The Bridge with Peter Mansbridge - Ford, Kenney and Trump And The SMT Blues with Bruce Anderson

Episode Date: January 19, 2022

Was it smoke or mirrors or the truth with three separate incidents over the last few days?  Doug Ford, Jason Kenney, Donald Trump. Case studies with Bruce Anderson make up today's episode of SMT on The Bridge.

And hello there, Peter Mansbridge here. You're just moments away from the latest episode of The Bridge. It's Wednesday, Smoke, Mirrors and the Truth, and we got some case studies on SMT for you today. And Smoke, Mirrors and the Truth means Bruce Anderson is with us. Bruce is in Ottawa. Good morning to you. Good afternoon, depending on what time zone your head is in on this day. It's white and cold here, Peter. I hope you're well and keeping warm too.

You know, I remember growing up in Ottawa when, you know, the snow seemed to be a lot more obvious in those days when you were a kid, and it seemed to be piled high all the time. You certainly got a lot of it this week. So I guess you must have been out there shoveling. I was shoveling, you know. I was actually, when a snowstorm came, of course, I was sitting inside thinking, what can I do with this time? Because, you you know it's

hard to go out so i just started planting the radish patch for the the spring planting and then i watched you know the premier of ontario and he he was out actually helping people anyway so i decided i had to go out and do a little bit of work myself but you go ahead and carry on with your point well i mean the point actually was exactly that i mean what we want to do today is we want to break down a couple of situations that we witnessed over the past few days and make them case studies into the theory of smoke mirrors and the truth in other words look at these and try to determine was it smoke was it mirrors Was it the truth?

And the first one is the one you actually just mentioned, which was Doug Ford, the Premier of Ontario, decided to hit the roads when they were saying, stay off the roads, to help people. So, you know, there's some good in that and there's some questionable activity in that, but it took on kind of a life of its own with reporters traipsing around trying to follow the Premier

as he was out in different places in the city. And it took my old friend Sid Sixero, who's part of the Dina and Sid morning show on Breakfast Television in Toronto, to stake out some ground. I'm going to play it for you here. It's a couple of minutes with Sid. And I should tell you, Sid started off in the sports business

and is a very good sports guy. But he's always had this urge about news and is always very well up to date on on what's happening on the news wise and so he just shifted over you know the last couple of months into this morning show and um right now he's actually at home he's isolated uh he tested positive and so but he's still doing the show and he seems to be in you know well you're about to hear he still seems to be in pretty good shape um so let me uh let me find this i've got it here on my that was somebody else who was trending yesterday it wasn't that's dina it wasn't the people stuck for eight hours it was

doug ford go sit it was doug ford good Dina. Great to see you. Good morning, everybody. I know your car's still buried. Yeah, it's still buried. Hopefully it gets out soon. So Doug Ford went out in Snowmacron yesterday, and not the biggest shovel I've ever seen. No, it's not the biggest. I have to say, listen, first off, anyone who helped anyone yesterday, and there were a lot of people that needed help, it was a great thing. Heroes. It was a great thing. Legit. Because nobody wants to be out there longer than they have to be

true that's really caring for your neighbor yes i believe my niece had a similar sized um uh shovel yesterday when she went outside okay um no but but listen credit to the premier for helping a few people out i don't mind that at all because i couldn't i'm quarantining here i didn't do a damn thing yeah you can't um here's my issue yesterday and i'm going to say this loudly for the people in the back that might have missed it because there was a lot going on yesterday poll numbers for doug ford's approval across the province came out he's at his lowest compared to any other time he's been premier. 30% of people in the province of Ontario, according to Angus Reid, approve of the job he's doing. So on that day, yesterday, a disaster in the city of Toronto and in various parts around it. Doug Ford went out in a car and called a TV station live and FaceTimed

while driving in a snowstorm. That's not only dangerous, but I find it ironic considering for months he would avoid questions from the media because he wasn't tech savvy enough and couldn't go on Zoom. I found that to be rich. Then there's videos circulating all over social media yesterday of complete strangers with no mask getting into Premier's car. Did they need help? Yes, they did. No one's wearing a mask. It's like the Amazing Race people jumping in and out of his car. And those videos are circulating like crazy. And on top of it, considering that he this premier has gone MIA for months during the darkest points of this pandemic. The second he called every media outlet for attention on this, we followed him like lemmings. And it was disgusting. He used a disaster in this city and in a large part of this province as a cheap political stunt the day numbers came out, which showed he's barely more popular than Kathleen Wynne.

