Justin Trudeau and Katy Perry’s Teen-Age Dream

It happened, as so many things seem to nowadays, on a yacht. Last weekend, the Daily Mail published a series of photographs in which the American pop star Katy Perry was spotted making out on the upper deck of her boat, the Caravelle, with her apparent new love interest, the former Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. Perry, who earlier this year split from her longtime partner and father of her daughter, the actor Orlando Bloom, was wearing a dark one-piece bathing suit, with her hair swept casually into a bun. Trudeau, who had separated from his wife and the mother of his three children, Sophie Grégoire Trudeau, in 2023, was shirtless and in jeans, R.F.K., Jr., workout-wear style. The grainy images were reportedly taken off the coast of Santa Barbara by a person on a nearby whale-watching boat, and appeared to all but confirm a romance which had, until that point, been merely rumored, thanks to a July sighting of the pair dining à deux at a Montreal restaurant, followed a couple of days later by Trudeau’s attendance at a Perry concert.

Yacht canoodlings and the gossip publications that love to feature them are nothing new: in the sixties, we had Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor vacationing on their yacht, Kalizma, off the coast of Sardinia; in the seventies, we had Jacqueline Kennedy and Aristotle Onassis sailing the Greek isles on the superyacht Christina; and, in the early two-thousands, we had Jennifer Lopez’s tongue-in-cheek music video for her single “Jenny from the Block,” which starred her then fiancé, Ben Affleck, having his picture taken by paparazzi on a yacht’s deck while applying sunscreen to his beloved’s bikini-clad buttocks. (In literature, the lineage of the yacht as a hub of romantic intrigue and rumor reaches even further back, to Edith Wharton’s 1905 novel “The House of Mirth,” in which the beautiful but doomed Lily Bart sails the Mediterranean with the conniving Bertha Dorset and her cuckolded husband, George.)

In recent years, though, the popularity of the celebs-on-a-yacht genre has reached new heights. After getting back together in 2021, Affleck and Lopez were spotted essentially re-creating the “Jenny from the Block” S.P.F. shot on a superyacht off the coast of Saint-Tropez, but this was just the tip of what has since become a full-scale iceberg. In 2025 alone, we’ve had, among many other examples, Leonardo DiCaprio and Vittoria Ceretti lounging deckside in view of Formentera; Dua Lipa and Callum Turner P.D.A.-ing off the Amalfi Coast; and Nina Dobrev and Zac Efron “sparking romance rumors,” per TMZ, in the waters of Sardinia. This overabundance has had something to do, I think, with the ascendence of the ultimate champions of yachting and lovemaking: Jeff Bezos and his bride, Lauren Sánchez. In the past couple of years, it has almost felt as if one couldn’t refresh one’s social-media feed without seeing new photos of the skimpily clad couple romping about the Amazon mogul’s five-hundred-million-dollar megayacht, Koru. Ass-slapping, picture-taking, foam-partying: it all went down on the boat.

Katy Perry is a friend of Bezos and Sánchez and has herself spent time on Koru. In April, she also climbed aboard another vessel associated with the couple, when she joined Sánchez and four other women on Bezos’s Blue Origin space-tourism rocket, for an eleven-minute-long suborbital flight. This was figured as a female-empowerment-style, “Taking Up Space” mission, and Perry spoke, cheekily, of her desire to “put the ass in astronaut.” (“Space is going to finally be glam,” she predicted.) The trip, however, was met with much derision (the Guardian said that it signalled “the utter defeat of American feminism”)—a reaction which came on the heels of other public Perry letdowns. Last year, she released the single “Woman’s World,” which was roundly mocked for its dated girlboss messaging—the song, Pitchfork wrote, sounds like “its author had to have feminism explained to her by the top half of the first page of Google”—and which peaked at No. 63 on the Billboard charts. (None of the other tracks on her most recent album, “143,” charted meaningfully.) Though her ongoing Lifetimes world tour has reportedly been doing well commercially, Perry is clearly no longer the culturally relevant, multiplatinum-selling artist she was in the earlier days of her career.

