When Canada’s new prime minister arrived at Oval Office on Tuesday morning to meet with the US president, he seemed to walk in a lion. But it turned out to be a house cat he found there.
“Canada is a very special place for me,” President Trump cleans at the top of the meeting. “I know so many people living in Canada. My parents had relatives living in Canada, especially my mother.”
This was a bit weird, since it had just been months to moan on how he would like to hit Canada and turn it into the 51st state.
“I love Canada,” Mr Trump added.
It was a decisively different tone than he had used just a few minutes earlier in a place on the truth of social, when he threw Canadians as a bunch of freeloaders who could not survive without the United States. He published exactly what the new Canadian Prime Minister, Mark Carney, arrived at the White House.
But now the man who led the nation that Mr Trump had taken was sitting next to him – centimeters away!
“Canada loves us and we love Canada,” Trump said now.
A journalist asked him what was the top “concession” that hoped to export from his neighbors to the north.
“Grant;” said Mr. Trump. “Oh, friendship.”
As the meeting hit, Mr Carney was holding an uncomfortable smile on his face and with his hands. He never threw his guard enough. Mr Trump, on the other hand, had the appearance of a person coming face to face with the consequences of his own actions and did not want to confront them.
He and the people who work for him in the White House have taken a lot of fun in the last few months from the reference to Canada as a “state” and addressed Carney’s predecessor, Justin Trudeau, as a “ruler”. Mr Trump published maps and mimicry of the two countries with the borders to be deleted, even when he insisted on Time Magazine last month, “I’m not really shrinking”.
Everything led to this meeting with his Canadian counterpart, who should have been enough, as it would be under any other administration, but now changed with anger, embarrassment and a thin scandal. Mr Trump does not seem to be willing to deal with any of the complications created by his “non -drawer”.
Mostly he tried to play around them, throwing a tone of other issues that were not even linked to Tête-à -tête with the Canadians. Issues such as the Barack Obama Presidential Library Program in Chicago. Gov. Gavin Newsom in California. A high -speed railway line in California. The weapons left behind in Afghanistan. “A very, very big announcement,” Mr Trump claimed he would soon do, but which was at the moment to remain secret, so he couldn’t really say what he was still, just that he would be “as big as he would get”? Diplomacy with Houtis in Yemen. And, as always, former President Joseph R. Biden Jr.
Mr Carney made it clear that he was not there to make it more nonsense for a 51st situation. “There are some places that are never for sale,” he said, steadily. Mr Trump would occasionally try to reach a last word (“Never Say!”) But his heart didn’t seem to be in it. “Well, I still believe that” he said of this idea that he had caused so many problems. “But, you know,” he continued, with axis, “two need two in Tango, right?”
Some of the usual characters playing small roles in these Oval Offices of Dramalogues sat on the couch on the left of Mr. Trump. There was Vice President JD Vance, Foreign Minister Marco Rubio and Commerce Secretary, Howard Lutnick, ready to jump if needed.
But they never did it.
The unsuspecting directive by the President seemed clear: Everyone is cool.
“This is very friendly,” Trump said in the room. “This is not going to be like – we had another little blow with someone else. That was very different. This is a very friendly discussion.” The sofa laughed, relieved.
“No matter anything,” Mr Trump said at one point, “we will be friends with Canada.”
