David French writes:

I had a conversation last week with a Canadian journalist about the culture war on American campuses. After we finished talking about that, she had one final question for me.

“What the hell is Trump thinking about Canada?”

She wasn’t just asking about President Trump’s tariff threats. She was also asking about Trump’s obsession with referring to Canada as the 51st state. The tariffs were somewhat understandable, even if terribly misguided. They are, after all, one of Trump’s few consistent policy obsessions. He likes tariffs perhaps even more than he likes walls.

But if anyone thinks that Trump is merely trolling or joking with his constant references to Canada as the 51st state, I refer you to my newsroom colleague Matina Stevis-Gridneff’s report that Trump told the former prime minister of Canada Justin Trudeau “that he did not believe that the treaty that demarcates the border between the two countries was valid and that he wants to revise the boundary.”

Trudeau told Canadians that Trump wanted “to see a total collapse of the Canadian economy, because that’ll make it easier to annex us.” The president’s statement is not one a world leader lightly makes, even if that world leader is named Donald Trump.

And why wouldn’t Canadians be alarmed? Trump has been quite clear with his intentions and his reasoning.

Let me quote Trump’s recent conversation with Laura Ingraham, a Fox News host.

“Here’s my problem with Canada,” Trump told Ingraham. “Canada was meant to be the 51st state, because we subsidized Canada by $200 billion a year.”

When a baffled Ingraham pressed him, saying, “You’re tougher with Canada than you are with some of our biggest adversaries,” Trump responded with the same talking point: “Only because it’s meant to be our 51st state.” Later, he said, “One of the nastiest countries to deal with is Canada.”

So, how did I answer my new Canadian friend? “Canada is Donald Trump’s Ukraine.”

Apparently, Trump agrees. On Friday, he made the comparison explicit. While talking to the press in the Oval Office, he once again called for Canada to become the 51st state and then compared Canada’s bargaining position to Ukraine’s. “The expression I use is some people don’t have the cards,” he said. “I used the expression about a week and a half ago” — referring to his infamous exchange with Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, when he told Zelensky: “You’re not in a good position. You don’t have the cards right now.”

I did not mean that Trump is preparing to invade or use force against Canada. But he does intend to dominate Canada, to render it little more than a vassal of the United States, making it only nominally independent. In fact, you can’t fully understand Trump’s approach to Ukraine without understanding his view of Canada (or Mexico or Greenland or Panama) — and vice versa.

By word and deed, Trump treats Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping as his only real peers. Our allies, by contrast, are our subordinates. It’s as if Putin, Xi and Trump are feudal lords, and each is entitled to his own feudal domain. [Continue reading…]