From a Fox News phone call about seizing Venezuela’s oil to a suspended defense pact with Canada, the president’s territorial fantasies are no longer rhetoric — they are policy. And they are costing Americans their alliances, their tourism economy, and the moral standing of the country itself.
On the morning of May 11, the Fox News congressional correspondent Bill Melugin came on air with a casual aside that ought to have stopped the country cold. President Donald Trump, he reported, had just spoken to Fox host John Roberts by phone and confirmed he was “seriously considering” making Venezuela — a sovereign nation of 28 million people — the 51st state of the United States. The president, Melugin added almost as an afterthought, had also mentioned that Venezuela holds an estimated forty trillion dollars in oil reserves. Roberts, to his credit, could barely hide his disbelief. The other hosts simply pivoted to a White House talking point. And just like that, the latest expansion of an unraveling presidency was absorbed into the morning news cycle as if it were a tax policy update.
It is not a tax policy update. It is the latest installment in what historians will, with the benefit of hindsight, recognize as the most aggressive imperial turn in American foreign policy in more than a century — a presidency that has openly threatened to annex Canada, Greenland, Panama, Cuba, and now Venezuela; that has weaponized tariffs against treaty allies; and that has, in the space of eighteen months, accomplished what Vladimir Putin spent two decades attempting: the genuine fracturing of the NATO alliance.
What is most striking is not the lawlessness of the ambition. It is that the political and journalistic class has by now grown so accustomed to it that a sitting American president openly musing on cable television about absorbing a sovereign Latin American country does not even generate a full day’s news cycle. We have, collectively, normalized the abnormal. This editorial is an attempt to un-normalize it.
1. The Fox News Confession
The Venezuela remark was not a one-off. As Newsweek documented, Trump had first floated Venezuelan statehood on Truth Social in March, posting “STATEHOOD, #51, ANYONE?” after the country defeated Italy in a World Baseball Classic semifinal. By May, the rhetorical flourish had hardened into something the White House was willing to characterize, on the record, as a “newfound partnership.” The administration’s Fox News Digital statement spoke of oil beginning to flow and credit accruing to a single individual: the president himself.
This was not subtle. The pretext for U.S. interest in Venezuela has, since the January military operation that captured former President Nicolás Maduro and installed his vice-president Delcy Rodríguez as the acting head of state, been narcoterrorism and democratic restoration. The actual reason — the only reason the president himself has ever cited on camera — is petroleum. Forty trillion dollars of it. As Rodríguez told reporters at the International Court of Justice the day after the Fox News interview, Venezuela has no plans to surrender its sovereignty to anyone, least of all to a foreign president who confuses oil reserves with consent.
The president is “seriously considering making Venezuela the 51st state.”
— Fox News congressional correspondent Bill Melugin, relaying a phone call with President Trump, May 11, 2026
What makes the Venezuela remark especially telling is the context in which it was delivered: not in a speech, not in a national address, not in a position paper, but in an unscripted phone call to a friendly cable host, sandwiched between segments about morning weather and immigration enforcement. There was no interagency review. There was no consultation with Congress. There was no diplomatic notification to Caracas or to any of Venezuela’s neighbors. The president of the United States proposed the absorption of a sovereign South American nation the way a man might propose buying a boat.
2. The Annexation Doctrine
Venezuela is the latest, not the first. Since taking office, Trump has openly demanded the annexation or absorption of Canada, Greenland, the Panama Canal Zone, Cuba, and Venezuela — a list compiled by his own administration’s preferred cable network. On January 5, 2026, in the wake of the Venezuela operation, the president renewed his Greenland push, telling reporters aboard Air Force One that the U.S. needs the Danish territory “from a national security situation.” Greenland’s Prime Minister Jens-Frederik Nielsen called the comments “utterly unacceptable” and demanded an end to what he termed disrespectful social-media fantasies about annexation.
Two weeks later, at the World Economic Forum in Davos, the president doubled down, declaring there was “no going back” on Greenland and threatening to tariff European allies until Denmark agreed to sell. Greenland’s prime minister responded with the rare clarity of a national leader who has read his own history: if forced to choose between the United States and Denmark, his country chooses Denmark. The Danish prime minister, Mette Frederiksen, has been blunter still — warning that a U.S. military attack on a NATO ally would mean the end of NATO and, with it, the post-1945 European security order.
“No more pressure. No more hints. No more fantasies about annexation.”
