Politics
Trump trolls Canada again, shares map with country as part of US: 'Oh Canada!'
President-elect Trump on Tuesday again suggested that Canada should be added as the U.S.’s 51st state, sharing maps showing Canada as part of the U.S.
Trump shared a pair of posts to his social media platform Truth Social on Tuesday night — one with a map of the U.S. and Canada with “United States” written across the two countries and another post with the U.S. and Canada covered in an American Flag.
“Oh Canada!” he wrote in one post.
The incoming president has been pushing recently for Canada to be added to the U.S., including earlier on Tuesday.
TRUMP TROLLING CANADA AS 51ST STATE COULD BOOST DEMOCRATS WITH ‘BLUE-STATE BEHEMOTH’
U.S. President Donald Trump, left, and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau talk prior to a NATO round table meeting at The Grove hotel and resort in Watford, Hertfordshire, England, Dec. 4, 2019. (AP Photo/Frank Augstein)
“Canada and the United States. That would really be something,” Trump said at a news conference at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Florida. “They should be a state.”
On Monday, the president-elect argued in a social media post that “many people in Canada LOVE being the 51st State.”
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“The United States can no longer suffer the massive Trade Deficits and Subsidies that Canada needs to stay afloat,” he wrote on Truth Social.
“Justin Trudeau knew this, and resigned. If Canada merged with the U.S., there would be no Tariffs, taxes would go way down, and they would be TOTALLY SECURE from the threat of the Russian and Chinese Ships that are constantly surrounding them,” he added. “Together, what a great Nation it would be!!!”
President-elect Trump and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images, left, CHANDAN KHANNA/AFP via Getty Images, right.)
Trudeau, who announced Monday that he will resign as Canadian prime minister once a replacement is chosen, said Tuesday there is no way Canada would join the U.S.
“There isn’t a snowball’s chance in hell that Canada would become part of the United States,” Trudeau wrote on the social media platform X. “Workers and communities in both our countries benefit from being each other’s biggest trading and security partner.”
Trump has been trolling Canada in recent weeks, floating the idea of it becoming the 51st state and posting a doctored photo of him standing beside a Canadian flag on top of a mountain.
President-elect Donald Trump arrives to speak at a news conference at Austin-Bergstrom International Airport, Friday, Oct. 25, 2024, in Austin, Texas. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)
The president-elect has also mocked Trudeau, repeatedly referring to him as “governor.” Additionally, Trump has threatened to impose massive tariffs on Canada.
Trump has also been pushing for Denmark to sell the North Atlantic island of Greenland to the U.S.
Rep. Eric Swalwell, D-Calif., sparked online backlash with a post in which he questioned President-elect Donald Trump’s ability to bring down grocery prices. Social media users were quick to point out that food prices spiked under President Biden’s leadership.
“I don’t care if Donald Trump wants to buy Greenland. I just want to know what he’s going to do to lower the cost of groceries,” Rep. Swalwell wrote on X.
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Social media users were quick to point out that the congressman’s party had control of the House, the Senate and the White House while Americans struggled to afford food. While they later lost control of the House after the 2022 midterm elections, the Democrats held on to the Senate.
Rep. Eric Swalwell at Fox News Studio (John Lamparski)
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Swalwell later appeared to double down on his assertion that Trump will not lower grocery prices.
“Guys, it’s so obvious. Trump has no idea how to lower your cost of groceries. So he’s going to distract you by sending your kids to die fighting Canada,” Swalwell tweeted.
President-elect Donald Trump makes remarks at Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Fla., on Jan. 7, 2025. (REUTERS/Carlos Barria)
However, this only brought more fury the congressman’s way, with social media users questioning why the congressman is not more worried about the fires raging in his state that has so far left two dead and forced thousands to flee their homes.
AMERICANS FORCED TO LEAVE EVERYTHING BEHIND TO ESCAPE DEADLY WILDFIRES NOW FACING NEW THREAT
On Tuesday, President Biden released a statement on the deadly wildfires and announced that FEMA had approved a grant to help fight the inferno.