Perry’s new paramour, for his part, has also been going through changes. Trudeau, with his popularity as P.M. on the wane, following a growing deficit and tariff threats from Donald Trump, resigned in January as the leader of the Canadian Liberal Party—a position he had held since 2013. In March, after a decade in power, he stepped down from his role as Prime Minister. Suddenly out of political office, he was a private citizen for the first time in a long time. Whether in public service or not, however, Trudeau has always been one thing: a natural celebrity. With his movie-star good looks—tall, broad-shouldered, with blue eyes and a floppy mane—Trudeau is a Prince Valiant-style figure whether he is in power or not. (In 2017, a popular meme called him “Mr. Steal Yo Girl,” for the moony-eyed responses he seemingly elicited in Ivanka Trump, the Duchess of Cambridge, the actress Emma Watson, and even President Trump.)

As the son of Pierre Trudeau, Canada’s Prime Minister from 1968 to 1979, and, again, from 1980 to 1984, Justin Trudeau is also a political nepo baby. His innate glamour doesn’t just stem from Pierre’s onetime position, however, but, too, from the fact that both his father and his mother, Margaret Trudeau, were themselves natural celebrities who shone in the spotlight beyond the political arena. This figured, for one, in their romantic lives: Pierre, whose entrée into the Canadian political scene drew a fanlike frenzy dubbed Trudeaumania, dated Barbra Streisand in the late sixties; and Margaret, after separating from the much-older Pierre, went on to be romantically linked to Jack Nicholson, Ryan O’Neal, and, perhaps most notoriously, the Rolling Stones’ Ronnie Wood. (In her 2010 memoir, “Changing My Mind,” in which she openly discusses her struggle with bipolar disorder, Margaret wrote of those years, “I became a cover girl, a celebrity in an age before the celebrity culture, famous for nothing except for my scandalous behavior.”)

Trudeau’s glitzy lineage might have readied him for what the life of an out-of-office politician increasingly looks like nowadays. It’s a role that someone like President Barack Obama, for instance, has played to a tee. Since leaving the White House, in 2017, Obama has been working on establishing the Obama Presidential Center, in Chicago; he has also done some stumping for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris during their campaigns; but he has mostly, as USA Today wrote recently, continued “to keep his sight set on opportunities in media and entertainment.” He and his wife, Michelle, have a deal with Netflix through the couple’s Higher Ground production company; he has signed—as Harris and Biden also have—with the talent agency C.A.A.; and he has been a prominent presence in the pop-culture realm, offering music, book, and movie recommendation lists to his followers on social media, and guesting on podcasts. (On Monday, he appeared on the final episode of Marc Maron’s “WTF” podcast.) He’s also hobnobbed, often on vacation, sometimes on superyachts, with the famous and ultra-wealthy: Richard Branson, Bruce Springsteen, Tom Hanks, Oprah, Steven Spielberg. His infiltration of Hollywood has proven so deep as to make him the object of unproven romantic speculation: Obama, a wild rumor went, was having an affair with the actress Jennifer Aniston. (Aniston denied the affair, and the Obamas said on a podcast that they were still together.)

What’s become increasingly clear is that we’re no longer living in the world of the late Jimmy Carter, with his post-Presidency dedication to public service. Rather, we’re now in a world of levelled-out celebrity, sprawled out in the blinding sun. This is at least partly the effect of living in Trump’s America: the current President has been known for the length of his public life as, above all else, a very rich and very famous person, and, as Empire crumbles, what else is there to do but take his lead? You might be a reality star like a Kardashian or a Jenner, or a billionaire like Bezos; you might be an actor like DiCaprio or a media mogul like Oprah. You might even be a pop star like Perry or a politician like Trudeau. On the yacht, and in the camera’s gaze, all are equal, and all are having their moment, just trying to get through another day.