Maple Beef

We all know Trump’s thing about Canada is deeply psychopathic, right?

On Tuesday, President Donald Trump posted to Truth Social that, to avoid his tariffs, “the only thing that makes sense is for Canada to become our cherished Fifty First State.” It’s a form of extortion so subtle you can already see Democrats at the State of the Union waving tennis rackets marked “PROTECTION” at him.

His threats aren’t new, but they are escalating. He called Canada the 51st state in December and January, referred to Canada’s then-Prime Minister Justin Trudeau as “governor” and told him that our shared border was “invalid.” During the Super Bowl pregame, he told Satan’s own Cabbage Patch doll Bret Baier that his annexation daydreams are serious, and that, in the absence of free trade with the United States, Canada is “not viable as a country.”

American reactions are understandably mixed. From a pop culture perspective, you might assume that Trump got the idea from Michael Moore’s mediocre satire, “Canadian Bacon.” Fans of better films might imagine that Trump has finally lived up to Ash’s praise for the face-hugger in “Alien”: “I admire his stupidity. A moron … unclouded by conscience, remorse or delusions of morality.”

Is there any point in walking through how pea-brained the idea of annexing Canada really is? Americans don’t want it. Canadians will fight it, and it’s already effacing political divisions and turning their own diseased MAGA offshoots against us. It would be economically ruinous. It doesn’t even make sense according to Trump’s own rationale. He wants to stop the flow of fentanyl and migrants coming over our northern border by absorbing the country the fentanyl and migrants are in. That’s like being worried your neighbor’s termite-riddled house will infest yours, so you buy it and build a wooden addition connecting the two. For his next trick, he’ll combat radical Islamic terror by making one of his sons join ISIS. Junior looks great in a beard, really, like he’s had a chin all along.

The biggest temptation is to just ignore Trump’s Canadian saber-rattling. Our oldest, wettest, dumbest president is at it again. But by now we should have learned that the more witless it sounds, the likelier it is he’ll try it. Trump’s biggest and brightest ideas about politics all got popular in the 1930s, so it’s hardly surprising that the same goes for his economic vision; why not combine the two? Already his melding of tariffs and aggression has produced a new model of warfare and resource acquisition: A king locking himself and his people inside the castle, telling 99.999999% of the rest of the world outside that he’s laying siege to it, then waiting for it to surrender.

Ordinarily, other nations would roll their eyes at threats to take this show kinetic, hit the snooze button and rouse themselves after Trump returns to obsessing about something higher up on the “Brain Warriors: Thought Force” scale, like trying to disable hurricanes with nuclear weapons. But this is America we’re talking about, and if we’ve proved nothing else in the postwar, rules-based international order we created, it’s that we are absolutely capable of this.

The whole world watched us make up extremely pathetic evidence about Iraq, then invade it and destabilize the Middle East. We tried to make a new Afghanistan when we knew 9/11’s responsible parties were Saudis and a few hundred of their lackeys in the remote Hindu Kush. Remember when Barack Obama effectively signed us up, with Hillary Clinton’s blessing, for regime change in Libya? Moammar Gadhaf got stabbed to death behind a soundtrack of the secretary of state cackling. You could watch it on YouTube and everything. This is when the adults were in charge. Vulcans, then technocrats.

We intervened when a democratic Iran discovered too much self-determination and replaced it with a monarch and his secret police. We installed Mobutu’s leopard-print hat and let him mint the word “kleptocrat.” We made Central and South America our playgrounds and treated them the way things get treated on playgrounds. We staged a coup in Guatemala because of the saying “if it walks like a duck” and a filmstrip called “Why the Kremlin Hates Bananas.” We brought you Pinochet, the guy on the helicopter T-shirts for sale in the merch room at CPAC. 

All of which is to say that invading Canada is exactly the sort of stupid shit we would do. Again. Despite the fact that each time, it ends up like a colder Bay of Pigs. And, folks, we’re going to reshoot that one in year three of this administration. I’m hearing terrific things about it.

The point is that this stuff is terrifying for everyone who isn’t us. Because we stand astride the globe, guns akimbo, and say these stupid, cruel things spun out of lies, conjure one flavor of parlous outcome or other, then high-five ourselves for our self-inflicted wounds. And like Vice President The Beav, we get real upset when nobody says thank you. You can’t blame them; they’re still dumbstruck by the human- and wealth-destroying mindlessness of it. 

Until recently, OECD-type nations did not have to sweat this sort of thing. Like us, they saw Uncle Sam’s hyperactive militarism and delusional sense of primacy as regrettable, but fundamentally happening over there, where it wasn’t their problem. The bad things only happened to different-looking people in countries where you’d just assume the leader’s first name was “General” and the minister of the interior would one day, post-coup, email your family about the release of certain funds. But now here we are, and Canada is just like them, after all. This is a reality so simple a Bush can understand it: If it can happen to Canada, it can happen to any of the countries that look like they could be Canada’s dad. When Trump remembers he’s supposed to do it, he’ll get back to threatening Greenland’s dad, Denmark.

You might suspect that strategic concerns would be a bit of a roadblock here. Say what you will about Trump’s favorite political theorist, Adolf Hitler, but he at least sold territorial expansion to people with an active interest in it. At the time, any German over 30 could remember when parts of Czechoslovakia, Denmark, France, Lithuania and Poland were Germany, and many people still had family there. The best Trump can do is show Americans footage of Toronto and claim that Canadians have overrun ancestral New York. 

Trump doesn’t have the first idea how he would prosecute a war against Canada; it’d be surprising if the joint chiefs had anything drawn up with a name better than “Operation Pyrrhic.” We haven’t won a war since there were Germans and Japanese involved, people who believe in good posture and contract law. The only thing we’re good at doing militarily anymore is droning weddings and night-bombing a Pink Floyd laser light show onto a city and waiting for the shock and awe to take hold. Nor does Trump have a counterterrorism answer for what to do with a nation of 40 million people able to slip through 5,200 miles of shared border and flawlessly pass as American as long as they can remember to carry guns, remove their Maple Leaf patches and lengthen their “O” sounds.

Those folks might be the biggest problems of all. I know my Canada. I went to Expo ’86 as a kid, could pick Gord Downie (RIP) out of a crowd and know that the “kill” answer to “Marry/Fuck/Kill” for Moxy Fruvous is Jian Ghomeshi. I got your bagged-milk jokes right here, pal, and I nod knowingly when Tim Horton’s is invoked. But despite nearly having my life ended on Florida roads by people with “Je Me Souviens” license plates innumerable times, I still love Canada, and would like to be considered for full immigration status, just in case. The Kids in the Hall are from there. Granted, so is Rush, but if that puts murder in my heart, it doesn’t put it in my hands. Good luck starting a war against a people whose No. 1 worldwide stereotype is being incredibly nice.

What 11 different presidents sedulously tended could be undone in mere weeks by a serially bankrupt hotelier, but our hearts are not so easily deconstructed. There are surely millions of Americans who will not lift a finger to bring harm to the place that makes some of our best comedians, most of the good hockey players and 99% of Hallmark movies. If you drive north, we will put nails on the roadways; if you fly north, we will shine our laser pointers at the runways. Imagine the George W. Bush shoe incident, only it’s a hail of unopened Labatt’s.

The only sensible response, then, is to draft and submit articles of impeachment, every day, until Trump is gone. The fact that that isn’t happening already might be the craziest thing of all.