WASHINGTON – President Donald Trump and other Republicans on Friday threatened to punish Canada as smoke from the country’s wildfires blows into the United States, trying to shift the blame for horrible air quality throughout the Midwest and northeastern United States away from climate change.

“We are holding Canada responsible for the fact that they are not properly maintaining their Forests, and Brush therein, and the United States is being unnecessarily invaded by filthy, polluted, and unhealthy air, the quality of which is dangerous, and totally unacceptable!” Trump wrote on his social media platform, saying he would call Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney about the issue.

He went on to threaten Canada with additional tariffs: “This is Willful Negligence, and becoming a yearly occurrence, costing the United States Billions of Dollars, which cost of this pollution must of necessity be added to the TARIFFS Canada is currently paying.”

Trump’s rhetoric was presaged by Sen. Bernie Moreno (R-Ohio) introducing a bill to sanction Canadian officials found “responsible” for the fires, revoke their visas and express a sense of Congress that the Canadian ambassador is a “persona non grata” until the wildfire smoke is gone.

The threats against Canada, which environmental organizations described as meritless, combine two of the most outlandish elements of Trump’s second term: The GOP’s return to a party that largely denies the reality of man-made climate change and Trump’s personal obsession with alienating Canada, a fellow member of NATO and one of the country’s most steadfast allies for decades before Trump’s second term.

“Insane,” Tim Gray, executive director of Environmental Defence Canada, a leading Canadian environmental advocacy organization, said of Moreno’s bill.

“The false rhetoric about the cause of wildfires is not constructive. It helps to further underscore the sense Canadians have that the U.S. has lost its way,” Gray said. “When California was burning last year, we didn’t try to pass laws falsely blaming the U.S. for fires. We sent water bombers, airplanes that drop water on fires, and teams that helped to put out the fires.”

More than 191 fires were burning across Canada as of Friday morning, driving plumes of smoke into the northeast and along the East Coast.

The fires were started by a combination of lightning strikes, human activity and extreme and long-lasting heat, which created swaths of dry vegetation that can act as fuel for fires. Throw in some trapped hot air, which leads to more storms and whipped-up winds, and you get rapidly spreading, sometimes spontaneously ignited, wildfires.

The root of the problem is climate change, which has dried out Canada’s forests so dramatically over the past decade, Gray said, that once an arboreal fire starts, it creates its own weather system and generates lightning within it. Fire crews can’t even get close to the source of these fires because they’re too hot.

“Think of a very dry pine and spruce forest as solid gasoline. If you light a match to these trees, it will literally explode into flame,” said Gray. “Imagine millions of trees across a massive landscape…. The temperatures get so hot that when they burn through a town, not even the foundations are left. Concrete is turned back into its compounds.”

A spokesperson for Environment and Climate Change Canada, the country’s government agency that oversees environmental programs, referred HuffPost to Global Affairs Canada, the government agency that handles diplomatic affairs.

A Global Affairs Canada spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment.

Moreno’s proposal comes as Cleveland and other parts of Ohio were especially hard hit by the haze, smoke and pollution caused by the wildfires. On Friday, the Cleveland Guardians had to postpone their baseball game against the Pittsburgh Pirates because of air quality concerns from the Canadian wildfires.

“Thanks to Canada’s failed leadership, Ohio’s skies are seeing the worst pollution on record and Ohioans across the state are being subjected to hazardous conditions — we will not tolerate this incompetence,” the Republican senator said in a statement. “My bill will declare an emergency, sanction all Canadian officials responsible, and study a victims compensation fund driven by imposing additional tariffs.”

Trump’s second term has seen the government work relentlessly to undermine solar and wind power — which have become far cheaper and more reliable in recent years, leading to their widespread adoption outside the United States — and to promote fossil fuels while gutting the authority the Environmental Protection Agency uses to regulate carbon emissions. In a 2025 speech to the United Nations, Trump referred to climate change as a “con job.”

Moreno, who is a staunch ally of Trump, isn’t likely to see any action on his anti-Canada bill. It’s more a way for him to get attention complaining about the toxic air in his state, which his constituents are understandably unhappy about, without criticizing the president or lending any credibility to climate science.

“For decades, coal-burning power plants in Senator Moreno’s state of Ohio have been spewing dangerous smog, soot & toxic pollution into Ontario, Quebec, and eastern Canadian provinces,” said John Walke, senior attorney and director of the federal clean air program at the Natural Resources Defense Council. “One wonders if he is willing to accept reciprocal Canadian sanctions for that pollution to match his reckless messaging bill.”

Another Trump-aligned lawmaker, House Republican Conference chair Lisa McClain (Mich.), is taking the same tack as Moreno.

“Michiganders shouldn’t have to breathe Canada’s negligence,” McClain said Thursday on social media. “YEAR AFTER YEAR the smoke crosses the border while Canada does nothing. Stop exporting your smoke into our skies. Enough is enough!”

She joined a handful of GOP colleagues in a Wednesday letter to Carney, baselessly claiming Canada “has the tools” to prevent wildfires but “has chosen not to,” arguing Canadian governments have not sufficiently invested in forest thinning and prescribed burns, which can limit the potency of forest fires.

“If Canada will not manage its forests to prevent these fires, the United States will look elsewhere, and act on our own, to protect our people,” reads the letter.

Athan Manuel, director of the Sierra Club’s Lands Protection Program, said that with people like this in charge, it’s no wonder climate change continues to take its toll.

“It should surprise no one that MAGA Republicans are continuing to invent new and embarrassingly absurd ways to avoid addressing the climate crisis,” Manuel told HuffPost in a statement. “Rather than fulfilling their obligation to protect the American people, Bernie Moreno and MAGA Republicans are proposing unserious legislation to distract from their refusal to tackle the climate crisis fueling these wildfires.”