‘Economic force’: Trump muses on how he’ll annex Canada and claim the country as a state

First it was Greenland. Then it was the Panama Canal. Now Canada? Trump apparently thinks he can buy any piece of land in the world. And if he can’t, he might just take it by force.

In a recent press conference, Donald Trump announced his intent to bring Canada under Untied States’ control through the use of “economic force.” His statements come on the heels of former Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s resignation announcement.

Trump responded to Trudeau’s resignation with a familiar jab, once again referring to Canada as the “51st State” in a post on Truth Social. Trump began musing about the possibility of Canadian statehood after announcing his intent to impose tariffs against the nation, leading Trudeau to hastily visit Mar a Lago in order to negotiate a deal with the president-elect. Trump has since personally mocked Trudeau, calling him Canada’s “governor.”

The “economic force” that Trump intends to use are the very tariffs that Trudeau attempted to avoid. The remark implies that Trump intends to double down on his tariff threat against Canada, a nation that he complains costs the United States “billions of dollars” to protect while getting a raw deal with regard to trade.

“Canada and the United States, that would really be something,” Trump mused – adding that getting rid of the “artificially drawn line” i.e. the border that separates Canada from the United States would “be much better for national security.”

Trump’s frequent trolling of Canada and Trudeau were in part responsible for the Prime Minister’s fall from political grace. At the time of his resignation, approval ratings for Trudeau and the Liberal Party he belongs to sunk to new lows according to a study from the Angus Reid Institute, a Canadian non-profit that studies political trends. Members of Trudeau’s own party excoriated him for failing to take Trump’s tariff threat seriously – including his former Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland, who ripped into the former PM in a resignation letter of her own.

Canada’s Conservative Party, whose political opposition also contributed to Trudeau’s resignation, have taken a hardline approach to Trump’s threat of “economic force.” In an interview with CTV, Conservative Party Leader Pierre Poilievre said in no uncertain terms: “Canada will never be the 51st State.” Trudeau himself has since that “there isn’t a snowball’s chance in hell” of Canadian annexation.

While Trump himself has said that he doesn’t intend to use the military to force Canada into statehood, he and his supporters have threatened using military intervention to solve what they deem to be American’s foreign and domestic problems before. When asked if Trump would use the military to take control of Greenland in an interview on CNN, MAGA political strategist Scott Jennings answered “we could.” Trump himself refused to rule out using military force against Greenland and Panama in order gain control of the island and the Panama Canal respectively at a news conference in Mar a Lago. Trump and his “border czar” Tom Hooman have also threatened to use the military in order to carry out their “mass deportation” plan to forcibly remove millions of undocumented migrants from U.S. soil.

But in the face of bipartisan Canadian resistance, Trump’s dream to make Canada the 51st state will likely turn out the same way as his suggestion to make hockey legend Wayne Gretzky the nation’s new Prime Minister: it isn’t gonna happen.