Trudeau’s letterman jacket: Good-luck charm or attempt to play hero?

When someone spends their adult years wearing a varsity letterman jacket, it’s tempting to suspect they peaked in school. But that hardly describes Justin Trudeau, who has a semi-respectable job and just got an endorsement from his former U.S. counterpart, Barack Obama. And yet he can’t quit this jacket with a red “L” and a maple leaf on the front and a Canadian flag on the sleeve. (If this picture were from the other side, we’d see the big “Canada” sign on the back, just in case we didn’t get that the Liberals are his letter but Canada is his team.) Trudeau wore it during his successful 2015 campaign, including this pensive pose in a pumpkin patch, and his fondness for the item was notable enough that some journalists mentioned it when analyzing why he won. Does he consider it a good-luck charm, or does he just enjoy the optics of looking like a sports hero leading an army of nerds? Then again, one U.S. publication included the jacket in a slideshow called “12 Times Justin Trudeau and Barack Obama Were Basically the Same Person,” so maybe it’s a condition of the endorsement.

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