Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau scored a direct political hit on Donald Trump Thursday night after Canada’s hockey team dispatched Team USA 3-2 in overtime in a 4 Nations Faceoff Championship Game in Boston. “You can’t take our country — and you can’t take our game,” vowed Trudeau just minutes after the win, referring to Trump’s repeated demeaning taunts that Canada would become the 51st state in America.
You can’t take our country — and you can’t take our game. Trump, who has been needling Trudeau for weeks, said in a post on Truth Social earlier that he was going to call Team USA to urge them to victory over the nation that will “someday, maybe soon, become our cherished, and very important, Fifty First State.".
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt piled on, telling reporters: “We look forward to the United States beating our soon-to-be 51st state, Canada.”. Earlier in the week Trump mocked Trudeau with an invitation to the Republican Governors Conference Thursday. The president said in an address to the governors that he would allow Canada to keep its national anthem even when it becomes merely a state.
While some hockey fans from both sides insisted before Thursday night’s competition that they wanted to keep politics out of the game, some Americans booed while the Canadian national anthem was sung at Boston’s TD Garden Arena. Canadians had booed the Star Spangled Banner in Montreal the previous week before Team USA won that faceoff.
Canadian Grammy award-winning singer Chantal Kreviazuk confirmed to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. Thursday that she had slightly altered the lyrics of her nation’s anthem O Canada before the game to make a point about continued independence and to protest the bullying Trump.
Kreviazuk, who is from Winnipeg, said she changed the words of the lyric "True patriot love, in all of us command" to "that only us command.". She wrote about the lyric change on Instagram: "In this very peculiar and potentially consequential moment I truly believe that we must stand up, use our voices and try to protect ourselves.”.