And she was hated by the time she left office. I'm offended that he used that for a political stunt. I'm offended that colleagues of mine in his business didn't have enough sense and followed him along for the ride when he barely wants to talk to any of us in the media and then wants attention that day. And I really hope people paid attention to that. I was born, but not yesterday. I know exactly what that was on a day where people needed legit help and he used it as a photo op and i hope people saw that for what it was people sitting in their car you want to really help there's about three dozen tractor trailers on the 401 premier you want to take that shovel built for a child you go down there and help out i thought you're gonna say something else would take that shovel and you hello i'm gonna tell you this sid hashtag canadian media failed was also trending yesterday

because they were shaming all of us for not saying what you just did. So what you're saying is you want to help your neighbor like many, many, many people did yesterday altruistically because you care. Good on you. You want to turn it into a PR stunt and not say, um, perhaps

I was overzealous and I did break a few rules and I was distracted driving myself. I shouldn't have done that. Own up to all that. And maybe there's that path to forgiveness then. But just the shutout of it all. And let's just carry on and only praise when anybody else would have been in big trouble. Find, et cetera, et cetera. In a pandemic, no less. Like you said, sitting in a car cheek to cheek sending out an ig reel maybe we all got to check ourselves a little bit and yes send your love to add six it's six zero if i could say your name all right well the thing about sid and dina is they don't hold back right man there's no doubt about where they are um which brings us to this issue about you know smoke mirrors and the

truth on this particular incident there seemed to be well it seemed to be a lot of the the first two and i don't know so much about the the third but what did you take of all that the balance is definitely off so first thing first i tried to do a little bit of research before because i knew we were going to talk about this and i wanted to make sure that doug ford doesn't do this after every snowstorm so i was trying to find evidence online you know with the google of all the times that doug ford did this i didn't find any so there might be some and if there is i'll you know season and rose the hat and eat it but it kind of felt to me like this might have been the first time um if of all the snowstorms that doug ford experienced

in his life that he got his little toys rush shovel and went out there and tried to help people. I will say that I don't recall any times where he's jumped out on the snow situation, but he has been evident at different times on different things where he kind of drives around not in the middle of a snowstorm right but helping people and that sort of thing yeah now maybe he did that before he was premier i guess this is really my point if he did that all his life and i really i'm going to apologize in advance to him and that's what he has been doing all of his adult life he's obviously then a better person than me because i don't do that every time there's a snowstorm. And now I think maybe I should.

Maybe he's showing me the example that he's lived by and that I should have been living by, but it's not too late for me to change and improve myself. But no, I think it's clearly one of those things. We saw another one from Premier Legault the other day who, you know, in the immediate aftermath of some polling numbers that weren't that favorable for him, which Chantelle LeBair talked about last Friday, he posts a tweet with extremely little content in it. How many people are in hospital in Ontario and how many people are in hospital in Quebec with COVID?

And a lot of people quite rightly said, well, not a that's not a reasonable way to look at the data and also obviously a fairly kind of aggressive way of characterizing his own situation and it looked to me like what we were seeing was smoke and mirrors in the sense of a politician reacting to bad poll numbers and saying here look at this instead i think that's what this was i think that's you know you mentioned that the media were scrambling to kind of cover it and and i think that they you know that was made easier by the fact that he brought his own photographer with him and made uh photographs available uh and it is an interesting question that so many covered it. And I think it kind of goes to the fact that I'd love to hear your thoughts on this, Peter,

that the media both love and hate when politicians are manipulative and performative. On the one hand, you know, Pierre Trudeau way back in the day does a pirouette at Buckingham Palace. And the coverage of it is fantastic. And then there can be other times when politicians do something that's equally manipulative and performative, and the coverage is brutal. And sometimes you get both. I don't really know where the media compass is set on this, but I'm glad that the questions are being discussed.

Yeah, I mean, I fall back, at least partly on my old refrain that um you know the media is not a monolith so i mean there are different news organizations and some of them cover these things differently but there's no doubt on monday in the midst of the snowstorm that as soon as the word got out that ford was out there doing he was doing, a lot of media organizations jumped on the bandwagon. And some of them raised issues about it, you know, in the sense that, you know, should he really be doing this? In fact, I think somebody even challenged him in it. Should you really be out there driving when the police are asking people not to go out

on the roads? And you're driving around looking for cars that are stuck and then, you know, with your toy shovel and a very strange, a very strange pattern that he was shoveling, which seemed to be nowhere near the actual car or tires that were stuck and spinning. um however your basic point is you know you know the old phrase if it bleeds it leads which i think is over overused but the the take is there about you know if the picture is you know interesting enough or is likely to gain eyeballs then it's going to get on whether it's television or on social media or on print and in the papers and you know politicians aren't stupid in in finding ways to get themselves on the front page or on the news and if ford's you know a classic example of that he's done that all his political career he's's always found ways, but he's not alone. A lot of them do.

