Claypool: Justin Trudeau’s Ego Is Too Big To Win In 2025

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has been in an obvious state of decline in the polls since Pierre Poilievre became the leader of the Conservative Party in late 2022. It seems that once the Conservatives picked a leader who wasn’t preoccupied with fighting or disowning their own base all the negative attention fell back on Trudeau and Trudeau has no clue what to do with it.

One could have actually called Justin Trudeau a dynamic and exciting politician back in 2015 when he was first running to become Canada’s prime minister.

Even as a Conservative, although I hated his policies and could tell there was nothing real about Trudeau, I can admit he is a good political marketer. “Sunny Ways” is frankly a brilliant political slogan, it cast Trudeau’s Liberals as a ray of sunshine compared to Stephen Harper’s dark and shadowy Conservatives, even if the characterization was untrue.

These days, Justin Trudeau has become bloated and slow on his drip feed of legacy media talking heads and supposedly objective “journalists” acting as spin artists and flak catchers for his government, and he has become incapable of defending himself.

Pierre Poilievre knows the best way to get at Trudeau is to go after him directly on social media and leave Trudeau’s legacy media defenders struggling to keep up with him.

Now whenever Poilievre attacks Trudeau, all Trudeau can do is make excuses, fire off incoherent attacks against his Conservative opponents, and dodge questions, and hope the legacy media can make it all sound sensible on the other side of the cameras.

The problem is after eight years of this shtick from Trudeau, and with a competent and fiery Conservative opposition leader to contend with, Canadians are not buying what Trudeau is selling anymore.

New Polls show Trudeau only has the approval of anywhere from 27 to 30 percent of Canadians, and his party is double-digits behind the Conservatives nationally.

The funny thing is Trudeau could win the 2025 election, but he would have to develop new skills he has never had to acquire before humility and ownership of his actions.

From my perspective, on the national political scene, if Justin Trudeau could simply make the statement “mistakes were made and here is how we can try and correct them” he would immediately gain back a large chunk of the voting base that he lost over the last year.

Former Liberal voters seem to be turning their backs on Trudeau and the Liberal Party because they don’t seem to be able to acknowledge their own policy failures and chart a new path for Canada in response. Even someone who voted Liberal in the last three elections recognizes the government has not delivered the growth and stability they claimed massive deficit spending would create, and Justin Trudeau’s woke social agenda has proven more divisive than unifying.

In an ironic twist since Trudeau’s “Sunny Ways” era in 2015, he has become the inaccurate caricature he painted about Harper. Trudeau has become a stuffy, undynamic, and shadowy political leader who only offers an IV drip of government programs in response to the economic chaos he has helped cause in Canada.

In contrast, Pierre Poilievre is the young dynamic leader who is offering a sunny picture of economic independence, lower taxes, affordability, and less involvement of the bloated federal bureaucracy in the lives of Canadians.

Trudeau looks old and befuddled in comparison and has almost no narrative to run on in 2025 other than excuses or denials of policy failures and fear-mongering about social conservatives and parental rights, a bad move considering both are on a popularity upswing across Canada and for good reason.

So while I believe Justin Trudeau could battle back much of his support base and survive the 2025 federal election, at this point, I don’t think Trudeau has the character to win. His ego is far too big to admit to and fix his past mistakes and mend fences with Canadians he has dragged for the last 8 years.

Trudeau is stuck in a cycle. He creates a problem, ignores the problem, taxes the problem, blames the problem on everyone but himself, calls the problem racist, pretends he solved the problem, then repeats the cycle.

Not a great reelection strategy.