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"Oh the Urbanity" a Canadian YouTuber just put out a video titled "Donald Trump is 100% serious about annexing Canada" where I think he puts forward a really convincing argument for the title argument, and for why it needs to be taken seriously.
I won't force you to watch the video but here it is, I'll give you his 13 points for it and explain them.
1: "Repeated preoccupation"
This isn't just a "one off brain fart" like a lot of Trump's rhetoric, he's been consistent about it over and over again. From Trump himself "So when I say they should be a state, I mean that, I really mean that"
2: "Aides say he's serious."
Includes a tweet from White House Deputy Chief of Staff to take him at face value and sources to CNN reporting other aides say similar, take his claims seriously.
3: "Canada says he's serious"
Some of the politicians in Canada believe that Trump is very serious about this threat too.
4: "Questioned our border"
He's talked about believing the Canadian/US border to be illegitimate (Something he also points out is that Trump has not done the same with Mexico) and that this is the rhetoric used before trying to take over another country.
5: "Loves big real estate deals."
Trump is narcissistic and loves to put his names on things and claim big accomplishments. "Is there any bigger real estate deal than doubling the land mass of the USA?"
6: "Fits into his world view"
Urbanity believes Trump has a view of great powers dominating over their local spheres of influence
7: "Threatened other countries"
He's talked about this with other countries like Panama and Greenland, showing the expansionist mindset. Along with the reported plans being developed for a potential Panama invasion.
8: "Consider his influences"
People that Trump likes are Pat Buchanan (who has talked about taking Canada and Greenland before) and McKinley (Trump's favorite president) who annexed multiple territories.
9: "Admires Vladimir Putin"
Trump has shown a lot of respect to Putin before and often victim blames Ukraine for being invaded.
10: "Pretexts like Drug Cartels"
They're trying to claim that Canada has been taken over by drug cartels and they need to wage a war to take it back from harming the country. It sounds like the Bush administration talking about WMDs.
11: "Spins Canada as abuser"
They talk about things like Doug Ford putting a tax on electricity exports as an "act of war" by Canada, and treat retaliatory tariffs as unprovoked aggression.
12: "Information Bubble"
Trump lives in an information bubble where the main sources he listens to are the ones that feed from him like Fox News. His ideas about Canada wanting to be taken over from Fox News talking about "Maple MAGA" likely reinforce his desire even more.
13: "No Personal Morals"
Urbanity views Trump as a man who has scammed people before with various business projects, shitcoins and the like. There's little reason to expect he wouldn't disregard the sovereignty of other nations.
While he doesn't mention this, I personally think another major point to consider is that Trump is not consistent on what he wants from Canada. One day he says it's the trade deficit, next day he says its drugs, then the next day its immigrants, the next day he says nothing can be done at all and he just wants the state. It sounds like excuses just being made up based off how he feels that day.
Urbanity goes on to argue that even if the threat isn't likely, it is no reason to take it as less serious. The main thing being that Trump is enacting a trade war, which is still causing serious harm to the Canadian economy and their people.
Like if a mafiaso moved in next door and started joking about killing you. Even if the chance was low, it's understandable to take their words seriously. "Threats don't have to be higher than a 50% chance to take them seriously"
He draws a corollary to Ukraine where there was a lot of disbelief and doubt about Russia invading in 2022, until as we're all aware, it happened. "But they did it"
All in all I think this is very convincing that Trump really does want to annex Canada and that we as a society should be taking that possibility seriously. And as Urbanity also points out, even if it's unpopular now, Trump's followers and the Republican party have been shown to be rather flexible at following his lead against their prior beliefs. They might be against him in 2025, but what about 2026 or 2027 when they've had years of Fox News and Trump speeches repeating the stories of Canadian Cartels and "Acts of War"?
So for discussion, there's a few questions.
Do you think Trump has serious intentions to annex Canada? Is it right of him or wrong of him to do this? If he does ramp up rhetoric (or efforts) to annex or invade, would you wish for the Republicans to oppose him or continue to support him as duly elected president? And how likely is it that Trump will transform from his rhetoric to serious action (beyond the trade wars)?
well why not? Canada is an uncountry, comprised of no one, & representing nothing.
Canadians do not even exist. There is no Canadian history and no Canadian culture. There is a Quebecois/First Nations history, and any annexation of Quebec/First Nations should be negotiated separately. But Canada is merely a term of geography in which nations reside, not a nation in itself. Not a controversial idea. The government proclaims it regularly, lest anyone look back farther than June 15th, 1964.
