Prime Minister Mark Carney and U.S. President Donald Trump engage in a meeting at the White House in Washington, on May 6.Adrian Wyld/The Canadian Press
If you talk to people who know Mark Carney well, one of the personality traits that comes up over and over is that he is not someone who suffers fools.
People he thought were unprepared in meetings; reporters who asked questions he considered unfair or lazy; anyone he thought was wasting his time and ought to know better – they all might get a shave from the elegant little pearl-handled switchblade of his dry wit if he lost patience.
But after Tuesday’s meeting at the Oval Office with Donald Trump, we know there is at least one colossal fool the Prime Minister will find a way to suffer quietly. You don’t really have a choice when that misfiring cannon is the most powerful man in the world.
The President welcomed Mr. Carney to the White House with a handshake and a fist-pump for the cameras. Then they sat side by side in the Oval Office for the customary ritual in which Mr. Trump holds forth for the press, flanked by his couch full of cabinet flunkies and the mostly mute guest who leads another of the world’s nations.
It was, even by Mr. Trump’s stupefying level of achievement, an incoherent pageant of doddering self-indulgence.
At one point, a Canadian reporter asked what sorts of concessions Mr. Trump wanted from Canada in order to lift the tariffs.
“Friendship,” he replied blandly.
“But that’s not a concession,” she said. She wasn’t aiming for attitude, but rather sounded genuinely flummoxed about what on earth he was talking about.
At this, Mr. Trump launched into free association on Canadian things he likes: the people of Canada, including his mother’s relatives; Wayne Gretzky – he apparently missed the memo about how that’s going at the moment – and Alexander Ovechkin, the extremely Russian captain of the Washington Capitals.
Another reporter asked if he still believed Canada should become the 51st state, and Mr. Trump said he did, but “it takes two to tango,” which caused Mr. Carney to bark out a small laugh. The President riffed half-heartedly through his sales pitch – lower taxes, free military, tremendous medical care – for what is at this point pretty plainly a high school-level troll job.
“I’m a real estate developer at heart,” he said. “When you get rid of that artificially drawn line – somebody drew that line many years ago with like a ruler, just a straight line right across the top of the country – when you look at that beautiful formation, when it’s together – I’m a very artistic person, but when I looked at that, I said, that’s the way it was meant to be.”
As the President treated the room and the world to this tour of the inside of his skull, the Prime Minister smiled uneasily, then shifted in his seat, sucked on his teeth a little and gestured a couple of times, attempting to air-traffic-control his way into the conversation.
The free square at the centre of any Mark Carney bingo card is “If I may,” which is his all-purpose interjection to delicately wrest a conversation back to something he considers to be more sane and realistic. Here, finally, he managed to if-I-may the President, and he would do it several more times through the meeting, though at no point would the conversation return to anything resembling sanity or reality.
“If I may, as you know from real estate, there are some places that are never for sale. We’re sitting in one right now,” he said, looking around at the Oval Office. He added, “And having met with the owners of Canada over the course of the campaign the last several months, it’s not for sale, won’t be for sale, ever. But the opportunity is in the partnership and what we can build together.”
Mr. Trump waited for him to finish, then countered blithely with “Never say never,” at which point Mr. Carney looked either toward his ministers perched on the couch or to the reporters beyond them, and mouthed the word “never” with cartoon exaggeration.
Over the 35-minute media availability, the President indulged himself in extended, unprompted meditations on the disaster of Barack Obama’s presidential library being built by woke construction workers; how a big ship takes 10 miles to turn around at sea; and the gross cost overruns and inadequacy of the train system that “Gavin Newscum” built in California. Throughout, JD Vance and Marco Rubio chortled obediently on the couch like Beavis and Butt-Head in nice suits.
At one point as Mr. Trump prattled on about USMCA, Mr. Carney – who had not been able to say a word for several minutes by this point – sat in the chair beside him, watchful and catlike, hands clasped over one knee. As Mr. Trump continued explaining how Canada was “paying” a tariff on aluminum and steel and cars, the Prime Minister gazed slightly up and out at some distant horizon, which must be what it looks like when an economist’s soul leaves his body out of self-preservation while listening to Donald Trump explain how tariffs work.
Later in the afternoon, after a closed-door lunch meeting that followed the Oval Office performance art, Mr. Carney delivered a news conference on the roof of the Canadian embassy, with the Capitol in the background.
Sirens wailed through the beginning of his prepared remarks, and then for the rest of the time he spoke, the sun and clouds kept duelling, so that he was cloaked in grainy darkness one moment and squinting in a glaring spotlight at others. The set dressing was working overtime to illustrate the full Donald Trump experience.
The first question came from a reporter who said she’d been watching Mr. Carney’s face throughout the meeting, and she wondered what he had been thinking when Mr. Trump talked about erasing what he sees as an artificial border, and when the President criticized Justin Trudeau and Chrystia Freeland.
Mr. Carney was smirking before she even finished.
“Well, thank you, I guess, for your question,” he said. “I’m glad that you couldn’t tell what was going through my mind.”