While you were sleeping, U.S. President Donald Trump was online trolling Canada, Greenland and Venezuela.
In a late-night post to his Truth Social platform, Trump published an altered image that features the U.S. flag covering parts of North and South America, including Canada, Greenland and Venezuela.
The social media photo was published just before 1 a.m. on Tuesday. It shows Trump displaying the map from the Oval Office as European leaders look on.
Trump has repeatedly expressed a desire to turn Canada into the U.S.’s “cherished” 51st state. Citing national security, Trump is also aggressively trying to annex Greenland, which is an autonomous territory of Denmark.
Canada, Denmark and the U.S. are all allies under the NATO security alliance. Both Canada and Denmark have pushed back against Trump’s expansionist ambitions.
The Trump administration is also looking to exert greater control over Venezuela’s oil industry after U.S. forces abducted Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro and his wife in a daring Jan. 3 military operation.
An undoctored version of the image was originally released by the White House on Aug. 18, 2025. Gathered around Trump and a map of Ukraine, it featured U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer, Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, French President Emmanuel Macron, Finnish President Alexander Stubb, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte.
Trump’s push to influence North and South America aligns with his administration’s new U.S. National Security Strategy. Released in late 2025, the document explains that the U.S. is seeking “to restore American preeminence in the Western Hemisphere.”
“The United States must be preeminent in the Western Hemisphere as a condition of our security and prosperity—a condition that allows us to assert ourselves confidently where and when we need to in the region,” the November 2025 document states.
Shortly before his second inauguration in January 2025, Trump posted a pair of similar maps on Truth Social.
Michael Williams, a professor of public and international affairs at the University of Ottawa, recently told CTVNews.ca that the Trump administration is clearly focused on solidifying the United States’ position as the Western Hemisphere’s dominant power.
“Unlike U.S. policy that saw your closest continental states as friends and allies, the Trumpian vision sees the geographic proximity of these states (Canada, Mexico, Greenland/Denmark) and their close economic and military ties to the U.S., as signs of weakness and sources of leverage to be exploited by the U.S. in building the continental core of it’s hemispheric hegemony,” Williams told CTVNews.ca in an email.
“It’s so strategic right now,” Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One earlier in January. “We need Greenland from the standpoint of national security.”