Maybe there was once a culture called Canada. But it's long dead now. Canada is now Terra Nullis. It's for no one and belongs to no one. So annexation is completely acceptable.
Whether it's the Ukrainians, Kurds, Taiwanese, Irish, Palestinians, or (Anglo) Canadians, denying the existence of a people seems like a guaranteed way to conjure one into being or rescuscitate one from the brink of extinction. Few remember or care today, but during the Revolution and the War of 1812 there was a bitter partisan struggle across the St. Lawrence frontier between Patriots and Loyalists that divided families, wiped the Iroquois off the map, and whose brutality shocked the British-born officers sent to take charge of the situation. I for one do not wish to needlessly invite conflict with such people when time was our ally in forging a peaceful economic and political union.
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You -- like Putin -- seem to be under the impression that a countries right to exist is contingent on the worth of its culture as judged by you. You are wrong.
My position is that basically all international borders are accidents of history, but should be treated as sacrosanct, because having a pointless war is much worse than having a random border.
Also, most of your arguments could just as well applied to the US. I will spare you the stale jokes about US culture, but notice that the US -- while it labels itself a nation -- is just a federation of individual states. So why should not Canada annex Seattle instead?
But then again, you are likely just trolling.
I'm Old Stock born in Toronto with family in Brampton. Every single expression of whatever the name given to my culture is treated as the most heinous evil possible that must be 'dismantled' as quickly as possible. I am mostly in mourning.
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Europe is divided along ethnic lines. Germany is where Germans live, France is where French people live, Poland is for the Poles.
And then there is civic nationalism and unnatural borders. Civic nationalism is the hellish melting pot of the US&A. Its borders do not matter because they're arbitrary. They happen to be what they are. But there are no Americans, really, to draw the borders around. And there are no Canadians either.
Unnatural borders are what we see in Africa and much of the third world. They are marks of colonialism. Straight lines on maps, drawn with a disregard for the people. Then, ethnic conflict is present, always.
There are only a few exceptions where unnaturally drawn borders hold despite differences in ethnicity. Singapore, Switzerland, UAE, etc. But these exceptions are of mutual economic and political benefit. They exist only in prosperity. Money holds them together.
But even here, why does Denmark have a say over Greenland? Ukraine over Donbass? Or Canada over Quebec? Outside the current legalistic status quo, I don't think they have a claim over those ethnically distinct regions.
Borders should be drawn around an ethnos. But there is no Canadian ethnicity. It's only a matter of time before that particular politico-economical assemblage dissolves or is subsumed by some other larger entity.
Look at a bunch of maps of Germany from 1914 to 1945, and you will notice that things are not quite as simple. Why is Austria its own thing, but Bavaria is not? These are all accidents of history. Culturally and ethnically, someone whose ancestors have been living in what is now Germany just across the Austrian border is certainly closer to Austrians than someone whose ancestors lived on a now German island in the North Sea.
Except that Brittany and Corsica are kinda their own thing ethnically, and that is before we go to the oversea departments.
A straight border just means that when the border was drawn, no stakeholder cared where exactly it ran, and yes, this generally was because they were colonizers and there were no pre-existing white communities.
The thing to understand is that for thousands of years, the borders between what would eventually become European ethnostates were redrawn every few decades in blood. The world did not suddenly spawn in 1945, with God drawing a neat line about the various ethnicities which He would grant statehood, carefully sorting every village to the correct side. Mostly it was the other way round, historically. Here is the border (e.g. the front line at armistice), and if you are not happy with the nationality this bestows upon you, you can just flee a few tens (or hundreds) of kilometers to a country more to your liking.
Straight borders in Africa are bad because they tend to split ethnic groups. However, I think ethnic conflicts would happen even if the colonizers had taken great care to respect ethnic boundaries. At the end of the day, every small ethnicity having a state the size of Lichtenstein is not stable. Land is a valuable resource, and conflicts about it were likely a human universal from the stone age till the recently.
North America is a bit special in that it was only thinly populated by steppe nomads (who murdered each other over territorial conflicts like everyone did). If Canada and the US had coexisted a thousand more years on a medieval tech level, I would guarantee that their border would look just as "natural" as in Europe.
