At first, Trump’s comments threatening to turn Canada into the 51st state seemed like a cruel joke. Surely, calling Trudeau the “governor” of “the great state of Canada” was just a bullying tactic. But Trump’s bizarre barking has started to feel legitimately menacing. What if he does want to annex Canada? The incoming U.S. president appears to be in an imperial mood, with all his talk of buying Greenland and taking control of the Panama Canal.
At Maclean’s, we had two questions: could Trump actually invade? And if yes, what would that look like? So we asked Stephen Marche, a Canadian writer and the author of The Next Civil War: Dispatches from the American Future,to map it out. His spirited essay on the topic is somewhat reassuring: Marche argues that the U.S. is too weak and divided to conquer anything. “America has come off of 70 years of failed imperialist adventures,” says Marche, “in which it discovered it couldn’t hold on to Afghanistan or Iraq or Vietnam or anywhere else.”
But his essay is also chilling. Marche warns of four more years of wacky, scary rhetoric from Trump, whom he calls “a rage-attention machine.” He reminds readers that destabilizing outbursts is how Trump rose to power—and how he’ll keep it once he’s president again. “He has to keep the world afraid of him, because the moment that stops, his power collapses. He is attempting to spread loathsome anarchy everywhere, not just here.”
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—Emily Landau, executive editor, Maclean’s
