President Donald Trump isn’t closing the door on using force to attempt to annex Greenland and Canada. But he said the prospect of attacking Ottawa appears “highly unlikely.”
Greenland on the other hand?
“I don’t rule it out,” Trump told host Kristen Welker in an interview that aired Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” “I don’t say I’m going to do it, but I don’t rule out anything. No, not there. We need Greenland very badly. Greenland is a very small amount of people, which we’ll take care of, and we’ll cherish them, and all of that. But we need that for international security.”
Since his November election, the president has made no secret of his desire to acquire Greenland. “We need it. We have to have it,” he told a radio host in March. That same month, White House officials led by Vice President JD Vance visited a U.S. Space Force base on the island, which boasts significant mineral reserves and a strategic spot in the Arctic.
It’s been a similar story with Canada. The president has often mused about turning the country into a 51st state. Trump’s fixation was “a real thing,” warned former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.
“I don’t see it with Canada. I just don’t see it, I have to be honest with you,” Trump said of attacking the country in the NBC interview.
But the patriotic fervor Trump’s repeated attacks unleashed in the True North helped propel former banker Mark Carney and the previously beleaguered Liberals back into government for the fourth consecutive term — the first three were with Trudeau at the helm. Conservative candidate Pierre Poilievre not only saw his party lose a double-digit lead, he even lost his own seat in last week’s elections.
“These are not idle threats,” Carney of said Trump after his election victory last week. “President Trump is trying to break us so that America can own us. That will never, that will never, ever happen. But we also must recognize the reality that our world has fundamentally changed.”
The two are set to meet at the White House on Tuesday.
Trump downplayed the idea of using force on Canada with Welker. But he said he’d bring up a merger with Carney.
“I’ll always talk about that,” Trump said. “You know why? We subsidize Canada to the tune of $200 billion a year. We don’t need their cars. In fact, we don’t want their cars. We don’t need their energy. We don’t even want their energy. We have more than they do.”
Trump’s claim of a $200 billion subsidy, perhaps based in part on the U.S.-Canada trade deficit, appears firmly off base. But the president continues to cite the figure when discussing the two countries.
“And, if you look at our map, if you look at the geography — I’m a real estate guy at heart. When I look down at that without that artificial line that was drawn with a ruler many years ago,” Trump said. “Was just an artificial line, goes straight across. You don’t even realize. What a beautiful country it would be. It would be great.”