The legalistic status quo is an excellent reason, because the alternative is historically a lot of bloodshed. Now, I am sympathetic to peoples right to self-determination, and if the Scots had voted for leaving the UK, I would be a-ok with it. Nor do I have a problem with colonies breaking away from their colonizers (even if they lack a distinct ethnicity, e.g. the 13 colonies the English lost in North America).
Yes. If the Austrians see themselves as Austrians, they're Austrians and not Germans. But if in a hundred years these same Austrians give up their Austrianness, and start calling themselves German and the Germans go along with it, they'll be German. The cultural and ethnic minutiae will be best understood by their respective peoples. And the borders should be reflective of these attitudes.
Yes, these are minorities in France, much the same way there are Arab and African minorities in France. And there will be either separatism or assimilation. There will be tensions. If those ethnically distinct regions want independence, they should get independence.
You are a colonialist. I fundamentally disagree with you. Even if you think small ethnicity-based states aren't "stable," forcing artificial borders upon a diverse people is much worse. But as a compromise, can we at least maybe not have very clearly multi-ethnic paper nations? The Québécois and the "Canadians" are nothing alike. Let them have their independence.
The bloodshed occurs precisely because the borders aren't drawn along ethnic lines. The legalistic status quo suppresses ethnic realities.
I tend toward a soft colonialism just because I think it’s actually more peaceful and stable, while allowing for the development of land and resources that ethnic tribes might not be able to do.
It’s more peaceful because as I see it the “every tribe needs and deserves a state” is a cause of strife, rather than a prevention for that strife. Most ethnic groups are too small or weak to actually achieve independence. They assert a right the global elite tell them they have, but they actually can’t for geopolitical reasons. Palestinians will never have a state. They cannot take one any more than the Cherokee could in America. But the Cherokee who were sent to a reservation in 1840 or so live in relative peace and safety because they are not trying to assert a “right” they don’t have and frankly never did. Palestinians are still fighting, and committing war crimes while doing so, because they came to the same position in the post war world where everyone is entitled to an ethnostate. Who’s better off, Cherokee or Palestinians? And in some cases like Ukraine, they’re “independent” but their neighbors are much stronger than they are and thus they must go along mostly with that stronger neighbor because they can’t afford to get in a war they’d lose.
It’s more stable because it doesn’t have various tribes fighting over strips of land nearby for farming right, water rights, minerals, or strategic advantage. The border is drawn and that’s it.
It allows for development because the most advanced society tends to run the empire and thus have the technology and skill to extract resources and use the land efficiently. Britain knows how to run a mine. It’s rather doubtful that the Zulu can do the same. If some rich natural resources sit under Zulustan they’ll stay there because people who live in mud huts can’t run a mine like the British can.
What strife, exactly? And between whom?
Shouldn't there logically be less conflict among ethnically homogeneous nations than in a multi-ethnic state (especially a colonial one)? It's the forcing of different ethnicities to exist within one arbitrary state that causes conflict. Each ethnicity being its own nation and political entity effectively solves this internal tension.
But you maintain that even with these ethnic tensions fully resolved, this plurality of newly independent nations would soon be launched into brutal conflict with each other. Because of what? Resources? Power struggles?
Resources can, and have always been, traded. Indigenous tribes trade just fine with each other. Why would these nations suddenly go to war any more than European nations have since 19th-century ethnic nationalism?
And conflict due to expansion beyond reasonable means doesn't make sense either, as the expanding nation would soon turn into the very multi-ethnic hodgepodge of a state with arbitrarily drawn borders we're trying to avoid.
Palestinians are fighting against Israeli colonialism. Israel is actively genociding Palestinians. They could've ☪☮e✡is✝-ed, even after the Zionists took Palestinian lands and established and ethnostate (good). But that wasn't enough for Israel. They couldn't stop. And expanded beyond. And it's too late to stop now. If Palestinians ever establish a functioning state, the Jews will be wiped from existence. But that's what you get for your colonialism.
Israel and Palestine deserve each other.
Colonial, or otherwise arbitrary, borders lock ethnically diverse, hostile groups into zero-sum struggles within states. Ethnically homogeneous nations reduce these internal tensions. And external disputes can be handled through trade or treaties, as has been historically done. But colonial borders don't change as easily.
The Africans seemingly still live in mud huts despite all the benevolence of colonialism.
