They didn't fall from the sky. We elected them.

00:41:50.860 But it's also, I think, the fault to some extent of conservatives who aren't willing to stand up to

00:41:54.600 all of this. Even you mentioned, you know, American emissions are falling. Well, unless carbon dioxide

00:41:59.340 is pollution, who cares if emissions are falling? What's that got to do with anything but no Canadian

00:42:04.280 politician? Plenty of American politicians, Republicans, virtually to a man or a woman, have

00:42:09.280 challenged the notion that there's a man-made climate crisis. Try and get Pierre Polliver to say there is no

00:42:14.680 man-made climate crisis. Try and get Danielle Smith to say it. None of them have the guts to say it.

00:42:20.180 And that's why I think our country's in danger of building up more pressure to a bigger populist

00:42:24.620 explosion because our political class, I mean, it's a strange thing to say if only we had people like

00:42:29.080 Donald Trump. But we need somebody who's willing to articulate the things that most normal people

00:42:35.660 understand, like that the weather's not getting worse. One of the reasons there were no climate voters

00:42:39.820 in the United States worth mentioning is that the average American knows it's not true that the

00:42:43.880 weather's getting worse. It's just bad because it's always been bad. And I think most Canadians

00:42:47.660 know that. But try and find one politician who'll say, you know what, the weather's not getting worse.

00:42:53.280 That's just a complete misunderstanding, misrepresentation. They should go look at the

00:42:57.320 records. We need more politicians who are willing to stand up for common sense in a decent way before,

00:43:03.220 again, as the Americans did, you get someone standing up for it in a way that's not that decent.

00:43:07.660 And the more we damage ourselves in policy and bounce off Donald Trump and all this kind of stuff,

00:43:12.860 the more likely it is that we're going to have this famous backlash. So for heaven's sakes,

00:43:17.520 why not be sensible before you're cornered? Why is that so hard?

00:43:22.560 Well, we've just got a couple minutes left. So let's talk about Trump and the impact on the world.

00:43:28.020 Of course, lots of people pulling their hair out over this. And what his position will be with Israel,

00:43:34.100 what his position will be with Ukraine, with China and Taiwan.

00:43:37.820 It was interesting. I was at a talk by Barry Weiss of the Free Press, a very intelligent,

00:43:46.660 impressive woman. And she was asked about Harris and Trump. And she said, my fear is that one

00:43:53.640 candidate doesn't want Israel to win. That's Harris. And the other candidate doesn't want Ukraine to

00:43:58.800 win. And that's Trump. I can see some sense in that there's a lot of pressure on the Republican side

00:44:04.060 just to get a deal. But I have the sense that Trump will be able to get a deal that doesn't see Ukraine

00:44:10.400 give up territory. But then again, I could be wrong on that. I don't see Trump's election leading to

00:44:18.360 utter chaos in the world because he was president for four years and those predictions didn't come true.

00:44:25.940 And one reason why is that Trump is somewhat unpredictable and he's somewhat touchy.

00:44:30.420 And so if you pick on one of America's friends, you might find that Trump, despite the various

00:44:35.840 things that he said, gets into high dungeon and does something about it. And the Ukraine issue is

00:44:40.740 an interesting one because I know people on the right in this country, too, who are against supporting

00:44:45.000 Ukraine because they're so disgusted with the elite on every issue, including COVID, that they don't

00:44:50.700 believe it even when it's right as it is on Ukraine. On the other hand, the elite is kind of anti-Israel.