— Greenland Prime Minister Jens-Frederik Nielsen, January 2026
The Canadian front has been, if anything, more humiliating. The president has, since his first weeks in office, referred to Canada as a prospective “51st state” and to its head of government as a “governor.” Prime Minister Mark Carney’s retort at Davos — that Canada does not live because of the United States, but thrives because it is Canadian — earned him a revoked invitation to the president’s so-called “Board of Peace.” On May 18, the Pentagon quietly suspended a joint U.S.-Canada defense forum that has functioned continuously since the Second World War. Republican Representative Don Bacon of Nebraska, no friend of progressives, posted on social media that “cooler and wiser brains are needed” and that the cost of the president’s taunts had now moved from the economic to the military.
Trump declared at Davos in January 2026 that there was “no going back” on annexing Greenland, refusing to rule out military force against a NATO ally. Greenland’s PM called the threats “utterly unacceptable.”
Trump has repeatedly called for Canada to be absorbed into the United States, using tariffs and now the suspension of a WWII-era joint defense forum as coercive tools against a treaty ally.
The president told Fox News on May 11 he is “seriously considering” annexing Venezuela, citing its estimated forty-trillion-dollar oil reserves. Acting President Delcy Rodríguez rejected the idea outright.
The administration has pressured Panama to abandon the Belt and Road Initiative and accept rotating U.S. troops, while floating Cuba as a future addition — a return to the 1823 Monroe Doctrine framework.
Get Involved Today
Contribute to our mission and turn your concerns into action.
3. How a Year of Threats Became Policy
The progression has been documented in real time. What began as social-media trolling in January 2025 has, by mid-2026, hardened into actual policy actions with measurable consequences: suspended defense agreements, troop withdrawals, tariff threats against NATO members, and the captured leader of a sovereign country sitting in a U.S. federal courthouse. The timeline is worth reviewing in one place, because the rhythm of it — the steady drumbeat of escalation — is itself part of the argument that something is profoundly wrong.
4. The World Recoils — and Stops Buying Tickets
The consequences are not theoretical. They are showing up in two places that touch ordinary Americans most directly: in the alliances that keep them safe, and in the tourism receipts of every coastal city, border town, and convention bureau in the country.
On the alliance front, the damage is now openly acknowledged even by the institutions Trump has spent the most time bullying. The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, hardly a hotbed of progressivism, published an analysis this month concluding that “the persistent U.S. threat of military invasion against Greenland has been a turning point for even the most reluctant of allies,” that European nations are now “quiet quitting” the United States in every domain where they can, and that Washington has so punished its own power that it has become its own biggest threat. PBS NewsHour reports that allies on NATO’s eastern flank are now actively planning how to backfill positions in case U.S. troop withdrawals continue.
The economic side of the ledger is, if anything, more vivid because it is more measurable. Foreign tourism to the United States dropped 5.4% in 2025 even as international travel rose 4% in the rest of the world; Tourism Economics describes “the sentiment drag” as “severe.” Canadian visits — long the single largest source of foreign visitors — collapsed by nearly 30%, with more Americans now driving north than Canadians driving south for the first time in modern statistical memory. The U.S. Travel Association estimates a loss of more than sixty billion dollars in tourism revenue. The 2026 FIFA World Cup, which was supposed to be the industry’s lifeline, has instead become a referendum: travel bans on nineteen countries (including four that qualified for the tournament) have pushed casual fans to spend their dollars in Canada and Mexico instead.
Canadian Visitors
Canadian travel to the U.S. collapsed by nearly 30% in 2025 amid annexation taunts and tariff threats — the largest single-source decline in modern American tourism data.
Al Jazeera →Foreign Visitor Spending
Foreign tourist spending in the U.S. is projected to slide nearly 11% — Tourism Economics cites “the effects of antipathy towards the US” as the principal driver.
The Conversation →Revenue Lost
The U.S. Travel Association projects more than sixty billion dollars in lost tourism revenue — money that would have flowed to restaurants, hotels, museums, and Main Street businesses in all fifty states.
Gulf News / AFP →5. What This Costs the Average Citizen
It is tempting, for the average American who does not work in foreign policy or the travel industry, to treat all of this as remote — as the kind of thing that happens to diplomats and ambassadors and people who live in places they will never visit. That instinct is wrong, and it is worth saying plainly why.
