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Chris Selley: We could have just ignored Trump's 'Lake America' trolling

This is not how a mature, confident, dignified country reacts to meaningless nonsense

Several Canadian commentatorshave noteda certain irony in the mass outrage over U.S. President Donald Trump’s supposed “renaming” of Lake Ontario. Where was that outrage, they ask, when vandals decapitated statues of various Canadian historical figures and successfully demanded the historic names of schools, buildings and other things be changed?

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It’s certainly a valid question (along with “What were we thinking?” and “Remind me what police are for?” and many others). But those questions don’t really have anything to do with Trump and his trollish naming, renaming and self-branding of things: the Gulf of Mexico, the Kennedy Center, the congressionally funded U.S. Institute of Peace.

Chris Selley: We could have just ignored Trump's 'Lake America' trolling Back to video

They’re just not the same kind of problem. And in a way, the comparison almost seems to diminish our own issues with historical erasure. How we’ve treated our collective history is far worse, infinitely more serious, than Trump pretending to have created “Lake America.” At most, his executive order binds U.S. federal government........

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