The Bridge with Peter Mansbridge - SMT -- The Trump Train Keeps On Rolling

Episode Date: October 13, 2021

It's been months since we talked about Donald Trump, and maybe that's been a mistake.  Is he dumb like a fox?  Some people say he is and the media is letting him get away with a "slow moving coup".  Bruce and I have our thoughts on that.  And while we're at it, how should the Canadian media be treating Max Bernier?

Hello there, I'm Peter Mansbridge. You're just moments away from Smoke, Mirrors, and the Truth. It's Wednesday. Bruce Anderson is next. Roll Up to Win is back at Tim Hortons with more prizes than ever. This time you might roll a Tim card, a Samsung Galaxy smartwatch, a Hilton Getaway, or even the all-new 2022 Volkswagen Taos. You're allowed to push your luck a little because every roll wins. Just scan the Tim's app when making a purchase on select products and win. Every time. Rules apply.

Open to registered Tim's reward members in Canada only. No purchase necessary. Full context details on the Tim Hortons app. Copyright Tim Hortons 2021. All right then. So Bruce is in Ottawa. I am in Toronto this week, or at least for most of this week. And I'm going to start with a confession. Well, first of all, we haven't talked about this subject for quite a long time, months.

We've been so focused on Canada and Canadian politics, and there's more to say on Canadian politics, which we will get to later, but I'm not going to start that way. I'm going to start by conceding the fact that, I don't know, back in January, I said, enough on the Trump story. I don't care what's being said. It's going to go away. It's all over. And there's just going to be no more, you know,

Trump's going to run in 2024, none of that stuff. It won't happen. Now, you disagreed with me at the time, Mr. Anderson. You said we have to keep our eye on the ball, and with him, you never know. There was a lot of craziness around him and part of him but that he was still focused on regaining power by one way or another i dismiss that i have come around to believing you were right i'm assuming you haven't changed your mind.

No, if anything, you know, the months tick away and he looks like he's organizing and he's making progress. And Biden is, you know, feeling the pain that I think any incumbent now feels, which is that there's just a whole bunch of people who are bound and determined that because you're a Democrat and they're Republicans, you can't do anything right in their eyes. So, no, I think Trump is a real threat. And I think Trump is a symptom of a bigger threat in a way, but he'd be bad enough just on his own. I've, you know, sometimes I'm kind of guided by watching the American media and how much time they're spending on any one particular subject. And, you know, I usually watch at least one, if not a couple of the Sunday morning shows.

And for the past few weeks, they've been, you know, when they haven't been talking about the pandemic, they have been talking about the debt ceiling. And, you know, like everybody knows, the country's not going to run out of money, that they will always come up with some kind of agreement between the Republicans and Democrats to fund the government. They'll argue and go after each other on lots of other things, but that's always going to kind of resolve itself in some fashion. But it's been getting a lot of airtime for the last few weeks. And the Trump stuff occasionally pops up, but not a lot. And nobody seems to string it all together as to what's really going on here.

What's the plan? Well, on Friday night on HBO, I have a program called Real Time with Bill Maher. Now, Bill Maher is a comic. He's a comedian. He's a late-night comedian. But he's also really into politics and really into big issues and has a thoughtful panel every Friday night of different people from different walks of life, different backgrounds. Well, last Friday night on his HBO show, Bill Maher did an eight and a half minute take on what Trump's really up to.

And he calls it a slow moving coup. Now, I'm not going to play you all eight and a half minutes. But I'll give you a little bit, a little tease of it. The first couple of minutes from Bill Maher on how he sees a slow-moving coup operate. So I'm going to run that, and then we're going to talk about it. Here it goes. You know, I was a young man of 59 when I started using the term slow-moving coup, and it pains me to have to report it's still

moving. A document came to light a few weeks ago called the Eastman Memo, which was basically a blueprint prepared for Trump on how he could steal the election after he lost it in November 2020. It outlined a plan for overturning the election by claiming that seven states actually had competing state slates of electors, which, while not even remotely true, would have given Mike Pence the excuse to throw out those states and thus hand the election to Trump. But of course, the plan required election officials in those states to go along. Trump thought the ones who were Republican would. Most did not. And that's what he's been working on fixing ever since. No, not a good thing. Not a good thing. Fixing on. I'll finish.

