Donald Trump has repeatedly raised the specter of annexing Canada since his inauguration to a second term as president.
The president’s rhetoric about making Canada “the 51st state” may seem to project confidence, a 21st-century vision of manifest destiny, a belief in the United States’ right and obligation to expand.
Trump is not the first American leader to dream of northern expansion. To me, a historian of early U.S.-Canadian relations, these designs suggest not power, but weakness and simmering divisions inside the United States.
