As an American, the question hanging on everyone’s lips when I’m in the room is: “What do you think of Trump?”
These days, people ask this question more often than they ask my name. However, they don’t really want my real analysis or opinion. They just want to confirm a preconception. Trump, to non-Americans, is the culmination of all of the years of American bluster and delusions of grandeur.
It appears to many that our home and native land does not have the same orange-haired problem. Canada just elected a young, attractive, but harmless prime minister to replace the boring, yet “evil” commerce teacher we were stuck with previously. We are enlightened, and don’t have a Donald Trump running up and down the country. To most of Canadians, the results of the American election will prompt no soul-searching, and no acknowledgment that what is going on down south is in any way similar to how people think and act here in Canada.
Yes, Canada gets to sit by and smugly judge its southern neighbours bowing their heads in shame of Trump and what he stands for, while ignoring its own manifestations of the same. Canadians cheer the Black Lives Matter movement abroad, while overlooking if not altogether condemning the actions of Black Lives Matter at work in their own country, such as at the Toronto Pride parade. This country is appalled at the American hatred of Mexicans, and then complains about its own immigrants, and promotes the need to protect “real” Canadians from “barbaric cultural practices.”Canadians complain about the south’s lack of multiculturalism, but can’t even accept the coexistence of English and French, or further still, they continue to discriminate against indigenous people. Canadians grumble idly about an American blustering on the world stage, but don’t suggest any alternatives or help clean up the mess.
This is all even before one gets to the more personal examples, like the jerk who spends all day on 4-chan complaining about the “femi-nazis” and how they’re keeping men from being “real men.” Or the woman who won’t talk to her Chinese neighbour because “I guess he just wants to keep to himself,” or the political science student with “his own views” on language laws.
Trump is a surrogate for all of these people. Conveniently enough, he’s on the other side of a border, so he’s not our problem. But he is something fundamentally wrong with society, and his bigoted and racist ideologies are not limited to a number of lunatics in the states across the border. I have been astonished at how many Trump supporters, overt or otherwise, I’ve found here in Canada. This is a social movement, appealing to the very worst instincts of the masculine ego, the xenophobe, and the contrarians looking to take a jab at the establishment, no matter what form that may take.
This form of populism will not just go away when the media gets tired of playing with its new favourite toy. It’s something that’s been here for a long time, and will outlast any single event. Canada is not as removed from Trumpism as it would like to think, and the phenomenon does not confine itself to merely “political” topics. Canada is no less a collective hypocrite for scoffing at Trump than America is for facilitating his current omnipresence. We are all as much to blame for him and his like.