Donald Trump Jr. is shown after arriving in Nuuk, Greenland, on Jan. 7, 2025. (EMIL STACH/Ritzau Scanpix/AFP via Getty Images)
“I am being frequently briefed on the wildfires in west Los Angeles. My team and I are in touch with state and local officials, and I have offered any federal assistance that is needed to help suppress the terrible Pacific Palisades fire,” Biden said in a statement.
The Trump team has not responded to a request for comment.
SAN FRANCISCO — Former U.S. Rep. Barbara Lee, a prominent progressive Democrat who represented the East Bay in Congress for more than two decades, said Wednesday she will run for Oakland mayor in an April special election prompted by the recall of the city’s former leader.
“I’ve never shied away from a challenge,” Lee said in a news release announcing her candidacy. “I’m always ready to fight for Oakland. Together, we can and will restore Oakland as a beacon for innovators, artists, builders, and entrepreneurs — creating opportunities that lift all families and neighborhoods.”
Lee’s storied Bay Area political career took an uncertain turn after Lee ran unsuccessfully in 2024 for the U.S. Senate, finishing fourth in the March primary against fellow Democratic Congressman Adam Schiff, who won in the November election.
Lee, 78, is running in an April 15 special election to fill the remainder of former Mayor Sheng Thao’s term, which ends in January 2027. Thao, a progressive politician elected in 2022, was recalled in November amid voter frustration with rampant crime, homelessness and a perception that the government had lost control of city streets. Alameda County Dist. Atty. Pamela Price, a vocal advocate for criminal justice reform, was also recalled in November.
“[Lee] is perfect for right now. She has the progressive bonafides, but she is also willing to make compromises and she is pragmatic,” said Keally McBride, a University of San Francisco politics professor and an Oakland resident. “That is what Oakland is desperately needing right now.”
Lee’s dominant name recognition and her long tenure representing the East Bay complicates the campaign for a list of local leaders who have already announced plans to run. Several candidates have indicated they would drop out if Lee joined the race.
“In terms of gaining respect and gaining alliances across the city, it would be hard to get a candidate better than her,” McBride said. “No one is going to be able to compete against her.”
Nonetheless, Loren Taylor, a former Oakland City Council member considered a top contender for the post, said he is preparing to file candidate paperwork next week. Taylor, an engineer who represented East Oakland for four years on the council, narrowly lost to Thao in the 2022 mayoral race after garnering the most first-place votes in the city’s ranked-choice voting system, which allows voters to select multiple candidates by order of preference.
“I am a kid from this town and have benefited so much from what Oakland could offer. I see the amazing potential of our beautiful, incredible city. But we’re not realizing it,” he said this week.
Taylor, 47, is more than 30 years Lee’s junior. He said he respects Lee’s service in Congress, but that Oakland needs a mayor with a “fresh-perspective approach to leadership and government.”
“One that is informed by working on the ground, in community and within City Hall,” Taylor said, “as opposed to someone who has been focused on Washington, D.C., Republican, Democrat politics at the national level.”
“This is a different position, one that she hasn’t had. Executive administration is much different from legislating,” he said.
Lee’s announcement generated excitement among several local community groups whose members have been lobbying her to jump in the race. They are hopeful that Lee, known in Washington for her anti-war positions and as a champion of civil rights, can usher in an era of stability in a city contending with several crises, including a gnawing budget deficit and spiking crime rates.
A coalition of local business, labor and education organizations implored Lee to run in a December letter calling for a new leader “who can restore integrity to the office of the mayor, unite us in a time of division, and help us address critical issues around the budget, public safety, housing, and inequity in our town.”
Born in El Paso, Texas, Lee eventually moved to the Bay Area and attended Mills College in Oakland as a single mom. She obtained her master’s degree in social work from UC Berkeley in 1975, and founded an organization that offered mental health services to East Bay residents.
