Why Trump Has It Out for Canada

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When Donald Trump looks at a map, he doesn’t see nations.

He sees property.

All of those pretty colors do not represent actual places filled with human beings who have distinct cultures, languages, and histories; the planet, to Trump, is a big board game, like Risk or Monopoly.

Greenland isn’t a real location—it’s a valuable chunk of territory nestled between Boardwalk and Park Place.

The Strait of Hormuz isn’t an international waterway—it’s a thing to control somewhere between Kamchatka and East Africa.

This inability to grasp the existence of independent nations drives the president to fury when countries and their governments refuse to play along with his delusions.

Trump cannot understand why Iran won’t bend to his will, why NATO won’t instantly obey his orders, why South Korea and Japan won’t just write checks or provide troops on demand.

The only people Trump seems to respect are the autocrats in Beijing and Moscow and Pyongyang who, like him, view the world as a brutal competition for power and territory.

Now Trump has declared economic war on Canada, a nation that has vexed him for years.

Even by the standards of Trump’s many fixations, his obsession with Canada has become not only weird but truly destructive.

He has opened a giant political and economic rift with one of America’s biggest trading partners, a sister nation, and an ally in the common defense of North America and Europe.

Why does Trump hate Canada so much? We can only speculate about what goes on in the president’s head, but his actions suggest a pattern.