00:44:55.740 So Donald Trump is pro-Israel. But I do think if China were to invade Taiwan, Trump would not say,

00:45:01.620 never mind, let him have it. That's not the kind of person he is. Whereas Kamala Harris,

00:45:05.960 so somebody said about George McGovern that if Israel were attacked and in the verge of extinction,

00:45:10.400 he would wring his hands and send to field hospital, that Kamala Harris might well have

00:45:14.720 failed to respond having made commitments. And Donald Trump might well respond despite not having made

00:45:20.960 them. If he's capable of complete irresponsibility and he doesn't really know the issues, I hope that

00:45:25.920 he will go to Putin with a deal on Ukraine that is not unreasonable. And then when Putin turns it

00:45:30.580 down, he will back Ukraine better than Biden did. But I may be guilty of wishful thinking. I am sure

00:45:35.900 he'll stand with Israel. And this is the critical conflict of our time. And so if you're going to be

00:45:41.280 right on one and wrong on one, be right on Israel. I don't see why you can't be right on both. But if

00:45:45.840 you've got to pick one, be right on Israel. And the Democratic Party was wrong on Israel and kept

00:45:51.040 calling for a ceasefire and saying, oh, let Hamas have free hits on Jews. Trump isn't like that.

00:45:56.140 So even geopolitically, I think on balance, he's better than Kamala Harris. So that's clearing a

00:46:00.680 low bar. There's one easy way for America to stop sending billions to Ukraine, but still fund them

00:46:08.400 so that they can win the war. And that's to hand over all of Putin's assets that they've seized.

00:46:15.840 There is a way to do that, even staying within the confines of what is loosely known as international

00:46:21.640 law. They've frozen these assets. They can hand them over to Zelensky and say, here you go. Spend

00:46:28.100 your boy's money attacking him or defending against him. Yeah, that's exactly the sort of thing Biden

00:46:34.180 wouldn't do because of that appeasement minded elite that has dominated Western politics is one of

00:46:39.700 the things that drives normal people crazy, because they figure if someone starts a fight with you,

00:46:43.820 you should fight back. What Ukraine really needs is artillery shells, right? It's fine if they can

00:46:48.960 spend the money, but they've got to be able to buy shells. We have learned in this war that it's still

00:46:53.040 the 20th century on a battlefield in many ways. And again, Canada needs to start ramping up its

00:46:57.720 artillery production. And even the Americans are doing it. Everybody needs a lot more shells as the

00:47:02.360 world gets uglier. So yes, give them the money, but give them the munitions. And Trump may,

00:47:07.940 especially if Putin annoys him, he might say, ha, well, we'll show you now. There's more hope with

00:47:12.640 him, but that one's a file that I'm anxious on. Yeah. And on the Israel side, he's already shown

00:47:18.140 that he was willing to deal with Iran and he was right on Iran. Eight years ago, Biden was wrong on

00:47:24.420 Iran when he came in and lifted sanctions and released funding. And Obama was catastrophically

00:47:30.260 wrong. That funding went directly to Hamas and Hezbollah.

00:47:33.940 As any fool could have seen, right? Again, the cleverness, one of the problems with the cleverness

00:47:37.920 is they're actually, they thought themselves into a degree of stupidity. So Orwell said,

00:47:41.980 you have to belong to the intelligentsia to believe stuff like that. No ordinary person could be such

00:47:45.840 a fool. And we have seen the revenge of the ordinary person in the United States. And we need it in

00:47:51.060 Canada. Again, let's try and channel it in a bit of more dignified and thoughtful way. But this is,

00:47:56.960 it's a shock to the whole world to say the elites who've been misrunning things can't just keep doing it.

00:48:02.820 And that may be salutary in Canada as well. We may all come out of this better off than you'd

00:48:07.540 think when you said the words, Donald Trump was just elected president of the United States again.

00:48:12.860 John Robson, thanks so much.

00:48:14.880 A pleasure as always.

00:48:16.300 Full Comment is a post-media podcast. My name's Brian Lilly, your host.

00:48:20.320 This episode was produced by Andre Prune. Theme music by Bryce Hall. Kevin Libin is the executive

00:48:25.380 producer. Remember, you can subscribe to Full Comment on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music,

00:48:30.200 YouTube Podcasts. Listen to us through the app or Alexa-enabled devices. Help us out as well.

00:48:36.620 Leave a rating. Give us a review. Tell your friends about us. Thanks for listening. Until next time,

00:48:41.400 I'm Brian Lilly.

00:48:42.080 We'll see you next time.

Full Comment - November 11, 2024

Revenge of the normal people, from Trump to Canada

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