Let’s start with a simple observation about how politics usually works: if you are looking to grow a new religion, your success or failure doesn’t depend on persuading the Pope and the College of Cardinals to renounce Catholicism.

That is, whatever idea you’re trying to promote in order to achieve something in politics — a policy change, winning elections and so on — job number one is not to convert your opponents’ leaders and base. You’re looking to persuade the persuadable.

As Donald Trump is sworn in as President of the United States, this relatively obvious point may bear repeating.

Because, as much as there is resolve fuelling mass protest marches, the resistance to Trumpism also includes a heavy dose of flummoxed defeatism.

Jabs at his ignorance or untruths or unpreparedness are met with a mantra of “this elitist attitude is why he won.” References to what appear to be scandals, or scandals in the making, draw cries of “his base is never going to be convinced by that.” Pointing out that the policies that appear to be brewing differ from some of his voters’ direct interests and his own campaign-trail rhetoric, some people shrug. “If his supporters liked him after the outrages of the campaign, why would this new information make any difference now?”

Some people even point to Toronto’s experience with Rob Ford as evidence of the ineffectiveness of this kind of evidence. For example, Jeet Heer, a Canadian writer for The New Republic, recently tweeted “Based on Rob Ford example, the most degrading possible tape of Trump could come out & he’ll not sink below 30 per cent. So: no impeachment.”

Heer was making a specific point based on levels of support and their partisan implications in congress, but the memory of how even after the crack scandal Ford’s approval rating never dipped below 30 per cent — even after he admitted to smoking crack and before he announced he’d go into rehab — is very often held out as an example of how he maintained strength in the face of scandal and opposition.

And sometimes, given the apparent similarities in the two men’s political cult-of-disaffected-personality actions, that is seen as a preview of what to expect of the U.S. populace under President Trump.

I’m not about to try to predict what will happen in the United States because I think making predictions is incredibly difficult. But I do think that whatever happens, my observation of the Ford years and politics in general does lead me to expect that it is highly unlikely Trump’s most fervent supporters will ever abandon him. I expect that no matter what the scandal, 25 or 30 per cent is probably a floor for his approval ratings. They call it a base because it is remarkably solid.

But if we’re looking to the Ford years for lessons, this one doesn’t teach that opposition is ineffective just because it doesn’t convert the most faithful. In fact, opposition to Ford was remarkably successful in Toronto, both in derailing his attempts to implement his agenda and in limiting his re-election likelihood before he left the race when he was diagnosed with cancer.

For instance, in the wake of the crack scandal (and the lunacy that followed its revelations) city council did pretty much impeach Ford — as close as they could come, anyway.

There is no mechanism that allows council to remove a mayor from office for anything other than absence, but his fellow councillors did strip him of all the powers they were able to strip him of, and re-routed much of his budget discretion and staff allotment to the deputy mayor, Norm Kelly.

A 32-per-cent approval rating and widespread majority disgust with Ford’s behaviour was enough to convince even most of his closest city council allies to abandon him: the votes were 37-5 and 36-6 on the key items involved, and one of those voting against was his brother.

But, even before we heard a whiff of the crack scandal, opposition protest and his own misdeeds (including a conflict of interest trial) had led public opinion to turn against him. By late 2012, halfway through his term and well before anyone heard about drugs, despite him having an approval rating in the low 40s, close to what Donald Trump’s is said to be now, Rob Ford was unable to implement most of the things he wanted to do. His transit plans had been reversed by city council, his budgets rewritten over his objections, his waterfront revisions rejected. Matt Elliott, the punditocracy’s council scorekeeper of the era, calculated that in 2012 then-mayor Ford was on the winning side of only 32 per cent of major votes.

He never lost his fanatically supportive base — and many people marveled and despaired at that fact while it was happening — but Ford’s move from 47 per cent of the vote on election day to 42 per cent approval in 2012 led his city council allies to vote against him on anything that looked like an extreme part of his agenda. And when he fell to 30 per cent approval amid more outrageous scandal, politicians of virtually all political affiliations had completely turned their backs on him and stripped him of the powers they could.

Donald Trump lost the popular vote, so was somewhat unpopular even on election day: his margin of victory, because of the way the electoral college shakes out to one or two percentage points in a few key states.

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His opponents don’t need to convert his base to change the electoral math; they just need to convince a small number of voters who maybe didn’t like Clinton, or thought they’d give him a try, or didn’t realize exactly what voting for him might mean. And since he was an insurgent in the Republican party to begin with, and legislators need to face mid-term elections well before Trump has to face voters, it’s within the realm of possibility that a change in electoral math results in a change in how much support he gets for his more extreme proposals, even from members of his own party.

Toronto is not the U.S., and the offices and systems the mayor and president operate in are very different. So perhaps people might be careful of trying to make too much of the example. But if we’re looking for what the example of Ford in Toronto might show, it is that opposition and protest can be very effective, and that scandals and missteps do matter — even with a politician whose base is unshakable.

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