President-elect Donald Trump might not have been joking when he suggested Canada could become the 51st state.
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Last Friday, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau flew unannounced to Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm beach, Fla., after the incoming president threatened to impose tariffs on Canadian products being imported to the United States.
“On January 20th, as one of my many first Executive Orders, I will sign all necessary documents to charge Mexico and Canada a 25% Tariff on ALL products coming into the United States, and its ridiculous Open Borders,” Trump wrote in a post to his Truth Social platform, complaining that “thousands of people are pouring through Mexico and Canada, bringing Crime and Drugs at levels never seen before.”
Trump said the new tariffs would remain in place “until such time as Drugs, in particular Fentanyl, and all Illegal Aliens stop this Invasion of our Country!”
After the two sat down for a hastily arranged dinner Friday night in Florida, Trudeau said they “shared a productive wide-ranging discussion.” The day afterwards, Trump wrote in a Truth Social post that they discussed “many important topics that will require both Countries to work together to address.”
But Trudeau was not invited to stay at Mar-a-Lago and had to spend the night at a hotel in West Palm Beach.
In the days following the dinner, news trickled out that seemed to indicate that the meeting might not have been as smooth as Trudeau was making it seem.
Paraphrasing their discussion over dinner Friday night from conversations he had with two people at the table, Fox News senior White House correspondent Peter Doocy said that when Trudeau informed Trump that tariffs would “kill the Canadian economy,” Trump joked that “if the Canadian economy can’t survive without ripping off the U.S. to the tune of $100 billion a year then maybe Canada should become the 51st state.”
Trudeau, he mused, could stay on as its governor.
Sources told Fox News that one of their fellow dinner guests told Trump that “Canada would be a very liberal state.” In response, Trump floated the idea of splitting Canada into two states: a conservative and a liberal one.
Public Safety Minister Dominic LeBlanc said that Trump’s comments were a joke and nothing more.
“In a three-hour social evening at the president’s residence in Florida on a long weekend of American Thanksgiving the conversation was going to be light-hearted,” LeBlanc said on Tuesday afternoon. “We had a discussion on trade issues, on border security that was very productive. But the fact that there’s a warm, cordial relationship between the two leaders and the president is able to joke like that for us was a positive thing.”
Nearly $3.6 billion Canadian (US $2.7 billion) worth of goods and services cross the border each day and Canada is the top export destination for 36 U.S. states.
But Tuesday night, Trump went viral after he shared an AI-generated photo of himself standing beside a Canadian flag on a mountain top along with the caption, “Oh Canada!”
On Instagram, the post generated over 376,000 likes in its first two hours, with many of Trump’s 29 million followers begging him to “invade Canada.”
“We need you, Donald,” one person pleaded. “Please save my country!!!”
“Please buy Canada,” another asked.
Trump and Trudeau had a rocky relationship during his first term as president. In 2018, Trump called Trudeau “very dishonest & weak” after the Canadian leader threatened to escalate a trade war between the two countries.
Trump also branded Trudeau as “two-faced” after the prime minister was caught on a hot mic at a 2019 NATO meeting in London making fun of then-president.
Elsewhere, Trump referred to Trudeau as a “far-left lunatic” following Ottawa’s harsh response to the “Freedom Convoy” protests that crippled the nation’s capital back in 2022.
Earlier this summer in an interview with video game streamer Adin Ross, Trump floated the theory that Trudeau was the son of Communist Leader Fidel Castro.
“He’s turned very liberal, actually they say he’s the son of Fidel Castro, and could be,” Trump told Ross in a video that has been viewed more than 2.5 million times. “Anything’s possible in this world, you know?”
In his recent book, Save America, Trump insists that Trudeau could be the son of the late Cuban revolutionary leader.
“His mother was beautiful and wild. In the 1970s, she would go ‘clubbing’ with the Rolling Stones, but she was also somehow associated with Fidel Castro. She said he was ‘the sexiest man I’ve ever met,’ and a lot of people say that Justin is his son,” Trump writes, in an excerpt obtained by the Daily Mail.
Trump admitted that Trudeau is aware of the longstanding rumour, but writes: “He swears that he isn’t, but how the hell would he know! Castro had good hair, the ‘father’ didn’t, Justin has good hair, and has become a Communist just like Castro.”