Some presidents spend their post-presidency building homes for the poor or raising money for charity or painting their toes. Trump has spent his figuring out how to pull off the coup he couldn't pull off last time. Here's the easiest three predictions in the world. Trump will run in 2024. He will get the Republican nomination. And whatever happens on election night, the next day he will announce that he won. I've been saying ever since he lost, he's like a shark that's not gone, just gone out to sea. But actually, he's been quietly eating people this whole time. And by eating people, I mean he's been methodically purging the Republican Party of anyone who voted for his impeachment or doesn't agree that he's the rightful leader of the seven kingdoms.

Yes, we're going to need a bigger boat. There was a grand total of 10 Republican congressmen who voted to impeach Trump. And by 2024, even those will all be gone. One of them was Liz Cheney, arch conservative, daughter of Darth Vader. And yet now politically dead in Wyoming. Another of the 10 was Anthony Gonzalez. He's already bowed out for running for reelection because he can see opposing Trump means you have no chance. The other eight will either like him, not run,

or they'll get primaried by a Trumper, or they'll have a sudden epiphany about how, come to think of it, Trump did win that election. Okay, so there you get it. You get what Bill Maher is talking about. That's just the beginning. It goes on for another, I i don't know five or six minutes and you can it's easily accessible you can find it on youtube bill maher and that's m-a-h-e-r

and you go to his october 8th essay um but you get the idea What he's saying is this is a slow-moving coup, that it's all being thought out, this is the plan, this is how they're going to do it, get the obstacles out of the way, and the obstacles for Donald Trump are elected officials in certain states that they need to topple to ensure, one way or or another they win the next election. Now, you could say, well, you know, he's just dreaming in color. Or you could say, maybe Maher has got something there that traditional media isn't really taking a hard look at in terms of the way this is unfolding what do you make it of of it bruce other than the fact that it was it's an entertaining little hit

there's no doubt about that and as maher always does he manages to sprinkle a few great lines in it that'll make you laugh um but that's not to take away from what his message, not to settle, is. Yeah, my first thought about it, Peter, is that whether Trump does what Maher projects will happen or not, and I think there's reason to believe that he will if his health holds up. He's not a young, young man. But if his health holds up, he's obviously got command of the party apparatus. And he can do those things that Maher projects that he could do. So he might.

But even if he doesn't, the problem that creates the situation where Maher could do that, Trump didn't create that problem. It found him. There is something inside the political culture of the United States of America that is at the surface right now in a way that we have not seen in a very long period of time and has huge ramifications for the steadiness of that country, its ability to participate in global solutions, its ability to solve problems within its own borders. I started re-watching last week Ken Burns' amazing documentary, Civil War. And I don't know, Peter, I'm sure you saw it before, but it's, you know, such a powerful reminder of the degree of schism that has always sort of existed within America. And that was a schism that was something to do with race and economic power and slavery and the idea that you couldn't succeed and that the union had to hold strong. It was a lot of different things. But

it's hard not to look at all of that and say America has kind of kidded itself about having a single unitary vision of America's role in the world or what America is. And, you know, a lot of Americans seem to love this idea of live free or die. And, you know, we don't, that's not a slogan that really has much resonance in Canada. But you hear it more in the context of the anti-vax movement and the pro-Trump movement, which are melded together in no small way. This is an anti-authoritarian authoritarianism, if you like. I know who my enemy is, and I hate them so much, I'm unwilling to consider anything that they have to say as being logical. And I'm willing to believe, and this is

the part that's more worrisome for the long term, is that I'm willing to believe anything that is said to me that reinforces that point of view. No matter whether it's tethered to reality or science or fact, it doesn't have to be vetted by a reputable news organization. It just needs to be on the internet. And so for me, the problem that existed underneath the hood of America, which is that the idea that you compromise in order to make things work better, is broken down. A lot of people would rather have stalemate. A lot of people would rather have confrontation. Some people would rather have violence. Maybe more people would rather have war, again, as a way of giving vent to the frustrations that they feel. of the schisms in society, Trump didn't create, but it found him and found in him somebody who was so amoral and kind of illiterate about this problem. And so he just decided that he could use that energy for his own personal agenda, and the internet basically did the rest.

