The New York Times’ Maggie Haberman on Tuesday suggested President-elect Donald Trump is “clearly in an expansionist mindset” with his recent talk about buying Greenland, merging the United States with Canada, and taking over the Panama Canal.
But Haberman sought to differentiate the three ideas and explain how “these things are not all the same.”
“Panama is a relatively new focus of his,” she told CNN’s Anderson Cooper, also noting how the idea of America “acquiring Greenland for strategic purposes” has been floated for decades.
Trump’s chatter about Canada becoming the 51st state, though, is “clearly much more of a troll,” said Haberman.
It’s also “sort of a dominance play,” she added.
Trump earlier Tuesday refused to rule out using military action to seize control of the Panama Canal and Greenland. Haberman wasn’t sure if Trump was actually thinking about using force or if it was just because he was angry about his upcoming sentencing in his hush money trial and the possible public release of special counsel Jack Smith’s reports on his classified documents and Jan. 6 election subversion cases.
Cooper asked if it actually could all just be a ploy by Trump to distract Americans if he fails to completely fulfill some of his more extreme campaign promises, such as conducting the mass deportation of undocumented immigrants, when he returns to the White House in less than two weeks.
Haberman doubted it was a technique of willful distraction.
Instead, she put it down to Trump’s tactic of flooding the information zone to overwhelm the media and critics.
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