The suspension of the joint U.S.-Canada defense pact, which Representative Bacon flagged as a self-inflicted wound, is not a Beltway abstraction; it governs how the two countries jointly defend North American airspace and how American military families stationed on either side of the border live and operate. The withdrawal of 5,000 troops from Germany is not a Pentagon line item; it is a signal to every European capital that the credibility of America’s word is now an open question, which in turn raises the price of everything from Treasury bonds (because foreign central banks are now reweighting their reserves) to imported cars and pharmaceuticals (because tariffs on European goods were announced the same week).
The tourism collapse is more immediate still. Sixty-four billion dollars in lost foreign visitor revenue is not a national-accounting curiosity; it is the wages of waitstaff in New Orleans, hotel housekeepers in Orlando, taxi drivers in New York, retail workers in Las Vegas, park rangers in Yellowstone, and every small-business owner who depended on a Canadian, a European, or a Latin American tourist walking through the door. When Brand USA — the federal tourism marketing agency — had its budget gutted in mid-2025, the country lost its single biggest promotional tool at the precise moment it most needed one. The damage will not show up on a balance sheet labeled “annexation costs.” It will show up in tip jars, hiring freezes, and shuttered restaurants in places that never voted on any of this.
And then there is the harder cost to measure: the cost in standing. The retired American diplomat Daniel Fried, now of the Atlantic Council, has described the president’s posture toward neighbors as that of a 19th-century imperialist. He is not wrong, and the description is not flattery. A country that holds itself out to the world as the leader of a rules-based order, and which then announces that it will absorb a sovereign South American country because the country happens to sit on oil, has surrendered the only argument it ever had against Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping. The Trump administration has, in eighteen months, retired the moral premise of American foreign policy and replaced it with a real-estate transaction.
The Off-Ramp the Cabinet Refuses to Take
The 25th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, ratified in 1967, provides the constitutional mechanism for the removal of a president who is “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office.” Section 4 specifies that the vice president, together with a majority of the principal officers of the Cabinet — or, alternatively, “such other body as Congress may by law provide” — may declare a sitting president unfit. The president may contest that declaration, after which a two-thirds vote of both chambers is required to sustain removal. The drafters of the amendment built it explicitly to address the scenario the country now confronts: a president whose judgment has so deteriorated that the chain of national command can no longer rely on it.
Who Is Calling for It
On April 10, 2026, Representative Jamie Raskin (D-MD), ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee, formally demanded that the White House physician conduct a comprehensive cognitive and neurological evaluation of the president and release the findings publicly. Four days later, Raskin introduced legislation with fifty Democratic co-sponsors to establish a Commission on Presidential Capacity — the “such other body” expressly contemplated by the amendment itself. Senator Ed Markey (D-MA), Representatives Eric Swalwell (D-CA), Sydney Kamlager-Dove (D-CA), Yassamin Ansari (D-AZ), and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) have publicly endorsed invocation. Even conservative commentator Candace Owens has, according to reporting from the Deseret News, joined the call.
The Constitutional Argument
The case for invocation does not rest on policy disagreement. It rests on a documented pattern of erratic behavior incompatible with the discharge of executive responsibilities: profane and apocalyptic Truth Social posts demanding the destruction of Iranian power plants and bridges; the off-the-cuff proposal on a Fox News phone call to absorb a sovereign nation as a state of the Union; the public suspension of a defense treaty with a treaty ally because its prime minister gave an interview the president disliked. As Raskin’s April 10 letter to the White House physician put it, the president’s recent conduct exhibits what medical experts have described as patterns “consistent with dementia and cognitive decline.” When the commander-in-chief of the world’s largest nuclear arsenal communicates major foreign-policy decisions via cable-news call-ins, the question of his fitness is not partisan. It is structural.
Why It Won’t Happen — and Why That Doesn’t Matter
The practical barriers are real. A 25th Amendment invocation requires Vice President JD Vance and a majority of a Cabinet hand-picked for personal loyalty — a coalition that, on present evidence, will not assemble itself voluntarily. Raskin’s commission bill is unlikely to pass a House that remains under Republican control. The clinical professor of medicine Lawrence Altman has argued in STAT that the amendment was never designed as a partisan tool and would be unlikely to succeed even if invoked.
But the impossibility of removal is not an argument against demanding it. The 25th Amendment exists precisely because the framers of the modern Constitution understood that a moment would arrive when the political class would have to decide whether the country’s institutions still meant what they said. That moment has arrived. The barriers to invocation are not a defense of the president’s conduct. They are an indictment of the political class that refuses to act on it.
