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Even allowing for the astonishing pyrotechnics of current American politics, the Canadian journalistic reaction has been rather disappointing. Canadians have a unique ring-side seat on American personalities and events, and flatter themselves that they know that country better than any other foreigners do. Perhaps because of the garishness of American politics, the immense amounts of money involved in American elections and the lobbying process, and the practical absence of laws of civil defamation, Canadians are almost perpetually appalled yet fascinated by the American political spectacle. The intense controversies of the Trump presidency have generated a dreary branch-plant, copy-cat, me-too replication of the Trumpophobia of the national U.S. media.

The whole point of the Trump campaign was the need for radical but centrist reform. He was midway between the Sanders left and the Cruz right. But he mobilized the angry and politically incorrect traditionalists, and much of the working and middle class, and attacked the deferences to both Wall Street and organized labour (especially the teachers’ unions), as well as the appeasement of the societally self-hating and faddish academics and Hollywood. At his heavily attended rallies, he singled out the national political media for its almost relentless disparagement of him and his followers, and for the soft ride it had given to the Obama regime, which — despite the great breakthrough of having a non-white president — was unsuccessful in almost every field.