New 'tell-all' book about Toronto's Rob Ford could teach us about the rise of Donald Trump
For a while it seemed that nobody was going to learn their lesson from the crack-smoking scandal that rocked Toronto City Hall in 2013.
Rob Ford â the mayor who was filmed smoking crack cocaine in a drug-dealerâs house â obstinately refused to admit he had a drug problem and refused to stand down from office.
Journalists were getting such good mileage out of the story that bidding wars broke out for the video footage, and Gawker nearly ended up paying drug-dealing extortionists $200,000 for the exclusive rights.
The general public too were either laughing too hard to be properly outraged, or they were fighting with all their might to keep him in office despite the fact he was smoking crack.
In the end it took an unrelated bout of cancer to quash the possibility of a second term for Rob Ford. And although he is currently undergoing chemotherapy for tumours attached to his bladder, he has previously made his intentions to run for mayor again when the next election rolls around clear, all things being well.
You might think it would be impossible for a man who was caught smoking crack in office to ever be re-elected as a mayor but despite everything Rob Ford is still incredibly popular.
How can that be? A new book on Ford, Uncontrollable: How I Tried To Help The Worldâs Most Notorious Mayor (written by Fordâs erstwhile chief of staff, Mark Towhey, and journalist Johanna Schneller) gives us a pretty good idea.
But rather than speculate about Fordâs chances in a Canadian municipal election in three yearsâ time, why donât we apply the observations made in Uncontrollable and see how they compare to a slightly more pressing car-crash: The one thatâs running for office south of the border. Donald Trump.
As recent polling has shown, Trump â far from burning out the way pundits suggested he would â continues to pull ahead in the Republican primaries. Nothing seems to be harming him. His detractors never seem to be able to land a hit. So how can someone so utterly ridiculous possibly be doing so well?
Maybe nowâs the time we can learn a little something from Rob Ford:
Social networking
According to Mark Towhey, one of the keys to the success of the Rob Ford campaign was one of Fordâs non-chemical addictions: his mobile phone.
Every day when Ford was a councillor (which he was for a decade before becoming mayor) he would leave the house with wads of paper in his hand, all filled to the edges with phone numbers.
These were the numbers of his constituents who had called his answerphone with questions â as many as two hundred a night.
Ford made a point of phoning every single one of them back. Mainly he knew heâd be getting through to answerphones, so heâd leave a quick, pre-prepared message. Occasionally heâd actually reach a constituent and would speak to them for a couple of minutes to talk through their problems.
This is what Rob Ford did with his free time. Whenever he was being driven anywhere, whenever he had a few moments between appointments, he would call people. Endlessly. To the extent that he would ignore his aides as they talked to him.
Now look at Donald Trump. His Twitter feed is relentless. For six years now, he has been tweeting â dozens of times a day â often manually retweeting people and responding to their comments.
He tweets late at night. He tweets early in the morning. He catches every wave of Twitter user and is retweeted, screengrabbed, and quoted endlessly by supporters and detractors alike. Consequently he enjoys an online presence completely unlike any of his competitors.
This may seem trivial and unimportant when there is actual policy to discuss, but itâs exactly the same formula as Ford. He appears as a man who is in touch with the people. Someone who relishes talking to the public. Those who receive a (not-especially-rare) retweet from Donald Trump feel like they have been listened to.
Like Ford, all Trump is doing is the Twitter equivalent of leaving answerphone messages. A small, token gesture â but one which registered with people.
And one which, clearly, had massive repercussions when it came to voter turnout in Toronto.
Crystal balls
Back when he was representing Ward 2 in Etobicoke North, Rob Ford would often â without consultation or deliberation â put forward unusual sounding motions to the local council for voting.
He was considered the odd kid of the class at council meetings, and when he stood up to propose that the city save itself $77,000 a year by having councillors water their own plants, the other 44 councillors would look visibly baffled.
He would place the same motions before the council again and again, year after year â lots of it stuff that was routinely mocked â and would be voted down 44-1 in hundreds of instances.
In most contexts, his record would make a person look like a pig-headed monomaniac. And for a long while, thatâs how he was seen. A crazed loon with specific personal interests, out of step with everyone else in his profession. A man who was using local government to get support for his weird pet projects.
However, when the mayoral campaign started, his team was able to use it as proof that Ford was a maverick. A man who wasnât afraid to stick his rather substantial neck out in pursuit of a fair deal for everyone.
