Did Donald Trump take his media strategy from Rob Ford?
Netflix recently released a new documentary about Rob Ford's 2010 to 2014 reign as mayor of Toronto. Trainwreck: Mayor of Mayhem includes footage of Ford's infamous admission to smoking crack cocaine and highlights how he delegitimized the media, using tactics that are strikingly similar to those now used by U.S. President Donald Trump.
Today on Commotion, host Elamin Abdelmahmoud discusses the documentary with entertainment reporter Teri Hart and Toronto Star reporter David Rider, who covered Ford's mayoral tenure and is featured in Trainwreck: Mayor of Mayhem.
We've included some highlights below, edited for length and clarity. For the full discussion, listen and follow Commotion with Elamin Abdelmahmoud on your favourite podcast player.
WATCH | Today's episode on YouTube:
Elamin: One of the key throughlines of this documentary, David, is — and I think I forgot about this again, because it's been enough time — but how adversarial Rob Ford was about the media. He would go on every day and say, "The Toronto Star is saying these things about me, they're just not true" — and by the way, he's talking about you! And in this particular case, he is casting you, or casting the media, I should say, as some sort of political opposition. And this is years before you see Donald Trump say the term "fake news."
What was it like trying to tell the Rob Ford story, while also having Rob Ford use the microphone of the mayor's office to try to say, "The media, they're not telling the truth about me" — and having people maybe believe him at the time?
David: Yeah, it was really difficult. I did very early stories on Rob Ford when there were rumours he was going to run and we got along really well. I spent a whole day with him as he did his constituency work and admired him getting people's potholes fixed and stuff like that. So when it became obvious that he had a real shot at being mayor, suddenly it turned…. I think the Fords have an incredible gut political instinct on how to turn situations to their own advantage, even situations that look like they could be a disaster.
And very early on, in a foreshadow of Donald Trump, they said, "We're going to discredit and delegitimize the media. And the Toronto Star are the ones who are the most likely to do us damage." So they started up this drumbeat and they portrayed it as a war. And they said, "Well, they're out to get us." And I always said to people when they'd ask me about it, "It's not a war. We're not trying to get Rob Ford out of office. We're covering him in exactly the same way we would have his two predecessors." And that was our yardstick for whether something was a story or not. But when you portray it as a war, suddenly he's able to just portray everything we do as being unfair and possibly false, when, in fact, he was lying all the time.
Elamin: Teri, the thing that trained us, I think, the most for the Donald-Trump-as-president years was living through this whole period of time of the Rob Ford news cycle. Because every day there was not one new thing, there were three new things — granted, a much more truncated timeline.
Teri: This documentary is certainly drawing that line — certainly a dotted one, sometimes a very, very bold line — between the Rob Ford mayoral temperature and tone in Toronto and the President of the United States in his second term, Donald Trump. And I think that that is really, really fascinating. Will we ever get the answer? Did Donald Trump watch Rob Ford? Did Donald Trump take a playbook from the Ford family, as David quite rightly points out, and their gut political instincts? We'll never know. But it's certainly there and you don't have to dig too deep to find it.
Elamin: David, what do you think Rob Ford's legacy is?
David: I think he was a first sign that a populist politician who had all kinds of baggage, who normally in normal-world politics of past decades wouldn't even be considered for office, can get elected. And part of it is that if they can lie with impunity, if they have no political shame and if the public is willing to let them get away with it — and in some cases even cheer it on — then that's an incredibly powerful political weapon. But it's dangerous for society because they think Rob Ford was the start of the fact-free universe, as far as current affairs and how we view each other, and to public policy, where the vibes about a politician are considered just as valid, or maybe more so, than what they've actually done.
So I think he was an early warning signal. Although there are people who are flooding social media now saying, "He was the best mayor ever, and this documentary proves it." So it all depends on how you look at it, but he was definitely the start of that.
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