Israel and Palestine are a result of the rules based international order creating a perception of a “right to an ethnic homeland, and forcing both sides into internationally coerced “ceasefires” and land swaps that have kept the two from fighting the long war they’ve been in since 1948 to its conclusion. It’s not a natural phenomenon in the least. The reason we’re still watching this flare up about every decade is that it’s a war that isn’t being finished. If the war in 1948 had been fought until capitulation as wars were until we decided that we’d rather have a series of stalemates, then one way or another it wou be over. Either Palestinians would be conquered and living under the thumb of the Jews or the reverse, but whoever lost would understand and likely accept their fate, and would consider themselves an ethnic minority in a nation rather than continuing to attempt to force a state they don’t have the military ability to actually claim. We did the same in the American south. Once Georgia was burned and looted they understood that whether they liked it or not, they were part of the United States and would remain so.
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Why must every border in the world be drawn according to 19th century European nationalist principles? Multiethnic empires, religious caliphates, city-states, mercantile republics, and tribal confederations all existed long before the national revivals of Mitteleuropa and I do not see why they should be considered inherently less legitimate forms of political organization.
Ethnicity is the persistent factor in how people organize politically. Multi-ethnic post-racial societies can only exist when there's prosperity, religion, imperial might, or ideology to suppress the natural tendency toward ethnic self-determination. These external forces sustain the opportunistic state and its arbitrary borders.
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There’s more sanity to some of these lines than people think: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoners_of_Geography
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That’d be great but you Canada has to take Portland too
If they could take California that would also be pretty nice of them.
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Every Canadian I know and seemingly a very large share of their population disagrees.
Yeah, this has probably been the best thing for Canadian nationalism is my lifetime.
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After checking the transcript with a ctrl+f "arctic" . . .
. . . #14: oh and not for nothing but if the Transpolar Sea Route opens Canada will gain the second most geostrategically significant coastline on the planet.
You can't have a discussion about the US acquiring Greenland or Canadian territory without including the arctic opening to shipping. If it should come to pass that freighters can easily cross the arctic, it will be the most impactful event for trade since the Panama Canal.
I assess Trump higher than most so I wouldn't be surprised if this is a tertiary motivator for his wanting Greenland after resource wealth and Monroe Doctrine. I don't know how to place his posturing on Canada, but that's because I don't believe Canada in its current form will exist by 2100. As discontent with their governance rises, so does the probability of a serious secessionist movement. If Alberta votes to secede, they will be backed by the full weight of the American establishment, up to declaring war if necessary. It's too much land, money, and power. If one leads to another, if Saskatchewan and Manitoba want to join, if Quebec also secedes, then suddenly we might have two or three highly developed nations to our north. Smaller states, more dependent on the US, more money. Imagine Vancouver becoming a city-state, we'd pour money in, we'd guarantee their sovereignty. We get the right leader in and in a few decades maybe we have the American Singapore. Meanwhile, with Alberta and/or Saskatchewan and/or Manitoba in the union, we'll have borders carved on one side to the shores of the Northwest Territories and on the other to the shores of Hudson Bay.
Regardless of what is actually going on in Trump's mind with Greenland and Canada, serious actors have understood the significance of the TSR for a long time. Greenland, regardless of the ice melting, will be part of the US soon enough. Canada depends on too much to say with certainty, other than the certainty of the US supporting any border province that votes to secede.
I mean, it's funny you call Quebec highly-developed, but anyway.
A secessionist movement there is going to have to be smart enough to consider Montreal a lost cause, or at least neutral ground (it is not a French city by voting pattern). Their failure to do this last time is the reason why Quebec is not today its own nation- too attached to the Provincial borders.
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My read of the 'realities' is that Albertan/Saskatchewanian oil money being redistributed east is the main factor neutering Quebecois independence; one can expect that if the prairies vote to leave Quebec will too, sometime soon. That leaves BC, Ontario, and some tiny poor flyover, which is a recipe for further fragmentation.
Like if Texas secedes it doesn't necessarily trigger California secession.
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It's worth noting that the polls (that show Upper and Lower Canada once again uniting to fuck up the rest of the country) show the West voting even harder for their regional interest party. Once the Alberta metro areas start seriously considering this, and extended trade war applied in sufficient quantities (on the Canadian side- tariffs are federal, and the LPC and its voters will gladly burn the nation down this way for ego reasons) will accomplish this, it's over.
