President Donald Trump has some strange obsessions: Diet Coke, windmills, water pressure, and more recently, annexing Canada. “The only thing that makes sense is for Canada to become our cherished Fifty-First State,” Trump wrote on social media recently, in one of his many comments suggesting that the US will subsume its northern neighbor.
The Canadians have not been amused by such rhetoric. “What he wants is to see a total collapse of the Canadian economy, because that’ll make it easier to annex us,” former Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau warned earlier this month after talks with Trump. And many Canadians don’t view Trump’s ranting about annexation as simply an extension of his trade war but as a possible prelude to a real war.
“Trump is delusional if he believes that 40 million Canadians will passively accept conquest without resistance,” Aisha Ahmad, an international security scholar and professor at the University of Toronto, wrote last month in The Conversation. “There is no political party, or leader, willing to relinquish Canadian sovereignty over ‘economic coercion,’ and so if the US wanted to annex Canada, it would have to invade.”
Thus far, Trump has not raised the possibility of sending actual troops to Ontario. Instead, he seems to believe he can achieve this Canadian Anschluss by simply crushing Canada’s economy and leaving it no choice but to join the US.
But Canada in 2025 is not Austria in 1938. “Canada will never, ever be part of America,” declared newly elected Canadian Prime Minster Mark Carney last week, making the country’s position crystal clear. And, last month, the Canadian Armed Forces announced that after years of declining enrollment, it had seen a surge in enlistments since Trump took office, with about 1,000 more applicants than last year. (Canadian officials couldn’t attribute the new rash of interest to Trump’s threats, but they didn’t rule it out, either.)
Given that Canada will never voluntarily join the US—which it is adamant about—would Trump try to use force to annex it? And would Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth go along with this crazy plan?
During Trump’s last administration, his own staff obstructed him from following through on some of his more harebrained schemes—military action against Iran, for instance, or Venezuela. Former Defense Secretary Mark Esper has said he had to head off Trump’s calls for law enforcement to shoot protesters in the legs during the George Floyd disturbances outside the White House. Former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley once had to call his counterparts in China to reassure them that, in fact, Trump was not going to order a military strike on the country.
But that was then. Now complete loyalty to Trump seems to be the primary qualification for government service. His new Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth does not seem inclined to serve as a bulwark against his commander-in-chief’s basest instincts. The former Fox News host appears to have been chosen specifically because he seems to lack either the intelligence or sobriety to stop Trump’s crazy schemes.
During Hegseth’s confirmation hearing, Sen. Mazie Hirono (D-HI) pressed him about whether he’d agree to use military force against our allies. He didn’t say no. “Senator, one of the things that President Trump is so good at is never strategically tipping his hand,” he replied. “And so, I would never, in this public forum, give one way or another direct what orders the President would give me in any context.”
While Hegseth may be a well-known Trump sycophant, what about rank-and-file soldiers, who would have to do the dangerous work of attacking some of our closest allies?
Last weekend, I went to a ham radio event in Vienna, Virginia, where a lot of guys who spend their time prepping for various disasters, EMP attacks, or the zombie apocalypse had gathered to trade vintage radio tubes and portable antennae. Many of the amateur radio enthusiasts also were veterans, and I thought they might have some insights into whether ordinary soldiers would agree to attack Canada.
“Why would we do that?” said Frank Haynes, a 94-year-old Korean War veteran, who seemed utterly baffled by my absurd question.
Robert Jeffery, a 20-year Navy veteran and former Virginia militia member who I’ve known since he was active in the tea party movement, said there was no way the military would go along with such a scheme. “Let’s just say that if [Trump’s] going to invade Canada,” he told me, “he’s going to do it solo.”
“Let’s just say that if [Trump’s] going to invade Canada, he’s going to do it solo.”
