Last week, we witnessed something rarely seen in our modern times: the ritual, public emasculation of a nation of 40 million people. In a rambling, venom-tinged Tuesday press conference at his Mar-a-Lago compound, incoming President Donald Trump idly threatened to annex the unassuming nation of Canada, his country’s closest ally, biggest trading partner, and nearest neighbor.
More specifically, Trump threatened to bring Canada to its knees; to subject it to blunt “economic force” until it submits blindly to his desires, like an escort in one of his gilded Trump hotels. “Canada and the United States, that would really be something,” he mused to a titillated press corps. “You get rid of that artificially drawn line, and you take a look at what that looks like.”
What it looked like, to many, was an opportunity to inflict Trump’s Thrasymachean politics on the soft-bellied liberals of the North. A gleeful army of meme-makers and MAGA footsoldiers soon followed, ready to make good on Trump’s Le Epic Trolling. “Many people in Canada LOVE being the 51st State,” Trump goaded from his Truth Social account, between AI-generated fan art and maps painting the continent with stars and stripes. “Here’s what I think, I think we take Canada and then we go right into Mexico,” Joe Rogan pontificated. On Fox News, Jesse Waters played the part of an Anschluss Obergeneral. “The fact they don’t want to be taken over makes me want to invade,” he told his audience. “I want to quench my imperialist thirst.”
No one, least of all Canadians, knows how seriously to take all this. On the one hand, joining Canada to the United States is effectively a legal impossibility. Put aside the fact that 80 percent of Canadians don’t want it—rewriting the Canadian Constitution in any capacity would require the consent of the 20 percent that live in French-speaking Québec, who have succeeded many times in holding the country hostage over much smaller matters than total cultural dissolution.
On the other hand, Canada is a big, soft, vulnerable teddy bear of a country, a place that perpetually channels the spirit of comfortable middle management and long- weekend deck drinking. We are not the stuff of Red Dawn or Finland’s Winter War, ready to hunker down in frozen wilderness with an arsenal of firearms. Our economy is almost entirely dependent on exporting raw materials to the U.S. for refinement. Our entire armed forces could easily fit inside an NFL stadium. Something like 90 percent of us live within 100 miles of the U.S. border. We like to buy our discount liquor there.
All this goes some way to explaining why the last time Trump threatened Canada with “economic force”—in November he vowed to implement 25 percent tariffs if Canada did not placate his concerns about border security—officials jumped into action to appease him. At a moment’s notice, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau flew to Mar-a-Lago, to enjoy the “excellent conversation” at the court of the mad king himself. It was there, Fox News tells us, that Trudeau “laugh[ed] nervously” while Trump first floated the idea of annexation. Two weeks later, Canada had committed to nearly $1 billion in new border security spending.
But last week’s declarations made it clear, very quickly, that appeasement would not be enough. (A key lesson of the Trump era: It never is.) Trump continued to claim that a $98 billion trade deficit in merchandise with Canada was a $200 billion subsidy for Canada’s defense. “We basically protect Canada,” he said on Tuesday. This time, Canada’s politicians tried a different tactic. “There isn’t a snowball’s chance in hell that Canada would become part of the United States,” Trudeau tweeted. Doug Ford, the beer-swilling conservative premier of Ontario, was sent on the offensive, putting his foot (ever so gently) down like a Midwestern Christian stepdad. “I love the U.S., I love Americans, and I get it,” he told Waters. “But that property’s not for sale.” (“I would consider it a privilege to be taken over by the United States of America,” Waters retorted. “For some reason that’s repellant to you Canadians, and I find that personally offensive.”)
The Canadian media, meanwhile, has responded the only way it knows how: with cringe comedy, capitulation, and genteel concern. One columnist insisted Trudeau failed by not responding with a joke about the War of 1812 (Ford had already made it, a day earlier). The right-leaning National Post, meanwhile, well on its own way to being dismantled by American hedge funds, offered a step-by-step guide on how to actually annex Canada, “regardless of whether that makes you feel sick or fills you with joy.” All the while, the public broadcaster’s headlines politely pleaded for clarity: “Trump has threatened Canada in all sorts of ways. What does he really want?” What they really wanted to ask was, “Why is he being so mean?”