I mean, Justin Trudeau paddling in the canoe in the 2015 election campaign. What was that all about? That was all about getting a picture on the front page and looking good with a beautiful, clean environment and all that. So, you know, I agree with you in terms of what we witnessed on the Ford situation, whether this was advice given to him or whether, as in many cases, he's decided on his own.

He got up and said, I can do this. You know, maybe he decided on his own, but I also think, and in some respect, you kind of want to credit his team for saying, here's an opportunity, because they would have understood exactly what you said, that there would have been a rush to cover it because the pictures were really interesting. People love stories about a snowstorm, and they love stories about a politician appearing to be a person of the people. And so they served that up, and it got widespread coverage. And by the most kind of cynical calculus, it was a successful day for Premier Ford. But it was definitely a distraction from what are his poll numbers looking like? What's the hospitalization rate of COVID? And we saw another one yesterday that you and I exchanged messages on, Peter, which is that I think in the middle of the day, completely unexpected by me, the Premier announced that I was going to get a discount on my electricity prices for the next several weeks. Now, I, you know, I do okay. You do okay, too. We don't need a discount.

I'm a struggling pensioner. I don't know, Peter, about struggling. You know, pensioner, yes. Yeah, no, I agree. I do okay. You do okay. And that's why this announcement was bizarre. We do okay, right? And I'm looking at this gargantuan provincial deficit and thinking there are probably some people who could use a break on their electricity prices, but I'm not one of them. I don't need it. I would rather that we give a little bit more of a break to people who really do need it or not do that because we're not doing it at all because what's the economic rationale for it? But anyway, I mean, it was another example from my standpoint of Ford trying to change the channel from the things that he doesn't want to talk about. How are schools going? What's happening in our hospitals?

When are we going to be out of this? Will we be able to open up a whole bunch of businesses and capacity next week, as was indicated, or is that going to be delayed again? So yeah, I think it was one of those cases where people are entitled to feel a little bit manipulated. And I also, by the way, I saw this other picture of him. I don't know if you saw it. I think I might have sent something to you this morning. But of him holding a kind of a tow rope, standing beside a stranded car, you know, one of these kind of bands that you hook up to a car if you're going to pull it out. And it reminded me of when another great illusion, it wasn't really an illusion, but there was this strong man in Quebec named the Great Antonio.

And he used to come to Valleyfield. He'd go to all the little towns. But I lived in Valleyfield. And he would eat four dozen eggs and two pounds of bacon. And then he would go down to the main part of the town and attach a bus to his hair and pull it a few yards. And people would pay to watch that because it was fascinating. And it just reminded me so much of that. Anyway, I know we've got other stuff to get to but you managed to slip the great antonio into the story good for you

four dozen eggs was that smoke or mirrors it was a lot he ate he ate a lot i posted a picture on my twitter feed of him pulling a voyager bus so people can judge for themselves whether he was actually doing it which he was but he was not follicly challenged he had that strong hair and he and he I used to be able to do that when I had hair because you know pulling a bus is not that hard once you get it moving once it's moving it I think that's the key thing is the first the first three inches that's the hardest part after that it just gets simpler all right uh time to move on because we have another example to discuss on whether or not it's a little smoke mirrors on the truth and this time we go west to alberta and premier j Jason Kenney right after this.

And welcome back. Peter Mansbridge in Stratford, Ontario. Bruce Anderson in Ottawa. This is Smoke, Mirrors and the Truth on the Bridge. You're listening on Sirius XM Canada, channel 167, Canada Talks, or your favorite podcast platform, whatever that may be. And we welcome you no matter where you're listening from. Okay.