She served as chief of staff to the late congressman and former Oakland Mayor Ron Dellums, and won his congressional seat after he retired in 1998. Lee also served in the state Legislature in the 1990s.
Even with her broad level of community support, Lee would inherit as mayor a list of weighty problems in Oakland that could test her legislative credentials.
Violent and property crimes have soared in Oakland, with homicides jumping to more than 100 deaths a year for multiple years during the pandemic. The City Council in December approved a series of cuts to services in efforts to close a $130-million budget deficit. The number of homeless people in Oakland increased by 9% between 2022 and 2024.
Last year, Gov. Gavin Newsom deployed a large contingent of California Highway Patrol officers to Oakland to mitigate the crime surge, with a focus on curtailing brazen retail and vehicle thefts. The operation has resulted in nearly 1,200 arrests, the recovery of more than 2,200 stolen cars and the seizure of 124 illegal guns as of November, according to the CHP.
“The crime issue needs to be brought under control,” McBride said, adding that the business community is reeling from retail thefts that have become routine. “People are afraid to invest in the city, and that makes the budget deficit worse.”
The mounting emergencies had many wondering whether Lee would want the mayor’s job, a post that will inevitably require tough decisions that could compromise her status as a progressive icon.
“She doesn’t need the job for her legacy,” said Ludovic Blain, a Berkeley resident and chief executive of the California Donor Table, a statewide network of donors who fund progressive candidates. “She’d be doing it to be of service, and to help and to lead.”
During an interview with KQED Tuesday, Lee reflected on her time in Congress and said she had spent weeks deliberating the difficult decision.
“If I make a decision to run,” she said, “it’s going to be because I want to do it and I think I can help make life better for everyone.”
Since his death, Jimmy Carter has been lauded for brokering the Camp David Accords and for his post-White House mission to help the poor and battle disease. But glossed over amid all the tributes is the burdensome legacy that Mr. Carter left for his Democratic Party: a presidency long caricatured as a symbol of ineffectiveness and weakness.
This perception has shadowed the party for nearly 40 years. It was forged in the seizure of American hostages by Iranian militants in 1979 and the failed military attempt to free them, as well as the invasion of Afghanistan by the Soviet Union. And it lingered in memories of Mr. Carter wearing a cardigan as he asked Americans to conserve energy, or bemoaning what he called a “crisis of confidence” in an address to the nation that became a textbook example of political self-harm.
Over the decades, these events have provided endless fodder for attacks by Republicans, who reveled in invoking Mr. Carter’s name to deride Democrats. And that mockery, in turn, influenced the way Democrats have presented themselves to voters. Without Mr. Carter’s image of weakness on national security and defense, for example, it is hard to imagine the party’s war-hero candidate for president in 2004 introducing himself with a salute at its nominating convention and saying, “I’m John Kerry and I’m reporting for duty.”
Mr. Carter’s political legacy produced what many analysts argue was a kind of conditioned response: an overreaction among Democrats anxious to avoid comparisons to him on foreign policy issues. This was evident in the roster of prominent congressional Democrats, including Hillary Clinton, who voted for the 2002 resolution that authorized President George W. Bush to take the nation to war in Iraq, a vote many said they came to regret.
It could even be discerned in the taciturn response from President Biden after the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021 descended into chaos, said Julian E. Zelizer, a professor of political history at Princeton.
“Democrats always feel defensive about these messy situations,” Professor Zelizer said. He linked that reflex to the taking of the Iranian hostages and to the raid Mr. Carter ordered to save them, which ended in a helicopter crash that killed eight Americans.
“They don’t act with command in talking about tough foreign policy events,” Mr. Zelizer said, pointing in particular to the struggle by Democrats in Congress over Iraq. “The instinct when things go bad is to either be silent or apologetic.”
Historians and Democrats say the characterization of Mr. Carter as weak is in many ways unfair and exaggerated, ignoring some of the major accomplishments of his four years in office. He ordered an American boycott of the 1980 Summer Olympics in Moscow and a grain embargo against the Soviet Union after its invasion of Afghanistan.
