“Trump whisperer” Maggie Haberman isn’t buying that Donald Trump will try to annex Canada as part of his grand plans for U.S. expansion.
The New York Times political correspondent told CNN that the suggestion to turn Canada into the “51st state,” which Donald Trump raised on Tuesday after Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s resignation, was “clearly much more of a troll and sort of a dominance play” than an actual proposition.
Originating online, the term “troll” refers to someone who says outrageous things they don’t actually believe in order to provoke a response in others.
Last month, Trump had trolled Trudeau in a similar fashion, calling him “governor” of “the great state of Canada.”
Trump’s bluster hasn’t gone over well with at least one prominent MAGA ally—Pierre Poilievre, the leader of Canada’s Conservative Party.
“Canada will never be the 51st state. Period,” he wrote in an X post Tuesday. “We are a great and independent country.”
While Trump might be joking about Canada, Haberman suggested to CNN that the president-elect’s imperial attitude toward Greenland and Panama might be more than trolling.
“This idea of acquiring Greenland for strategic purposes has happened for decades,” Haberman said earlier in the interview. “A close friend of Trump’s, Ron Lauder, suggested it in his first term.”
Trump on Tuesday mentioned the possibility of purchasing Greenland, a nation rich in natural resources, and reclaiming the Panama Canal from Panama—which has controlled it for the past 25 years. He said he wasn’t willing to rule out the use of military force in either case.
“It’s not clear if that’s actually something he’s thinking about or something he said because he was—quite visibly—in a pretty bad mood during this press conference," Haberman told CNN.
She noted that Trump has never been one to shy away from an aggressive attitude toward international relations.
“Trump, at least in his language, has never been especially respectful of sovereign borders,” she said. “We’ll see what that looks like in actual practice.”
With the president-elect’s inauguration less than two weeks away, it won’t be long before Trump will have the opportunity to convert his bravado into action.
