Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said he and President-electTrump’s briefly discussed his comments about making the neighboring country the “51st state” during his Mar-a-Lago visit in November.
“It actually sort of came up at one point and then we started musing back and forth about this,” Trudeau told Jen Psaki in a preview clip of a longer interview expected to air on Sunday.
“And when I started to suggest, well, maybe there could be a trade for Vermont or California for certain parts, he immediately decided that it was not that funny anymore, and we moved on to a different conversation.”
Trump has repeatedly jabbed at Trudeu, who announced this week he would be resigning as Canada’s prime minister, over a U.S. merger with Canada. It has been seen in part as an effort by Trump to win a better economic deal with Canada as the president-elect warns of new tariffs on Canadian exports.
Trudeau said that if Trump implements tariffs on Canadian exports, it would warrant a “robust response.”
“This isn’t out of the blue that he’s doing this, but my focus has to be not on something that he’s talking about that will not ever happen, but more on something that might well happen — that if he does choose to go forward with tariffs that raise the cost of just about everything for American citizens, that on top of that, we’re going to have to have a robust response to that,” Trudeau said.
Besides talking about making Canada the 51st state, Trump has also discussed buying Greenland and taking back the Panama Canal.
He did not rule out the use of military force when it came to Greenland and the Panama Canal during a Tuesday Mar-a-Lago press conference.
“It might be that you’ll have to do something. The Panama Canal is vital to our country,” he told reporters at the resort in Palm Beach, Fla. “We need Greenland for national security purposes.”
