Now that an election is approaching, we may be due for a revival of one of Pierre Poilievre’s favourite accusations against the current Prime Minister: the suggestion that Trudeau is somehow unqualified to be the nation’s leader on the grounds that he used to be – and this is, apparently, hilarious – a high-school drama teacher.
This tactic began under Harper. During the 2015 election campaign, a Conservative attack ad attempted to portray Trudeau as a lightweight, offering as evidence the fact that he once taught theatre to teenage kids. The irony is built-in. The tone of amused condescension in the announcer’s voice over the fact that Trudeau was “a drama teacher!” is the kind of emotionally precise timbre achieved only by those who spent years learning their craft under the guidance of, well, drama teachers.
For a while, Poilievre kept dragging that dreadful insult up again in Parliament: “No drama lesson will distract from the question that I asked…” “He’s trying to engage in a dramatic distraction…” “The high-school drama teacher over here…” It’s all clearly meant to imply that having done such work renders one unfit to hold high office.
But the criteria for a good politician are similar to those for a good drama teacher. Both kinds of leader mould a disparate group of random people into a team eager to work toward a common goal, drawing on its members’ different talents. They encourage those suffering from nervousness and diffidence, and rein in those who are over-confident and hogging the spotlight. They encourage individual inventiveness and submit those inventive ideas to the will of the group; recognize talent in people in whom it may be hidden; maintain authority without being overbearing about it; and represent the team to the public in the best possible light – among other skills and abilities.
So it’s not surprising that there’s a long list of professional theatre and film artists, liberal and conservative, who have gone on to careers in politics. Names include Shirley Temple Black, Sonny Bono, Clint Eastwood, Al Franken, Vaclav Havel, Glenda Jackson, Ronald Reagan, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Fred Thompson, Jesse Ventura – and of course Vlodomyr Zelenskyy, whose extraordinary career took him from playing a non-politician who flukishly became President of Ukraine, to being a non-politician who flukishly became President of Ukraine, to being an authentic national hero.
But there’s another election approaching as well, rather near by, so let’s look at one of their candidates through an acting lens. Donald Trump has never been a real actor. (To be a real actor, you must be able to understand how other people feel.) However, he did his amateurish best to impersonate a successful businessman for 14 years on the NBC television series The Apprentice. I could not fathom the popularity that got him elected President, until I started watching clips of old Apprentice shows. It is edifying to watch those clips through the eyes of a drama teacher.
They display an unskilled, untalented ham actor, ineptly portraying a powerful, savvy businessman. He struts and frets his hour, posturing like a plus-size department-store dummy and pontificating boastfully in that whiny, nasal voice with its tone of patient, put-upon fatigue. He seems to have collected a repertoire of facial expressions and gestures, by observing genuine successful businessmen and politicians. But he has probably never had a drama teacher explain to him that his job was not just to replicate the external appearances of real successes, but to inhabit their inner thoughts and feelings, drives and hopes and fears. Or maybe he has had such teachers, but he just can’t pull it off.
Instead, The Apprentice gave him all the costuming, makeup, hair styling, lighting, settings, background music and worshipful fellow performers he needed, to help him look like the real deal. Fran Lebowitz has described Trump as “a poor person’s idea of a rich person.” Others later added that he’s also a stupid person’s idea of a smart person, and a weak person’s idea of a strong person. The Apprentice taught poor, stupid, weak people that rich, smart, strong people like Trump spend their time riding around in stretch limousines, flying to mysterious locations in their private planes, and sitting enthroned in dramatically-lit board rooms where they pass judgment on us lesser mortals, based on arcane wisdom we could not possibly understand. The fact that this garbage was consumed by gullible Americans for 14 years may help to explain why enough of them bought into this plasticized version of the American dream to get Trump elected.
Indeed, former NBC executive John Miller recently apologized for the program to the American public, in a U.S. News and World Report op-ed. “I helped create a monster… We created the narrative that Trump was a super-successful businessman who lived like royalty… Trump may have been the perfect person to be the boss of this show, because more successful CEOs were too busy to get involved in reality TV and didn’t want to hire random game show winners onto their executive teams. Trump had no such concerns. He had plenty of time for filming, he loved the attention and it painted a positive picture of him that wasn’t true.” He added that even the famous board room was a set, because Trump’s real one was “too old and shabby for TV.”
America narrowly avoided a disaster with Trump as President the first time, and as I write this, in October, it appears that they might avoid that disaster again: as I noted in an earlier blog, he is clearly too dimwitted, or too spoiled from earliest childhood, to understand that when you flout the rules, you’re supposed to at least try to cover up doing so. The real danger is that at some point in America’s future, somebody else will come along who shares Trump’s “values,” but who also has the brains to disguise their future schemes and past transgressions – and the acting talent to convince a larger public of their sincerity.
I guess what I’m saying is that it’s a good thing Trump never had a drama teacher as good as Trudeau.