Trump Uses His Bizarre Canada Joke to Bash Outgoing Finance Minister

Donald Trump has suggested yet again that Canada should be absorbed by the United States as the northern country grapples with the MAGA leader’s forthcoming trade plan.

The president-elect’s proposed trade tariffs on the Great White North (which include a 25 percent tariff on goods) have launched the country into a political and economic crisis. On Monday, Canada’s deputy prime minister and minister of finance, Chrystia Freeland, resigned just hours before releasing the nation’s first economic plan in response to Trump’s “America First” policies. In a stinging resignation letter, Freeland openly questioned Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s ability to deal with the tariffs, prompting Trudeau to discuss his own resignation with his Cabinet, according to Canadian broadcaster CTV News.

Trump, of course, had a diplomatic and delicate reply at the ready.

“The Great State of Canada is stunned as the Finance Minister resigns, or was fired, from her position by Governor Justin Trudeau,” Trump wrote on Truth Social late Monday. “Her behavior was totally toxic, and not at all conducive to making deals which are good for the very unhappy citizens of Canada. She will not be missed!!!”

Freeland was a key figure in negotiating the U.S.-Mexico-Canada trade agreement, or USMCA, in 2018 after Trump dissolved NAFTA. Now that Trump apparently sees the USMCA as less than favorable to the U.S., it’s no wonder he’s glad to see Freeland go.

Trump also made the biting state joke last week, when he falsely claimed during an interview with MSNBC’s Meet the Press that Mexico and Canada’s trade deficits with the United States were “subsidies,” rather than indicators that America’s neighbors are purchasing more of its goods than they were selling in return. In 2023, that differential—or deficit—was nearly $41 billion with Canada and $162 billion with Mexico, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

The president-elect also vastly overinflated the reality of the deficits, wrongly asserting that the U.S. is “subsidizing” its neighbors to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars each. Turning Canada—and Mexico, for that matter—into a state, was the obvious solution.

Trump has, apparently, been mocking Trudeau with the flagrant suggestion for years, long before the Canadian prime minister was wrestling with historically low approval ratings and nationalistic trade policies from one of its strongest trade partners.

“Trump used this 51st-state line all the time with Trudeau in his first term,” Trudeau’s former principal secretary Gerald Butts wrote on BlueSky earlier this month. “He’s doing it to rattle Canadian cages.”

The president-elect’s ex-allies also don’t believe there’s any underlying meaning to Trump’s bully behavior. In an interview with CBC News on Thursday, Trump’s former national security adviser John Bolton suggested that the comments about turning Canada into a state were little more than a public humiliation ritual for the president-elect.

“I think he’s poking at Justin Trudeau and trying to humiliate him, and I think Trump gets a laugh from it,” Bolton told CBC News.

When asked specifically about Trump’s quips targeted at Trudeau, Bolton told the outlet that he “wouldn’t over-intellectualize it.”

“I think he’s just mean,” Bolton said.

CNN reported Monday evening that it had wrongly identified a man who appeared in a video report claiming to be a long-term prisoner of former President Bashar Al Assad’s regime.

In reality, the man is a former Syrian intelligence officer. 

In a CNN story published last week, chief international correspondent Clarissa Ward and her crew were led by Syrian rebels into a Syrian air force headquarters in Damascus to look for Austin Tice, a missing American who they believed might have been held in a secret prison there. Instead, they discovered a locked cell where a man was hiding under a blanket. 

The man identified himself as Adel Gharbal from Homs, and claimed that he had been in solitary confinement for three months. He appeared surprised and overwhelmed to learn that Assad’s regime had fallen. The footage, if verifiable, would have been astounding. 

However, reports online suggested that the man might be lying about his identity. He appeared well-groomed and uninjured, and a website called Verify-Sy, which states that it fact-checks stories about Syria, said that it could not find any such “Adel Gharbal.”

Verify-Sy reported that residents of a neighborhood called Al Bayyada in Homs had identified the man as Salama Mohammad Salama, or “Abu Hamza,” a first lieutenant in Syrian air force intelligence.

On Monday, CNN was able to confirm that it was Salama.

“We can confirm the real identity of the man from our story last Wednesday as Salama Mohammed Salama,” Ward posted on X Monday evening. 

A resident of Al Bayyada provided CNN with a photograph of the same man, who appeared to be on duty in a government office. CNN was able to use facial recognition software to provide a match of more than 99 percent with the man who’d appeared in their report. 

While Verify-Sy also said that Salama had been jailed for less than a month for a dispute over “profit-sharing from extorted funds with a high-ranking officer,” CNN was not able to verify this claim.  

Multiple residents have accused Salama of having a reputation for extortion and harassment. More than a few journalists voiced their outrage at CNN’s reporting. 

“Amazing that she just drops this like a further development to the story and not an embarrassing piece of misinformation and poor reporting,” wrote Christin El-Kholy, an editor for New Lines Magazine, in a post on X.

Journalist Tariq Kenney-Shawa slammed Ward’s response. “No retraction, no apologies. The style of journalism that reporters like Clarissa Ward engage in is more about promoting themselves, their brand, & emotional narratives they believe will bolster their ratings, rather than reporting accurately & conscientiously,” he wrote.

And others were just disturbed by just how ridiculous it was to falsely portray the jailer as the prisoner. “You got played by a corrupt intelligence officer from a dead dictatorship,” journalist Jacob Silverman wrote in a post on X, responding to Ward. 

Hundreds of drones are reportedly descending over northern New Jersey. Residents have filmed them, mayors have complained about them, and an appallingly quiet federal response has led Americans across the country to offer wild speculations about their origins, with everyone from leftists to military contractors and conservative lawmakers chiming in on the issue.

