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Trump keeps up talk of U.S. expansion: From the Politics Desk

Welcome to the online version of From the Politics Desk, an evening newsletter that brings you the NBC News Politics team’s latest reporting and analysis from the White House, Capitol Hill and the campaign trail.

In today’s edition, we put Donald Trump's repeatedly stated desire to annex Canada in historical context. Plus, national political correspondent Steve Kornacki breaks down the counties that have seen the most dramatic political shifts during the Trump era.

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Canada, Greenland and the Panama Canal: Trump keeps up talk of U.S. expansion

During a freewheeling news conference at his Mar-a-Lago resort Tuesday, President-elect Donald Trump suggested he would consider using military force to gain control of the Panama Canal and Greenland and “economic force” to acquire Canada, Katherine Doyle and Vaughn Hillyard report.

A reporter asked Trump whether he could assure the public that he would not use military coercion against Panama or Greenland, as he has floated in recent weeks. “No, I can’t assure you on either of those two, but I can say this, we need them for economic security,” Trump said. He said later that he would not use military force against Canada, only “economic force.”

“That would really be something,” Trump said of the United States’ taking control of Canada.

“You get rid of that artificially drawn line, and you take a look at what that looks like. And it would also be much better for national security,” he added.

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said afterward on X: “There isn’t a snowball’s chance in hell that Canada would become part of the United States.”

Historical context: As Scott Bland writes, the sentiment — like Trump’s breezy confidence about the ease and popularity of Canada’s joining the United States — is far from new.

During the War of 1812, President Thomas Jefferson told Philadelphia newspaper editor Thomas Duane that “the acquisition of Canada this year, as far as the neighborhood of Quebec, will be a mere matter of marching.” (Spoiler alert: It wasn’t.) Among other things, the National Park Service notes in an article about the comment, many in the United States wrongly “assumed that the Canadian population would welcome the arrival of American forces.”

Later in the 1800s, a degree of pro-annexation sentiment developed within each of the major U.S. political parties, according to historian John W. Quist, united by a common thread that annexation of Canada “would occur peacefully and be welcomed by Canadians.”

Public opinion polling of Canada illustrates a distinct political culture that’s far different from the United States.’

A September poll from the Environics Institute showed Canadians preferring Vice President Kamala Harris to Trump by a 3-to-1 ratio ahead of the election, though Trump fared better than Joe Biden in the same measure four years ago, especially among younger Canadians. (The poll did show a plurality of Canadian Conservatives preferring him this time, which was not the case in 2020.)

Canadians generally have had favorable opinions about the United States over the last quarter-century, according to Pew Research Center surveys — but they were never lower than when Trump was president, dipping to 35% favorable in 2020 before they rebounded after Biden’s election. The Environics Institute’s polling shows a similar trend.

Meanwhile, in Greenland: The king of Denmark has changed the royal coat of arms for the first time in more than 500 years to more prominently feature Greenland, Astha Rajvanshi notes. And Donald Trump Jr. arrived in Greenland on Tuesday accompanied by at least two incoming White House officials.

The parts of the country that have seen the biggest political shifts during the Trump era

By Steve Kornacki

The Trump era has produced some dramatic changes in both the Republican and Democratic coalitions. One way to visualize the scale of those shifts is to zoom in on America’s political map.

Using the 2024 election and the 2012 election — the last one not to feature Donald Trump as the GOP presidential nominee — as bookends, we can measure partisan movement of all 3,143 counties in the country across the Trump era.

Nationally, the country has moved 5.5 points in the GOP’s direction over those 12 years — from Barack Obama’s popular vote margin of 3.8 points in 2012 to Trump’s 1.5-point victory in 2024. But it’s at the county level where some of the numbers are off the charts.

Here are the 25 counties that have moved toward the Republican Party by the largest margins during the Trump era.

The political transformation is staggering in those places. Starr County, for instance, which is on the Mexican border in south Texas, had the longest uninterrupted streak of voting Democratic in presidential elections of any county in the U.S. — until Trump broke it last year. Or there’s Kentucky’s Elliott County, which is in the state’s eastern coal region: Trump has carried it by 62, 51 and 44 points in his three campaigns. But before that, Elliott had gone Democratic in every election since it was formed in 1869.

Starr and Elliott both embody one of the two demographic features common to all 25 of those GOP-trending counties.

In Starr, 96% of residents are Hispanic — the second-highest concentration in the United States Nine other counties on the list also have majority-Hispanic populations, with concentrations from 51% to 95%.

Elliott, meanwhile, is 96% white. But the overwhelming share of the white population (89%) doesn’t have four-year college degrees. And the county also has a median household income far lower than Kentucky’s statewide figure. That basic profile also fits 14 other counties on the list — heavily white and blue-collar.

At the other end of the spectrum, there are the 25 areas that have moved the most decisively toward Democrats during the Trump era.

In those Democratic-trending places, other demographic characteristics loom large. Seven of the counties are in Utah, with sizable Mormon populations. Similarly, two-thirds of the population in Madison County, Idaho, is Mormon. As a group, Mormons are politically conservative and have made Utah one of the most reliably red states in the country. But among Republican-aligned groups, they are unusually cool toward Trump, who endured his worst state-level result in the 2016 primaries in Utah and again faced significant resistance during last year’s primaries.

Democrats also have made Trump-era gains in a pair of Georgia counties — Henry and Rockdale — that are experiencing rapid population growth keyed by an influx of middle-class African Americans.

The remaining 16 counties on the list stand out for two reasons. One is their wealth. Eleven of them feature six-figure median household incomes. Wyoming’s Teton County (where the Jackson Hole resort is located), Indiana’s Boone County, Georgia’s Forsyth County, New Mexico’s Los Alamos County and Kansas’ Johnson County all rank first in their states for median household income. Falls Church, Virginia (which is not technically a county but functions as one within the state), ranks No. 2 statewide. Broomfield County in Colorado and Collin County in Texas ranked third in their states.

Those 16 places also have large populations of white residents with four-year college degrees. In each, the concentration of white adult residents with at least bachelor’s degrees exceeds the national average. In Falls Church, for example, 82% of white adults are college-educated — the third-highest total out of 3,143 counties (or county equivalents) in the country.

🗞️ Today’s top stories

⚖️ In the courts: The federal judge who oversaw the classified documents case against Trump issued an order temporarily blocking the release of special counsel Jack Smith’s report on his investigation. Meanwhile, two agencies involved in the case face turnover in key roles. Read more →
⚖️ In the courts, cont.: A New York appeals court judge denied Trump's bid for an emergency order halting his scheduled sentencing Friday on criminal charges in the hush money case. Read more →
📱In the Metaverse: Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced the parent company of Facebook and Instagram will end its fact-checking program with trusted partners and replace it with a community-driven system similar to X’s Community Notes. Read more →
📱In the Metaverse, cont.: Dana White, the UFC CEO and a longtime friend of Trump’s, is joining Meta’s board. Read more →
⛔️ Shrinking the circle: The number of people with direct access to Trump will be more limited when he takes office in an effort to tighten the lines of communication with him. Read more →
📝 First order of business: The House passed a strict border measure named for a 22-year-old Georgia nursing school student whose murder last year by an immigrant in the country illegally became a flashpoint in the presidential campaign. Forty-eight Democrats joined every Republican in voting for the first bill of the new Congress. Read more →
🗳️ Never-ending election: The GOP-controlled North Carolina Supreme Court blocked state officials from certifying the Democratic candidate as the winner of a razor-thin race for the state’s high court. Read more →