The best ending for us at this point is that the West leaves Canada for good, and becomes part of a full free-trade economic union with the United States but still a nation in its own right. I don't think the Alberta public will accept outright joining the Union as a new State, at least at first; actually, I don't think BC, SK, or MB will either. This is for the same reason that some US territories outright reject Statehood. Ottawa and Toronto will be able to apply more pressure on the parts of Ontario that are not them so it'll take them longer and Atlantic Canada is utterly dependent on government handouts for survival so they'll never leave willingly. There are far more entrenched economic interests in the East compared to the West, and the ones that do exist out West are more heavily enmeshed with American interests.
And then there's the matter of who they'd be voting for in US elections with full Statehood, and the fact that being under American dominion means American institutions, and American institutions means American grievances, and American grievances are wrong and bad (witness how much damage they have done to the whole of Canada already!) so if we can limit the damage they do that's good.
The ultimate problem for AB right now is that it's landlocked, so it needs to be able to cut a path to the sea to sell its wares (the closest warm-water port is Kitimat and it would become a nation away should it leave the Dominion). Having no border between it and the states to its immediate South will help with this, but it'll still be at a disadvantage.
Vancouver will only become a city state should the rest of the province seek a divorce. This isn't a hypothetical when you look at the election map: the current government has literally zero seats outside the GVRD and Island yet the interest party for those areas forms a majority government. Clear evidence of irreconcilable differences, much like the West is to (Upper and Lower) Canada as a whole.
Again, there are certain trade levers that can be pulled to make that happen; the US dropping its softwood import tariff conditional upon desired political realignment and ensuring northern reserves of natural gas are legal to extract would be one of them.
Fossil fuel extraction pushes local politics towards the GOP in the US. There are few irreconcilable political differences between the parties but fossil fuels is the biggest.
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As a true believer in Fifty-four Forty or Fight, and someone who looks at a map and thinks it's crazy that Cuba and Vancouver aren't American, I can only say that Manifest Destiny demands it.
The causus belli is the infiltration of Chinese and Indian influences, the same as would be the case for Mexico. The Monroe Doctrine must be kept alive, for it is the only foreign policy that has ever made sense for America.
Never understood why they didn't just annexed in the 50-s
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I'm less serious about Trump invading Canada as I am about what happens 20 or 30 years down the line. I think Trump sincerely wants to annex Canada. I do not think many other Americans do, even his biggest sycophants. But this was simply something that was never considered as an option. Trump has all kinds of weird supporters among young people who take certain projects of his very seriously; who's to say that a few decades down the line annexing Canada doesn't have a solid chunk of support?
American attitudes toward annexing Canada have waxed and waned. Obviously there was 1812, but there were also major pro-annexation swings in the 1870s and 1890s. I think it is far from impossible to wonder whether it might grow in strength as a movement again.
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It's not that hard to imagine that Trump is serious about this and would sincerely like to do it, but it will still never happen.
By way of comparison, I think he was serious about wanting to overturn the 2020 election results, but it didn't happen. To make something happen, you need to take the actions that lead to it occurring in the real world. Posting on Truth Social isn't adequate.
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I’m not buying it simply because I don’t see anything to make me believe that he’s ramping up to start a war. No reporting of troop movements even on the Canadian side, no announcement of anything of that sort. It’s not something you can just do on a whim. Canada isn’t just going to roll over and become part of the USA. You need tanks and planes mobilized on the border.
Something that a lot of people tend to forget is that there is no land border between Canada and the United States. Tanks aren't going to do the US much good here, and that's even if the average Canadian tank wasn't broken down.
Now sure, you can say "but the Western border", and it's true that isn't defensible in the slightest, but it also isn't really Canada, it's just a territorial possession. The people who live there will all say that too, by the way- they vote like it, those who opposed Canada violently in the past are venerated, etc. Just like Quebec, for that matter.
In truth, Canada is (as it was originally, back when it was called Upper Canada) defined as "the peoples who live in the area constrained by 2000km of vast, relatively impassable Ontario wilderness to the West (there is one road, and a lot of bridges along that road), the Great Lakes and the St. Lawrence to the South and East, and the French to the North (and they are similarly surrounded by water and wilderness)".
As far as the peoples unprotected by the natural barrier of the St. Lawrence go (where you can just drive across), the fact of the matter is there's nothing out there worth taking that the US doesn't already have. Halifax is strategically significant because there's a warm-water port there, and the Great Lakes ports are not (or at least, they aren't yet). Everywhere else is about as populated as the Territories are: PEI has less than 200,000 residents, and NS only has a million.
