The Meanings of Ivanka and Justin Side by Side on Broadway

There was much talk recently about the evening that Justin Trudeau and Ivanka Trump spent side by side, sitting together at the Schoenfeld Theatre to watch the Canadian musical “Come from Away.” As it happened, my wife and I were present at the performance, and not that far from the odd couple. (I was there only by virtue of residual Canadianness, having been asked to be a semi-official host, helping to celebrate the hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary of the Canadian Confederation—a scary thought, for me, since I can still clearly recall the hundredth anniversary, at Montreal’s beautiful Expo 67.) An unease, it should be said, ran around the theatre, dampened properly by the fixed Canadian rules of politeness, which make all other forms of politeness look like a policy for rudeness. (My favorite Canadian joke: “How do you get twenty-five Canadians out of a pool?” You say, “Please get out of the pool.”) The problem, of course—hard to articulate—was that, while the heavily Canadian audience recognized that what Justin was doing in “dating” Ivanka, so to speak, was admirable and understandable, the room also recognized that accepting Ivanka as a natural companion for one of the world’s remaining liberal leaders was one more step in normalizing the abnormal.