Former prime minister Justin Trudeau dressed up as a shark for Halloween this year, seemingly to reference a viral moment from a 2015 Katy Perry concert.justinptrudeau/instagram/Supplied
The phrase “jumping the shark” dates back to a 1977 episode of Happy Days where the Fonz jumps over an actual shark on water skis, still in his signature leather jacket (Ayyyyyy). The gimmicky plot line was called out as a desperate and embarrassing grasp at maintained relevance, and the expression has become a catch-all for similar stunts: when the Connors won the lottery on Roseanne, when Grey’s Anatomy did a full musical episode.
And when Canada’s former prime minister dressed up like a character from his girlfriend’s 2015 Superbowl Halftime Show for Halloween 2025 – the first person, as far as I’m aware, to jump the shark while wearing a shark costume.
It’s true, Justin Trudeau and Katy Perry are not fictional TV characters, but we have most certainly been watching a show over the last several weeks – a cross-continental relationship rollout that has been both a thirst trap (as in the public makeout session on the deck of Perry’s yacht over Canadian Thanksgiving), but also just incredibly thirsty, as in plainly attention seeking and undeniably cringe.
You know the girl who shows up at school in a turtleneck the day after the big dance, hoping to draw attention to her hickey? That is Trudeau right now: dressing up as the lyrics to Perry’s music (in his Teenage Dream-inspired “skin-tight jeans”), and turning a decade-old internet joke into a Halloween costume.
Most recently, he posted a Band-Aid selfie after getting his flu shot, which felt, at first, like a typical ex-politician engaging in public service. But only until you connected the Band-Aid across Trudeau’s bicep with Perry’s just-released single called (what else?) bandaids.
The easy takeaway: He’s “gone Hollywood.” And if it was Stephen Harper suddenly trolling us from the background of his new pop star girlfriend’s birthday video – as Trudeau was caught doing by eagle-eyed netizens – that would be a logical conclusion. But this is Justin Trudeau we’re talking about – cheeky photo ops and deeply unsubtle dad humour aren’t a brand diversion so much as a return to form.
Long before he was a pop star’s dutiful back-up shark, he was the first PM of the Instagram era – a hashtag hottie whose global popularity was tied to public facing visuals.
Of course he had an important job to do (Trudeau’s legacy is in the eye of the beholder, but his accomplishments include an expanded social safety net, legalization of marijuana, guiding Canada through the pandemic and a ban on assault-style fire arms), but he was also the internet’s boyfriend – a title Ryan Gosling happily and publicly ceded to his fellow Canuck in 2016.
A year later, our boy made the cover of Rolling Stone magazine, reflecting the kind of Bieber Fever/Beatlemania that even the most impassioned Angela Merkel voters failed to muster. It was never about his words. I voted for the man and honestly can’t remember a single speech, but the carousel of iconic imagery lives on: The topless jogger, the wedding photo bomber, the Pride parade dancer, the greeting of Syrian orphans at the airport, the time he broke the internet doing desk yoga.
Trudeau takes a selfie on Canada Day in Ottawa, 2023.Justin Tang/The Canadian Press
The aptly titled “peacock pose” was the Trudeau brand magic in all its gravity-defying glory – fun, photogenic, staged (duh), but still projecting a level of authenticity and joyfulness that followers (and voters) responded to. Even to his critics, Trudeau was the “selfie savant.” Not since the whole Nixon won the debate on the radio/Kennedy won it on TV divide had there been such compelling proof of the power of optics in the political sphere.
The back end of Trudeau’s tenure was a different story – plagued by crisis both on an individual level (the Blackface images were an ironic twist on the power of optics) and the more general challenges of leading a country through a pandemic while a significant chunk of said country has turned you into the antichrist.
The freedom-convoy era came with few photo ops. The implosion of the Trudeau Liberals followed by the unlikely rise of Mark Carney reflects the current desire for unshowy sobriety on Parliament Hill.
But that’s not Trudeau’s sandbox any more and post-politics, he is falling back on what he’s good at. The image of him walking out of Rideau Hall carrying his chair (a Canadian political tradition) while sticking his tongue out (his own spin) was a fun bit of trolling. “What a childish man – that is a real photo,” alt-right commentator Ezra Levant wrote on social media, seemingly missing the point.
The divorced dad shopping at Canadian Tire selfie felt amusingly self-aware. The green “retirement runners” he wore to King Charles’s Throne Speech got more attention than anything the monarch had to say without saying a single word.
Trudeau wore a pair of brightly coloured sneakers to King Charles’s Throne Speech in May.Sean Kilpatrick/The Canadian Press
And now, here we are, sitting front row at the pop-politics crossover episode that nobody ever dreamed to ask for. With 202 million Instagram followers, Perry is obviously more than proficient in the personal branding department, but if we’re betting on who came up with jeans on a yacht, smart money’s on Trudeau. It’s the jogger selfie all over again, only less suitable for work and even more obviously orchestrated for eyeballs.
A friend in my Trudeau/Perry group chat lamented that the former has done irreparable brand damage by dating a kind of trashy pop star when he could be, say, dating a high-profile lawyer who writes op-eds for the New York Times. And now I’m just describing George Clooney, but the comparison may be useful.
Clooney is a globally recognized figure, but he doesn’t even have an Instagram account. He moved to France to escape the glare of the spotlight, the very glare that Trudeau basks in so comfortably that he doesn’t even need a top.
Is it cringey? Of course it is. But as a 53-year-old dad seeking validation on the internet, I’m not sure there are many better options. Nor is there a better place to troll your haters than from the deck of your pop star girlfriend’s yacht. He may have jumped the shark but I can’t wait for the next episode.