A red tie and laughs about annexation: How Canada’s prime minister is trying to get in Trump’s good graces
By Kevin Liptak, CNN
(CNN) — Prime Minister Mark Carney of Canada wasn’t leaving anything to chance when he was packing for his visit to Washington this week — including, apparently, his neckwear.
“I wore red for you,” he explained to US President Donald Trump, gesturing to his patterned tie colored to match typical Republican branding, as they shook hands beneath the West Wing Portico.
Trump, it turns out, was wearing blue.
After months of tangling on trade — and trying without much success to neuter Trump’s threats to annex his country — Carney is still trying to get on the president’s wavelength. And he might be making some nascent progress.
He entered Tuesday’s talks amid low expectations he’d be able to successfully talk Trump into easing steep tariffs on Canadian goods, including steel, aluminum, automobiles and lumber.
He departed with assurances from Trump that he and his delegation would “walk away happy,” though the US leader refused to explain what exactly he meant.
“You’ll find out,” he told reporters.
It all made for a somewhat ambiguous visit, colored neither by the outward acrimony that has come to define recent US-Canada relations nor by pronouncements of major progress on the issues causing all the sourness.
Canada is now the only member of the Group of 7 that hasn’t secured a trade deal to stave off the punitive duties, and the effects are taking a toll on Canada’s economy and on Carney’s political standing.
“I think the people of Canada, they will love us again,” Trump predicted, acknowledging the reality that, at least for now, the neighbors are miffed.
Since entering office last spring, Carney has walked a tightrope with his American counterpart. He’s tried to lower the flaming hot temperatures set by his predecessor Justin Trudeau, who called Trump’s tariffs “very dumb” and accused him of appeasing Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Carney has exchanged text messages with Trump on world affairs and, so far, has avoided being on the receiving end of any tirades.
At the same time, he’s tried to push back on Trump’s territorial aspirations, telling him firmly during their first Oval Office encounter in May that Canada is “not for sale” and “won’t be for sale, ever.” Trump offered some mild pushback — “never say never,” he shrugged — but the moment was mostly defused.
On Tuesday, the touchy topic arose again as Carney was making an attempt to flatter his host’s foreign policy acumen, listing conflicts Trump has successfully intervened to end.
Calling his US counterpart a “transformative president,” he began rattling off conflicts between India and Pakistan, and Azerbaijan and Armenia, before trying to conclude with Trump’s latest efforts to broker peace in Gaza.
“I’m running out of time, but this is in many respects, the most important —,” he began saying.
“The merger of Canada and the United States?” Trump interjected slyly.
“No!” Carney exclaimed with a grin. “That wasn’t where I was going.”
Carney laughed it off, and the meeting proceeded cordially, with Trump doing most of the talking. But the moment nonetheless underscored a national relationship that has seriously deteriorated since Trump arrived back to the White House.
Canadian tourism to the United States has declined sharply. Some stores pulled American products from their shelves. And among many Canadians, a sense of betrayal has set in that their closest relationship — physically, culturally and economically — has turned rancid.
In Trump’s telling, it’s all that closeness that’s making it hard to make a deal.
“It’s a complicated agreement, more complicated maybe than any other agreement we have on trade. Because, you know, we have natural conflict, we also have mutual love,” he said in the Oval Office.
Carney, a former central banker known for enforcing efficient meetings, didn’t have much to say as Trump detoured through all manner of topics, from the ongoing US government shutdown, which he blamed on leaderless Democrats (“They remind me of Somalia.”) to his efforts to clean up Washington, DC (“This place was a raging hellhole.”) to his inability to resolve the war in Ukraine (“It’s a crazy thing. I thought that would have been one of the easy ones.”)
It was a distant cry from the last time they met one-on-one on the margins of the G7 that Carney convened in Alberta. After seven minutes of questions, Carney cut the session short, declaring it was his prerogative as host.
When he did speak Tuesday, he made sure to side mostly with Trump. After a reporter asked about fentanyl crossing the US-Canada border — the basis for a 35% tariff set by Trump, despite relatively small amounts of the drug crossing into the US from the north — he suggested there was still work to do.
“Any amount is too much. So we’ve gotten it down. It’s down substantially. It’s less than 1%, but it’s – look, it’s still too much,” he said.
After Trump expressed ambivalence over next year’s mandatory review of the North American trade agreement, saying it might result in bilateral deals with Canada and Mexico — rather than the multi-country arrangement in place now — Carney said nothing, despite ongoing fears in Canada over the fate of the plan.
It was a sign that, despite their deep disagreements, Carney saw little benefit to derailing the meeting with Trump, at least in public.
Carney, Trump declared later, “is a nice man but he can be very nasty.”
Well, a reporter wanted to know, if he’s such a “great man,” why can’t you make a deal?
“Because I want to be a great man, too,” Trump replied, drawing laughs as they ushered reporters out of the room to continue their conversation in private.
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