Is Trump Trying to "Hitler" Canada?

In the early 1930s, Adolf Hitler began a campaign of coercive trade practices, bullying nations like Romania, Hungary, Bulgaria, Sweden, and Turkey into making separate economic deals that disproportionately benefited Nazi Germany. Many world leaders, including British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, believed that by making economic concessions, they could appease Hitler and avoid war. They were wrong.

Today, in 2025, President Donald Trump is pursuing an eerily similar playbook. As Canada celebrates its independence and sovereignty, Trump has increasingly made it clear that he sees Canada as economically subordinate to the United States. He has floated the idea of economically forcing Canada to become the "51st state," a chilling notion for any sovereign nation.

Trump has imposed and re-imposed tariffs on Canadian goods like aluminum, steel, softwood lumber, all on a whim. He has interfered with Canada’s tax policies, pushing back on digital service taxes that target American tech giants. He wants to dismantle Canadian dairy quotas, deregulate our banking system, and move all steel and auto production south of the border. In short, Trump wants to weaken Canada’s economic autonomy to make it easier to control.

This is economic coercion. It’s designed to create dependence. It echoes Hitler's strategy: make economies fragile, then offer lopsided trade deals as the only lifeline.

But the parallels don't stop at trade.

In Nazi Germany, Jews were scapegoated. Hitler blamed them for the country's economic collapse, moral decline, and political instability. By 1935, just two years after taking power, Hitler revoked Jewish citizenship. Jews began fleeing Germany as early as 1933, suspecting detention and worse to come. In 1938, Hitler invaded Austria. By 1939, after the war began, most countries including Canada, shut their borders to fleeing Jews.

When the world closed its doors, Hitler felt emboldened. It wasn’t until 1943 that the Western world heard serious rumors of mass extermination camps. Many dismissed them as exaggerations or propaganda. It wasn't until 1944–1945, when Soviet and American troops began liberating camps, that the world finally confronted the full horror of industrial genocide.

Now look at the United States in 2025:

• Trump is building remote detention camps in the Florida Everglades for thousands of migrants.

• People are being held in tents with cages, surrounded by alligator-infested waters, with only one way in and one way out.

• Trump has floated ideas about stripping citizenship from U.S. immigrants and expanding mass deportations.

• Like Hitler, he portrays these vulnerable groups as criminals, invaders, and the source of national decay.

Trump isn't just a political threat. He is an authoritarian with a clear and familiar playbook: blame, isolate, coerce, detain, and dominate.

Just as Hitler used economic manipulation to soften Europe for conquest, Trump is using tariffs, trade bullying, and regulatory pressure to fracture Canada’s independence. Combine that with the rise of right-wing extremism, digital surveillance, and anti-immigrant hysteria, and we are seeing the historical warning signs repeat themselves.

This isn’t fearmongering. This is history rhyming.

And if Canada, and the world, doesn’t push back loudly and united, we risk becoming the cautionary tale our grandparents warned us about.

Because appeasement didn’t work in the 1930s. And it won’t work now.