What The Hell America!

AMERICA’S ALLIES ARE REPORTEDLY STUNNED by two things Donald Trump has done since returning to power. One is his alignment of U.S. foreign policy with Russia. The other is his fixation on annexing Canada.

Here’s the key to understanding these two confounding moves: They’re related. Trump thinks about Canada in much the same way Vladimir Putin thinks about Ukraine. He identifies with his fellow imperialist.

In July 2021, Putin published an article outlining his view of Ukrainian history. Historically, “Russians and Ukrainians were one people—a single whole,” he asserted. “The idea of Ukrainian people as a nation separate from the Russians” had “no historical basis.” He dismissed this idea as an artificial result of “chopping the country into pieces.”

Putin also belittled Ukraine as dependent on Russian money. “Throughout the difficult 1990’s and in the new millennium, we have provided considerable support to Ukraine,” he wrote. Russia was “the largest trade and economic partner of Ukraine,” he noted. For these and other reasons, he concluded, “true sovereignty of Ukraine is possible only in partnership with Russia.” This sounded like—and in a few months would prove to be—Putin’s rationale for seizing Ukraine.

In February 2022, days before launching his invasion, Putin delivered a speech elaborating on these themes. “Our Ukrainian colleagues . . . turned to us for financial support many times,” he complained. “The subsidized loans Russia provided to Ukraine, along with economic and trade preferences . . . amounted to $250 billion” over two decades, he said. But “the Ukrainian authorities always preferred dealing with Russia in a way that ensured that they enjoy all the rights and privileges while remaining free from any obligations.”

Trump shared Putin’s view of Ukraine as weak, subordinate, and ripe for annexation. In 2016, he defended Putin’s seizure of Crimea, asserting that “the people of Crimea, from what I’ve heard, would rather be with Russia.” Two years later, Trump repeated that Crimea should be Russian. Fiona Hill, the senior Russia expert on Trump’s national security council, later told New York Times reporter David Sanger that “Trump made it very clear that he thought . . . Ukraine, and certainly Crimea, must be part of Russia. . . . He really could not get his head around the idea that Ukraine was an independent state.”

In his second term, Trump has suggested that all of Ukraine could be folded into Russia. “They may be Russian someday, or they may not be Russian someday,” he told Bret Baier in an interview in early February. Putin spokesman Dmitry Peskov welcomed Trump’s suggestion. “A significant part of Ukraine wants to become Russia” and in fact “has already become Russia,” said Peskov.

Trump has also talked about folding Canada into the United States. It’s not clear how this notion got into his head. But the idea that the America should think about Canada the same way Russia thinks about Ukraine—as a barely distinct neighbor, essentially an extension of itself—is at least four years old. And the person who proposed that analogy was Putin.

“Look at how Austria and Germany, the USA and Canada live next to each other,” Putin wrote in his 2021 article. These paired countries, he observed, were “close in ethnic composition, culture, in fact sharing one language,” with “the closest integration” and “very conditional, transparent borders.” In a similar way, Putin proposed, Russians viewed Ukrainians in Russia “as our own close people.”

It’s unlikely that Trump, who seldom reads past a headline, paid any attention to Putin’s article. But the way Trump talks about annexing Canada bears a disconcerting resemblance to the way Putin talks about annexing Ukraine.

Trump first raised the Canadian annexation idea in late November, during a meeting with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. Canadian officials brushed it off as a joke, but Trump kept pushing.

Trump made the same economic case for absorbing Canada that Putin made for absorbing Ukraine. “Canada has been taking advantage of the United States for years,” Trump complained on January 25. “Without our subsidy, Canada, you know, doesn’t exist really. . . . Canada is totally reliant on us. Therefore, they should be a state.”

Trump didn’t talk about invading Canada. Instead, he threatened to destroy it financially. He even cited—albeit in a shorter time frame—the same figure Putin had cited to justify taking Ukraine. “We lose $250 billion a year on Canada,” Trump alleged, misrepresenting both the size and the meaning of the U.S.-Canada trade deficit. “I could stop that in one day. And if I stopped that, Canada wouldn’t exist . . . as a country.”

On February 9, in his interview with Baier, Trump added another bogus rationale for his threats against Canada. “Canada has a very big car industry. They stole it from us,” Trump lied. Later that day, as he signed a proclamation declaring “Gulf of America Day,” Trump bragged that “with a stroke of a pen,” he could impose economic consequences that “would not allow Canada to be a viable country.”

In his February 9 remarks, Trump fantasized about obliterating the U.S. border with Canada. He sounded eerily like Putin talking about Russia’s border with Ukraine. “Think of how beautiful that country would be without that artificial line running right through it,” said Trump, referring to the Canadian border. “Somebody drew it many years ago with a ruler.” (Actually, the border isn’t exactly straight, and it’s the result of multiple treaties and agreements.)

On February 20, Trump said Canada would eventually have to capitulate. “They get 95 percent of their product from the United States. I think they have to become the 51st state,” he predicted. At a cabinet meeting on Feb. 26, he repeated: “We subsidize them $200 billion a year. Without us, Canada can’t make it. . . . Canada should be our 51st state.”

Share The Bulwark

Last week, standing in front of the White House with Elon Musk, Trump mused again about erasing the Canadian border. “When you take away that artificial line . . . and you look at that beautiful formation of Canada and the United States, there is no place anywhere in the world that looks like that,” he boasted.

“Plus Greenland,” Musk added. And Trump chimed in: “If you add Greenland . . . that’s pretty good.”

Two days later, in a meeting with NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte, Trump again brought up the idea of absorbing Canada. “This would be the most incredible country visually. If you look at a map, they drew an artificial line right through it—between Canada and the U.S.,” he lamented. It “makes no sense.”

Rutte tried to humor the president. When Trump talked about annexing Greenland—essentially threatening Denmark, the island’s sovereign state and a founding member of NATO—the secretary general pleaded, “I don’t want to drag NATO in[to] that.” Instead, he praised Trump for having “started the dialogue with the Russians” to end the war in Ukraine.

Good luck with that. Trump will never see the war through NATO’s eyes. He sees Ukraine through Putin’s eyes. They’re the same eyes through which Trump stares hungrily at Canada, Greenland, Gaza, and the Panama Canal. They’re the eyes of a predator.