Blame Canada
As I noted on Bluesky, many Americans – including me – have tended to treat Donald Trump's comments about annexing Canada as a joke. That attitude is a mistake on our part, but let me explain why we've made it.
We've treated the idea of a conflict with Canada as a joke because, for most of our lives, the idea of a conflict with Canada has, quite literally, been a joke. The suggestion that our closest ally might transform into our deadliest enemy has been a comedic premise that has been mined for laughs time and time again.
During the Reagan era, for instance, when ABC ran a controversial miniseries about a Soviet takeover of the United States called "Amerika," Saturday Night Live spoofed it in 1987 with a version pretending to portray a Canadian invasion of the United States called "Amerida."
You can watch the full bit here, starting around 7 minutes. Stick around for Bronson Pinchot's Carl Sagan.
Less than a decade later, we had another spoof of an implausible American-Canadian conflict in Michael Moore's 1995 comedy film Canadian Bacon.
This time around, the threat of an invasion comes from the American side of the border, as an inept and unpopular president tries to gin up a new Cold War-style conflict in order to boost his sagging popularity. (Played by Alan Alda, he makes the memorably lame threat: "Surrender Pronto, or We'll Level Toronto.")
In a nice reversal, Canadian comedy legend John Candy got to play an American yahoo who starts the conflict by disparaging Canadian beer at a hockey game.
Four years later, at the peak of their show's popularity, South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut provided another example of "war with Canada" played as an obviously absurd idea.
Here, the conflict starts when the boys start imitating some foul-mouthed Canadian performers and their parents launch a culture war against Canada that soon becomes a real war.
And on and on.
The fact that "war with Canada" has been a reliable punchline in American TV and films for the past few decades should explain why Americans have tended to ignore Trump's noises on this topic – it's seemed much less "real" to us than the ongoing headlines about the wrecking crew that is very much dismantling our government and destroying our democracy each and every day.
But while all of this explains our lack of attention to Donald Trump's threats, it shouldn't excuse it.
No matter how ludicrous loose talk about "annexing Canada" or making a sovereign nation and longtime ally "the 51st state" might seem to us, we have to remember that it's one thing when comedians are clearly making jokes about it and quite another when the commander-in-chief is making threats about it.
He's the President of the United States. And even if he doesn't act like one, we have to react to him like one.
Americans seem surprised that Canada is taking seriously something we've all just dismissed as a joke, but we can't laugh it off anymore. There will be serious consequences to this stupidity, from the obvious economic toll and the strain on our political alliances, to the upcoming World Cup and Olympic Games as well.
Trump is an idiot and a liar, but he still has considerable power at his disposal and a clear willingness to wreck things until he gets his way.
Who can blame Canada for being alarmed?