A TikTok video by John Ferguson, the CEO of drone manufacturer Saxon Aerospace, was amplified by Joe Rogan on Sunday, with the podcaster remarking that it was the first conspiracy about the aerial machines that had him “genuinely concerned.”

Ferguson didn’t believe that the “small-car sized” drones indicated any “nefarious intent” but suggested that “the only reason why they would be flying, and flying that low, is because they’re trying to smell something on the ground,” suggesting that the drones could be looking for gas or radioactive material.

“Now drones, they have no reason to be in the air at night. Unless you’re doing some type of ISR work—intelligence surveillance reconnaissance you know, looking for bad guys or a search and rescue victim,” Ferguson continued. “The only reason why you would ever fly an unmanned aircraft at night is if you’re looking for something, whether it be a person, or trying to smell gas.”

Commercial-grade drones were first spotted lingering over sections of northern New Jersey in mid-November, sparking an FBI investigation into the aerial gathering. At a Wednesday briefing between the office of New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy and the Department of Homeland Security, mayors from the region lamented that no one from state or federal agencies had been able to tell them exactly how many drones were flying over the state, with estimates ranging from 400 to thousands, according to NBC News.

Nick Ribaudo, a self-described “leftist Ben Shapiro” and media critic, also joined in on the conspiracy conversation on TikTok, posting a skit on Sunday that highlighted the spontaneous rise in drone activity around the same time that UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson’s assassination was bringing Americans together across party lines.

“Sure seems like we could be doing a lot more if we were a unified working class,” Thompson joked in a video that drew more than 1.6 million views and nearly 300,000 likes.

The drone sightings have also breathed fresh air into some of the most outlandish conspiracies from the last several decades, including the so-called Project Blue Beam, a theory invented in the 1990s by Canadian Serge Monast that claimed a cabal of the world’s most powerful people were projecting images into the sky to induce fear and confusion among the masses. Images could include alien invasions, religious figures, or, in this case, hundreds of drones inexplicably patrolling New Jersey.

Politicians also joined the chorus on the drones, with some stoking fears that the sky gathering was a visitation from a foreign adversary.

New Jersey Republican Representative Jeff Van Drew suggested to Fox News on Wednesday that the drones were coming from an Iranian “mothership”—a claim that the Pentagon quickly shot down.

“There is no Iranian ship off the coast of the United States, and there’s no so-called mothership launching drones towards the United States,” Pentagon deputy press secretary Sabrina Singh said the same day.

Other Republicans also, perhaps a little overzealously, pointed to foreign actors as the reason behind the New Jersey drone takeover.

“The elusive maneuvering of these drones suggests a major military power sophistication that begs the question whether they have been deployed to test our defense capabilities—or worse—by violent dictatorships, perhaps maybe Russia, or China, or Iran, or North Korea,” Republican Representative Chris Smith told reporters on Saturday.

Georgia Republican Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene also got in on the drone action last week, claiming in a video rant on her X account that the government’s continued inability to ID the strange lights hovering over the Garden State was “total bullshit” that put every American “in danger.” She has since claimed that the federal government is controlling the drones.

Elon Musk’s favorite Democrat is one of Donald Trump’s top choices to head the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA.

CNN reported that Florida Representative Jared Moskowitz, who served as Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’s “Covid czar” during the pandemic, had his name floated for FEMA head. It’s not yet clear if Trump and Moskowitz have spoken about the role, but three sources with knowledge of Trump’s thinking confirmed to CNN that the Florida Democrat is definitely a contender for the role.

While the addition of a Democrat to Trump’s Cabinet may be surprising, Moskowitz has historically aligned himself with House Republicans on many issues and is familiar with many people within the Trump campaign.

Moskowitz was also the first Democrat to join the congressional caucus for Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE. He has advocated for crippling federal government cuts, supports Israel’s bombardment on Gaza, is one of the top recipients of AIPAC funding in the House, and was one of just 15 House Democrats to vote to give Trump the power to revoke nonprofits’ tax-exempt status.

These decisions make Moskowitz’s rumored FEMA nomination much less surprising. If Moskowitz does leave to join Trump’s Cabinet, however, his absence would make Democrats’ position in the House even more precarious. DeSantis is known to delay special elections for Democrats so that their seats may remain vacant for as long as possible.

A group of Senate Democrats introduced a bill Monday to abolish the Electoral College.

U.S. Senators Brian Schatz of Hawaii, Dick Durbin of Illinois, and Peter Welch of Vermont introduced a constitutional amendment to install a nationwide popular vote in presidential elections. Currently, a network of 538 electors represent the 50 states, and whichever candidate secures at least 270 electors is declared the winner.

The Senate Judiciary Committee posted on X Monday that the bill advocated “restoring democracy by allowing the direct election of presidents through popular vote alone.”

A press release from the group said that 17 states and the District of Columbia had agreed to bypass the Electoral College and allocate their electoral votes to the winner of a nationwide popular vote.

“In an election, the person who gets the most votes should win. It’s that simple. No one’s vote should count for more based on where they live. The Electoral College is outdated and it’s undemocratic. It’s time to end it,” Schatz said in a separate tweet.

But attempting to get rid of the Electoral College via constitutional amendment may prove to be a massive boondoggle for Democrats. Far easier than ratifying an amendment to abolish the Electoral College, the Democrats might be better off simply passing legislation to increase the number of House representatives, as the number of electors is determined by the number of senators and representatives.

The Founding Fathers intended for the House to continue expanding in proportion to the population of each state, but the number of representatives has been frozen at 435 since 1910. In 1910, each district had 211,000 constituents. In 2020, each district had an average of 762,000 constituents, a dramatic 360 percent increase.