Not long ago, Justin Trudeau’s fondness for donning inappropriate costumes was safely confined to a handful of cringe-making photos from a state visit to India; Boris Johnson’s disregard for truth was discounted as a harmless quirk, or even seen as part of his blustery charm; Donald Trump’s mob-boss dialogue with world leaders was hard to watch, or read about, but not enough to induce a crisis. But as political karma suddenly descended on these men, their fragility revealed very human characters behind their carefully managed facades, real people who are convincingly fallible, petty, and inept.
None will emerge unscathed. Trudeau, the Instagram leader, par excellence, now looks like a pious fraud. Even before his “brown-” and “black-face” photos went viral – three have surfaced so far, and Trudeau is reluctant to give a “definitive” number – he had failed to meaningfully answer a finding by Canada’s ethics commissioner that the Prime Minister’s Office had improperly pressured a former Attorney General in a major anti-corruption case. Nor did Trudeau have anything useful to say about several female colleagues who have tarnished his feminist credentials after being ejected from the party for their dissenting opinions. Instead, in the wake of serial embarrassments with the photographs, he peevishly skipped a debate on the environment, then aired an ad which promised robust legislation (even though his government recently nationalised an oil pipeline!) and ended with him jogging, photogenically, in the woods. The sequence left him looking, and sounding, more like a spoiled child than the wise and sensitive leader he has tried so hard to portray. Were he not blessed with lacklustre and unattractive opponents his re-election would be a forlorn hope.
Johnson’s buffoonery has also lost whatever modest appeal it may once have enjoyed. Deemed a liar by the Supreme Court, and called out in parliament for the hectoring insults which have exposed some MPs to death threats – Johnson could only ‘disagree’ with the learned judges (a view that he shares with most criminals, as one wag pointed out on Twitter), dismiss opposition concerns as ‘humbug’ and then try, with his customary puerility, to goad his rivals into an early general election.
Trump’s self-inflicted wounds arose in circumstances more appropriate to a B-movie shakedown than a formal conversation and they would be merely comical but for his position as the default leader of the free world. Caught in the act of using US foreign policy to further private political ends even he must have realized how foolish it all seemed. Just months after the Mueller report published damning accounts of his campaign holding shady meetings with foreigners who could smear a political opponent, Trump has quite literally recreated the crime, but made sure that this time he himself is the incriminating evidence. The old playbook of half-truths, evasions and lies has been compromised by Sharpiegate and Trump’s rush to pin the evolving disaster on Rudy Giuliani only makes sense until you realise that as the president’s personal lawyer Giuliani’s culpability may implicate both of them even further. After months of ineffectual dithering, even the Democrats seem to have grasped the fact that a line has been crossed, although they remain quite capable of botching an impeachment.
Setting aside their lurid particulars, each of these reversals illustrate how a modern society ought to function. Each of these reckonings was brought about not merely because of partisan ill-will but because each of these leaders had exhibited patterns of behaviour that any reasonable citizen should condemn. Furthermore, they were held accountable by an independent press which focused on the issues instead of the usual misdirection. In short, democratic institutions like the media, judiciary and legislature have showed that they can still, in the very different democracies, flex their muscles and make a few days seem like a long time in politics. And that is exactly as it should be when overreaching leaders take public trust for granted.
