Peter Worthington, the late founding editor of the Toronto Sun, had a saying about how the media cover politicians.

“They’re either at their feet, or at their throat.”

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For a long time following his election victory in 2015, taking the Liberals from third place to a majority government by defeating Stephen Harper’s nine-year Conservative regime, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau had the media at his feet.

He enjoyed one of the longest honeymoons in Canadian history, domestically and internationally.

It was “Trudeaumania 2.0”, reminiscent of the fawning coverage his late father received when he first became PM.

It wasn’t surprising.

Trudeau the younger had a storied name in Canadian politics and he delivered what the media most love in an election, a surprise victory over an opponent whose relationship with the media was always testy.

Trudeau professed views on issues like gender, indigenous and minority rights, climate change, immigration, refugees and Canada’s place in the world, that the liberal media share.

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He believed, along with Canada’s Laurentian elites in Ottawa, Montreal and Toronto, that smart people like themselves could create a better Canada and a better world, if only the public could be kept from falling prey to conservative “populism”.

For a long time, it worked. Trudeau remained popular despite controversies that could have felled another politician, such as his alleged groping of a young reporter before he entered politics, which he denied.

Like the finding by the federal ethics commissioner that he violated conflict of interest laws by accepting family and friend vacations on the private Bahamas island of the Aga Khan, whose charitable foundation receives millions of dollars of taxpayers’ money.

Like his trip to India, which Trudeau seemed to treat it like a giant Bollywood set, with himself as its costumed star.

Those controversies dented Trudeau’s popularity, but not fatally, except something else was happening at the same time.

In the middle of his media honeymoon, Trudeau made a fundamental mistake — he raised expectations, unrealistically, about what he could do.

He promised that unlike his predecessor, he would always tell Canadians the truth.

He promised to spend big on the middle class, without big deficits and debt.

He said his carbon tax would give Alberta the “social licence” to build pipelines to tidewater and that, unlike Harper, he would honour Canada’s international commitments on climate change, announcing “Canada is back”.

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When none of that happened, cracks in his Liberal base of support began to appear.

Then came Lavscam, broken by the Globe and Mail, on Feb. 7.

Trudeau, through his tone-deaf response, shredded his carefully crafted image as a politician who was different, who would never mislead Canadians, who would defend female and indigenous rights, who would govern on behalf of the middle class, not special interests.

With Lavscam, the transformation of Trudeau from Teflon, where nothing sticks, to Velcro, where everything does, was complete.

That can be seen in the media’s reaction to the dropping of a criminal charge of breach of trust against Vice-Admiral Mark Norman on Wednesday, another case in which Trudeau’s government was accused of inappropriately interfering in a criminal prosecution.

Trudeau and the prosecutor denied it Wednesday, but Trudeau’s problem, as the late Liberal Sen. Keith Davey famously said, is that in politics, perception is reality.

The reality is Trudeau’s no longer Teflon, he’s Velcro.

And the media, or at least a lot of it that were at his feet, are now at his throat.