6. What This Says About Priorities
There is one thing more to say, and it is the thing that ought to be said last because it is the thing that matters most. The territorial fantasies are not random. They follow a pattern, and the pattern is revelatory. The president does not propose annexing nations that are poor and inconvenient. He proposes annexing the ones with oil (Venezuela), with rare-earth minerals (Greenland), with strategic shipping lanes (the Panama Canal), and with a captive consumer market for American goods (Canada). The proposals are not ideological. They are extractive. They reveal a chief executive who understands the office of the presidency as a vehicle for personal aggrandizement and the projection of brand, and who has confused the dignity of the United States with the inventory of a Trump-branded balance sheet.
An American president who governed according to the actual interests of American citizens would not have spent eighteen months alienating the country’s two largest tourism markets, its largest treaty alliance, and the four neighboring nations most central to North and South American security. He would not have suspended a defense agreement with Canada that has functioned without interruption since 1940. He would not have proposed seizing Greenland with the same casualness another politician might use to propose a new bridge. He would, most fundamentally, not have done these things on cable television, in unscripted phone calls, and in social-media posts written at three o’clock in the morning.
The fact that the president has done all of these things, and that the political class around him has chosen not to act on what the 25th Amendment exists to address, is the story. It is the story of an executive branch that has stopped being executed. It is the story of a Cabinet that has chosen loyalty over duty. It is the story of a country whose institutional immune system has, for reasons that future historians will struggle to explain, declined to respond to the infection.
Editorial Conclusion
The president of the United States proposed the annexation of a sovereign South American country in an unscripted phone call to a cable-news host, citing the country’s oil reserves as the principal reason. He did this while his administration was simultaneously dismantling a 1940 defense pact with Canada, withdrawing troops from Germany, and threatening to tariff Denmark over a territory that is not for sale. None of this is normal. None of it is policy. And none of it is sustainable.
The 25th Amendment exists for the moment when a president’s judgment can no longer be trusted with the powers of the office. That moment has arrived, and the political class — Republican and Democratic — knows it. The question is no longer whether the conduct warrants invocation. The question is whether the institutions of American government still have the will to defend the country from the person they have placed in charge of it. The Republic will not save itself. It must be saved, deliberately, by the people the Constitution names.
Sources & References
- Mediaite — Trump “Seriously Considering Making Venezuela the 51st State,” Fox News Reports (May 11, 2026)
- Fox News — Trump eyes Venezuela as 51st state, citing $40 trillion in oil wealth (May 11, 2026)
- CNN — Venezuela’s acting president defends country’s territory, rejects 51st state remarks (May 12, 2026)
- Newsweek — Donald Trump Wants Venezuela to Be 51st State — Is It Possible? (May 11, 2026)
- Time — Trump’s New Annexation Threat Sparks Fury from Greenland’s PM (January 5, 2026)
- Time — U.S. Troop Withdrawals From Europe Won’t Hurt Defenses, Says NATO Chief (May 20, 2026)
- Al Jazeera — Greenland warns Trump against any “fantasies” of annexation (January 5, 2026)
- House of Commons Library — President Trump and Greenland: Frequently Asked Questions (May 2026)
- Al Jazeera — U.S. suspends joint defence effort with Canada dating back to World War II (May 18, 2026)
- Euronews — Trump threatens Canada with 100% tariff over its trade deal with China (January 24, 2026)
- NBC News — Trump’s latest Western Hemisphere fixation: Canada (January 18, 2026)
- PBS NewsHour — NATO allies bewildered by Trump’s about-face on U.S. troop moves in Europe (May 2026)
- Carnegie Endowment — Trump Turns NATO Into a Tool of Coercion (May 2026)
- Carnegie Endowment — The Crisis Trump Is Causing in Panama Will Reach Far Into Latin America (2025)
- The Conversation — Will a “Trump slump” continue to hit US tourism in 2026? (February 2026)
- Al Jazeera — Foreign tourism to the US drops amid Trump-era policies (September 2025)
- U.S. House Judiciary — Raskin demands White House physician evaluate Trump’s cognitive fitness (April 10, 2026)
- MSNBC / MS NOW — Raskin offers bill setting up 25th Amendment process to remove Trump (April 14, 2026)
- Deseret News — Democrats introduce Trump fitness bill amid 25th Amendment calls (April 14, 2026)
- STAT News — A presidential-health expert: The 25th Amendment is not an option (April 21, 2026)
Related News
