While the Team USA men’s hockey team was reveling in its gold medal, sudden-death overtime win over Team Canada over the weekend, former NASCAR driver Danica Patrick was taking a shot at the silver medalists.
“If Canada had been smart and become the 51st state, they’d be gold medalists right now,” Patrick, 43, shared via her Instagram Story on Sunday, February 22, over a photo of Team Canada wearing their silver medals. “Too soon?”
She appears to be referring to President Donald Trump’s 2025 push to make the United States’ northern neighbors its own state — one that would be bigger than the rest of the country combined.
“The United States can’t subsidize a country for $200 billion a year,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office last March, “We don’t need their cars. We don’t need their energy. We don’t need their lumber. We don’t need anything that they give. We do it because we want to be helpful. But it comes a point when you just can’t do that.”
Trump added that Canada would be better off as a part of the United States.
Justin Trudeau, Canada’s prime minister at the time, railed against Trump’s proposal, insisting that his country has no interest in joining the U.S.
“What he wants is to see a total collapse of the Canadian economy because that’ll make it easier to annex us,” he said of Trump, according to a story for ABC News at the time.
Patrick, an outspoken supporter of Trump, has publicly taken his side multiple times since he re-entered office last January. Most recently, she was a vocal opponent to the NFL’s decision to have Bad Bunny headline the Super Bowl LX halftime show.
She and other conservative pundits bashed the decision, citing Bad Bunny’s decision to perform almost exclusively in Spanish, his previous opposition to Trump’s immigration policies and arguing that the Puerto Rican artist is not American. (Bad Bunny, real name Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio, was born in Puerto Rico, a territory of the United States. Puerto Ricans are American citizens.)
“The Super Bowl is the most highly watched show that we have on television in the whole year,” Patrick said during an October 2025 episode of the “War Room” podcast. “127 million people are estimated to watch it. It’s the crown jewel on television and in sports, in particular. It’s where we come together as a country. We enjoy it, we have parties, we love watching the halftime performance. We know we love to sing along to the halftime performance and it’s usually one of those that’s very versatile across so many different age ranges.”
She continued, “I don’t have any problem with someone performing at halftime that is not from the United States, although Bad Bunny is technically a citizen because he was born in Puerto Rico. He wasn’t necessarily born in America. I don’t care where you’re actually born. What I care about is that I can sing along to the music. His music is almost nothing in English.”
Trump also opposed the decision, telling Newsmax in a phone interview in October, “I’ve never heard of him. I don’t know who he is. I don’t know why they’re doing it. It’s, like, crazy.”
He added, “I think it’s absolutely ridiculous.”
Trump later ranted about the show itself after it aired, calling the show he at one time claimed he wouldn’t watch “absolutely terrible, one of the worst, EVER!” in a post via Truth Social.
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