AP

 

Lisa Van Dusen

May 11, 2023

 

“My reformation, glittering o’er my fault

Shall show more goodly and attract more eyes

Than that which hath no foil to set it off.”

 

William Shakespeare’s Prince Hal

Henry IV, Part One, Act I, Scene II

 

During the 2016 US presidential election campaign, the unprecedented political stylings of Donald J. Trump – from his characterization of immigrants as rapists during his campaign launch to that instant-classic pussy grabbing tutorial — were so relentlessly outlandish that, at a certain point, it became both editorially sensible and just plain fun to change his default ID in our US politics copy to “Clinton surrogate Donald Trump”.

Trump’s spectacular, disqualification-baiting, voter-alienating stunts provided such an apparently overwhelming advantage to his opponent that, to anyone who had ever covered, worked on or witnessed a national election campaign in any functioning democracy, he was that opponent’s single biggest asset. Like the foil used by merchants in Shakespeare’s time to backdrop gems so that they appeared to shine more brightly — the origin of the term “foil” as a narrative device describing a character whose traits set off those of the protagonist to positive effect — Trump was a tinselly, flashy, perpetually shiny object of stupendously scandalous thrall.

That Hillary Clinton lost in spite of that advantage really says more about other factors than it does about Trump’s value as an empirically unelectable contrast candidate. He presented voters with an option that effectively trumped all the negatives attached to the Clintons over years by the media, by polling, by conventional wisdom, by the craziest conspiracy theorists and by their own behaviour: he was more corrupt, more narcissistic, more of a sexual predator and, most invaluably, more of a liar by several orders of magnitude in both frequency and outrageousness. The reasons voters seemed not to respond to that contrast in a more reliable fashion have been exhaustively excavated, analyzed, misrepresented, obfuscated, argued and counter-argued.

At this point, even in the highly abnormal new normal, all Joe Biden has to do is keep taking his cholesterol meds, sleep with one eye open and give the presidential food taster a big, fat raise.

In 2020, Joe Biden’s victory proved that, in a democracy still relatively free and fair albeit under siege on a number of fronts — from the rise of operational propaganda to the incumbent’s attempts to sabotage and discredit electoral infrastructure to the narrative warfare forays designed to degrade Biden’s electability — Trump was, again, the sort of political foil that any candidate would dream of. Biden’s authenticity, familiarity to voters as a known, face-value quantity and reputation for integrity, public service and empathy provided the sort of genuine contrast to Trump’s autocratic gasbag act that produced a seven million-American margin in the popular vote.

Since then, Trump has doubled down on his contrast value so sensationally that the Clintons — amid a recent tour (here, here, here, here and here) that may or may not prove to be of the contingency/comeback variety — are surely wishing they’d waited for a longer list of foilisms. Trump has now been impeached not once but a record-shattering twice; he has plotted an overt, violent failed coup; he has repeatedly proven his status as an asset to the global war on democracy in a way so public and brazen that we’ll soon be changing his default ID to “Putin surrogate Donald Trump” or “Xi surrogate Donald Trump”, at least until further notice. And, as of Wednesday, he’s been deemed by an actual jury to have sexually abused and defamed a woman accuser. At this point, even in the highly abnormal new normal and barring a wholesale cyberattack on the entire US electoral infrastructure by People’s Liberation Army hackers, all Joe Biden has to do is keep taking his cholesterol meds, sleep with one eye open and give the presidential food taster a big, fat raise.

Then again, America’s democracy problem is considerably bigger than Donald Trump — a fact evidenced in everything from gobsmackingly counterintuitive opinion polls to the migration of lunatics, performative or not, from the fringe into the halls of Congress. If it weren’t, CNN would not have provided a national cable platform Wednesday night for a twice-impeached, coup plotting, anti-democracy actor broadcasting disinformation, sowing division and spreading all the wrong tinfoil-hat conspiracy theories.

In the process, it served up the democracy-discrediting bonus of degrading the news media. But it certainly did present a contrast.

Policy Magazine Associate Editor and Deputy Publisher Lisa Van Dusen was a senior writer at Maclean’s, 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.