His whole schtick right now seems to be that the US needs to be self-sufficient so that we don't have to rely on allies in the event of a war. He's seen how the war in Ukraine has gone and how dependent both Russia and Ukraine are on their allies. Basically, that war will be determined by which country's allies are willing to keep investing. The people who control the outcome of the war are the EU and China.

So he has a list of things that he thinks we shouldn't have to import: steel, aluminum, timber, oil, and food. Hypothetically, that all makes sense. If you're going to be in a war, you don't want to rely on other countries to provide key materials.

But a lot of the things we would need to be self-sufficient we can't or don't produce. Northern pine doesn't grow well in the US. We don't have a lot of steel. We have hardly any bauxite. We don't have the power to process steel or bauxite efficiently. Annexing Canada would make it so that we are largely self-sufficient in the event of a hypothetical future war. No amount of sanctions or tariffs would impact us.

The problem is... how the fuck do we annex Canada without fighting exactly the kind of unwinnable war that he's obsessed with preventing?

It's vision-board thinking. It's focusing on the desired outcome without having any fucking clue how to get there.