I personally can downplay them as a joke because it is a joke. The mostly likely path forward for anything like that would instead a certain oil rich province voting themselves independent and then asking the US for aid or to join.
And, if it wasn't a joke, then that's even more of a reason to consider meeting your 2% NATO agreement instead of just phoning it in.
They were not joke and no one laughed at them either. They were posturing and trying to be threatening. They were coupled with start of actual trade war and intentional attempts to weaken Canada.
Calling them jokes is just a lie, retroactively trying to make it better.
They were an objective joke/troll, but multiple psychological studies on certain mindset patterns under stress show that some are intellectually unable to get certain types of jokes.
It's downplayable because Trump isn't actually serious about it. He's serious about something until he learns what's possible. Some things are possible (absurd tariffs), other things are not (declaring war on a bordering country).
Lets not downplay that fact.