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There is a heightened expectation that one should express one’s disgust with the boorish American president at any time that an occasion to do so presents itself

And even then, Trudeau did so with a 10-foot pole, but not before expressing confidence that the entire world should be sufficiently familiar by now with the purity of his state of mind that what he thought should go without saying. “Canadians, and indeed people around the world, know exactly what I think about those particular comments,” Trudeau said. Well, okay then. “That is not how we do things in Canada. A Canadian is a Canadian is a Canadian, and the diversity of our country is actually one of our greatest strengths and a source of tremendous resilience and pride for Canadians and we will continue to defend that.”

To understand what Trump said, which was to the effect that certain novice Congress Democrats who are neither white nor male should “go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came,” it is necessary to know something about who his remarks were directed at. They are the pugnacious and notably leftish rising stars Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ayanna Pressley, Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib. All but Omar, who arrived in the United States as a child refugee from Somalia, are American-born. But that’s almost beside the point.

The point Trump intended to make was clearly that those women are not genuinely American, or at best they’re precisely the type of Americans Trump’s voter base should fear and loathe, and they should be understood as the true and frightening faces of the Democratic Party. It’s not Democratic presidential-ticket front runners Joe Biden or Elizabeth Warren, or House leader Nancy Pelosi, that Trump wants to cast himself against in next year’s presidential elections. They’re veteran and effective politicians. It’s not easy to make them seem scary.