Donald Trump is leaning in to his joking suggestion that the United States annex Canada with a bizarre Truth Social meme.

Last week, Trump announced that he plans to impose a 25 percent, potentially trade war–inducing tariff on goods from top U.S. trading partners Mexico and Canada when he takes office in January.

On Friday, when Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau warned Trump of the damage this would cause, the president-elect reportedly joked that “if Canada can’t survive without ripping off the U.S. to the tune of $100 billion a year, then maybe Canada should become the fifty-first state and Trudeau should become its governor.”

The joke has proven an understandably controversial one, but Trump on Tuesday afternoon followed up on it by posting an apparently AI-generated image to Truth Social captioned “Oh Canada!” The image depicts the president-elect atop a mountain, beside a Canadian flag, gazing upon a pinnacle that users have noted closely resembles that of the Matterhorn in Switzerland.

The post recalls some of the more delirious moments of Trump’s first term, namely his half-joking posts about the administration purchasing Greenland. It also offers a foretaste of the presidential communications that await us in his second term, thanks to the wonders of AI image generation.

But in this instance, behind the post and original joke, there lies a serious threat against our top trading partners, which analysts say would have dire consequences if fulfilled—even barring retaliatory actions.

NPR reports that Trump’s proposed tariffs would likely raise the cost of groceries and gasoline for American consumers. The Brookings Institute notes that the tariffs could be even more ruinous considering “approximately 50% of U.S. trade with Canada and Mexico is driven by supply chains” in which products cross borders repeatedly during their production.

Vivek Ramaswamy and Elon Musk may be on the same team now that Donald Trump has named them co-chairs of the still-in-the-works Department of Governmental Efficiency, or DOGE, but behind closed doors, Ramaswamy has reportedly spent years bad-mouthing the Tesla CEO.

A new report by CNN’s K-File uncovered audio and video recordings in which Ramaswamy openly derided the SpaceX founder, routinely referring to Musk as a “circus monkey,” while accusing him of “bending the knee to Xi Jinping” when it came to international economics.

“I think Tesla is increasingly beholden to China,” Ramaswamy said in May 2023, while discussing Musk’s decision to build a battery plant in Shanghai. “I have no reason to think Elon won’t jump like a circus monkey when Xi Jinping calls in the hour of need.”

Ramaswamy’s more pointed critiques honed in on Musk’s comments about Taiwan, after the carmaker drew praise from Chinese officials in 2022 for claiming that the former Chinese colony should become a “special administrative zone.” That, according to Ramaswamy, was little more than a successful political ploy for Musk to obtain regulatory approvals and tax breaks from the Chinese Communist Party for his Shanghai factory, which singularly accounted for more than half of Tesla’s global sales in 2023.

Musk’s apparent aptitude for political games for the benefit of his own companies ultimately calls into question his appointment to a (still nonexistent) agency with high ambitions of cutting government spending, and whether he’ll follow through on those claims or simply restructure the government from the inside to line his own wallet.

“Both Tesla and SpaceX quite likely would not exist as successful businesses if it were not for the use of public funding, either through subsidies, through the electric car industry, or through actual government contracting in the case of SpaceX,” Ramaswamy said in 2022 on a Fox News podcast. “Elon Musk has, I think, demonstrated his willingness to change his political tunes based on the favors that he gets to be able to do business in China.”

In a lengthy 2023 post on X in which Ramaswamy openly targeted Musk, the biotech billionaire wrote that “the U.S. needs leaders who aren’t in China’s pocket.”

In a statement to CNN, Ramaswamy said that the pair had “aired some of these issues” the first time they spoke.

“I love him and respect the hell out of him, and I’m proud to call him a friend. The only country he puts first is the same one I do: the United States of America,” Ramaswamy told the network.

Tucker Carlson is back in Russia to gush over how much he loves the country under Vladimir Putin.

The former Fox News host posted a video on X Tuesday from Moscow’s Red Square announcing that he’s interviewing Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov. The purpose of this visit to Russia, Carlson said, is because U.S. support of Ukraine has “driven the U.S. ever closer to a nuclear conflict with Russia.”

“We are, unbeknownst to most Americans, in a hot war with Russia,” Carlson said. “An undeclared war, a war you did not vote for and that most Americans don’t want but that is ongoing.”

Carlson attacked President Biden for allowing Ukraine to strike Russian territory with American-made missiles and made the misleading implication that the U.S. military is directly involved in Ukraine’s war with........

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