Annexing Canada the Dumbest Idea Since DC Statehood
Donald Trump promised to build a wall at our Southern border in his first term. He promotes the erasure of our Northern border as he readies for a second term.
Granting sudden citizenship to 40 million foreigners strikes as one of the great unacknowledged about-faces in political history. Alas, if men can declare themselves women in our age of identity, then America Firsters can retain the title while depicting Canada as a “Minnesota: The Sequel” of sorts.
The original proponents of America First — to include aviator Charles Lindbergh, Marine Smedley Butler, and publisher Robert McCormick — opposed empire and foreign adventurism. Donald Trump followed that template to great success during his first term. This makes the recent emphasis on annexing Canada and the Panama Canal and revived talk of acquiring Greenland, bewildering.
“We talked a lot about Canada becoming the fifty-first state,” Senator Markwayne Mullin told reporters about a private meeting between the president and lawmakers this week. The junior senator from Oklahoma did not speak with The Twilight Zone theme playing in the background.
Everything about this down to “The Star-Spangled Banner” replacing the soaring “O Canada” as the Great White North’s national anthem seems a lose-lose. At least the Mexicans who in some cases traveled to the United States at great risk to themselves want citizenship. Bob and Doug McKenzie, Terrance and Phillip, Jack, Steve, and Jeff Hanson, and their fellow countrymen do not want to become Americans. Greenland, with half the population of Green Bay, similarly exhibits no enthusiasm for U.S. governance, either.
This mania for annexation stems not from America First, essentially a revival of principles outlined in George Washington’s Farewell Address, but from another, rival tradition.
The territorial ambitions of Thomas Jefferson ran beyond the Louisiana Purchase. After the breakout of the War of 1812, the former president imagined that the absorption of Canada into the United States would give the world “such an empire of liberty as she has never surveyed since the creation.” Instead, the war sowed disunity and prompted serious talk of secession in New England.
Still, prominent Americans bought into such oxymorons as “empire for liberty.” Early American novelist Charles Brockden Brown essentially anticipated Trump’s stated desires in saying of the United States: “We may be sure that, in no long time, it will stretch east and west from sea to sea, and from the north pole to the Isthmus of Panama.”
The present imagines what it experiences as normal, inevitable, and right. So, when in 2025 Americans hear the past call for a United States from coast to coast and pole to pole, the latter half of that equation shocks ears. But for most of those living 200 years ago (and quite a few even today), a republic stretching across the continent seemed a preposterous idea producing an ungovernable country.
In 1845, Imperial America received the name Manifest Destiny. That same year, Stephen C. Phillips, a former congressman from Massachusetts, delivered an eloquent address objecting to Texas statehood coming by virtue of a mere bill, an event that again demonstrated why addition always leads to calls for subtraction. Amid serious secession talk in Massachusetts, Phillips described the Constitution as:
A compact between certain States, providing for the establishment of a general government for certain purposes which are expressly prescribed, and stipulating that all rights not granted to the general government are reserved to the States and people respectively. By ratifying the Constitution, the original States became united in a political partnership, and as voluntary partners they have shared all the privileges and burdens, all the responsibilities and duties, of such a connection. The Constitution contains no provision for extending the partnership, except so far as to authorize the formation of new States within the limits of the original States or the territory belonging to them collectively; and it clearly was not contemplated or desired that the question of enlarging the common country should be considered or decided in any other manner than as a question submitted, like that upon the adoption of the Constitution, to the people of all the States.
The original states found their power profoundly diluted by additions to the partnership that transformed 1787’s one-of-thirteen stake into one-of-28 by the end of 1845. Beyond this, the original 13 created the federal government; the rest of the states more or less owed their existence to the federal government. This radically shifted power from states that created the United States to the nation, a word that by design nowhere refers to the United States in the Constitution, that created the states (a carefully chosen word that doubles for “nations” in modern usage save for, strangely, when referring to Delaware, New Mexico, and other “states” that we now treat as provinces).
Some subsequent expressions, often violent, of Manifest Destiny did not dilute the power of states but instead stripped power from the subjugated people.
At least one of these two outcomes occurs with the addition of Canada and Greenland. Either the federal government further weakens the power of the existing states, or the people within the annexed territory possess less power than each of the United States. Whatever the outcome, resentment ensues.
Beyond this, we can expect the inevitable payback of the conquered colonizing the conqueror country. Who really wants to hear aboot, hoser, or eh in everyday American conversation and surround themselves with people who imagine donuts and Labatt’s as part of the four food groups?
Trump wants to own all these places. He does not consider how this means they one day own us.
The sun never set on the British Empire. The colonized, rather than enjoy all that sunshine, moved en masse to London, a place where it always rains.
Reporter Salena Zito famously warned confused progressives to take Trump seriously, not literally. Possibly this advice misses the critics of the real estate developer’s ostensible plan of land acquisition. Maybe the art of his deal seeks Panama to treat its creator, the United States, with at least as much friendliness as it does China, Denmark to approach proposed U.S. security and energy arrangements involving Greenland with a more open mind, and Canada to dump its woke prime minister, which it just did.
One could argue the chest-beating makes sense when understood as a ruse to gain concessions. Absent this purpose, it harms our relationship with friendly countries in the short-term and harms the United States — it serves as an existential threat, really, given that more than doubling the size of the United States morphs it into something unrecognizable — if actualized in the long-term.
Conservatives believe in the rights of states. The greatest erosion of the power of states came through the federal government creating more and more of them to such a degree that Americans started regarding the U.S. Senate, the Electoral College, and the National Guard as anachronisms. Canada becoming Veralaskasota and Greenland Guam puts us further down the road away from small, self-government and toward gargantuan, distant empire.
This is the worst idea since D.C. statehood. Saskatoon for the Stoons.
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