WASHINGTON — President-elect Donald Trump and the spending-skeptical House may be on a path that could end in a collision over federal spending. Just consider his pricey idea of the U.S. purchasing Greenland.

A group of conservative House Republicans last month demanded deep spending cuts as Congress struggled to pass an extension of government funding as a shutdown deadline approached. They have not dropped those demands, with some even vowing to break with Trump should he try to increase spending.

Trump did just that during his first term, with the nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget finding that “the government accumulated $7.8 trillion of gross federal debt while President Trump was in office.” Now, he’s talking about seizing and operating the busy Panama Canal and turning Greenland and Canada into U.S. states. Buying Greenland could cost up to $1.7 trillion, Arctic Institute analysts calculated in 2019, when Trump first floated such an acquisition.

Trump addressed the media Tuesday from his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida as his transition continues to overshadow the final days of the Biden administration and members of Congress prepared for the arrival of the casket carrying the late President Jimmy Carter at the Capitol.

The president-elect gave lawmakers a lot else to talk about, including a vow to reverse a Biden administration ban on offshore oil and natural gas drilling.

“Banning offshore drilling will not stand. I will reverse it immediately,” Trump told reporters in Palm Beach.

Here are four takeaways from the latest rollicking Trump news conference:

Blame Canada?

Trump again signaled that his preferred path to enacting his agenda under the budget reconciliation process would be for Republicans to send him “one big, beautiful bill.” But he also said he would not be opposed to GOP lawmakers passing two measures if that would speed things up.

He didn’t spend much time Tuesday on the legislative process, however.

In one of several eye-popping statements, Trump, when pressed by a reporter,​ said he would seriously consider making Canada the 51st American state, claiming that the United States is spending too much to help its northern neighbor.

He contended that he would try to take Canada via “economic force,” calling the U.S.-Canadian border an “artificially drawn line” — although he added that he would not deploy the U.S. military in any efforts to bring Canada into the fold.

Trump cited the figure of $200 billion to describe how much Washington devotes to help subsidize Canada.

“We’ve got a lot of dairy,” the president-elect said, appearing to suggest that imports of such Canadian goods hurt the U.S. economy.

Greenland by force?

As he often did during his first term, the self-described opponent of “endless wars” rattled the American military saber while seemingly attempting to intimidate the leaders of several U.S. neighbors and allies.

Asked whether he would rule out “military or economic coercion” to make Greenland a part of the United States or to take back control of the Panama Canal, Trump declined to do so.

“I cannot assure you,” he told a reporter.

“We need them for economic security,” Trump said of the Danish territory and the Central American passage that links the Pacific Ocean and Gulf of Mexico (more on the latter later).

“I’m not gonna commit. … It might be that [we’ll] have to do something,” Trump said. “The Panama Canal is vital to our country. It’s being operated by China. We gave it to Panama, not China.” (Panamanian President José Raúl Mulino has called Trump’s claims of China operating the canal “nonsense.”)

Donald Trump Jr., the incoming president’s oldest son, arrived in Greenland earlier Tuesday for what he called a “personal trip.”

Turbulent transition?

White House aides for months have said the transition period has been going smoothly, citing outgoing President Joe Biden’s order to the entire federal government to work with Trump’s team.

Not so, Trump said Tuesday.

“It’s not smooth. They’ve been playing with the courts,” Trump said of Biden administration officials, adding that their actions “got me more votes than any Republican … by a lot.”

Trump said of Biden, “A man that says he wants the transition to be smooth, you don’t do what he’s doing with the courts. All they do is talk.”

He also partially rewrote his connection to Aileen Cannon, a federal district judge in Florida who has been widely criticized for her handling of his classified documents case.

While criticizing Democrats, Trump dubbed Cannon a “brilliant judge in Florida who sees right through them.” He also claimed, “I don’t know her.”

Late in his first term, Trump nominated Cannon to the federal bench.

Say what?

The 78-year-old president-elect, who repeatedly attacked Biden’s mental competency over the past four years, made several head-scratching pronouncements of his own on Tuesday.

“It’s called rain. It comes down from heaven. And they want to do no water comes out of the shower,” Trump said at one point, meandering about Democrats’ alleged water policy views. “It goes drip, drip, drip. … You can have all the water you want. It makes no difference.”

He wasn’t done: “They don’t want much water in your dishwasher.”

Meanwhile, Trump vowed to change the name of the Gulf of Mexico during his second term. Fittingly for the “America first” leader, his proposed new moniker would be the “Gulf of America.” Various agreements among countries, including the United States, Mexico and Cuba, serve as guidelines for territories and boundaries within the vast body of water.

About federal prosecutor Jack Smith, who was leading investigations into Trump’s alleged mishandling of classified documents and his role in the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot, Trump made this odd and false claim: “He executes people. He shouldn’t be allowed to execute people.”

Fact check: Federal prosecutors do not hand down sentences of any kind. Federal judges do that.

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