Donald Trump is returning to the world stage. So is his trolling

NEW YORK (AP) — President-elect Donald Trump’s recent dinner with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his visit to Paris for the reopening of the Notre Dame Cathedral were not just exercises in policy and diplomacy.

They were also prime trolling opportunities for Trump.

Throughout his first term in the White House and during his campaign to return, Trump has spun out countless provocative, antagonizing and mocking statements. There were his belittling nicknames for political opponents, his impressions of other political figures and the plentiful memes he shared on social media.

Now that’s he’s preparing to return to the Oval Office, Trump is back at it, and his trolling is attracting more attention — and eyerolls.

On Sunday, Trump turned a photo of himself seated near a smiling first lady Jill Biden at the Notre Dame ceremony into a social media promo for his new perfume and cologne line, with the tag line, “A fragrance your enemies can’t resist!”

The first lady’s office declined to comment.

When Trudeau hastily flew to Florida to meet with Trump last month over the president-elect’s threat to impose a 25% tax on all Canadian products entering the U.S., the Republican tossed out the idea that Canada become the 51st U.S. state.

The Canadians passed off the comment as a joke, but Trump has continued to play up the dig, including in a post Tuesday morning on his social media network referring to the prime minister as “Governor Justin Trudeau of the Great State of Canada.”

After decades as an entertainer and tabloid fixture, Trump has a flair for the provocative that is aimed at attracting attention and, in his most recent incarnation as a politician, mobilizing fans. He has long relished poking at his opponents, both to demean and minimize them and to delight supporters who share his irreverent comments and posts widely online and cheer for them in person.

Trump, to the joy of his fans, first publicly needled Canada on his social media network a week ago when he posted an AI-generated image that showed him standing on a mountain with a Canadian flag next to him and the caption “Oh Canada!”

After his latest post, Canadian Immigration Minister Marc Miller said Tuesday: “It sounds like we’re living in a episode of South Park.”

Trudeau said earlier this week that when it comes to Trump, “his approach will often be to challenge people, to destabilize a negotiating partner, to offer uncertainty and even sometimes a bit of chaos into the well established hallways of democracies and institutions and one of the most important things for us to do is not to freak out, not to panic.”

Even Thanksgiving dinner isn’t a trolling-free zone for Trump’s adversaries.

On Thanksgiving Day, Trump posted a movie clip from “National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation” with President Joe Biden and other Democrats’ faces superimposed on the characters in a spoof of the turkey-carving scene.

The video shows Trump appearing to explode out of the turkey in a swirl of purple sparks, with the former president stiffly dancing to one of his favorite songs, Village People’s “Y.M.C.A.”

In his most recent presidential campaign, Trump mocked Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, refusing to call his GOP primary opponent by his real name and instead dubbing him “Ron DeSanctimonious.” He added, for good measure, in a post on his Truth Social network: “I will never call Ron DeSanctimonious ‘Meatball’ Ron, as the Fake News is insisting I will.”

As he campaigned against Biden, Trump taunted him in online posts and with comments and impressions at his rallies, deriding the president over his intellect, his walk, his golf game and even his beach body.

After Vice President Kamala Harris took over Biden’s spot as the Democratic nominee, Trump repeatedly suggested she never worked at McDonalds while in college. Trump, true to form, turned his mocking into a spectacle by appearing at a Pennsylvania McDonalds in October, when he manned the fries station and held an impromptu news conference from the restaurant drive-thru.

Trump’s team thinks people should get a sense of humor.

“President Trump is a master at messaging and he’s always relatable to the average person, whereas many media members take themselves too seriously and have no concept of anything else other than suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome,” said Steven Cheung, Trump’s communications director. “President Trump will Make America Great Again and we are getting back to a sense of optimism after a tumultuous four years.”

Though both the Biden and Harris campaigns created and shared memes and launched other stunts to respond to Trump’s taunts, so far America’s neighbors to the north are not taking the bait.

“I don’t think we should necessarily look on Truth Social for public policy,” Miller said.

Gerald Butts, a former top adviser to Trudeau and a close friend, said Trump brought up the 51st state line to Trudeau repeatedly during Trump’s first term in office.

“Oh God,” Butts said Tuesday, “At least a half dozen times.”

“This is who he is and what he does. He’s trying to destabilize everybody and make people anxious,” Butts said. “He’s trying to get people on the defensive and anxious and therefore willing to do things they wouldn’t otherwise entertain if they had their wits about them. I don’t know why anybody is surprised by it.”

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Gillies reported from Toronto. Associated Press writer Darlene Superville contributed to this report.

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