There have been suggestions, I think in this thread and also in others, that the most likely outcome of all this is that Canada will make some trade concessions, Trump will hail this as a major victory and evidence of his superb leadership, and it will all blow over.
I believe this is, indeed, the most likely outcome, but there’s a much darker possibility. I’m going to link to a post and a cite I made in the Canadoper Cafe thread. I think the article by Timothy Snyder is well worth a read. The main thesis is around what historians of Hitler call The Big Lie – an accusation against a people or a nation that is completely untrue, but repeated again and again and eventually used as a pretext for whatever escalation the authoritarian wants. Trump is already doing this with respect to Canada. The “fentanyl pouring into the US from Canada” is a complete and total lie (the amount is something like 0.02% of the total amount smuggled into the US each year). Blaming Canada for illegal immigrants is equally a lie. And the trade deficit argument is a lie, too – the numbers are grotesquely exaggerated, and are accounted for entirely by US imports of Canadian oil and gas which America needs; remove that from the trade balance, and the US actually runs a trade surplus with Canada.
Trump isn’t even smart enough to stick to one Big Lie; he keeps alternating between the three made-up excuses as if he’s trying to gauge which Big Lie will work best.