Later, I put the Canada invasion question to another Trump voter I know, Gary Durand, a retired DC police lieutenant and a former Army paratrooper who served in Panama shortly before the US invaded it the last time. “I think if he did that, Congress would immediately invoke the 25th Amendment,” he told me. “It would most likely be considered an unlawful or immoral order. But I also don’t believe he would ever order that.”
Durand is not alone among Trump supporters who believe the president would never engage in such aggression against an ally. After all, Trump campaigned as the “peace” candidate, with surrogates like MAGA influencer Scott Presler directly appealing to young men with promises that Trump would never send them to war.
Republicans have largely dismissed Trump’s territorial expansion plans as a spitballed idea no more likely to materialize than his military base on the moon. In a January interview about Trump’s threats to also take over Greenland, Sen. James Lankford, R-Okla. downplayed Trump’s language as just another example of how the president “speaks very boldly” as a negotiator. He insisted that Trump “is the president that kept American troops out of war. He is not looking to be able to go start a war, to go expand American troops.”
Lankford’s comments, though, sound a lot like the Wall Street masters of the universe and other Republican Trump supporters who were sure that the erratic reality TV star would never follow through on his campaign pledge to impose high tariffs on US allies. Billionaire hedge fund manager John Paulson, then angling to become Trump’s next Treasury Secretary, assured the Wall Street Journal back in October that any tariffs Trump imposed would be “strategic” bargaining chips, not blanket trade sanctions that would destroy the economy. Brian Riedl, who served as an aide to former senator Rob Portman (R-Ohio), told the Washington Post in September that Republican officials he’d spoken with believed Trump’s tariff threats were just “bluster.” (He also added that he thought they were “in denial.”)
But here we are, six months later, with Trump intentionally crashing the stock market with massive tariffs on allies as he follows through on some of his campaign promises.
At least one important MAGA luminary thinks Trump is deadly serious about annexing Canada. In early February, former Trump White House adviser and convicted felon Steve Bannon told Global News, a Canadian news outlet, that he believes that Trump’s rhetoric about Canada is evidence that he’s seeking “hemispheric control.”
Trump has “really thought this through,” Bannon said, explaining the sophisticated geopolitical strategy he believes informs the president’s plans. Trump’s fight with Canada, Bannon argued, stems from his focus on the Arctic, parts of which are becoming more accessible to China and Russia because of climate change. The region, he said, is going to be the “great game of the 21st century,” and Trump knows that Canada’s northern border is poorly defended. If Canada doesn’t agree to become the 51st state, Bannon suggested, Trump will force it to.
A few Democrats in Congress have also seen the danger of Trump’s annexation threats. “As with everything with Trump, it’s hard to know whether he’s serious, whether he’s lying, whether he’ll back off,” Rep. Seth Magaziner (D-R.I.) told me in an interview. “But I think we have to take him at his word when he says he wants to expand the territory of the United States.”
Magaziner says that for him, “the alarm bells started ringing” during Trump’s inauguration. “In his speech, he said one of his goals was to expand our territory, which to me was jarring,” Magaziner told me. “That has not been the goal of the US president in well over a century.”
In contrast to some of the people with whom I spoke, Magaziner thinks the military definitely would follow Trump’s orders if he wanted to attack Canada. “That’s their job and their role,” he said. “But Congress doesn’t have to go along with this.” That’s why, earlier this month, he introduced the “No Invading Allies Act,” which would ban military funding for any operations to invade or seize territory in Panama, Greenland, or Canada without Congressional authorization.
So far, the bill has only a few co-sponsors, all Democrats, and it will require Republicans to move it forward in the House. But despite the unlikelihood of garnering GOP support, Magaziner thought it was important to put the issue on the table given Trump’s continued sparring with Canada.
“It’s insane that we’re having to have this conversation,” Magaziner said. “But the Republicans do not have the courage to stand up to Trump. I think they are in a state of denial, just as they were in denial about tariffs and his plans to cut Medicaid. Trump’s not letting it go. And we can’t ignore the possibility that he’ll do something reckless.”
