Canada’s Trudeau’s turn from cool to laughing stock, by Terry Gavin.
Ever since his election as Canada’s prime minister last October, Justin Trudeau has revelled in global tributes, raves and swoons. He’s the Disney prince with the trippy dance moves, the groovy Haida tattoo and the gender-balanced cabinet. He’s the last best hope for globalization, the star attraction at the Pride Parades, the hero of the Paris Climate Summit, the guy everyone wants a selfie with.
Trudeau made himself synonymous with Canada. He made Canada cool again. It was fun while it lasted.
By the early hours of Saturday morning, Havana time, Trudeau was an international laughing stock. Canada’s “brand,” so carefully constructed in Vogue photo essays and Economist magazine cover features, seemed to suddenly implode into a bonspiel of the vanities, with humiliating headlines streaming from the Washington Post to the Guardian, and from Huffington Post to USA Today. …
Times have changed, and the Trudeau family’s bonds with the Castro family, first cultivated while Pierre Trudeau was prime minister and carefully nurtured during the years that followed, now seem somehow unhygienic. Greasy, even. Definitely not cool. …
“It is with deep sorrow that I learned today of the death of Cuba’s longest serving President,” Trudeau’s statement begins, going on to celebrate Castro as a “larger than life” personality who served his people. He was “a legendary revolutionary and orator” whose people loved him, and who worked wonders for Cuban education and health care. …
Trudeau’s lament for the last of the Cold War dictators ended up confirming every wicked caricature of his own vacuity and every lampoon of the Trudeau government’s foreign-policy lack of seriousness.
Twitter lit up with hilarious mockeries under the hashtag #trudeaueulogies. Florida senator Marco Rubio wanted to know whether Trudeau’s statement came from a parody account. The impeccably liberal Jeffrey Goldberg, editor-in-chief of the Atlantic magazine, called Trudeau’s praise of Castro “a sad statement for the leader of a democracy to make.”
Cultural Marxism tries to make all things leftist cool — even Castro. But although Trudeau fell for this reality-defying trick, too many did not. Loser.