And I say that knowing that there are lots of good things that come with the internet, but the breakdown in the system of information flow that we can trust and the ideas that we should bank on is so near at a shocking level now. It makes me wonder that if the internet had existed and was able to do then what it's able to do now, would we have eradicated polio? Would the world have been able to come together and defeat Nazism? There's a whole lot of things that we did collectively as societies that require us to believe in collective effort and to some degree in compromise and certainly a base of fact or information. And I worry that that's all breaking down right now, and I hate to say it. Those are all really scary thoughts about what may have gone unchallenged in the past and what may be going unchallenged right now.

I want to be careful about this because there's a lot of great journalism that's done in the States, a lot of great journalism that's done in the States, a lot. But, you know, I find the Maher commentary really interesting because of the fact that, you know, American media, you know, for the most part in the last, I don't know, month has been consumed when they talk about Trump, have been consumed with January 6th and what led up to January 6th and all the new books that are out, whether it's Bob Woodward and Bob Costas or the other ones. There's quite a few of them. And they're all about that period. They're not about this period, at least from what i've read so far and i just wonder whether they've they're taking a pass

on what seems to be going on right now or whether they just don't see enough evidence of it um i mean mar clearly does but you know mars mars is mar he'sr. He's a late-night comic. Smart one. He's been at the leading edge of some of the controversies in the last 20 years. Basically got taken off the air for his commentaries about 9-11 after it happened. But I wonder, you know, I wonder whether they're, and, you know, I'm going to be careful here because it's not just Americans, because there will be those who make the argument that the same thing,

to a lesser degree, but it all starts somewhere, is happening here in Canada. So on that front, before we get to Canada, on the American media side of things, do you think they're missing the story here? I think they are to some degree. I don't think all of them are. I think it is important to acknowledge that there's a lot of very good journalism, but all of the very good journalism exists on the ecosystem called the internet. And almost all of the traditional news organizations are struggling financially. There's some that are doing a little bit better than others,

but none of them are doing particularly well, it seems to me. And I guess the question on my mind is, do they have the instinct and the wherewithal, and will it fit within their business model to kind of throw up their hands and say, stop everything, everybody, look at what's going on. If we tell you the truth in journalism, we are subjected to vitriolic, hateful attacks that multiply exponentially overnight. We saw a discussion about this in Canada around the treatment of women journalists just last week

and the week before, but we know this has been going on for a while. And I guess the question in my mind is, do we let the news cycle turn away or does the news cycle by its nature turn away from this issue very quickly? Have we all lost sight of the fact that the Russians almost upended, well, arguably did upend the U.S. election that President Trump won. We saw a piece a couple of weeks ago that said of the, I think it was, I might get this a little bit wrong, but of the 20 most popular Christian pages on Facebook, 19 of them were run out of Russia. And to me, this is a much bigger existential crisis for our democracy. It's big around climate change. It's big when we think about collective security.

It's big when we think about cybersecurity. If we don't have systems that we all trust. And if journalism can't kind of turn us away from the direction that the internet is kind of letting us migrate towards, and I'm not blaming journalism for this, I'm saying the instincts that are fed by the algorithms that are used on the internet create what seems like a fairly unstoppable force. But we really need to look at where it's going and what to do about it because it's a real problem as far as I'm concerned. And we're seeing it so loud and clear in the context of the vaccination debate. But there are micro versions of it all the time.

