Is anyone else also concerned that Donald Trump keeps referring to Canada as the 51st state and calling its prime minister Justin Trudeau “governer?” We don’t know what new buffoonery the president-elect is up to now, but we’re pretty sure this goes above and beyond the cheeto-in-chief’s conventional bullying tactics. Or perhaps it’s just the fact that, as we called it earlier, four years of living under Joe Biden’s shadow and nobody buying the ridiculous narrative about the previous election being stolen has left Trump even more unhinged than before.
Whatever the case, the president-elect is now tiring of spouting lies about nasty Democrats and the fake news press and is instead focusing his attention on sowing some premature chaos around the world before his official inauguration in January. After taking swipes at the Middle East and threatening “all hell to pay” if the Gaza Strip crisis isn’t miraculously resolved within the next two months, Trump is now grossly insinuating that Canada might as well become the 51st state, because apparently “many Canadians” want this.
Logging into his Truth page — which, as with all great ironies of this day and age, contains everything you could possibly conceive except any truth — this is the hostile message Trump sent the United States ally and bordering nation after threatening to put a 25% tariff on all Canadian goods over, you guessed it, border issues.
“No one can answer why we subsidize Canada to the tune of over $100,000,000 a year?” He wrote. “Makes no sense! Many Canadians want Canada to become the 51st State. They would save massively on taxes and military protection. I think it is a great idea. 51st State!”
When Trump says something is a great idea, I can’t help but tremble in fear, thinking back on all his other great ideas like how he handled the COVID-19 pandemic, or waged needless trade wars that ended up damaging agriculture industries, or implemented tax cuts for big corporations and exacerbated income inequality, or collectively ushered us to our inevitable demise with his environmental rollbacks. The list goes on and on.
Now, in his growing hubris, Trump is actually undermining the sovereignty of another country, thinking himself smug, and little realizing how damaging it could be to future relations with Canada, a country that’s not only arguably the United States’s closest ally, but also a founding member of NATO and the United Nations.
You may think Trump is only fooling around (which begs why a person in his position should even feel inclined toward this behavior?) but this is always how it starts. Trump begins to spin a false narrative into existence, the people laugh it off, and then he starts repeating those lies over and over again until inevitably they gain enough weight to turn into a serious issue. The president-elect is once again pandering to that reliable policy of turning border problems into political leverage, so there’s no telling how far he’s willing to take this new idiocy, especially now that Justin Trudeau also finds himself in a precarious situation following the resignation of his finance minister over the same tariff dispute with Donald Trump.
It’s been six weeks since Trump was elected president. He’s not in office yet, and already the world is suffering the consequences of the choice the nation made on Nov. 5. It’s going to be a long four years.