Trump's designs on Canada show his Putin envy

He wants to join the annexers' club

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I’m broadly sympathetic to the argument that the MAGA movement, led by Donald Trump, represents a form of fascism. Nowadays, one of the main reasons for this view is Trump’s irrational aggression toward Canada.

Aggression and expansionism for their own sake have been features of most fascist movements. Although they often involve victim-blaming, their key feature is being entirely unprovoked. Fascist leaders like to threaten, intimidate, and ultimately conquer their neighbors because it makes them look strong, gives society a goal to rally around, and reinforces the alleged need for a strong leader.

What other way is there to understand Trump’s aggression toward Canada? Its government and people have done absolutely nothing to provoke the United States. They have been a peaceful neighbor, an economic partner, and a military ally. Their only crime is being weak when Donald Trump is trying to find a way to look strong.

Although Canadian officials initially dismissed Trump’s threats as a joke, they have more recently come to see him as deadly serious. In January, Trump said that he would seek to annex Canada using economic force. Since then, he has repeatedly threatened action which would do significant damage to the Canadian economy while still keeping up his threats of conquest.

Earlier this week, he posted this completely unhinged rant on the topic:

Trump ought to read a history book. Americans have been interfering in Canadian politics and security affairs for a long time, and some of them have had their eyes on incorporation. During the American Revolution, the colonists invaded Quebec (then part of British-controlled Canada), expecting the French speakers there to be eager to throw off the British yoke and join their new nation. Instead, the Quebecois were mostly confused about what the colonists were doing there, and the revolutionaries were defeated militarily at the hands of local British forces.

The next attempt came in the War of 1812, when most in the U.S. government hoped to capture Canada and use it as a bargaining chip in negotiations with Britain over trade and maritime issues. Although a small minority favored annexation, Canada was mostly viewed as collateral rather than the primary goal. The issue became moot anyway when invading American forces met with comprehensive defeat. The forces that invaded over the Detroit River fared so badly that they actually ended up temporarily ceding territory to the British. Whoops.

From that point, official American interest in annexing Canada declined rapidly. During the heyday of American expansion across the North American continent in the nineteenth century, some starry-eyed dreamers still broached the subject. But most practical statesmen had little time for it. We sometimes remember “Manifest Destiny” as a mad push for any land available, but its leaders were actually strategic. They wanted the Great Plains to provide an outlet for settlement, and California and Oregon because they provided access to the markets of the Pacific. Canada, they had little use for.

Canada also didn’t really fit into the racial logic of a growing United States. It was easy to justify taking land from Mexicans and Native Americans, who were seen as biologically incapable of developing it to its fullest economic potential. Taking land from another prosperous, virtuous white people was another matter. Americans liked to see themselves as believing in freedom and equality, even if it was only freedom and equality for civilized white people. Annexing Canada would have severely tested that self-image.

Into the twentieth century, governments all over the world came to realize that conquest pays less in the information age than it used to. When economies were based on coal and steel, there was a perverse logic to conquering another country and exploiting its resources. But it’s much harder to get people to write software or innovate in the marketing sphere at gunpoint. Given the tremendous nationalist backlash and armed resistance that the U.S. annexation of Canada would generate, it’s impossible to see it making any economic sense at all.

What, then, brought Trump around to the idea? The adjacency of his political movement to fascism is one reason. Another is his bafflingly simplistic idea of how a modern economy works. Because the only economic issue he pays attention to is trade, he understands every problem as a trade problem. As an independent country, Canada trades with the United States, and Trump doesn’t like that. Bring it into the union, and suddenly that trade is just the same as the flow of goods between California and Alabama. For some reason, that matters enormously to Trump, whatever other economic costs would be associated with annexation.

Trump also revels in eviscerating America’s identity as a country that believes in freedom and equality. It’s as if the prohibition against aggression, enshrined in the United Nations Charter since the 1940s, is just another norm for him to shatter for the sheer joy of it. Previous generations of Republicans railed against various aspects of the UN system, like the World Health Organization or UNESCO, as an infringement of American sovereignty. Trump seems determined to reject the very idea that America ought to be subject to international law, starting with its most sacred principle.

But I believe that the biggest factor driving Trump to this point is his Putin envy. Trump watched Russia invade Ukraine and attempt to annex more of its territory and saw not a warning, but an example to be followed. I find it impossible to imagine that he would have arrived at this policy of flat-out annexing Canada without seeing that example play out. At the end of the day, he wants nothing more than for America to become more like its enemies, and for himself to become more like the dictators who lead them. Unfortunately, he seems to think that the easiest path to achieving his goals lies through Ottawa.

Fortunately, there are still many barriers to Trump actually following through with his threats. Predictably, Canadian nationalism has surged, and it has become clear that any annexation would be militarily contested. Past expansions of territory have revealed massive splits in the American political system as it becomes clear that there would be political gainers and losers from bestowing citizenship upon millions of people. Given the liberal nature of Canadian politics, it’s clear that the Republicans would be the losers, making it difficult to get annexation through Congress. Finally, it’s hard to imagine the U.S. military actually carrying out such a mission without causing a massive internal fracture.

All of this means that the smart money still lies on Trump’s fascism and Putin envy remaining mostly symbolic, at least as far as Canada is concerned. But there’s a slim chance that he intends to go through with it, particularly as senility sets in.

So here we are, wondering if the United States might really invade Canada at some point in the next four years. Which is not where I wanted to be.