Thus, Canada is literally an ocean away from the US (in the absence of those bridges, which for all the faults of the Canadian military they will still have the capacity to destroy in open warfare with the US). And sure, while their tactical situation is completely untenable for other reasons- modern artillery has range sufficient to just sit on the US side of the border and dismantle Canadian industry completely unchallenged, something that wasn't possible in 1812- it's going to take the US long enough to actually get their military pieces into position for foreign military aid to arrive.
While it's likely that Canada would still lose extremely quickly due to a complete lack of will to prosecute a war against an ally offering better terms to its soldiers than the Canadian government ever would, the destruction of Canadian industry in that area would nullify Canada's value as an ally. This isn't a war that can be realistically won by the US primarily with a traditional exercise of military power.
Were I to attempt this I'd exploit the fact that the West is unwilling to fight a war the East gets itself into. Thus, I would target industry most commonly found in the East with a competitive advantage against American industry due to its dirt-cheap power, that being steel and aluminum production, and wait for counter-tariffs and a political split to get the West to the table. And I'd offer the most powerful Western province special treatment- a comparative exemption on tariffs to its strategic resource- to suggest that provinces willing to deal independently of the federal government may have other payoffs (and to further drive a wedge between the West and the East, for the East hates petrochemical development).
Which is probably why those things are happening.
Certainly trying to take Toronto by invading from the West along the North Shore would be silly. But forcing crossings of St. Lawrence River and the Niagara River is far easier than crossing an ocean (or even the Great Lakes). If the US for some reason decided to invade Canada, certainly it could head north and west from Maine and New York, and cross the St. Lawrence. The Niagara is a bottleneck and so harder, but I expect it would still be done, probably combined with true amphibious crossings over the lakes. And the St Clair, though that's also a bottleneck -- it might be a race to see who can get heavy units there faster.
Again, calling these "rivers" is a bit of misnomer. This isn't the Rio Grande where you can more or less just walk across- it's at least half a mile across (miles in some areas), and it's not fordable. It doesn't freeze in the winter any more either, so that's out too.
If you want to invade you need a green-water navy (to get your transports from the Eastern seaboard through the open water, down the mouth of the Seaway), and only then can you start ferrying gear across. This is not a trivial problem- in fact, I argue that the relative difficulty of crossing this body of water until the mid-20th century is the main reason the Canadian identity exists distinct from the American one in the first place.
(This is, of course, ignoring the fact that this would probably all be done by air; the US can drop more tanks out of C-5s in a day than the Canadians have in their history ever fielded.)
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All the major objectives would be seized within a week of an American attack, even with no preparation. For example Fort Drum holds the 10th Mountain Division, which alone is more combat capable than all of the Canadian Armed Forces combined even if they weren't spread out. It takes Ottawa on day 2.
The biggest defence of Canada is that a large proportion of Americans likes us quite a bit, and an attempt to actually violently seize us would more likely result in an American Civil War then a straight-forward invasion.
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While I appreciate the post summarizing the arguments, I think that with a little tweaking it could be a copypasta that we could use whenever Trump is talking about anything. Most of it isn't Canada-specific, and I actually started laughing a little during the Buchanan/McKinley/Putin portion. At that point I thought it was a copypasta and I had been successfully trolled into reading the little list.
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Thst point at least is rather weak. If the US military hasn't kept an up to date plan for military action to secure the Panama Canal for a very long time now, I'll eat several of my hats.
All of the points are rather weak: "He likes big real estate deals?" (and therefore, we must assume that he wants to annex every other nation on Earth, since what could be a bigger real estate deal that the US taking over everyone!) "Canada says he's serious" (and if we know anything about the Canadian elite, it's that they're honor-bound not to take cheap shots at a person not well-liked by their populace)
This is all so, so tiresome. Nothing presented rises above vague platitudes that, if we accept as true, would allow us to preemptively accuse Trump of any nefarious schemes our minds can imagine, with no need to worry about the messy process of determining if they represent reality or not. Anyone convinced by this had, quite frankly, already made up their mind, and were looking for any rhetorical cover to justify themselves.
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Of course he's serious. Trump loves Canada, and he thinks Canadians are great. He thinks they could be even better as part of the US, and they could help Make America Great Again. He thinks they are weak alone, and their current political and economic trajectory are unforunate, and if they continue as they are then Canada may become liability rather than an ally.
If Trump wants to annex you, that's a compliment, a huge compliment. But he's not going to send troops into Canada. He wants Canada to want to join the US. He sincerely does not understand why so many Canadians dislike the US. He thinks he's offering Canada a good deal, the best deal.
