Donald Trump is trolling Canada. Rosie DiManno says it's time to stop being vexed by his regime of bullies.

You'd think that someone whose grandfather pioneered the family fortune by opening a restaurant-cum-brothel in the Yukon during the Klondike Gold Rush might have a little more historical and sentimental regard for Canada. But the grandson of Friedrich Trump — a 16-year-old barber's apprentice when he emigrated from Germany to the United States in 1885 — has no mush or respect for the nation he endlessly ridicules on Truth Social and in press conference snark, when he's not coveting/threatening Canada as a 51st state. Or maybe President Donald Trump is still festering over losing his bid to build and operate a casino complex in Niagara Falls, Ont., in the late '90s. On that occasion, the then hotel and casino mogul — despite four bankruptcy filings involving properties in his Atlantic City and New York holdings, which threw thousands of employees out of work — accused the consultant retained by the Ontario government who ran the selection process of bias against him, demanding that person be sacked while fomenting falsehoods about conflict-of-interest. It's getting harder to believe that the president is a symptom rather than the cause of what's gone off the rails in the U.S., Susan Delacourt writes. Rather like continuing to assert the utterly baseless claim that he won the 2020 election. It's the Trump playbook, of course, lies and deflection wrapped up in revenge. That grumbling followed an earlier bid that Trump had withdrawn to manage the proposed riverside casino in Windsor, awarded to Caesar's Entertainment. Trump had envisioned a gambling emporium with a Canadian theme — 'more rustic, not glitzy' — unlike his gilded Trump Taj Mahal. At the time, Trump had recently bounced back from a fall from hotshot grace, digging himself out of a $5 billion debt from his toes-up businesses, largely by mastering the art of refinancing via junk bonds, unloading assets and transferring debt onto creditors and shareholders. That allowed him to avoid declaring personal bankruptcy. Now he unloads on us. I'm looking at a press release — 'The Four Times Donald Trump Has Declared Bankruptcy' — put out in 2016 that itemized Trump's hotel and entertainment failures. It came from the campaign of one Marco Rubio, then a rival for the Republican presidential nomination and now Trump's loyalist Secretary of State. Decades later, it's the same modus operandi that Trump has deployed in his punitive one-trick-pony tariff trade war with Canada — a 50 per cent levy on imported goods ranging from hockey sticks to agricultural products following collapse of 11th hour negotiations. Which triggered an avowal of retaliatory tariffs from Prime Minister Mark Carney, scheduled to come into effect this week. Trump believes himself an economics genius rather than a businessman flop, and greater fiscal mastermind than the guy who used to be governor of the Bank of England. As his popularity plunges to historic lows in the U.S. — what I fervently hope heralds the beginning of the end of the abomination that is MAGA, with 866 days left in his miserable second occupation of the White House — Trump has been exposed as a president who starts but can't win or finish wars, who's poured fuel on a catastrophic cost-of-living crisis, whose second term has seen the U.S. take on more debt than at any time outside of a recession or a war, who's cozied up to the worst dictators on Earth. And whose staggering narcissism has him obsessively slapping his face and name on everything from a newly commissioned class of battleships to a newly minted $1 coin. Because, as he correctly observed: 'Nobody will do it after I'm gone.' When vulgarian Donald Trump goes down as the worst American president in history, a footnote will be that he coined the neologism 'fake news.' The world after Trump beckons. Already he's well past his Trumpian peak, a sooner than expected lame-duck phase of shrinking global influence and the retreat of Pax Americana. But what Canada shouldn't do is be hysterically vexed into more hand-wringing and hurt feelings. That is precisely the provoking intention of all this insulting argy-bargy coming out of the Trump administration, the trolling X-posts, 'Lake America', the baiting from 'Secretary of War' Pete Hegseth, the scornful jokes from Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. It is all an extension of normalizing the unhinged bonkers of Trump 2.0. They thrive on needling and taking the piss out of Canada. I don't believe in turning the other cheek. I'd like to punch Hegseth in the nose. But I wince when, from a posture of the wounded, we bemoan decency lost and venom spewed by Trump's cabinet cadre. It is belittling to us. We try to get serious by reminding that Canadian troops lost their lives alongside Americans in Afghanistan. Except we're dealing with a manifestly un-serious regime of bullies and scoundrels and incompetents. Umbrage cracks them up. Carney got it just about right in his eye-roll response a few days ago to the trash-posting and dissing. 'Stop doing memes, stop throwing shade, stop trying to be tough.' Some experts are forecasting a gradual recovery in terms of prices, but the ongoing trade war makes it hard to predict what will happen next. The prime minister elicited praise and a rare standing ovation for his extraordinary speech in Davos early this year, wherein Carney candidly stated that the traditional rules-based international order was over, urging middle-power countries to unite in building strategic autonomy because superpowers were ransacking global integration and turning tools such as tariffs into cudgels of coercion. 'Let me be direct: We are in the midst of a rupture, not a transition.' And the old order wasn't coming back. After covering all three of Trump's presidential campaigns — in disbelief when he beat Hillary Rodham Clinton in 2016, exhaling in relief when he lost to Joe Biden in 2020, dismayed when voters re-elected the convicted felon in 2024 — I would counter that the 'rupture' arose from the inexplicable rapture surrounding Trump. Rapture in its biblical meaning, as interpreted by evangelicals, when both the living and the dead will ascend to heaven at the Second Coming of Jesus Christ. Spellbound by a villainous huckster preaching American hegemony resurrected. I blame American voters more than I blame the diabolism of Donald J. Trump.