Beneath all of these reactions was a fluttering heartbeat of dread. What if he actually means it? In the flood of explainers and Q&As since Trump’s imperialistic musings, experts have generally rallied around the idea that all his madness is merely posturing; an attempt to intimidate opponents in Russia and China, or extract reasonable concessions from allies like investment in border protections. “President Trump … is a very skillful negotiator,” Trudeau said on CNN. “I was pleased to highlight that less than 1 percent of the illegal migrants, less than 1 percent of the fentanyl that comes into the United States comes from Canada.… We’re not a problem.”
But therein lies the problem. In situations like these, one can never be sure what exactly is motivating Trump. But it is unsettling that what he has so far demanded has been things the U.S. has more or less already received. America does not need to go to war with Greenland to gain economic and military access: It has it already. Perhaps what Trump is really after is the thrill of conquest and domination. We know Trump will wreak great havoc for symbolic submissions to his own power and glory—just look at the renaming of Nafta. Now, he is returned to command as a wounded tyrant, hepped up on the fumes of manifest destiny. Trump may simply want to grab some country, any country, “by the pussy”—and Canada’s is (forgive me) wide open.
That’s why, though they may try to shoulder through it with characteristic good humor, many Canadians are, privately, scared shitless. No one was prepared for the eminently likely scenario of an attempted U.S. takeover, despite its having been the stuff of red-teaming fantasies since before Canada was a country. The day before Trump’s comments, Trudeau was forced into resignation by his own party, setting up a three-month lame-duck government overlapping with the president’s first 100 days in office. Trump is already seizing the chance to build a sycophantic politburo of his favorite Canadians. This weekend at Mar-a-Lago, he hosted Alberta’s anti-vax premier, Danielle Smith; psychotic self-help guru Jordan Peterson; and Canada’s own inexplicably famous rich guy, Kevin O’Leary, who claimed “at least half of Canadians” supported annexation. (Not quite: In Alberta, where support is strongest, just one in five do).
Our next prime minister, meanwhile, is all but certain to be Pierre Poilievre, a sapling-like Trump Lite known for being “MAGA’s favorite Canadian” and a dead ringer for The Simpsons’ Milhouse. When first asked about Trump’s threat of annexation, he called for “locking arms with American economic allies,” and publicly begged Elon Musk to build Tesla factories in Canada. His party is more than 20 points ahead in the polls.
The only saving grace now, it would seem, is how bad this would all be for everyone, and not only for Canada’s painfully earnest liberals. Its vast population of everyday conservatives, the backbone of its milquetoast culture, want nothing more than a quiet drive through the suburbs and a new party in government every 10 years. Canada’s conservative leaders must now somehow convince them that even though all signs indicate they would rule like Trump’s vassals, they are actually the best bet to keep everything normal. It’s worse still for their base, Canada’s own extremely online #patriots, who have found themselves paradoxically stumping for a foreign invasion. “There’s a way to respect ourselves, to have some dignity, to defend our sovereignty, but also do a deal with this consummate dealmaker,” suggested Ezra Levant, founder of Rebel News, Canada’s gift to the far-right infosphere.
Perhaps, in the end, it would be the worst of all for those same Republicans now baying at Canada’s doorstep. It took one day of learning about Canada for right-wing Americans to realize that they would in all likelihood be adding 40 million Democrats to their number. “Canada would be a blue-state behemoth, matching California in population … and, presumably, in reliably Democratic politics,” Rich Lowry, editor-in-chief of the National Review, wrote in an editorial. “We might think we’d annex Canada and make it more like us, but … Canada would surely make us more like it.”
Isn’t that a thought? Perhaps then, annexation might not be such a bad thing after all.
