Here’s how I spent my winter vacation: driving to the land of Donald Trump, only to discover that my homeland had taken a right turn into Doug Ford territory.

Anyone visiting the U.S. knows the feelings of envy we evoke in American friends who coo over our Canadian cool. In their eyes, Justin Trudeau is the anti-Trump — prone, perhaps, to overdressing on road trips with a fashion faux-pas, but a welcome foil all the same.

Seen through their eyes, it’s easy to see why. While we read about Trump’s depredations in the abstract, online, they live with his decisions as a daily reality on the ground.

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When you’re staying with American friends and comparing notes with Washington journalists, it hits home. Herewith, a few lessons learned on the perils of populism and the popular press in the time of Trump and in the dawn of a Doug Ford era.

First, the old storyline that casts Canada as a sanctuary of sanity (and our PM as a paragon of politics) is being rewritten. A chill wind is blowing from the country of cool as Toronto’s old Ford Nation juggernaut hits the comeback (and campaign) trail across the province.

Americans have seen this script before, just like Torontonians.

In the waning days of Rob Ford’s reign, during my last visit to the capital, his portrait graced the cover of the Washington Post’s Sunday magazine. His mayoral notoriety went global — a reminder that his populist appeal took root in Toronto long before America fell under Trump’s spell.

Doug Ford visited the Ontario legislature on March 12 for the first time since becoming leader of the province’s Progressive Conservatives. Ford says he plans to be “out on the road” as much as possible before the June 7 election. (The Canadian Press)

On this trip we visited the National Portrait Gallery, where crowds line up to see the recently unveiled paintings of Barack and Michelle Obama. But it was a picture of P.T. Barnum that caught my eye, notably the explanatory label that captured the essence of the circus showman back then, the U.S. president today, and perhaps the next premier of Ontario:

“The greatest impresario of the nineteenth century, P.T. Barnum was a shrewd judge of popular taste and an intuitive master of the art of publicity who tickled the public’s imagination and gleefully exploited its credulity for more than 50 years,” the caption explained helpfully.

Against that historical backdrop, how do we restore sanity amid the inanity of today? Journalists are deeply ambivalent about the penchant for populists to tell blatant falsehoods, because even exposing their unfounded claims often has the effect of amplifying them to a wider audience.

I asked an old friend, New York Times White House correspondent Mark Landler, what lessons he has learned from reporting on Trump’s ascendancy. How do you cover a candidate while uncovering the contradictions?

“The only course for journalists is to keep our heads down, keep reporting, keep trying to separate policy from pronouncements and not be intimidated by either Trump’s defenders or those who attack us,” Landler told me. Public figures remain accountable, so their outlandish statements can hardly be ignored, but they can surely be parsed for context and accuracy.

I also asked an old colleague, the Toronto Star’s Washington bureau chief, Daniel Dale, for his unique perspective after first covering the Ford brothers from city hall, and then pioneering a new story structure that deconstructs Trump’s tall tales.

He cautioned against the media’s temptation to give wildly disproportionate space in mid-campaign to the loudest voices. Balanced coverage means not just fair reporting but equal time for the major players, so that those who are most controversial don’t get all the air time.

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“One of the biggest failures of the media with Trump was letting him dominate the coverage … it got ratings,” Dale says. “You can’t let his tone and bluster suck up all the oxygen ... You have to be conscious of the balance.”

Make no mistake. Network TV made Donald Trump into a commanding figure long before Facebook’s fake news or Russia’s meddling. And the media remade the Ford brothers into mythical figures fighting the “elites” long before Trump appropriated that battle cry.

There’s no magic antidote to amplification — that’s what the media does by default. But greater awareness of how populists play the game — and keep playing us, all of us — may shed light on the circus atmosphere that Barnum first trademarked as “The Greatest Show on Earth.”

Martin Regg Cohn is a columnist based in Toronto covering Ontario politics. Follow him on Twitter: @reggcohn

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