Justin Trudeau has let the side down — again.

The politician who promised a bright, new day in Canadian politics, has already disappointed First Nations, environmentalists, veterans, electoral reformers, and those expecting swift action on repealing the odious police-state legislation from the Harper era, Bill C-51.

Some have called Trudeau’s underwhelming performance a question of “over-promising.” It looks more like bad faith.

After a brief pause, Trudeau endorsed the missile attack on Syria ordered by President Donald Trump. It will dog him as one of the worst decisions of his increasingly Harper-like government — secretive, arrogant, and two-faced.

First, Donald Trump is a dangerous, unprincipled and astonishing liar who is trying desperately to use the office of president to sanctify the man. The Nixon gambit. Now that he has passed the Cruise Missile test, big time politicians and the mainstream media are kissing his feet, if not his ample backside.

The Wall Street Journal and the New York Times are swooning so hard for Trump’s display of techno-muscle that they have apparently forgotten about Saddam’s missing weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and a million dead; invented Kuwaiti soldiers killing babies straight out of the incubator; the debacle of Libya; and the the atrocious Yemen mission in which the US is wielding the devil’s crop on behalf of Saudi Arabia — and selling white phosphorus to the Saudis. That is an incendiary weapon that kills by burning to the bone.

Perhaps the low point of the media coverage of this illegal and unconstitutional strike U.S. legislators like Sen. Rand Paul have called it, was CNN’s Fareed Zakaria. He was positively grovelling in his assessment of Trump’s strike: “I think Donald Trump became President of the United States tonight.”

So what sort of person has Canada endorsed in this dread matter? The sort of man who wants the world to believe that the hideous images of children killed in a poison-gas attack changed his entire view of Syria and its president Bashar-al-Assad. Trump evoked “beautiful babies” as justification for the missile attack, all the while leaving tens of thousands of other Syrian babies to suffer and, yes, die in refugee camps.

But is Assad’s killing children really a Red Line for Trump? Hardly. In 2013, nearly 1,400 civilians died in a gas attack in Ghouta, a suburb of Damascus. That included a large number of children. (By comparison, a relatively modest 72 people died in this week’s gas attack in Khan Sheikhoun.) The President of the day in 2013, Barack Obama, tried to make the case for a military intervention in Syria with a reluctant Congress. He failed. Citizen Trump weighed in on the debate with his Twitter bazooka.

“Again, to our very foolish leader, do not attack Syria – if you do, many bad things will happen and from that fight the US gets nothing…We should stay the hell out of Syria. The rebels are just as bad as the current regime…”

Bottom line? Just four years ago, the guy who now wants everyone to think he is Albert Schweitzer didn’t think that the death of 1,400 men, women, AND children was worth fighting for. Worse, he reduced the whole situation to the fact that the US would get “nothing” from such an intervention except lost billions and lives. That is not a humanitarian; it is someone with a cash-register for a heart.

In fact, Trump actually advocated a policy that raises the most basic question of all about his true feelings about killing children in war: in certain circumstances, does he actually advocate it? This is what candidate Trump told Fox News during the 2016 presidential election.

“The other thing with the terrorists is you have to take out their families. When you get these terrorists, you have to take out their families…When they say they don’t care about their lives, you have to take out their families.”

When you say it three times, chances are you mean it.

Presumably those families included innocent men, women, and yes, children. Chalk that remark up to the Saddam Hussein school of counter-terrorism. But the sentiment is perfectly in line with the man who slammed the door in the face of Syrian refugees, including thousands of children — the real Donald Trump.

Trump was also silent in the wake of the U.S. bombing in Mosul on March 17th that led to the deaths of 229 civilians, including women and children. Apparently, death by bombing is free of the opprobrium reserved for death by poison gas. In the month of March alone, coalition bombing killed 1,000 people, whose broken and mangled bodies didn’t make it to the evening news.

The theory that America’s missile attack on Syria was about fiendishly murdered children is designed for the under-informed and overly-partisan; empty nonsense.

So if not about human rights, what was this latest example of shock and awe politics about. Was it about a strategic intervention designed to change the game in the long-running Syrian civil war in which 400,000 people have died and millions more have become desperate refugees?

If so, the missiles should have rained down on the presidential palace of Bashar-al-Assad, not some insignificant airbase. The day after Trump’s cruise missile strike, Khan Sheikhoun was bombed again — by persons unknown. I wonder: did the bombers take off from the runways Trump’s symbolic attack left operational? It is already being reported that fighter jets took off from the base the day after the missile strike to attack targets in the Eastern Homs countryside.

It is noteworthy that Trump loudly criticized the Obama administration for “telegraphing” its military moves. He, Trump, would use the element of surprise, and hold press conferences only after he had vanquished the enemy — or so he said.

In the wake of the gas attack on Khan Sheikhoun, and before the Cruise missile attack he ordered, Trump was asked in a press conference what he was going to do about it.

“I’m not saying anything, one way or the other. But I’m certainly not going to be telling you [the media.]”

So instead, he told the Russians, who in turn, almost certainly informed their clients, the Syrians, so that they could take evasive action before the missiles came in. A new definition of the element of surprise. Too bad that the nine civilians who died in the U.S. missile strike, including four children didn’t get the message.

So if the strike wasn’t about dead children or evil dictators, what was it about? The answer is as clear as the perpetual smirk on Steve Bannon’s face. What better way of deflecting the criticism that you are having a bromance with Vladimir Putin than to bomb Syria with Russian forces on the ground — especially when House, Senate and FBI investigations of links between the Kremlin and your presidential campaign are nipping at your heels?

Military action has a way of turning the nightly news into a Patriot’s Day parade. With Trump’s popularity sinking faster than his daughter’s fashion line, he needed to change the channel. It’s an age-old tactic: “wag the dog.”

As Ken Paulson of the First Amendment Centre told the Washington Post, “There is no faster way to bring public support than to pursue military action. It’s a pattern not only in American history, but in world history.”

Journalists tend to fall for that gambit like fifty-cent fish hitting a red and white lure.

At Mar-a-Lago, the U.S. president and his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping were enjoying dessert when Trump told his guest that he was attacking Syria. Justin Trudeau should remember that despite the choice of chocolate cake with vanilla sauce or sorbet trio, this is a table he doesn’t want to be sitting at.

Canada should not be attached to the desperate actions of a flim-flam artist who operates outside the auspices of US law, the United Nations, and any known concept of honesty — all to save his own skin.

Hey, PMJT, it’s not why you were picked to run the show. You promised to be different than Stephen Harper. You promised to be better.