One of the big topics that came around in the 2010 mayoral race was overspending in local government. Suddenly, Rob Fordâs complaints about the flower-watering bill didnât look so crazy after all. With a bit of selective massaging, what had started out looking like an aimless, bloody-minded fist-swinging now began to take shape as keen political foresight â and Rob Ford looked positively clairvoyant.
The same thing is happening with Donald Trump.
Trump hasnât been involved in local politics before, but he has been giving his unrequested (and often unpopular) political opinions on Twitter for about the same length of time.
Trump has a time-stamped track record of his positions on various issues dating back six years. A lot of his early material is just a load of honking about Kenyan birth certificates â but, like a heckler who got a decent response for his first interruption, he has kept at it.
What often is overlooked is that there is a huge contingent of voters who dislike Obama and the Obama administration just⊠because. Theyâll hate the Affordable Care Act; theyâll think heâs been too soft on immigrants; some may even genuinely think heâs a Kenyan Muslim dead set on bringing about the destruction of the decadent West.
It doesnât matter what their reasons, there are millions of Americans who just want Obama out â whatever it takes.
The most virulently anti-Obama candidate? That nasally little guy off The Apprentice.
The benefit of having six years of shite online is that now Trump is able to cherrypick anything from that time and reposition it. He has been mouthing off about IS for ages. At a time when fear of terror attacks has been so recently renewed, he now looks like the most ferocious candidate.
Whether the details of his foreign policy actually check out is a different matter entirely. To the casual voter, Trump is the guy whoâs been saying all along he will ride into Syria on an F-35 and fuck shit up.
Same with China. Same with Russia. Same with building a wall. Heâs been saying that, and hundreds of other things, for years. Was any of it acute political foresight? Or just the ravings of a rich, old madman whoâll chuck his heavy two cents in on absolutely everything?
Depends who you are; depends who you ask. But regardless of your stance, Trumpâs got six years of âI told you soâ to back up his positions â just like Ford did.
Single syllables
Something that both Ford and Trump understand is the power of straight talk. They pride themselves on their brash, forthright style and they donât much care for patronising eggheads with their Ivy League credentials and their $10 words.
When Rob Ford was on the campaign trail, and the debates and discussions got too airy-fairy, he had no qualms about mouthing, from the stage, the words âWhat the fuck did he say?â to his aides in the wings. Heâd address similar comments to the audience directly, saying âI donât know about you, but I have no idea what he just saidâ after his opponents finished speaking.
The political class was horrified; the crowd absolutely loved it.
Trump, too, is celebrated in certain quarters for being ârefreshingly un-PCâ, for âtelling it how it isâ, for âspeaking his mindâ â even when his mind is, say, describing Mexican immigrants as rapists and murderers, or comparing his competitor Ben Carson to a child molester, or calling for a ban on all Muslims entering the US.
But where this approach is particularly helpful is when dealing with scandal. For where most politicos will offer forth meaningless and mealy-mouthed cliché when asked to defend dodgy behaviour, Ford and Trump just continue to bulldoze.
When Ford was accused of sexually propositioning a policy adviser, he gave a press conference in which he said: âOlivia Gondek. It says I wanted to eat her pussy. I never said that in my life to her. I would never do that. Iâm happily married and Iâve got more than enough to eat at home.â
When Ford was asked about smoking crack in a drug-dealerâs basement, he said, outright: âI do not use crack cocaine, nor am I an addict of crack cocaine.â And when the police got hold of a video which showed him actually smoking crack cocaine, his response was: âI wasnât lying, you [journalists] didnât ask the correct question.â
What happens when Trump is interrogated similarly? When he was taken to task on having called women âfat pigsâ, âdogsâ, âslobsâ, and âdisgusting animalsâ on a televised debate, how did Trump respond? With a joke about Rosie OâDonnell that was met with the sort of stadium-wide laughter and whooping that Chris Rock would get at the end of a set (and then a sly threat of social blackmail at Megan Kelly).
Itâs no less sneaky than what the others do. Neither Ford nor Trump is being any more truthful or clear in their answers than anyone else. Itâs just a different way to cover your tracks. But what they seem to know â instinctively â is that while people might dislike you for being duplicitous, they will truly resent you if you force them to crack out their dictionary.
What does this all mean? Trump to take the White House in 2016, and turn it into a crack den by 2018? West Wing interns being hired and fired with stories that would make Monica Lewinsky blush? Trump getting blind drunk and declaring heâd like to âfucking jamâ other heads of state? Itâs unlikely. But not impossible.
Uncontrollable: How I Tried To Help The Worldâs Most Notorious Mayor by Mark Towhey and Johanna Schneller is out now. This article first appeared on the website Popbitch.
