In a White House that prizes the power of pictures, the images it shared after a first meeting with Mark Carney spoke volumes.
It was all smiles, thumbs up, friendly photo captions and warm videos on U.S. President Donald Trump’s social media feeds after his initial encounter with the prime minister.
“The new prime minister’s a terrific guy,” Trump told reporters later in the day, at an unrelated news conference.
“It went very well. We had a very great meeting.”
This is consistent with the tone he adopted at the outset of their Oval Office meeting, which played out, per his custom, to an uncommon degree in view of TV cameras.
Trump said he had a lot of respect for Carney. He complimented his election race, which he called one of the greatest comebacks in political history. He called Canada special to him, said he would defend it militarily, and wanted a friendly relationship.
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The encounter began so congenially that The Associated Press headline referred to Trump “radiating warmth” for the Canadian leader.
As the on-camera portion dragged on, however, over the course of 33 minutes, the reminders began piling up of the substantive challenges ahead.
For starters, there’s no guarantee U.S. tariffs will come off. There’s not even any indication at this point, at least not publicly, of how the negotiating process will work.
Beneath the smiles and handshakes, old ambitions peeked through. It’s now abundantly clear Trump wasn’t joking about annexing Canada. He really does long for it.
That said, it’s a distant dream. He appeared to concede Canadians aren’t interested, and said it wasn’t on his meeting agenda. Maybe someday, he said. “Never say never.”
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This prompted Carney’s best moment of the day. He got Trump to nod, smile and acknowledge, as a one-time real-estate mogul, that some properties are not for sale.
Then the president took some digs at Justin Trudeau. He referred, again, to the former prime minister as “governor” and, in view of Carney, said: “I didn’t like his predecessor.”
After the meeting, there were two basic takeaways among people who watch Canada-U.S. relations.
First is that, given the rock-bottom state of the relationship, this easily cleared a low bar.
“This is as good a start as we could have hoped for,” said Louise Blais, Canada’s former consul in Atlanta who, in 2016, was among the first Canadian diplomats to build connections to Trump’s original campaign team.
Brian Clow, who managed U.S. relations in Trudeau’s office, summed it up as “the best-case scenario.”
The second takeaway? Prepare for a long, winding road. It won’t be fast, or easy, to reach the comprehensive trade and security agreement, as proposed by Carney.
“We’re going to hit some rough patches before we get to the finish line,” Blais told CBC News. Clow called the meeting the first of many, many steps.
Spoiler alert: Carney knows this too. Speaking later on the rooftop of the Canadian Embassy, he referred to the meeting as having been just one step.
“Today marked the end of the beginning of a process,” Carney said. “The question is: How we will co-operate in the future?”
He was a little cagey on a key detail, perhaps because it’s unresolved: Will these negotiations happen quickly, or under the already planned review of the Canada-U.S.-Mexico Agreement, which cannot formally start, under U.S. law, until next year?
Trump sounds open to different approaches. So does Carney. One possibility is that the talks might unfold in stages — some now, some next year.
The one strong hint Carney dropped relates to a well-known Trump objective: tightening the rules for the North American auto trade.
With Trump’s team eager to reduce auto imports from Asia, Carney said he told Trump that Canadian parts, steel and aluminum could be part of the solution.
This offers a glimpse into why Carney proposed tying trade and security into one negotiation; to make the case for Canadian imports, as benefiting U.S. security.
But he offered no other details from their closed-door talks. When a reporter asked for more, Carney said: “That’s why they’re closed-door.”
So Carney left Washington without suffering the fate of Volodymy Zelenskyy. The Ukrainian president was the victim of perhaps the most catastrophic photo op in the history of the Oval Office, with visiting world leaders now fearing getting “Zelenskyy-ed.”
But it’s worth noting what happened next to Zelenskyy as an example of the twists and turns of dealing with the notoriously transactional Trump.
They’ve been on better terms lately. They just had an encounter at the Vatican that Zelenskyy called their best yet.
They got a new minerals deal analysts are calling a win-win. The New York Times just ran a piece headlined, “How Zelensky Maneuvered Himself Out of the Doghouse With Trump.”
But you know who else had a decent first meeting with Trump after the Nov. 5 U.S. election? Justin Trudeau. By initial accounts, his trip to Mar-a-Lago was friendly. In an initial statement later that month, Trump called it “very productive.”
Yet, within days, Trump started belittling Canada’s sovereignty, in a campaign of cross-border denigration without parallel in modern history.
It’s a reminder that, in Trumpland, the vibes come with a one-day warranty. But on this one day, Trump was all smiles when a reporter asked if he’d find it easier to work with Canada’s current PM than the last one.
“Yes,” Trump replied. “I like this guy.”
