A Cartoon Villain with a Brain Injury

The first time I heard that Donald Trump wanted to annex Canada, I thought maybe he’d finally decided to flee the country and was just making the paperwork easier. But no—this wasn’t a retirement plan or some late-night Fox News hallucination. He was serious. The man who spent his life bankrupting everything he touched had decided that Canada—polite, frostbitten, maple-drenched Canada—was next on the chopping block. Not for its culture, its people, or its poutine, but for its rocks.

Not just any rocks, of course. Critical minerals. The kind that keep the world turning—lithium, cobalt, nickel—the building blocks of electric cars, missile systems, and whatever dystopian tech they’re cooking up to replace human workers. And Canada, with all its vast, unassuming wilderness, just happens to be sitting on a mountain of them. To Trump, that makes it less of a country and more of a mineral buffet that he has every right to plunder.

So now, like a cartoon villain with a brain injury, Trump has taken to calling Canada the “51st state” and referring to Justin Trudeau as “Governor,” because in his tiny, misshapen view of the world, foreign leaders are just middle managers waiting to be fired. You could practically hear Trudeau’s soul leave his body when he had to address this lunacy. The man already looks like he’s been awake for three years straight, and now he has to deal with a belligerent casino owner threatening to carve up his country like a well-done steak at Mar-a-Lago.

And yet, somehow, Canada isn’t even the biggest victim of Trump’s shakedown diplomacy. That honor belongs to Ukraine. Because while Canada is just being threatened with takeover, Ukraine is getting its legs broken in the alley behind the restaurant—and Trump’s demanding they hand over their wallet while it’s happening.

See, Trump has decided that the United States should no longer just give Ukraine military aid out of some old-fashioned sense of “supporting democracy” or “not letting Russia steamroll an entire nation.” No, no—that’s socialism. Instead, he’s proposing a much more refined system: the War-Time Pawn Shop, where Kyiv trades its natural resources for weapons like a desperate gambler handing over his watch to cover one more hand of blackjack.

Trump’s logic, if you can call it that, is that the U.S. has given Ukraine “close to” $375 billion in aid, and now it’s time for collateral. Because in his mind, every relationship is just another sleazy business deal waiting to be leveraged. If your house is on fire and Trump throws you a bucket of water, don’t be surprised when he demands your kidney in return.

Zelenskyy, who has spent the past few years dealing with a literal war criminal, now has to sit through negotiations with a metaphorical one. And like any man cornered in a room full of lunatics, he’s trying to smile through the madness. “We are open to investment,” he said, which is diplomatic code for “I am saying words so I don’t get shot.”

Meanwhile, the rest of the world is watching this with the exhausted disbelief of a man realizing his plane is being piloted by a chimpanzee in a red tie. Even Germany, a country that rarely reacts to anything stronger than a sternly worded statement, called Trump’s demands “very self-centered.” Which is like calling Jeffrey Dahmer “a little hungry.”

And of course, Vladimir Putin is loving every second of it. You think he’s worried about Trump’s scheme? No—he’s thrilled. The entire Kremlin is probably watching this play out like a reality show, laughing their asses off as Trump does their propaganda work for them. Oh, Ukraine doesn’t even get free aid anymore? Oh, it’s just another American business deal? That’s the exact kind of narrative Russia wants—proof that the West doesn’t actually care about Ukraine, just its resources.

And the scariest part? This won’t stop with Ukraine. If Trump pulls this off, every alliance turns into a transaction. Taiwan better start shipping semiconductors to Mar-a-Lago if they want U.S. protection. NATO might have to Venmo Trump a few billion just to stay relevant. Hell, don’t be surprised if he tries to sell Montana to the Saudis and then claims it was a “terrific deal, the best deal, nobody’s ever seen a deal like this.”

This isn’t foreign policy. This is a mob shake-down. This is Trump flipping through a catalog of world resources and pointing at the ones he wants. This is a corrupt real estate developer treating entire nations like distressed properties.

And the worst part? The world is actually entertaining it.

We’re through the looking glass, folks. Diplomacy is dead, and the Art of the Deal has been replaced with the Art of the Mugging. And the only thing more terrifying than watching Trump shake down the world like a two-bit gangster is realizing that nobody seems willing to stop him.