Case study number two of a SMT situation in these past few days. The headline on the CBC website is, Alberta Premier Asks Justice Minister to Step Back from Job Over Phone Call to Police Chief. Now, this is interesting, and it's not the first time we've heard these kind of situations, but man, it's the first time I've heard

this kind of an excuse. So let me just give you the bare details here. Alberta Premier Jason Kenney says he's asked Justice Minister Casey Madu to step back from his job while an independent review examines if there was interference in the administration of justice after Madu phoned Edmonton's police chief about a traffic ticket. The request follows a CBC News story Monday that revealed Madhu had telephoned Edmonton police chief Dale McPhee

to discuss a $300 distracted driving ticket that he received on March 10, 2021, so a year ago. In a late-night announcement on Twitter, Kenney said that Alberta Energy Minister Sonia Savage will act as Justice Minister and Solicitor General during Madu's leave of absence. The Premier said he will appoint an independent investigator to review all the relevant facts.

In the interim, I've asked Minister Madu to step back. Kenny said, here's what Kenny has heard from the Justice Minister, or the one who's sitting on the bench right now. Kenny said Madu told him that he did not ask the chief to have the ticket rescinded, and it wasn't his intention to interfere in the case. Madu also paid the ticket. So those are the basic facts. I mean, there's more to this.

The Justice Minister, Casey Madu, is a person of color. And there's this issue about, you know, whether he'd been profiled on the stop. He was on his phone, or he was holding his phone, or it had something to do with whether or not he was using his phone while driving. But the interesting part of this story is not that he got ticketed, not that he paid the ticket, but that he phoned the police chief. And Kenny, at least in his initial statements,

doesn't seem to be very firm about whether that's right or wrong, where it's been clearly determined over years in Canadian politics that if you're the justice minister, you don't phone a judge or a police chief or anybody in the system about anything, whether it's about you or not. That's not the way the system works. Anyway, Bruce, smoke mirrors of the truth on this one. Well, I think it was really clear what jason canney was trying to do i think he thought carefully about what he was going to do and

what he was going to say about what he was going to do and it was designed to allow him the situation where he could have this member of the legislature back in his cabinet in due course or at least to stay in his caucus and the reason I say that is he chose the words step back instead of step down he said that there needs to be an investigation and that the focus of the investigation should be on whether he asked the police chief to rescind the ticket, as opposed to the judgment question, the propriety question that you've put your finger on, which is that if he didn't ask the police chief to rescind the ticket, does that make the call okay? Well, I don't think that it does. I'm sure you don't think that it

does. If you're the justice minister and you call a police chief and you say, I got a $300 ticket, you don't actually have to ask for that ticket to be rescinded for the police chief to have some understanding of what it is that you are hoping will happen. Now, I understand that the justice minister says he wanted to understand whether it was possible that in the issuance of that ticket, he was being racially profiled. Now, I don't know this gentleman, and I'm reluctant to cast aspersions on him. But presumably he has to know that if he's concerned about racial profiling in the police force, that the appropriate thing to do is not to raise that in a call with

the police chief about a $300 ticket that he got, but to initiate some other process. And if not, he should have staff around that say, hey, wait, wait, just a second. That is not how you deal with this issue. The conclusion that a reasonable person might draw from this is that whether he asked or didn't ask for the ticket to be rescinded, if he called the police chief to talk about his ticket, he was hoping that it would be rescinded. So I kind of feel like Jason Kenney is setting this up so that he can have this investigation. The investigator might come back and say the call was inappropriate, but he didn't ask for the ticket to be rescinded, in which case everybody go back about your business. And I don't think that's setting a reasonable standard for public conduct in the justice system. And it's certainly not a standard that Jason Kenney would support

if, for example, something like that happened in the Trudeau government. So I'll be watching this. I hope that people do the right thing here. But I don't think the right thing is having this person who's shown this bad judgment back in that job. There are a couple of things that I i find loose ends in the in this story i don't understand the timing this happened a year ago you know almost a year ago 10 months ago and he makes the call apparently after he paid the ticket we don't know when he paid the

ticket that'd be interesting to know as well um But he makes the call on this week, 10 months after the fact. He calls the police chief. We don't know exactly what happened in that conversation, but it was about the ticket. So the possibilities, you've kind of gone through what they, what they could be. Hang on though. I hadn't understood that he paid the ticket before he made the call. He says he, he says he paid the ticket.

Now, when he paid the ticket, we don't know. Did he call, did he pay the ticket before the call just before the call or months ago? Or did he pay for the pay for it afterwards when the story started to blow up right we don't know all we know is he paid the ticket i think at the end of the day that does matter in terms of how i would judge his behavior uh but um it doesn't

it still doesn't feel right to have a justice minister calling a police chief in the in in this way to talk about this issue but it certainly would be a lesser offense ethically in my view if he'd already paid the ticket rather than if this call happened before he did. I'm just reading through the end of the story. It's a CBC News story. They appear to have broken it. In a statement to CBC News on Monday, prior to Kenny's announcement, Madhu confirmed the incident and that he had already paid the ticket in full.