Nonetheless, “He became an exemplar of why you had to look tough and not weak in foreign policy,” said Robert Shrum, a Democratic consultant who worked for Senator Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts when Mr. Kennedy challenged Mr. Carter for the presidential nomination in 1980.
Indeed, more than 30 years after Mr. Carter left office, Republicans reached back to the Carter years to dismiss a momentous decision by President Barack Obama that delivered a forceful rebuttal to the idea of Democrats as weak or ineffective: approving the American raid to assassinate Osama bin Laden in 2011.
“Even Jimmy Carter would have given that order,” said Mitt Romney, the Republican candidate for president.
(None other than Mr. Biden, as Mr. Obama’s vice president, made that raid a staple of his speeches in their 2012 re-election campaign. “Osama bin Laden is dead, and General Motors is alive,” Mr. Biden said often.)
This aspect of Mr. Carter’s legacy was ultimately set in cement by his defeat at the hands of Ronald Reagan, a former actor and governor who presented himself as a decisive and forceful contrast to the sitting president. “He was the standard by which Democrats and Republicans judged political effectiveness,” Tim Naftali, a presidential historian, said of Mr. Reagan. “So by definition, Carter, whom Reagan had beaten, was the opposite of effective, the model to be avoided.”
“The killer Reagan line, ‘Are you better off than you were four years ago?’ was first aimed at Carter,” he said.
So it was that from the moment Mr. Carter left office — on the day Iranian militants released the hostages — Democratic candidates for president have sought, with word and action, to escape his shadow.
Bill Clinton frequently invoked strength in talking about both international and domestic issues when he ran for president. During his 1996 re-election campaign, he boasted of putting 100,000 police on the street and promised to keep America “the world’s strongest force for peace and freedom and prosperity.”
For her part, Mrs. Clinton, who as the Democratic candidate in 2016 also had to allay voters’ doubts about whether a woman had the fortitude to be president, repeatedly cited her experience as secretary of state under Mr. Obama, and made “Stronger together” her campaign slogan. She used the words “strong,” “stronger” and “strength” 13 times in her speech accepting the party’s nomination.
In last year’s presidential campaign, Kamala Harris, the vice president and Democratic candidate against Donald J. Trump, boasted of owning a Glock pistol, and left little doubt about her belief in military might as she accepted her party’s nomination in Chicago.
“As commander in chief, I will ensure America always has the strongest, most lethal fighting force in the world,” she said.
But some efforts to escape the Carter legacy only seemed to reinforce it.
Michael S. Dukakis, the former governor of Massachusetts, was ridiculed when he donned a green tank helmet and “military coveralls over his Filene’s suit,” as a New York Times report said at the time, to ride a 63-ton M1 tank around a field at a manufacturing plant in front of a battery of television cameras. “Rat-a-tat,” Mr. Dukakis said.
“Dukakis was trying to demonstrate strength,” Mr. Shrum said. “Instead, he demonstrated weakness. People are always fighting the last campaigns, and they are often wrong.”
In the case of Mr. Kerry, who, like Mr. Kennedy, was a Shrum client, Republicans sought to turn his decorated military record against him by accusing him of fabricating details of his Navy service, in an advertising campaign — later discredited — that was launched by a group calling itself Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. (One producer of those ads was Chris LaCivita, a co-manager of Mr. Trump’s 2024 campaign.)
To be fair, the seeds for this line of attack against Democrats predated Mr. Carter: In 1972, four years before Mr. Carter burst on the national scene, Republicans invoked the “weak on defense” argument against George McGovern, the Democratic senator from South Dakota, when he challenged Richard M. Nixon for the presidency.
“The 1972 presidential campaign and the landslide defeat of McGovern made the weak-on-defense argument a centerpiece for the G.O.P.,” Mr. Zelizer said. “The problems that Carter faced in the final year — Iran and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan — cemented this political imbalance, placing Democrats in a position to constantly stress that they would be tough on defense.”
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