In the long run, I think he will be proven right, but he'll be gone before then.
It's because he's going about it in the worst way possible. He's basically insulting them, telling them their trade policies (that he renegotiated!) aren't fair, and that they're letting drugs and whatever else over the border, then trying to coerce them with economic warfare and veiled threats of invasion. This isn't some rogue country that happens to be next to us, but probably the closest of many close allies. If there's ever any chance at a union it's through even closer cooperation. The first order of business should be trying to get all tariffs and duties down to zero in both directions, and negotiating some kind of Schengen-style agreement to get rid of border controls.
The people who feel the most insulted are also the ones who screwed up the country with their (and it has been exclusively their) idiotic economic policies. I have zero problem with the complete destruction of their culture and their political power, because they have had zero problems with destroying mine.
And I suspect that, should they win again (for the sole purpose of fighting this stupid trade war), that the Western provinces are going to get good enough at foreign diplomacy that this might occur regardless of what Ottawa wants. Alberta in particular has had some success in this and I think that's a bigger deal than others recognize.
Of course it should, but if we're going to do that, having some actual political lever to pull for economic policy will be useful. Hence the suggestion that Canada should join the
EuropeanUnion.Simply wrong. Canadian nationalism has been the province of the right since being disowned by the woke left and their captain Trudeau for the last decade. I and many Canadians I know who are like me were sympathetic to the Trump administration and their goals before they took power and started showing their immense capacity for bullying and self-sabotage on the world stage. Ideological alignment is one thing, but question the sovereignty of my country and insult the flag that I served under and you’ve made yourself an enemy.
When I was an Ontarian I was a Doug Ford supporter and I think his comments represent this way of thinking best; there is no contradiction in this line of thinking and it has not even damaged him and his image as the strongest Canadian leader in the current trade war: https://www.cbc.ca/amp/1.7449512
Post-nationalism is nationalism for Eastern Big City Canadians. Being interested in the whole country's growth rather than invested in holy crusade against it is indeed a "right-wing" thing though.
Your desire to get credit for putting your life on the line for people who hate you is understandable.
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Hypothetically, if Canada did become the 51st state, would I be right in saying it would be the largest state in the union by landmass by quite a huge margin? Or am I too Mercator-projection pilled?
Seems like a terrible idea from a Republican standpoint: adding ~30 million new voters to your electorate, 80%+ of whom can be assumed to be reliable Democrat voters.
Also worth pointing out that in his first term, Trump became the first POTUS in decades not to start any new wars, so his track record is pretty respectable on that front at least. Unless we're talking about peaceful annexation, whatever that might look like.
LOL. By landmass, Canada is the second-largest country in the world, after Russia. It's not just bigger than any US state, it's bigger than the US.
Even by population, it would be the largest, just slightly higher than California.
Does this mean it would be bigger than Texas? How many Canadas fit into Texas?
Texas is already smaller than Alaska(Alaska notoriously has a bit of a complex about this), despite Texas being bigger than any country in Europe except Russia and Ukraine.
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A quick Google suggests approximately 1/15.
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If Canada joined the United States each province would probably be a separate state.
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As we've seen in other areas, Trump 2 has already been radically different than Trump 1. Whether that is because he himself has changed, a difference in advisors/staff, or a change in the Republican party around him I do not know.
But what we do know is that things have changed quite a bit, and he is now calling for Canada to be made into a state. A thing he did not do before, and especially not this much.
I think this proves too much. Just because Trump's second term is different from his first doesn't mean his past behaviour is of no use to us in predicting what he'll do next. If I said that I expected Trump to begin a massive campaign of carbon divestment starting in 2026, you said that nothing in his political career to date suggested that was likely to happen, I don't think you'd be very impressed if I countered with "well, Trump 2 is radically different from Trump 1".
I also notice that the argument directly contradicts point 5 of your post - why is Trump's past as a real estate developer of greater relevance to what he'll do next as POTUS than the last time he was POTUS?
How many times has he publicly floated the idea of annexing Canada since assuming office?
Of course former precedent does matter but changes matter too.
Think of it like this, let's say a parent has a 10 year old who suddenly starts muttering to themselves about killing you in your sleep. And they keep doing it over and over, and they sometimes brandish a knife and say they're gonna stab you. And they started stabbing animals outside.