And you said we get to Canada at one point. I was just reading this story about a MLA in Alberta who, you know, is thinking about forming another party, a breakaway from the United Conservative Party that Jason Kenney leads. And his idea is that people who live in rural Alberta need a party that just says what they believe. And I understand the logic behind that. It's the same logic that Max Bernier used to start the People's Party. But it misses the most fundamental point from my standpoint about democracy, which is that if everybody only did that, we'd never agree on anything.

We'd never get anywhere. We'd never build any good public policy that served a collective interest. And so polarization, the solution to polarization isn't more polarization. It's a recognition that this is a force that's driving us in some very, very unpleasant and unhelpful directions. You know, there are countries in the world, countries we admire, that have a collection of parties just like that, that are themed on kind of one central issue, which means everything to them.

And they're going to fight for that and basically just that. I mean, we see it to a degree in Israel. We see it to a degree in Italy. We're seeing it unfold yet again in Germany as they try to come up with a solution to who follows Angela Merkel, who if she decided to run again, she would have won. I don't think there's any question about that. And there would,

there wouldn't be in this situation of once again, trying to find a coalition partnership. She may end up staying as chancellor for quite a while while they try to do that. But I, I don't know whether we're saying here that it's worked in other countries or it's worked where the system is oriented culturally towards the creation of coalitions that come together and that negotiate solutions right um And I think that's a version of this that makes reasonable sense. I don't know if it's perfect, but big tent parties are not perfect either.

They produce maybe more compromises than would be useful sometimes. But where you have a history of coalitions forming, where power gets negotiated among the parties based upon agreed upon sets of public policy, I don't see a problem with that. But the problem that I'm kind of more preoccupied with is the sort of thing that leads people to on the question of equalization. Do I feel confident that Albertans to vote on this equalization formula are really going to make an informed decision about whether or not this is a good thing for them and for the country? I'm not because the rewards for politicians stepping into that conversation and trying to make an argument that is based on a sound analysis of where things have been, where they're at today, what they might be like in the future. All of the different benefits and downsides, I guess, of confederation. What are those? I don't think we're going to have that. I think we're going to have a reflexive vote where people say, I'm mad as hell because I'm mad as hell.

And I've been told that this is a good way to express my madness. And it's the same thing with the People's Party. It's the same thing with this idea of a fledgling rural Alberta party. It's not that those individuals who might vote for that party don't have a specific set of issues. But the question that needs to be asked, I think, of them before they cast a ballot is, do you just want to make a point or do you want to make some progress? And if you don't think that you're going to make progress, then why do it? And I think if we allow our politics to turn into just a series of expressions of mood, and that's always been a part of it, but I don't know if the risk is that it becomes

too much a part of it and that people don't stop and think about those choices in a more fundamental way. And certainly that's what Donald Trump has been doing from the get-go. I'm going to take a complicated idea, issue. I'm going to tell you that it's really simple. I'm going to tell you I have the answer. The other guys have not only not got the answer, but they're making it worse. And that's all you need to know. And, you know, in the world where we don't have that much time collectively to devote to studying issues, if we don't have media that are strong enough and powerful enough and influential enough to drive that process, which we don't, I don't think, and it's not a criticism of journalists. I really want to reinforce that. But, you know, I saw something today, and this will be my last

point. I'll stop ranting and rambling. But there was a study done of news organizations and how much they were contributing to maybe misinformation about climate change. And I don't know if you saw this this morning, Peter, this reference, I think National Post or Post Media was considered to be one of those organizations that was not particularly helpful on that. And I think that's, for me, that's an existential issue. And we need to demand that media organizations play a constructive role on those on those issues or call them out if they don't well i you know i have no problem with that i

think the calling in the mouth part is the important part i mean you know all media organizations have a responsibility to be to reflect things accurately and fairly and in context, and when they're not, they should be called out by somebody. Whether it's a press council or something like that or not, I don't know. Sometimes they worry about, well, such and such an organization isn't a member of the press council. Well, so what? Why should that stop the press council or so what yeah why should that stop the press council or whoever whatever

