Trump’s Threat to Take Over Canada Is a Scandal
As an American teenager who grew into a semblance of political consciousness during the height of George W. Bush’s War on Terror, it was easy to notice how the post-9/11 period corroded our political culture and our grasp of decency in ways from which we have never truly recovered. One thing I’ll never forget is how so many people in the United States lost their minds over Iranians who once chanted a “Death To America” jingle.
To this day, too many members of the U.S. media and political elite still believe bombing Iran is a rational policy. Imagine, if you will, that in 2002, Iranian leaders had gone a step further and, with grins on their faces, had repeatedly and openly propagandized about annexing large swaths of American territory, thus putting millions of our citizens under their rulers’ authority.
How do you think our nation would have responded, collectively, to that unrealistic threat? Would we have a shred of patience for anyone telling us not to worry about it?
Our many millions of neighbors to the north are hearing similar threats today from our new president, Donald Trump. They are not laughing it off.
Of course, Iran is on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, and is a markedly less powerful nation than the United States. The Canadians share a border with the U.S. and are currently being menaced by a profanely imperialistic leader who not only keeps trying to destroy the Canadian economy with large tariffs for nonsensical reasons, but who also controls the mightiest military on the planet — and he keeps talking about taking over their country and referring to Canada as “the 51st state.”
“The excuse that he’s giving for these tariffs today of fentanyl is completely bogus, completely unjustified, completely false,” Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said on Tuesday, responding to Trump’s latest salvo in his buffoonish trade war on Mexico and Canada. “What he wants is to see a total collapse of the Canadian economy, because that’ll make it easier to annex us.”
Whenever I press senior Trump advisers, other administration officials, and Republican sources close to the White House about the president’s threats against Canada, I am typically told that it’s just Trump being Trump, and that I’m being a hysterical leftist. Or, I’m told that the president is once again doing his Art Of The Deal-style diplomacy, and that there’s a method to the reality-TV-grade madness. Other times, I get an earful about how Canada’s prime minister is the real problem, and that finding offense in Trump’s words is a whiny waste of time.
On occasion, I’ll get a moment of candor that gives away a larger game, even if the comment is to be taken with some grain of irony.
“Donald Trump should not accept Canada as the 51st state; it should obviously be a territory,” says one Trump administration official, who notes that making Canada a state would likely add “so many liberal voters” that it would risk tipping the Electoral College in the Democratic Party’s direction. (U.S. territories, like Puerto Rico, are not allowed electoral votes for the presidency.)
There are numerous reasons why Trump and his government’s pervasive blathering about turning Canada into the “51st state” shouldn’t be dismissed as a “Madman Theory”-negotiating tactic, or as performative MAGA trolling. During a private phone call last month, according to a Friday New York Times report, Trump “told Mr. Trudeau that he did not believe that the treaty that demarcates the border between the two countries was valid and that he wants to revise the boundary. He offered no further explanation.”
Lately, Trump — a man who would never try to do anything world-historically rash like ending democracy in America — has told every news camera that would listen and broadcast his message to the world that he would like to rule Canada, one of the U.S.’s most vital allies. It’s not just Trump blurting it out: This has become the position of the United States federal government; his White House press secretary and his Homeland Security secretary are now, too, calling Canada “the 51st state.”
“Canada could do a lot more. Canada has been taken over, Bret, by Mexican cartels,” top Trump trade adviser Peter Navarro, bizarrely, told Fox News host Bret Baier on Wednesday, attempting to justify Trump’s tariffs. (At least Trump White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt practically admitted the tariffs are about forcing Canada’s annexation.)
The president and his senior administration officials may have been talking about our partner on the northern border, but the invocation of the U.S. fentanyl crisis and violent Mexican drug kingpins as justification for reckless economic decisions potentially spells far more doom and pain for our neighbors to the south.
For years, Trump and numerous heavy hitters in the Republican Party elite — at think tanks, in Congress, and now within the highest levels of his second administration — have moved the idea of invading and bombing Mexico from the fringes of right-wing fantasy and into the GOP’s mainstream. It’s in proposed legislation. The policy papers have been written. Trump campaigned on it during his successful reelection bid.
“President Trump is committed to calling them a terrorist organization and using the full might of the United States special operations to take them out,” Trump’s “border czar” and immigration-crackdown ringleader Tom Homan said in November.
Whether or not Trump ultimately sends in a single troop or launches a drone strike on Mexican soil within the next 200 weeks, it would be criminally negligent of the Mexican government to view this talk as an empty threat. The Republican Party, not just its bloviating leader, has made it abundantly clear that they believe they can violate Mexican sovereignty in spectacularly violent ways, if and whenever they feel like it. The justifications they cite, of course, are the drug cartels and fentanyl.
How is the average Canadian supposed to process the fact that the new Trump administration is now consistently wielding those exact same justifications when discussing economic war on Canada and a desired territorial takeover of their country? The fact that the U.S. federal government is squawking in one loud, highly irritating voice — in your name and mine, and doing so on our taxpayers’ dime — that it would like to obliterate the national sovereignty of our longtime friend and ally to the north is in and of itself a scandal.
Not a troll, or a joke, or mere bluster — a scandal.
Ever since Trump’s rise in 2015 — during a decade-long political career that has only grown more fascistic and lawless with age — it has become standard practice for too many members of the elite ranks of the media and political class to describe various Trump outbursts or actions as little more than a “distraction” from the real issues. This includes but is sadly not limited to pundits and politicos insisting that the president’s recent announcement that he considers himself “THE KING” is a frivolous distraction, even as Trump and his lieutenants have been deploying everything in their arsenals to grant him the powers of one.
Indeed, it would be easier to dismiss Trump’s cartoonishly imperialistic talk of conquering Canada, a country of roughly 40 million souls, if this weren’t occurring against the backdrop of an administration working to impose its degenerate MAGA incarnation of American imperialism on a war-torn European nation.
Over the past 10 years, a hallmark of Trumpist propaganda has been that The Donald is a new kind of Republican on foreign policy: He’s no neocon, he’s not Bush or Cheney, he is “ending endless war,” he wants his own version of “peace through strength.” That propaganda has always been bullshit, and only further revealed itself to be just that during his first administration — when Trump escalated the war in Afghanistan and refused to end it, as President Joe Biden finally did.
The second presidency of “Donald The Dove” has further inflamed that contradiction, as Trump and his senior officials seek to bully the Ukrainian government into signing over access to its valuable fossil fuel and mineral resources, as the nation continues to suffer under a brutal Russian invasion. It is a uniquely depraved shakedown, and demonstrates that Trump’s primary interest in the Russia-Ukraine conflict is to join Vladimir Putin in a joint mission to divvy up the spoils of war.
Closer to home, the Canadians can all watch this play out on the evening news. Will U.S. Marines be marching on Quebec next week? No, probably not.
And yet, the damage is already done. Canadians are experiencing the same politics of extortion and harassment that Trump has unleashed on Ukraine.
It is, or at least it should be, a damp stain on our national conscience, and your average outraged Canadian is responding rationally. If anything, it’s the American public that should be taking Trump’s depravity more seriously. We allowed this to happen.
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