You could go "Haha well, they've never killed me before when they were younger so it won't happen now" and sleep soundly, or you could go "Huh they've never threatened me before, I should probably get them checked out and get medical help".
I assume you would choose the second one. I assume you understand why a change in their rhetoric and behavior is meaningful. The parent that chooses the first one gets stabbed at night and is "surprised" despite being told that it would happen.
That's one way of looking at it, although I am way more interested in what you did to your kid to drive him patricidal. Another perspective is if you have ever been in a relationship that started getting serious, and your girlfriend starts talking about moving in with you. Some guys panic at the very suggestion, but that's silly. You only really need to start worrying when she begins redecorating your place.
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Sure. But on the other hand, Trump has a propensity to verbalise every stray thought that crosses his mind unrivalled in politics domestic and foreign. He suffers from terminal logorrhea. It's hardly an original insight to say that he's a showman first and a politician second, and every good showman knows you can't just play the hits over and over again - you have to spice up your act with new material. Maybe he never discussed this in his first term, but there were lots of things he talked about doing during his first term (and beforehand) that he never got around to. Lots of the things he's done have been outrageous, but I don't think you've presented a very convincing case for why it's likely that invading the US's neighbour will be one of them.
But he is playing to ’a hit’ here. He’s repeated the 51st state line over and over and over again. A lot of his stray thoughts lately have concerned this subject or other potential annexations.
By "playing the hits", I mean repeating the same talking points he made during his first campaign and his first term.
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I have always assumed that Canadian provinces and territories will come as states if they do.
The Canadian territories are too small in terms of population to be reasonable states. The three Canadian territories combined have only 130,000 people, despite their huge land area. That's significantly fewer than the least populous Canadian province's 180,000 people, and far fewer than the least populous US state's 590,000 people.
Yeah, the territories would probably have the same "no, you don't get to sit at the big kids' table" status as they do now within Canada, if not moreso. Might want to merge some of the Atlantic provinces too, making ten provinces into something like eight US states.
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One solution might be to make a territory, not a state, so they wouldn't have the right to vote.
But I really don't think Trump is serious. At least, I don't think he's thought this through in detail, he just thinks it would look cool on the map and make him famous in history.
If this was the proposal, there's no way in hell it happens in a voluntary way, like Trump seems to want at least according to the video.
Not that I give much odds of that in any scenario, but especially that one.
Well yeah.. Puerto Rico and Guam also didn't exactly become territories in a "voluntary" way...
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Canada is literally bigger than the US, so yes it would be the largest state in the union. It would also be the most populous, edging out California. And yes, it would definitely guarantee that the Democrats win every election for quite a while. Canada's major parties are a centrist party, a left-wing party, a radical left wing party, and a French separatist party. Also universal healthcare has supermajority support from both the left and right, so expect that to become the single most important issue facing the government.
Frankly, it would make more sense to turn Canada into five states than one big one (BC, Ontario, Quebec, Western, and Maritimes).
Giving Democrats a good time in Senate elections too!
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I'm against annexation, but I think we should have an open door policy to apply for voluntary association and incorporation. We should be open to becoming the United States of the world. No first world nation needs more sovereignty than Alabama has.
Leading with "COFAs for all who want it" would have been an interesting policy move, but I rather strongly suspect that Trump has poisoned the well on that front.
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Canada wouldn't just be bigger than any other state in the union- it would be bigger than all of them combined. Yes, including Alaska.
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Canada is roughly 5x the size of the next largest state, Alaska. So, yeah, it's huge. And mostly empty. Unfortunately the people there (like in most of the rest of the world) are mostly leftists, so it would be a bad deal to incorporate it.
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Your youtuber doesn't seem to have addressed the relevant question of 'what makes this time different than the last failed predictions of Trump the warmonger?'
This list of supporting arguments is not new. Most of them applied to the previous Trump term as well. Setting aside the selection and framing biases in them, why should predictions that Trump is going to invade countries now supposed to be treated more credibly than previous predictions that Trump was going to invade countries? Particularly since one of the greatest points of diplomatic contention between Trump, the Europeans, and even the Trudeau government, has been a lack of interest in military expenditures?
I'm not aware of any time during the first administration that Trump talked about taking over Canada or Greenland, especially not so consistently. So what makes it different is exactly that, he's now saying he wants to.
Now whether or not he can do it is a different question from whether or not he wants to do it. I think the chance of a Canada annexation is unlikely. But he has signaled consistently (along with his aides saying he is serious) so the motive seems real.
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