the body is from making a judgment about uh poor practices in journalism this is the bridge with peter mansbridge I wanted, and this, you know, this relates to the Canadian situation in a way. Well, more than just a way, because I think it's a dilemma right now for news organizations trying to determine what they should do and how they should cover, you know, somebody like Max Bernier, who's still traveling the country. He'll get a big whack of cash, I imagine, from the public purse because of the number of votes his party got. I don't know how much, but enough to probably sustain his ability to travel and spout his feelings about various issues. But back after the 2016 election in the United States,

most media organizations, including ones in Canada, determined, you know what, we blew this election coverage because we weren't listening to what was really going on out there. We weren't giving space on our airwaves to the kind of voices that were supporting trump and why they were supporting trump we weren't listening to them and we weren't giving they weren't seeing themselves on the air so we all did kind of handstands uh to a degree, trying to correct that situation as time marched forward. There was in the States, there was more coverage from the kind of Midwest,

more attempt to try and gauge those reactions and understand what those feelings were. And it's always been a, there's always been a similar concern in Canada on the part of certainly many conservatives, that their voices outside of the big urban cities are not being reflected in general in terms of media coverage. And so when there are strong feelings, they're not heard. And instead, you get the sort of the downtown Toronto take on whatever is happening how the campaign was covered and how did the People's Party, with the exception of the last few days of the campaign,

where people started saying, geez, they're not doing badly. They've got double the votes that the Green Party has in the polls. And as it turned out in the final election results they did. And so there's this kind of reflection, are we missing the story that seems to be happening in parts of the country, or is this a story that, say, you kind of hinted at it, is simply being driven by the vaccination debate? That if there was no vaccination debate going on, if that point gets passed as the pandemic finally dies out, we hope in the next year or so, that those kind of feelings will be eased. I'm not so sure. But at the moment, it does raise this question of how do we cover that, those voices?

How do we cover Max Bernier, who's not going to disappear just because he got no seats? And, you know, it's a legitimate question that all news organizations have got to face and try to determine how they're going to move forward. Yeah, I do think it's a legitimate question, and I don't think the answer is easy at all. I do think that it's always going to be a subjective decision.

It's not going to be possible to create an absolute bright line that says, you know, you have to be willing to interview a Max Bernier, but only about these subjects. Or if he starts talking about his theories on how to protect yourself from COVID, that you can cut him off. I think that there needs to be some measure of that kind of subjective treatment of his message. But I think that he won't go away. And the problem that he represents or the symptom of the problems that he represents won't go away, simply by denying him the airwaves. So it's going to be messy. I mean, I remember when Trump was campaigning

and he talked about his Muslim ban. You remember that, Peter? And a lot of people, myself included, were horrified by what he was doing, which is basically saying, I need to find a stronger tool to let people know that the people they don't like, who they think are a threat,

I think they're a threat too. And it's so easy to see situations develop where politicians are kind of tempted to play with those sentiments. I remember the discussion in Canada about the refugee crisis several years ago and the notion that Canada would accept 25,000 Syrian refugees. And I remember that a number of conservatives that I talked to thought, well, that seems like a reasonable thing. But there were a number that publicly seemed horrified at the prospect that this is something that we would do as a country. And the reason that they were expressing that, I don't believe at the time was that they thought this was a real security threat. I think it was because they felt like there were some sentiments out there that were uncomfortable with the number of people of Muslim faith in Canada,

and that this was a way to kind of touch on those sentiments in a politically constructive way. Happily, the Conservatives have not been pursuing this in Canada in the last while. You remember those snitch lines and that kind of thing, which cost them votes. Not very many elections go to, in fact. And so I'm happy to see the Conservative Party here moving away from any of that kind of stuff. But I don't think that that means it's gone away. I think it found Max Bernier. And Max Bernier knows enough about political communication to say things that maybe seem on some days like they're painted within the lines of what's appropriate on race. But on medical science, he doesn't. And so I think it's, you know, I saw people criticize the CBC for giving him a platform, interviewing him.

