He surely would reject any such comparison but, in a recent interview, Justin Trudeau briefly sounded just a little bit like Richard Nixon.

“The problem is right now that there is a silent majority that is a little bit silent, and maybe wondering whether it’s actually a minority. And you got a lot of good, thoughtful people saying, you know, ‘I don’t have anything personal against the leader, but everyone seems to hate him because I see all these flags and therefore, you know, he must be on his way out or he must be unpopular,’” Trudeau told Village Media.

While Nixon, the 37th president of the United States, didn’t coin the phrase, he did popularize the notion of a “silent majority” in a televised address about the war in Vietnam in 1969. Those words conjured up an image of a mass of voters who could not be heard over the din of the protesters and activists clamouring for political and social change.