However, he said he told the officer who pulled him over that he disagreed with the fine and that his phone was in his pocket. He said he called the police chief. Yeah, I read that, had already paid the ticket. I read that as being, he had paid the ticket before that press conference but not necessarily before the the call to the police chief right well it's unclear uh when the ticket was paid well it's good that there will be an investigation and we'll get to

understand there are there are loose ends so the bottom line though is still you know i appreciate the timing on that ticket payment may make a difference but it doesn't make a difference to the fact that he called the police chief and we've seen in past cases um and they're not a lot of them but there are precedents for this, Jean Charest, when he was a young minister in the Mulroney government. And he was either justice minister or solicitor general at the time, it was the mid-80s, and he called a judge about some particular case. And when that came out, he had to resign immediately. There was no issue. He had to resign like immediately. There was no issue. He had to resign.

Well, an investigation went forward. Eventually, he got back in the cabinet. I think it was after the next election. But he was gone like immediately. It wasn't a step back. It was a step down. If you were that minister and i was your advisor peter um i think what i would have told you to do let's say he had not wanted to contest the ticket maybe he'd

even paid the ticket but he was really concerned about the possibility that he had been racially profiled because from his standpoint he wasn't distracted driving then what i would have advised you to do is to write a letter and put the letter on the record saying, I got this ticket. I paid this ticket. My phone was in my pocket. I would like to register a level of concern about what caused this officer to ticket me in this fashion. Then you've got something that's kind of up front on the table and people can understand it for what it is placing a call to have that conversation makes it a lot more difficult for people to just take his his kind of assertions at face value okay we're going to move

off this and go to our third example but but I'll just say one thing, because the police chief actually added a few facts to the conversation, where he said that Madhu did not ask to get out of the ticket, and that he expressed concern about people of color being stopped by police and political tension with a number of police services in the province. So, we'll see where that one ends up. The investigation, one assumes the details will be made public and we'll answer some of the questions that we've raised here. But it's another interesting way of how you handle a situation, what you say,

and whether it's tainted by smoke mirrors and the truth. And I'm not, I don't think this one's as clear cut as the Ford one on that issue. I mean, there are questions about what Kenny's decided to do and how he's doing it. I'm not sure anybody is questioning the truth surrounding this yet. And whether there's a little smoke and mirrors of political, you know, dancing. Well, I really do think it comes down to had he paid the ticket or not. And if he had paid the ticket,

then it's reasonable for him to say, I wasn't trying to get out of the ticket. If he hadn't paid the ticket, then the fact that he called, even if he said, even if he didn't ask to get out of the ticket, but raise questions about racial profiling could easily be interpreted as an effort to get out of the ticket rather than an,

I, you know, the idea that he was raising a policy issue so let's let's let's watch for the investigation results yeah yeah to me the important question is when did he pay the ticket and if it was 10 months ago when a thing happened like why now like what's happened now that he would suddenly make that call well also i don't know that i would have asked him to step back i would have said the call was inappropriate but he did pay the ticket and um so let's move on okay moving on third example and this is uh just a quick one and it's about one of your favorite

guys donald trump he had a speech in ari other day, one of his rallies. And there were a lot of people there, thousands of people there, not as big as the rallies you used to have, but nevertheless, they were there. But he dropped this little bomb, if you will, in the middle of it, where he claimed that white people are discriminated against or for COVID-19 treatment. The quote is, if you're white, you go right to the back of the line. The left is now rationing life-saving therapeutics based on race, he said, discriminating against and denigrating, just denigrating white people to determine who lives and who dies.

Now, he must have been planning to say that because when you look at the television footage of that, behind him are five people in Blacks for Trump-shirts and they're african-american along with an awful lot of white people the majority of the rest of the crowd overwhelming majority if not everybody in the rest of the crowd was white so one it's not true it's a lie as fits with so many of the things that trump says and it's been proven to be a lie um but what's why the smoke and mirrors on this well it's it's shocking on some level to realize that we have a i mean i remember reading about and knowing a little bit

about george wallace when he was a prominent u.s politician and realizing that basically his his political career was built on the idea of representing the interests of white people and indicating that they were being undermined by minorities. I don't know if he would have used language as bluntly racist as this. If you're white, you don't get the vaccine, or if you're white, you don't get therapeutics. That's the last sentence in that sequence that you were referring to. And the whole gist of it was basically to gin up white people, to understand that the left was not for white people. The left is championing the interests of people who aren't white, and not just championing the interests of people who aren't white,