And I found myself kind of agreeing that we shouldn't give him too easy a platform to just sort of say whatever he wants. And so I don't envy the CBC for having to make the decision. Do you not do you de-platform somebody who gets that many votes in an election? Versus do you interview him, but challenge him pretty aggressively and not play maybe the parts of an interview where he talks about health misinformation, because the it's one thing to sort of make a political argument to him about don't you understand that you're not just you're not the only person who's affected if you don't get a vaccination? If you don't get a vaccination, other people don't because they follow your lead. Our healthcare system gets overwhelmed and surgeries get put off and people die.

That needs to be part of that conversation. But we could silence these voices more, and we probably should, but it won't solve the problem of this polarization that's out there. fighting the fight against polarization in a very obvious and deliberate and strategic way, not just worrying about it, because it's easy to worry about it, but it's getting worse, and it's time to do more. In Bernier's case, silencing the voice during the campaign didn't work either. You can argue that if he had been on the debate stage or made more use of in the interview stage, his stuff would have been challenged. His misinformation would have been challenged in an aggressive way. But it wasn't. And so he probably benefited from not being in the debates. So the reverse now becomes the case now.

Is it appropriate to interview him and let misinformation spill if it in fact does and isn't challenged? You know, these are issues media organizations are confronted with all the time and have to't have to come up with a not only a good solid policy but one that is uh dealt with evenly across the board you know max bernier dealt in misinformation absolutely so in fact did some of the others in the more traditional parties not the kind of misinformation you're talking about on vaccines necessarily, but misinformation nonetheless. Yeah, I agree with that.

I think the, you know, somebody wrote me a note the other day suggesting that there isn't that sort of independent, objective, kind of informed commentary on the role that the media play. It's extremely difficult to imagine doing it or having it done without it creating such a backlash from journalists and media organizations. But that still isn't to say that it wouldn't be a useful thing for for society to have some some of it or some more of it than exists right now. And I think from my standpoint, all I would really like is to be able to quickly identify whether a news organization is in the business of trying to modulate

these problems that we're talking about trying to find a sensible middle ground or is giving you know giving some sort of reflexive nod in the direction of well the clicks come when we when we play to these sentiments or we give voice to these sentiments. And I think that's kind of where we're headed is that there will be a group of news organizations which we can observe are trying to minimize this problem as messy as that might be. And maybe it'll make some of their news product more boring. Maybe they'll have more financial trouble because of it. And then those that I don't want to say would profit from it, although obviously there are some media enterprises that do try to profit from polarization, but others that just have a kind of a more lazy willingness to kind of accept that it's something that happens in terms of how people

consume stories. And, you know, we've all sort of known, we both known lots of journalists who feel very uncomfortable with the stories that they write, sometimes given a headline that is far more clickbaity, and not really reflective of what's in the story. And it seems to me that that's part of this kind of syndrome where news organizations sort of find their default setting, what will make us a little bit of money in a hard situation. And journalists underneath the hood are kind of going, wait, that's not exactly what I wrote. the hood are kind of going wait that's not exactly what i wrote and meanwhile they're getting a ton of negative feedback from people on on twitter or facebook or the internet more generally

good conversation lots of questions there and um not sure we're well clearly we're not able to answer them all uh yet i mean the whole issue of like what to do about it in terms of the internet is something that's been the constant puzzle for more than a few years now and nobody has come up with the magic bullet on how to deal with this um and that's just one of the questions raised here today look i know you're off you're off to to points overseas, and I hope to be joining you on the odd golf course in the next week or so. But we'll keep doing this. It may have a Scottish accent to Smoke, Mirrors, and the Truth, and good talk, but we'll be there.

Hi. I'll see you soon. Yeah, that's very good. Travel safe, and we'll talk to you then. That's Bruce Anderson in Ottawa this week, Smoke Mirrors and the Truth. Thanks for listening. We'll talk to you again in 24 hours.