April 14, 2026 — 11:00am
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Toolie: (noun) Adult who gatecrashes post-high school exam celebrations. He is generally older than the students, typically in his 20s, and considered to be acting in a predatory or annoying manner.
Trudoolie: (noun) Festival-dwelling former world leader wearing backwards baseball cap and taking sartorial style notes from tennis brats everywhere, canoodling with pop-star-turned-astronaut girlfriend whilst eating two-minute noodles with chopsticks in a gutter. Generally older than everyone at said festival. Also acting in an annoying manner.
Former prime minister Justin Trudeau wears his cap backwards and eats some noodles with Katy Perry in a picture the pop singer posted from the Coachella music festival at the weekend.Instagram @katyperry
You heard it here first, people: Coachella has jumped the shark-ella. Or perhaps that’s too harsh. Maybe it’s just that, much like its most recent attendees, Justin Trudeau and Katy Perry, it’s in the middle of an identity crisis-ella. The Californian desert festival, which began in 1999 following an industry backlash against service charges on concert tickets, quickly became known as a trendsetting annual event on the fashion and music scenes, and has latterly (inevitably) become a haven for cashed-up influencers and beautiful people everywhere.
But then in blundered 54-year-old Trudeau, aka Trudoolie, with his freshly ironed jeans and aforementioned-backwards baseball cap, and 41-year-old Perry, wearing a cropped white T-shirt whose slogan, rendered in text-speak and gobbledegook, carried a warning about not sharing vapes with her. Or something.
Goodbye, Coachella cred. Hello, someone’s dad raided his teenage son’s wardrobe and nicked his Montreal Alouettes cap, while his newish girlfriend borrowed her five-year-old daughter’s bike pants for the day.
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As a package, they looked uncannily like an AI artist’s impression of Brooklyn Beckham and Nicola Peltz, albeit 25 years, and less weird family drama later.
Cringe-ella.
Look, as middle-aged love on the rebound goes, it’s hard to begrudge Trudeau and Perry a second (and technically in her case, third) chance at happiness. They seem nice enough. As anyone with a pulse and an internet connection knows, he’s a former Canadian PM, and one of the few world leaders prepared to raise a metaphorical middle finger to Donald Trump while in office; she’s one of the bestselling music artists of all time, the voice of Smurfette, and in a recent turn of events that no one saw coming, an astronaut.
She’s also, in a recent turn of events that everyone saw coming, estranged from her baby’s daddy, Orlando Bloom, while Trudeau is divorced from Sophie Gregoire, the mother of his three children.
It’s a lot of baggage. No wonder they needed to blow off some steam. Which brings us inevitably to Coachella and the weird emotional space that he, in particular, seems to be occupying post-politics. In December, he and Perry were resplendent in besuited, cucumber-finger-sandwiches-and-drinkies-with-the-Japanese-PM-and-his-wife mode, photographed in front of a Christmas tree, with Trudeau posting on X that “Katy and I were so glad to have the chance to sit down with you and Yuko. Thank you, Fumio, for your continued commitment to both the international rules-based order and to a better future for everyone.”
The 54-year-old former Canadian prime minister and father of three with the pop singer in another picture posted by Perry.Instagram @katyperry
So far, so statesmanlike. Fast forward to this week, when Trudeau’s evil twin, the Coachella-dwelling Trudoolie was calling the shots, snuggled up with Perry in whatever passes for a mosh pit at a Justin Bieber live show and then, as canvassed, rehydrating with some sort of noodle-based cardboard box affair while his fancy Oura smart ring (worn on every freshly-divorced man’s ring finger of choice: the middle one) pestered him about how all the partying was throwing out his weekly sleep stats.
The gear change was enough to induce whiplash. It was also eerily discombobulating, like accidently running into your old school principal in the underwear department of David Jones and discovering that, tucked under the mountain of sensible flesh-coloured support hose and matching brassieres is a pair of crotchless undies, a whip and a set of edible suspenders.
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It’s possible, of course, that as a relatively new couple, Trudeau and Perry are just in the first flush of love, which is simultaneously sweetly endearing and phenomenally irritating to be around, and that, as such, all the handholding and oversharing will run its course. She’ll start begging off the boring diplomatic gigs where no one cares that she once kissed a girl (even if she did like it) and he’ll realise that anyone who goes out in public wearing a backwards baseball cap had better have an upcoming boy band album in the works, a forehand smash for the ages, or a death wish.
To be fair to Trudoolie, he did look faintly embarrassed in much of the footage Perry posted to Instagram, although whether that was a sympathetic response to Justin Bieber, who seemed to have forgotten the lyrics to his own songs, or hanger and boredom, or because the penny had finally dropped about the stupid baseball cap, is anyone’s guess.
Ageing is a brutal game. And ageing at Coachella, with a younger girlfriend, a mid-life identity crisis in the offing, and an imminent berth on a concrete perch-ella slurping two-minute noodles, must surely be infinitely worse.
Michelle Cazzulino is a Sydney writer.
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