The first meeting between Mark Carney as Canada’s elected prime minister and President Donald Trump could have gone better, but it was far from a disaster.
Trump opened the May 6 press conference that preceded the more formal White House meeting by congratulating Carney on winning a “very big election in Canada” at the beginning of the previous week.
Trump noted that Carney’s Liberal Party “was losing by a lot, and he ended up winning.” He called it “probably one of the greatest comebacks in the history of politics, maybe even greater than mine.”
Carney took hold of a Liberal Party that had been written off prior to the late April election and closed a 20-point gap in the polls to win 43.8% of all votes and the most seats in Parliament.
Carney’s government is a minority government, but in name only. It holds 170 seats of the 172 needed for an absolute majority in Canada’s House of Commons. And it has plenty of options for how to grab those extra few votes in a pinch.
The American president also took some of the credit for the Liberal Party’s reversal of fortunes. “I think I was probably the greatest thing that happened to him,” Trump said.
“We’re going to be friends with Canada,” the president said. “Regardless of anything.” He called America’s northern neighbor “a very special place to me.”
As for all the talk of annexing Canada to be America’s “51st state” that had so incensed Carney’s predecessor, Justin Trudeau, along with a good chunk of Canadian voters, Trump played it down. “I still believe that. But, you know, takes two to tango, right?” he said.
Trump explained that he looked at these things as a “real estate developer” who would like to develop Canada. Carney replied, “Well, if I may, as you know, from real estate, there are some places that are never for sale,” such as Canada.
Some news outlets reported that Trump replied, “Never say never.” While that is technically true, it was not his first response.
The president first said, “That’s true [that some things are never for sale],” then he praised Canada’s prime minister for “stepping up the military participation” in NATO, and then he tacked on the “never say never” line, seemingly as an afterthought.
Talk immediately shifted to the prospect of lowering tariffs on Canadian imports. Even on this contentious issue, Trump hinted at common ground. “We want to protect our automobile business, and so does Mark,” Trump said.
No respect for Trudeau
“Carney is someone Trump can respect,” Paul Tuns, Canadian author of The Dauphin: The Truth About Justin Trudeau, told the Washington Examiner.
From the White House’s point of view, “Carney is an improvement over Trudeau because he doesn’t come with all that baggage, including tweeting against Trump’s policy,” Tuns said.
Tuns pointed out that Trudeau needled the American president quite a bit during Trump’s first term, especially on the issues of refugees and immigration. After Trump won a nonconsecutive second term in a victory that much of the world wasn’t prepared for, Trudeau came-a-calling at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago golf club in Florida. The two did not get along well.
Trudeau implored Trump not to impose threatened tariffs against Canada. Trump clapped back that Canada could become the 51st state and thereby avoid the tariffs. This was one of the reasons Trudeau cited in his Jan. 6 speech announcing his impending resignation as prime minister, which opened the door for his party to choose Carney overwhelmingly as a leader.
But first, Trudeau had to serve as a lame-duck leader, and those few months were unbelievable. During one press conference, Trudeau had to fight back tears. Tariffs on Canadian goods were threatened and then delayed, then imposed, and then reduced, and Canadian tariffs on American goods followed a similar trajectory with added boycott fun, to simplify greatly.
Trump and Trudeau were in frequent contact, though it didn’t seem to do much good. Trump continued to attack Trudeau in interviews and on social media. “I think that Justin Trudeau is using the tariff problem, which he has largely caused, to run again for Prime Minister. So much fun to watch!” Trump wrote on Truth Social on March 7.
As a candidate for party leader and then as the sitting prime minister in the general election, Carney did not run as a Trump appeaser. He said Canada’s posture should be “elbows up,” borrowing the famous hockey term coined by Gordie Howe.
In one late March press conference, with several Canadian maple leaf flags in the background, Carney announced that the “old relationship we had with the United States based on deepening integration of our economies and tight security and military cooperation is over.”
He warned Canadians, “We will need to dramatically reduce our reliance on the United States. We will need to pivot our trade relationships elsewhere. And we will need to do things previously thought impossible at speeds we haven’t seen in generations.”
That was a much more categorical rejection of American influence than anything that Trudeau ever made, and yet Trump has been much more welcoming to Carney than to Trudeau. Why?
The American president has been frank about the fact that he simply didn’t like the previous Canadian head of government. Trump doubled down on his 51st state troll by calling Trudeau “governor” rather than “prime minister,” for instance.
Age might have had something to do with it. Trudeau is a boyish 53. He looks and sometimes acts much younger than he is. The gap between Carney, 60, and Trump, 78, is narrower. Yet Trump has had no problem surrounding himself with much younger advisers and staffers. His vice president, JD Vance, is 40.
Kushner and Qatar
Tuns suggested another reason for the very different reception to the new Canadian prime minister: Trump’s son-in-law and former White House adviser Jared Kushner, a key player in securing the Abraham Accords.
Before becoming prime minister, Carney was most famous for leading the banks of Canada and England. He is also a former executive at Brookfield Asset Management, the company that bailed out Kushner from some real estate troubles “with a sweet but unusual rental deal in 2018,” Tuns said.
“Brookfield did Trump’s son-in-law a favor and thus did his family a favor, and Carney is part of the Brookfield family, so there is some affinity for him. Never mind that Carney wasn’t at BAM when the deal helped Kushner; in Trump’s transactional relationships, Brookfield is one of the good guys and Carney is connected to that.”
He added, hopefully, that this connection “can’t but help Canada-U.S. relations.”
If Tuns is right about the reason for Trump’s more positive appraisal of his Canadian counterpart, that could shed some light on another current controversy.
The government of Qatar, an oil-rich Gulf state, has offered to gift Trump a Boeing 747-8 luxury jumbo jet, worth somewhere in the neighborhood of $400 million. The idea is to help speed along the planned replacement of Air Force One.
The plane would not necessarily stay with the U.S. government once Trump leaves office, which has led some critics to decry it as bribery and personal enrichment. (Though technically, the plan is for it to be owned by the future Trump presidential library.) Other critics have trained their fire on Qatar’s shortcomings on free speech, labor laws, and other human rights matters.
Thus far, Trump has waved off all criticism of the offer and indicated that he’s inclined to accept the plane. The would-be donor of the plane, the government of Qatar, is Brookfield’s well-known “largest investor” and, thus, might be getting some benefit from its professional associations in the president’s thinking.
THE GREAT SUPPLY CHAIN ROBBERY
“There are a lot of connections for the conspiracy-minded,” Tuns warned, and he suggested it’s better to keep things simple. He’s far from the only analyst to point out that Trump tends to think in terms of distinct transactions, or deals, and extrapolate widely.
That insight could be useful for Canadian heads of state, or just ordinary citizens, in understanding why the president makes some of his calls. Call it Occam’s Pocketbook. Better yet, call it The Art of the Deal.
Jeremy Lott is the author of The Warm Bucket Brigade: The Story of the American Vice Presidency.