U.S. President Donald Trump has been on a long-running quest to find a 51st U.S. state. While it’s always been more of a performative act than a hard-and-fast political strategy, the White House has treated his efforts in a fairly serious fashion.
The main focus of this two-year quest has been Canada. That’s not the case any longer, it seems. The President’s gaze has seemingly shifted from America’s northern neighbour to a former dictatorship located in the southern hemisphere.
Trump recently told Fox News that he is “seriously considering” making Venezuela the 51st U.S. State. “Venezuela loves Trump,” he also remarked. This comes a few months after the U.S. military captured Venezuelan dictator Nicolas Maduro and removed him from power. Trump wants the oil-rich country, with an estimated value of $40 trillion (USD), to become part of the U.S. and help offset escalating oil and gas prices due to the war in Iran.
Acting Venezuelan President Delcy Rodriguez has unsurprisingly spoken out against this. She said that Venezuela is “not a colony, but a free county” and will “continue to defend our integrity, our sovereignty, our independence, our history.” Indeed, the chances of it happening are almost zero. Even in her country’s weakened state, they don’t want to become the 51st U.S. state.
It should comfort some Canadians to know that Trump has decided to consider other nations for American statehood. The poking and prodding of the Great White North has seemingly come to an end. It could potentially lead to a decline in the rising tide of anti-American sentiments in our country, too.
What are some reasons that may have led Trump to stop caring about bringing Canada into the American fold? Or, to paraphrase a popular line from the annals of old Jewish-American humour, “what are we now, chopped liver?”
This all started during a Dec. 2024 meeting between then-President-elect Trump, then-Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and some of their advisers at Mar-a-Lago. The topic shifted to Trump’s announcement of a forthcoming 25 percent tariff on all Canadian goods. “Trudeau told Trump he cannot levy the tariff because it would kill the Canadian economy completely,” Fox News reported, which led the latter to respond, “so your country can’t survive unless it’s ripping off the U.S. to the tune of $100 billion?”
Trump suggested to Trudeau that “Canada become the 51st state, which caused the prime minister and others to laugh nervously.” While he didn’t dispute that “prime minister is a better title,” he still thought he could be “governor of the 51st state.” He would torment Trudeau with jokes and memes for several months that put our mediocre and ineffective PM in an even worse light. It was one of several factors that led to his political demise.
While some Canadians actually thought Trump was seriously considering annexing Canada, nothing could have been further from the truth. The President wasn’t going to start a war against our country. He knew that his rhetorical statements about Canada becoming the 51st U.S. state would generate plenty of media buzz and public attention, which are two things he constantly craves. He enjoyed needling Trudeau and, to a lesser extent, putting Prime Minister Mark Carney on the spot.
That being said, Trump also knew that Canada wasn’t interested in his offer. Trudeau and Carney both rejected it. Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre and other federal leaders rejected it. Provincial premiers rejected it. Mayors, councillors, reeves and school trustees rejected it. Polls also showed that Canadians and Americans rejected it, too.
As I speculated in a recent Loonie Politics column, “Maybe Trump got bored with it. Maybe he was sick and tired of talking about Canada all the time. Maybe the teasing and taunting of former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau became less enjoyable when Mark Carney assumed the role. Maybe it was always more of a joke than a serious idea.”
This may help explain why Trump started to discuss the possibility of purchasing Greenland. Telling the media that “I can do anything I want” with Cuba. Musing about Venezuela to anyone who would listen. None of them have expressed an ounce of interest, however.
The harsh reality is that no country or territory will take up Trump’s offer to become the 51st U.S. state. It has nothing to do with specific feelings about Trump’s leadership, Americans or anything else. Rather, it’s because they like things just the way they are.
That won’t stop Trump, of course. We’ll see who the President approaches next. It won’t be Canada, that’s for sure.
Michael Taube, a longtime newspaper columnist and political commentator, was a speechwriter for former Canadian prime minister Stephen Harper.
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