Rolling Stone Unflinchingly Gives Justin Trudeau the Rock Star Treatment

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is hot, just so you know. So it feels like it was only a matter of time before he got the comely Rolling Stone cover and fawning profile to match.

The nearly 7,000-word-long cover story by Stephen Rodrick is immediately, and exhaustingly, animated by comparing Trudeau to our leader in the United States. Alongside a homophobic, anti-immigrant, spray-tanned buffoon like Donald Trump, how good does Trudeau, a boyishly handsome young man from a good family, look by comparison? The answer, according to Rolling Stone, is really fucking good:

It’s strange to witness: [Trudeau] speaks in a modulated, indoor voice. His dark hair is a color found in nature. At home, there is a glamorous wife and three photogenic children, still not old enough to warm his seat at next week’s G-20 summit or be involved in an espionage scandal.

The writer salivates a bit more about the “longtime dork” leading Canada:

Join me as we visit a nation led by a man who wore a Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy T-shirt on national television, rides a unicycle and welcomed 40,000 Syrian refugees with open arms.

…and favorably compares the prime minister, whose father also held the job for more than a decade, to President Obama no fewer than four times (of course, “Obama-esque” makes an appearance):

Trudeau reminds me of, well, Obama as he smiles and listens patiently to me droning on about my Canadian wife as if it is actually interesting. For Trudeau, listening is seducing.

There has to be something bad about this guy, right? He can’t be all flowing locks and that feel-good brand of centrist liberalism, can he?

The eco-spouting Trudeau is also a Keystone-pipeline supporter to the end.

Ah, there we go. Trudeau’s tenure has been a major disappointment to environmentalists, with the prime minister approving the expansion of a massive oil pipeline in November. When confronted by anti-pipeline activists in January, Trudeau condescendingly admonished them in front of the crowd. A self-proclaimed feminist who earned international headlines for achieving gender equality in his Cabinet, Trudeau has done little to improve the limited access to reproductive health and abortion services available to women living in rural, socially conservative areas of the country. While the prime minister hasn’t shied away from criticizing human rights abuses in China, he’s awful quiet about abuses by the government of Saudi Arabia, a country whose patronage has helped make Canada the second-largest arms dealer in the Middle East, behind the U.S.

While Trump has taken concrete steps to turn his anti-immigrant fervor and Islamophobia into administration policy, Trudeau has said very little to directly critique his neighbor to the south and again declined to criticize Trump to Rolling Stone, saying that while they “obviously” disagree on many issues, “We also have a constructive working relationship.”

Politicians will always let you down. But by falling so hard for Trudeau’s carefully manufactured image, you make it that much easier.