RANDALL WHITE, FERNWOOD PARK, TORONTO. MONDAY, APRIL 14, 2025. Bill Maher has been surprised that the crazy public Donald Trump we see on TV and so forth is not the real Donald Trump you meet when you have dinner with him at Mar-a-Lago.

Unlike Mr. Maher I am a Canadian, born and raised. I have largely lived, worked, and worshiped in Canada my entire life — a circumstance shared with millions of (if by no means all) other Canadians. (In 2021 some 74% of people living in Canada [91% of whom were Canadian citizens] had been born in Canada.)

My most immediate problem with Donald Trump, in other words, is his (almost) latest attitude towards Canada.

I agree he has at least kept this attitude under the covers in the most recent past. Along with my TV-watching partner I also believe the ultimate crux of Donald Trump’s now altogether clearly expressed hatred of Canada as an independent country flows from the patently obvious attraction of the two most important women in his life to former Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.

Whatever its deepest source, this hatred was finally expressed so strongly early in 2025 that many Canadians (a very solid majority on all the polling evidence I’ve seen) cannot possibly entertain any good thoughts about Donald Trump — even of the sort Bill Maher has been offering lately.

Beyond his attacks on Canada as an independent country (and one of the founding members of the United Nations in 1945), the absolute worst thing about Donald Trump is what he has done to the level and quality of public debate in the world’s democracies, especially in the United States itself (and since we are so close, and so much less populous, in Canada too, if not to quite the same degree).

President Trump has dumbed things down “about as fur as they c’n go!” or even further. And especially right now this is dramatically reducing the ability of the American political system to make even sensible let alone wise and effective public policy decisions.

My biggest personal problem with Donald Trump is that in his US presidential attitude to Canada he is effectively telling me that I do not exist. Canadian as a national identity separate from that of the United States (ie American) does not exist in his MAGA philosophy.

Yet I am not American. I have a Canadian passport when I travel abroad and nothing else. I am certainly not a citizen of the USA with an American passport. Now if I stay say in California or Florida or Hawaii longer than 30 days in the winter I must register as an alien.

The long and short is that I cannot be anything other than a “Canadian,” who on the Trump-inspired MAGA view of North America today does not exist. (At least in any stronger sense than a Californian or Texan exists, as opposed to the quite different “American.”)

So unless I am the total wimp Mr Trump might want me to be, I am now just obliged to reject him and his philosophy hook, line, and sinker, with no doubt or reservation at all. (Which may finally also say there is quite a lot of American in a Canadian, but that is true for a Mexican or Brazilian and so forth on and on in “the Americas” as well!)

Otherwise the guy I see in the mirror every morning isn’t really there. And if I believed that, I would be just as crazy as Donald Trump — in his public persona, which is the only one that matters to we ordinary people, who do not get invited to Mar-a-Lago for dinner.