He’s still rolling with it.
Two weeks after inviting the Canadian prime minister to dinner at his wretched hive of scum and villainy in West Palm Beach and threatening to turn America’s largest trading partner into the 51st state if Justin Trudeau doesn’t give him all his lunch money, Donald J. Trump continues to float the idea of annexing the country and recently posted the following on his dollar store version of Twitter:
It was a pleasure to have dinner the other night with Governor Justin Trudeau of the Great State of Canada. I look forward to seeing the Governor again soon so that we may continue our in depth talks on Tariffs and Trade, the results of which will be truly spectacular for all!
“The other night” is doing some heavy lifting as it took him eleven days to come up with this zinger. Calling Trudeau “the Governor” might’ve been shrugged off during his first term as the incurious dotard simply not knowing what fellow world leaders’ job titles actually are, and Crom only knows what he thinks it entails to be Governor-General — King Charles’ domestic Mini-me and technically the Commonwealth country’s unelected head of state — if he’s even heard of the sweet, mostly ceremonial gig. Someone probably once had to explain to him that a Prime Minister isn’t a televangelist supporter who preaches the Gospel on Jeff Bezos’ streaming service.
But Old Treasonballs is clearly trolling with his latest, especially coming only days after an unhinged interview with Kristen Welker on NBC News’ “Meet the Press” where he made similar claims following yet another dumb post featuring an AI image of him standing atop a mountain with the Canadian flag while gazing towards Switzerland’s Matterhorn.
No explanation was given for what he might’ve been up to in the Swiss Alps but trying to capture the von Trapp family would certainly be on-brand.
This is all just Trump being Trump throwing shit at the wall to see what sticks of course, and beefing with Canada is probably a better distraction from his plans to devastate the North American economy by bringing in a 25 percent tariff on imports from Canada and Mexico and a way to have the daily news cycle be about anything other than his disastrous cabinet picks.
Speaking of disastrous cabinet picks, boasting about discussing international relations in a dinner meeting that included three of his stooges — Howard Lutnick (Commerce), Mike Waltz (National Security) and Doug Burgum (Interior) — was certainly a choice given it’s a clear violation of the Logan Act that prohibits private citizens from chatting up foreign governments without Uncle Sam’s permission. Like it was this past summer when he hung out and talked shop with fellow bloodthirsty bullies Viktor Orbán and Benjamin Netanyahu. It’s not as if anyone expects the guy with the Get Out of Jail Free card to suddenly start obeying the law NOW but it’s worth mentioning that the Logan Act — which nobody has ever been convicted of violating — was trotted out as the reason the president-elect was unable to meet with Japanese leader Shigeru Ishiba prior to next month’s scheduled inauguration. More likely he didn’t want to risk hurting the feefees of North Korean love interest Kim Jung Un.
Not that Trump is even eligible to visit the country, let alone rule it with a short-fingered fist, given his multiple felony convictions that have yet to be stricken with the stroke of a Sharpie. Canada is currently just another place he is no longer welcome — like Melania’s bedroom, his Scottish golf course or Miss Teen USA changing rooms — which is going to make planning the upcoming G7 meeting in Alberta tricky.
He’s surely also pissed that the lame duck Trudeau isn’t simply obeying in advance. While the embattled PM has promised to put more helicopters and drones along the border as appeasement, Trudeau also said he’ll respond with punishing tariffs of his own if necessary like he did the last time Trump pulled this crap. Like some sort of reverse quid pro quo, as the great Hannibal Lecter might say.
“We will, of course, as we did eight years ago, respond to unfair tariffs in a number of ways and we’re still looking at the right ways to respond,” Trudeau said last week, referring to Canada’s retaliation to previous new taxes slapped on steel and aluminum goods by successfully targeting seemingly random imports — booze, orange juice, toilet paper, even Dear Leader’s beloved ketchup — that would cause financial pain specifically in districts held by Republicans and their donors. “”They’re coming in with a lot clearer set of ideas of what they want to do right away than they had last time, but we can do this. We can do this because when crises happen, when we are challenged as a country, we step up.”
There’s been a lot of references to Mike Judge’s cult sci-fi classic Idiocracy in recent years as we grapple with the scorched-earth dumbification of the Trump era, but a better fit here is Michael Moore’s underappreciated 1995 comedy Canadian Bacon about a US president who needed a new foreign adversary to help boost his sagging poll numbers.
(For the record, Canadians have no idea why Americans insist on calling ham “Canadian bacon” when we simply call bacon “bacon,” a controversy Trudeau addressed in a recent softball interview with Stephen Colbert. Also “Canadian whiskey” is just rye, eh.)
With Russia no longer interested in reliving the Cold War again, the president (Alan Alda) gets talked into picking a fight with Canada after seeing footage of a beer-fuelled hockey brawl in Niagara Falls on TV. He was skeptical the American public would go along with it at first but, as a Stephen Milleresque aide (Kevin Pollack) explains: “Mr. President, the American people will buy whatever we tell them to.”
Moore may have been ahead of his time as Fox News didn’t even exist when the movie was released. He also gave himself one of the better lines in a cameo as a gun-toting MAGA prototype gearing up to kick some Canuck butt: “It’s time we put the America back in North America!” Moore’s sole non-documentary film ends with (spoiler!) nuclear armageddon being averted at the last second thanks to a lunatic American with an assault rifle (Rhea Perlman), a twist from the director better known for Bowling for Columbine even M. Night Shyamalan mightn’t see coming.