but discriminating against white people. And, you know, there's a part of me that thinks that this is, you know, I think for all the time that Trump's been in politics nationally, I've kind of wanted to look at things that he says like that and say, he's not that smart. He just says the first thing that comes out of his mouth. He doesn't mean it. But I can't feel that way anymore. This is deliberate. This is kind of working for him. He's ginning up his base again. He's in this fight with Ron DeSantis. He wants to be president again. There's a chance that he will be president again. Yesterday, or earlier this week, we saw Joe Biden say he might not be able to get voting rights legislation done

because the politics of it are too tough. And it's hard not to look at this situation and say America is dealing with deeper problems of racism and racial discontent and division than at any time in my life, maybe going back to the 60s. But even then, you didn't have the leadership of the Republican Party arguing against black people and in favor of white people. You had some people in it doing that. But the question right now is, will America be able to unify itself if Trump keeps on with this kind of language? Or will we be headed for more racial tension, more racial violence, more sense that America is not one country, let alone, you know, the kind of country that it wants the rest of the world to see. He says from time to time, he's the least racist person you'll ever meet. And if that isn't the worst crap that I've ever heard somebody who you know was president of the United States say I

don't know what would be worse than that in terms of a lie yeah well there's lots to choose from on that question about the line um one of the things that has bothered me about this when you watch that clip it's it's similar in a way to January 6th. You know, aside from the content, which like you, I find this is just absolutely disgusting. But aside from the words, it's the visual image. It's like January 6th where you saw all these people waving flags and Trump banners and, you know,

clearly armed in some cases with, you know, sticks and various things to beat up police with. You asked yourself the question, where'd all that stuff come from? Who paid for all that stuff? You know, that's part of the January 6th investigatory committee trying to determine where the money came from to organize all this, but also all the paraphernalia that they were all carrying, where to come from. And I think of that when I look at this event in Arizona and I look at those five people who are wearing these t-shirts and you say, who are they? Just like we did on January 6th, who are wearing these t-shirts. And you say, who are they? Just like we did on January 6th. Who are these people? Where did they come from?

Why are they there? Who helped them get there? Where did they get the t-shirts from? Did they pay for the t-shirts? Or did somebody pay for the t-shirts and put them on them? And how did they get the seats directly behind trump you know that that's where i think the you know i i don't know maybe some news organizations tried to find that out last weekend because it was so obvious that they were staged right that these people were staged to be there and probably for that very line,

right? But it's, you know, when we talked about the Doug Ford thing and whether or not the media had fallen down and not challenging it enough, what was going on

the way Sid Sixero did. It's, you know, it's left just you know it's just now another clip that's out there and every time it's played you'll see these five people behind him and it you know it kind of in a way visually supports what he's saying right because they're cheering and they're you know they're smiling and they're chanting trump's name and they're wearing them they're wearing trump's name i don't know he's you know i don't know that i think this is a political strategy as much as it is kind of who he is what's in his dna i was reading a piece on the NBC News website

this morning as well, that it's an opinion piece, it's an analysis piece, that talks about, he has comments about Jewish people. And, you know, recently he said, people in this country, meaning the United States, that are Jewish no longer love Israel. He talks about Jewish people running the New York Times. And the piece is an interesting piece. It kind of runs through an analysis of how Trump, you know, walks not a very fine line in terms of saying that he supports Israel, that Israel's got no better friend than him, but also making comments that reasonable people might say, well, that's anti-Semitic.

So I think this guy just has a bundle of bad kind of DNA when it comes to equality. I don't think he believes in it. I think he's conducted himself in a racist way so often in so many situations that the really shocking part isn't that he does it again, it's that he still has the level of voter support in the Republican Party that he seems to have. Okay, I'm going to wrap it up for today. Different kind of smoke mirrors and the truth, but one that's interesting, and we'll have to keep this in mind as the weeks go by,

because obviously there are other politicians and other situations where you can raise the question of how much of all that was smoke, how much was mirrors, and how much was the truth. Bruce, thanks very much. See you again on Friday for Good Talk with Chantel. I'm Peter Mansbridge in Stratford. I'll be back tomorrow. It's a day where we can have your opinion. So send them in. The Mansbridge Podcast at gmail.com.

The Mansbridge Podcast at gmail.com. Thanks again. Talk to you again in 24 hours.