BOSTON — A Thursday night hockey game between the American and Canadian national teams might as well be played in the Situation Room.
The cross-border rivals will lace up their skates here for the final of the National Hockey League’s 4 Nations Face-Off. But politics has bled into hockey, with the acrimony between the two teams and their fans reflecting President Donald Trump’s recent attacks on a longtime allied nation. The game echoes a lower-stakes version of the Cold War face-offs on ice between the U.S. and the old Soviet Union.
Trump spoke to the American players in a phone call after their practice Thursday morning. In a Truth Social post, the president continued to antagonize Canada, but said he would not be at the game.
“I’ll be calling our GREAT American Hockey Team this morning to spur them on towards victory tonight against Canada, which with FAR LOWER TAXES AND MUCH STRONGER SECURITY, will someday, maybe soon, become our cherished, and very important, Fifty First State,” he wrote, touching off a torrent of heated reactions from fans, ex-players, journalists and sports talk radio hosts on social media.
“We will all be watching, and if Governor Trudeau would like to join us, he would be most welcome,” Trump wrote.
Canadian fans booed the American national anthem when the two sides last took the ice on Saturday in Montreal in the tournament’s round robin games. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and conservative opposition leader Pierre Poilievre were in attendance. And the sides fought three times in the game’s first nine seconds. But the Americans came away with a 3-1 victory.
Trump floated his 51st state rhetoric in a meeting with Trudeau at Mar-a-Lago in November. In the months since, the president has repeated the barb so often Trudeau has become convinced the fixation is “a real thing.”
A win for team U.S.A. in the final — in a sport Canada claims as its birthright — would only ramp up the expansionist rhetoric from MAGA hard-liners.
And though Trump will not be at the stadium, Boston’s TD Garden, Bill Guerin, the general manager of team U.S.A., made it known he was welcome.
“We would love it if President Trump was in attendance,” Guerin said on Fox News’ “America’s Newsroom” on Monday. “We have a room full of proud American players and coaches and staff.”
Adding to the tension on game day is a narrowly avoided trade war that could flare up again. Trump in early February imposed and then delayed 25 percent tariffs on Canadian goods, with the stated goal to push the country on the flow of drugs. (Trump has repeatedly suggested publicly that his moves were more about perceived economic disadvantages for the United States.) Trudeau’s government readied retaliatory tariffs on more than $100 billion of American goods in response.
That week, hockey fans in Vancouver and Ottawa and basketball fans in Toronto deafeningly booed the American anthem, setting the stage for the frenzy in Montreal on Saturday.
And though Trump temporarily called off the tariffs, Canadian officials still aren’t clear on the president’s next steps.
“I think there was a little bit of a political flair to it. It’s just the time that we’re in,” Guerin said on Fox Monday. “If you let it get the better of you, then you’re in trouble. But I do think the players used it as inspiration.”
Vice President JD Vance also got in on the festivities, saying at CPAC on Thursday that “to Canada, if you guys don’t win, the tariffs are even higher.”
“We’d like you to kick their asses again because you don’t boo the United States of America,” Vance said.
But not everyone wants the game to be the latest fight in an expanding international battle between the two neighbors. Canadian coach and two-time Stanley Cup champion Jon Cooper tried to play down the game’s geopolitical undertones.
“Other than the fact that like, the talk of the 51st state and then somebody saying, ‘Wow, we’d have one hell of a hockey team’’” he said.
Greg Svirnovskiy reported from Washington and Kelly Garrity reported from Boston.
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