The late, great Rafe Mair left us with one of the truest of truisms: in politics, if you are a three, it doesn’t matter — if everyone nearby is a two.
Never has Mair’s observation been more true than with Justin Trudeau. The Liberal leader may be a dwarf, politically, but he still dwarfs all the dwarfs around him. (True.)
Such was the case with one Donald Trump, soon to be a private citizen. Trump was the best thing that ever happened to Justin Trudeau.
Trudeau had no shortage of wounds, all of them self-inflicted. And in each and every case, however bad Trudeau looked, Trump could always be counted upon to look far worse.
Take Trudeau‘s commitment to ethics (please). Trudeau is the first sitting prime minister to have been found to have violated ethics rules multiple times.
Remember the Aga Khan scandal? In that one, Trudeau took gifts from a lobbyist – free flights, traveling to a private island, and then saying nothing was wrong when he got caught.
Well, it was wrong. Plenty wrong. So said the ethics commissioner, who found Trudeau had flagrantly violated conflict of interest laws.
Same with the SNC Lavalin scandal, otherwise known as Lavscam. In that one, Trudeau and his officials – including his finance minister, who hastily-departed in the middle of yet another ethics imbroglio — tried to bully his justice minister into giving a sweetheart deal to a Quebec-based Liberal Party donor facing prosecution for corruption.
Because she refused to go along with the scheme, Trudeau drove out his female and Indigenous justice minister. He was again cited for wrongdoing by the ethics counselor.
But, even after all that, Trump made Trudeau look like a rank amateur. Trump actually attempted to get a foreign power to investigate a detested political rival who was also an American citizen – one Joe Biden, Democrat — thereby, earning himself a full congressional investigation and a later impeachment.
Another example: racism. In the middle of last year‘s federal election, Justin Trudeau was found to have worn racist blackface no less than three times. He even admitted that he may have done it more times than that.
It was inarguably racist, and it made Canada an international laughing stock.
Well, Donald Trump outdid even that. After the terrible events in Charlottesville — where an innocent woman was actually killed by a white supremacist — Trump said that there were “fine people” to be found among the ranks of the neo-Nazis and white supremacists.
That’s not all: in the middle of his first debate with Joe Biden, Trump declined to condemn white supremacy and groups like the racist Proud Boys.
During the coronavirus pandemic, which has been the defining political event of our collective lifetimes, Justin Trudeau again found a way to unimpress.
At the start of the pandemic, his government actively discouraged the wearing of masks, sniffed that the risk to Canadians was “low,” and actually called those who wanted to shut the border to China racist.
In retrospect, not impressive. But once again, Donald Trump was determined to impress even less.
He said the virus would go away in the Spring (it didn’t). He said it was a hoax (it wasn’t). He said people should consider injecting themselves with bleach (they shouldn’t).
And so on and so on. Justin Trudeau is a three. But Donald Trump was always, always a two.
Heads up, Justin: Joe Biden may not be perfect, but he’s no two.
And compared to you, big guy, he’s pretty close to a 10.
Warren Kinsella worked as a volunteer for Joe Biden and the Democrats in several US states
There are lots of theories about why Joe Biden beat Donald Trump.
That Trump had offended lots of people. That Trump had alienated Americans of color. That female voters hated him.
But the reality is that Trump dramatically increased his vote total over 2016 — including with minorities and Republican women. The reality is that the Republican President received the second-highest share of the popular vote in American presidential history.
But it wasn’t enough. He lost.
Because the reality is also this: Joe Biden won an even bigger share of the popular vote. And that happened — his win happened — because of organization.
Full disclosure: This writer worked as an unpaid volunteer for Joe Biden and the Democrats for many months. I’ve helped the Democrats for years, and was to be an accredited volunteer at their August leadership convention in Milwaukee.
But the coronavirus had other plans. With the border closed, I couldn’t cross the border to knock on doors and get out the vote for Biden.
So, I and many others worked the phones. Night after night, day after day, we ran phone banks, calling millions of American voters. And our objective was always the same: Encourage them to use absentee ballots. Encourage them to vote early. Encourage them to mail in their ballot.
Over and over, we’d tell voters how to use the so-called absentee ballots: Get them from the town clerk. Put an X on the ballot. Put it in the small envelope, seal it. Sign it — with your real signature. Put the small envelope in the big one. Then take the sealed big envelope back to the town clerk — and don’t trust the postal system!
I made hundreds of such calls to Americans from New Hampshire to Florida to California. And, over and over, I was amazed by how enthusiastically voters — particularly Democratic voters – were embracing early voting.
We would’ve preferred a landslide election-night win, of course.
But months ago, Biden campaign manager Jen O’Malley-Dillon told us on a conference call three things: One, the polls were wrong, the race was going to be tight. Two, our voters were much more concerned than GOP supporters about the coronavirus. They were more concerned about possible vote suppression dirty tricks, too. And, three, we weren’t going to win big landslide on election night. Instead, O’Malley-Dillon told us, we’d have to fight a long, hard organizational war to identify our voters early — and then get them to vote early.
So we did that. And the Republicans just didn’t.
The other guys had big rallies, sure. But those rallies are always just preaching to the converted — particularly when the TV networks aren’t televising them.
Trump needed to grow his vote base. He needed to reach out to first-time voters. But he didn’t do that.
Joe Biden did. The Democrats did.
The media, and the Republicans, didn’t pay attention to what we Democrats were doing. I will never understand why. When around 100 million Americans are voting in advance, isn’t that newsworthy? When that many voters are motivated enough to vote in that way, isn’t that something that should deeply worry the incumbent?
Joe Biden won because he was a specific antidote to Donald Trump — he was decent, he was human, he was less partisan, he was experienced.
But mostly, we won because our voters were more motivated, and because our disciplined army of staff and volunteers were one thing the Trump Republicans simply weren’t:
Organized.
[Kinsella worked as a volunteer for Joe Biden and the Democrats in several US states]
I still think I’m going to get that last one right. Plan to work on the Georgia runoffs – as I did in the midterms and in 2020 – to help make it happen.
But feeling so emotional and so happy, today. So grateful.
Lots of you – lots! – have tweeted, texted and called me to say how upset you are about Trump’s statement tonight. You are very upset – but I’m actually not. So, let me try and explain why. Let me try and make you feel better.
