Donold Appears to Not Know Who Pierre Poilievre Is

Peewee who, man?

He’s the one on the left. Image: Luisa Vieira

Imagine if you worked as a fluffer on one of Stormy Daniels’ adult film sets and you did your very best to make sure performers’ peens remained suitably stiff during breaks in shooting in the hope of making a good impression on the boss, and then you find out she never even bothered to learn your name.

This must be how Conservative Party of Canada leader Pierre Poilievre feels after discovering Donald J. Trump apparently doesn’t know who he is. Or at least not his name.

Dear Leader appeared on a rambling livestream last week hosted by a 23-year-old incel influencer named Adin Ross, where he whined about how unhappy Canadians are with the current Liberal government led by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.

“If they had a good conservative person which — maybe they do, maybe they don’t, I don’t know — but, uh, somebody that’s a strong conservative would win Canada,” declared Trump. “Canada is very unhappy about the way they’ve been treated as people.”

He’s actually not wrong for a change as polls currently show the Conservatives leading the Liberals by a whopping 20 points. But it must sting worse than an ear grazed by a flying shard of glass for Peewee to learn his counterpart south of the border probably couldn’t pick him out of a police lineup. (Although no doubt his cognitively functional running mate knows perfectly well who Poilievre is, not least because his BFF from Yale is a newly minted Conservative MP.) It would probably be a stretch for the elderly statesman to properly pronounce “Poilievre” but you’d think Donold might’ve at least managed a Pierre Apple or something.

The moment came after he was shown a photo of Trudeau as part of a game where he was asked to give one-word descriptions of various political leaders and public figures, and the very stable genius brought up the long-debunked but persistent rumor Trudeau is the bastard love child of a former Cuban dictator.

“He’s turned very liberal actually,” said Trump. “They say he’s the son of Fidel Castro and, uh, could be. I mean anything’s possible in this world, you know.”

This is hilarious on several levels. He didn’t “turn liberal” after, say, previously being of conservative heritage. He is literally the Liberal prime minister who is the son of a Liberal prime minister who has liberal views he shares liberally. And while a lot of seemingly impossible things are indeed possible in this world — a convicted felon and adjudicated rapist has an actual shot at becoming president again! — it’s highly unlikely El Comandante managed to knock up Margaret Trudeau with Justin as the kid was four-years-old when the two were first introduced. This is all public record.

I watched the interview — for lack of a better word — because, as Wonkette’s senior Canadian correspondent, it’s my Very Important Job to look for domestic stories of potential interest to readers outside the country. Hearing reports the dotard had dredged up the conspiracy again seemed more fun to write about than reports of a bunch of bot accounts from all around the planet mysteriously gushing with identical excitement after allegedly attending a Poilievre rally at a remote mining town in northern Ontario.

But I screwed up the assignment after somehow getting it into my head Trump had gotten his enormous son Barron confused with UFC head Dana White. I can explain.

You might have seen that clip from the Republican National Convention last month where a smiling Tiffany Trump went to greet her dad with a peck on the cheek, and he clearly had no idea who the hell she was. Most people shrugged it off since she’s 30 now and this is probably around the age he would normally struggle to remember blond women who aren’t Ivanka even in his prime.

The spiraling Trump campaign is desperate to attract voters who were too young to have cast a ballot for him in 2016 or 2020. They know they’re pooched with female Gen Zers as it’s only a matter of time before childless cat lady Taylor Swift activates her army of stans — which she’s already teased at — to curb stomp the guy on November 5 and so their best hope of turning their sinking swiftboat around is through attracting junior members of the He-Man Woman-Haters Club.

Which is how the obviously tired old man found himself sitting across from a ridiculous MAGA cheerleader like Ross, who Trump admitted from the start he’d never heard of before and only agreed to it because Barron is a big fan and urged him to do it. I thought I’d found a bit of a scoop when, after skipping forward to the “Person, Man, Woman, Camera, TV” part because I didn’t want to spend a full 90 minutes on a summer day watching a scheming white nationalist chatting with a senile one, and stumbled upon a segment where Trump seemed to instead be crediting “Dana” for his appearance on the show:

Dana is very much into this world. Dana is a young guy sort of you know. Dana is very into this world where you could be like an 18-year-old or a 20-year-old. He knows more about you and the Nelk Brothers and the Nelk Boys, and he asked me to do this show.

I took this as further proof outlets like the New York Times and Washington Post were clearly in the tank for the Trump campaign because they committed the sin of omission by not mentioning this in their own coverage. And neither did anyone else. He obviously gets names wrong all the time but getting the name of a son named after his own alias seemed newsworthy. So I saddled up my high-horse for what I thought would be an exclusive and went all J’ACCUSE..! on them like a common Émile Zola.

Fortunately my excellent editor, Rebecca Schoenkopf, caught the mistake and killed the post. Figuring out what the hell Trump is actually talking about has always been a challenge of covering him but in this case was probably just Trump showing his appreciation for Dana White, who he may well think of as the tough, successful son he never had. (White himself is actually shown on the screen a few minutes later and got “fighter” for his own one-word description.) But the 55-year-old who “is very into this world where you could be like an 18-year-old” may have also come up earlier in parts of the show I skipped over as self-care. Mea culpa. I probably had dementia on my own mind too much after we had to put my father into the same care facility as my mother last week.

Substack is great in the sense that it levels the playing field for writers and anyone can publish whatever they like. But AI or spell-check will never be a substitute for a good editor.

[The Tyee]