There’s a new Doug Ford in town. He’s keeping his head down, hoping his polling numbers will go up.

But it’s a different look when the premier skips town. He lets his hair down, giving us a glimpse of the old Ford, polls be damned.

Ever since people started booing him in public, the premier has projected a kinder, quieter face at home — flashing a smile and freezing his tongue. But it’s hard holding it in all the time, which is why Ford loosens up when he leaves Ontario.

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In the rarefied air of Washington this month, Ford forgot himself. Or more precisely, he allowed himself to be himself.

How else to explain his passionate homage to Donald Trump?

“I loved listening to the president’s State of the Union address the other night,” Ford gushed to a hushed Canadian American Business Council. “We hope the election is going to turn out the right way. Literally the right way.”

Lest there be any doubt as to our right-leaning premier’s political preferences, he offered an unsolicited public put down of the most powerful woman in U.S. politics. As Speaker of the Democratic-controlled House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi just happens to be a linchpin of the legislative framework upon which our trade treaties depend for approval, but Ford vented his personal disapproval all the same.

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“I was disappointed when I saw Nancy Pelosi get up there and start tearing the speech up,” Ford mused to his audience, unprompted. “That’s uncalled for. I think it’s a shame, it’s a real, real, real shame.”

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Not content to diss Pelosi, Ford went on to badmouth Bernie Sanders, the current front-runner in the party’s primaries, for daring to call himself a social democrat: “That’s actually scary. It is. It really is.”

Never mind that Sanders is merely an echo of the New Democratic Party that came second among Ontario voters in the election, and that now serves faithfully as Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition in the legislature. Scary for Americans, which translates as shame on you Ontarians, in Ford’s book.

It’s not often that a visiting politician meddles in the domestic politics of his host country, pining in public for a Republican president in an election year while demonizing a Democratic front-runner in primary season. All the more awkward when Democratic governors come to Toronto later this year for a bilateral conference hosted by Ontario.

In the past, people might have been scandalized. But there are so many scandals at play in Washington that no one paid heed to a provincial premier offering his play-by-play analysis of Trump’s oration and Pelosi’s desecration.

While Ford’s public indiscretion went unremarked in America, any private fantasy he may harbour of a future bromance with Trump — akin to the chemistry between Justin Trudeau and Barack Obama — also remains unrequited. In Ontario, however, the premier’s words are worth considering more closely.

Listen to what else he told his American audience:

“Economics is very simple. You cut red tape, you cut regulations, you have lower business taxes and lower taxes with people and new revenues will come up to the coffers, as we say.”

This is vintage trickle-down economics, embraced by Trump despite being discredited and disproven over time. But Ford is a true believer, a politician who understands the business of government because of his fidelity to business:

“I always say I’m a businessman first. I’m an elected official second. And I take that business approach to the government.”

So who is Doug Ford, exactly? Heir to his father’s printing business, understudy during his late brother’s mayoralty, he is in many ways an accidental premier.

Notwithstanding the media hype about Ford Nation taking the province by storm in 2018, he won mostly by default — and despite himself — thanks to the unpopularity of Kathleen Wynne’s Liberals. Yet in the aftermath, Ford borrowed liberally from Trump’s populist playbook, rechristening himself leader of “Ontario’s First Government For the People.”

Approaching the midpoint of his mandate, Ford has been trying hard to tamp down the hubris, ramp up the humility, and reinvent himself. But his enduring endorsements of Trump remind us of his true colours.

Before running to be premier, Ford said without hesitation that he’d vote for Trump. Lying low during the last federal election, he hedged, claiming he couldn’t give “two hoots” about Trump. But in front of an American audience, the premier wears his heart on his sleeve and then puts his hand on his heart.

That is his right — even if it’s wrong for a guest to say so on U.S. soil. His bigger mistake is to telegraph how utterly out of sync he is with most Ontarians by unequivocally and uncritically praising a president who remains anathema at home.

As the legislature resumes sitting next week, we may see more of Ford 2.0 — more modest and modulated than ever before. But no amount of rebranding can conceal the underlying ideological affinity of Ontario’s premier with the president who would Make America Great Again.