How did being a rampaging ass become a prerequisite for political success instead of a disqualifier? Good question.

PA

Lisa Van Dusen

June 27, 2019

The least important similarities between Donald Trump and Boris Johnson are the superficial ones: the unleashed-id, toddler temperaments; the apparent inability to find a sober tailor; the crassly kinetic interactions with women; the follicular fixation — one heavily invested in dominating his own hair, the other who refuses to.

The most important similarities between Boris Johnson and Donald Trump lie in how they approach their roles as politicians: How they conduct themselves in a time of hyper-tactical politics and previously unthinkable outcomes, and how that impacts not only their fellow citizens but — in one case as leader of the free world and in the other as the man favoured by oddsmakers to possibly drive Britain over a no-deal Brexit cliff — multitudes beyond their borders.

Trump and Johnson share a quality that didn’t exist among politicians in ostensibly functioning democracies until recently — the curious ability to say or do absolutely anything and still get elected. It’s a special power once exclusive to despots who starve, oppress, imprison and terrorize their own citizens and then win 99 percent of the vote in staged elections.

Now, it seems character and behaviour have been decoupled from electability elsewhere in a way that, as Trump himself so astutely noted in 2016, would allow him to “stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody” and not lose any voters.

After more than two centuries of American democracy, how is it — Hillary Clinton, Vladimir Putin and the electoral college notwithstanding — that a man who behaves as abhorrently as Donald Trump can not only win the White House once but still be considered remotely viable as a prospect for re-election?

How can Benjamin Netanyahu — who has been indicted on charges of bribery, fraud and breach trust, and whose wife has been convicted of misusing state funds — be running for a fifth term for a second time this year to consolidate his increasingly authoritarian power, possibly irreversibly? How can Rodrigo Duterte, who unleashed a terror campaign of extrajudicial murders dressed as a drug crackdown, have swept recent midterm elections to consolidate his increasingly authoritarian power, possibly irreversibly? How has Narendra Modi, whose role in the bloody Gujarat riots of 2002 should have disqualified him for higher office, just won a massive majority to consolidate his increasingly authoritarian power, possibly irreversibly?

Have voters in jurisdictions that, for generations, produced relatively rational electoral outcomes based on logical factors of experience, competence, likability, judgment, vision, intelligence, character and ability to communicate suddenly become lunatics and/or masochists? In a 21st-century perversion of the Teflon quality attributed to Ronald Reagan whereby his personality seemed to repel permanent popularity depletion, Trump, Johnson and their assorted global equivalents seem to be coated in Kevlar, not because of their personalities but, astonishingly enough, despite them.

Trump’s initiation as a weapon of democracy degradation began when he sold his soul to be the pitchman for an utterly absurd, racist tissue of lies designed to de-legitimize the elected president of the United States and Johnson’s began when he sold his to be the pitchman for an utterly absurd tissue of lies designed to legitimize a corruptly generated referendum outcome.

Like other politicians around the world who meet the Fifth Avenue Gunman Impunity Test, they behave as if they are somehow operating with insider information of predetermined electoral success and therefore have nothing to fear from the media, the voters or any form of legal sanction.

As a result, when they do win, it ratifies toxicity as a political commodity and makes democracy seem both ridiculous and dangerous by catalyzing divisive and destructive policy agendas. In a status quo of contrived unpredictability, it’s the one thing that’s becoming stupefyingly predictable.

Lisa Van Dusen is associate editor of Policy Magazine. She was Washington columnist for the Ottawa Citizen and Sun Media, international writer for Peter Jennings at ABC News, and an editor at AP National in New York and UPI in Washington.