So many times in the last two years, conservatives have given their cosmopolitan liberal friends a curious look and said something to the effect of, “Sorry, but this is how you got Trump.”

Opportunities for this abound, for the political Left displays an astonishing lack of introspection about how extreme they’ve become and how the 2016 election snuck up on them. “It was just a few thousand people in a handful of states!” they say, brushing off more fundamental reasons for their candidate's defeat in 30 of the 50 states. People who disagree with them on politics, find their agenda repellent, or merely live traditional lives of work and worship disdained by coastal bien-pensants are treated with smug superiority. They are too low to merit explanation.

But today, by the same token, it is necessary to point to President Trump’s tweet during the weekend, aimed at Democratic Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar and at least one of her comrades.

“So interesting to see ‘Progressive’ Democrat Congresswomen, who originally came from countries whose governments are a complete and total catastrophe, the worst, most corrupt and inept anywhere in the world (if they even have a functioning government at all), now loudly and viciously telling the people of the United States, the greatest and most powerful Nation on earth, how our government is to be run,” Trump tweeted. “Why don’t they go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came. Then come back and show us how it is done.”

It is time to turn to Middle America and say, "Sorry, but this is how you got Ilhan Omar."

The congresswoman, like many of her far-Left colleagues, is the product of an increasingly Balkanized culture. Victim-identity politics is filling the vacuum that civic unity and religious community have left open. And Trump, whether from clumsiness or malice, just made this worse, not better.

America is increasingly fractured, rapidly losing its common civic culture and thus its ability to assimilate new immigrants. Part of the blame goes to decades of multiculturalism. Part of it goes back to Soviet anti-American propaganda, which lives on in a zombie form, disparaging the achievements of the greatest, most generous, and by far most diverse nation in the history of the world. The common culture understood American exceptionalism and taught it to succeeding generations. But Balkanization has eroded it. We now have a generation of politicians who do not regard America as a special country and have no predisposition to defend it. President Barack Obama was a mild precursor in this regard to the likes of Omar and others who are far more likely to disparage America.

A thorough reform of the education system can help fix it to some extent. But part of the problem originates with the self-satisfied attitude of some Americans who persistently refuse to think of or treat people who are different from them as real Americans. Perhaps they aren’t even being malicious on purpose, but the damage they do is real. There’s no better way to make new immigrants and refugees dislike their new country and embrace victim-ideology than to tell them to go back where they came from. Likewise, there's no better way to make whiter, "fly-over" country dislike immigration than by treating its inhabitants as yesterday's America, unworthy of respect in the new multicultural dispensation.

We have never been fans of Omar, whose batty policies and pronouncements would be comical if her bigotry, such as in her anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, were not so virulent. She is an embarrassment to the U.S. House and to the otherwise fine city she represents. But despite that, she is an American citizen and an elected official with a right to her opinions. She should not be told to “go back” to Somalia, especially not by the president.

Put yourself in her position for a moment. From your childhood, you have been told by educators and by some in your social circles that you will always be a second-class citizen in America; that Americans (which you understand to mean “white Americans”) will never really think of you as an American, no matter how hard you work or how well you fit in and strive for the American ideal. It’s not true, and the data on immigrants’ economic and social success proves it. Ordinary Americans’ attitudes prove it.

But any internet troll can still stumble along nowadays and tell any immigrant that she will never really be an American. When that troll is the president, it’s disgraceful and should not be defended.

It would be bad enough if Trump had merely addressed Omar with this tweet. But he used the plural “congresswomen.” Although he did not name names (as he was quick to point out Monday), he appears to have been referring to one or more of Omar’s closest socialist comrades-in-arms, all three of whom are American-born.

We have plenty of differences with them, on almost everything indeed but their nationality. They are American. This is their country, even if they do not evince much affection for it. They, like Trump, are the product of our eviscerated civic culture.