Adrian Wyld/The Canadian Press via AP
Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney and President Donald Trump meet at the White House in Washington, May 6, 2025.
Prime Minister Mark Carney arrived in Washington to meet with President Trump riding the crest of his historic win, the fourth straight election victory for the Canadian Liberals. That put him in the pole position to deal with his south-of-the-border version of the global trade crisis.
Carney had strengthened his hand in March by delaying a visit to the United States, traditionally the first stop for a newly elected prime minister, to fly to Europe, where British Prime Minister Keir Starmer and French President Emmanuel Macron were enthusiastic hosts. Prior to the trip, he spoke by phone with European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen. He’s also invited Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to the annual G7 summit in Canada next month.
What probably captured the full attention of the man in the Oval Office, however, was Carney’s pièce de résistance, a Buckingham Palace audience with Charles III. As King of Canada, the titular head of state of America’s northern neighbor, Charles later accepted the prime minister’s invitation to deliver the Speech from the Throne, which opens a new session of Parliament and lays out the government’s program, at the end of the month. Elizabeth II, Charles’s mother, gave the speech twice, in 1957 and 1977.
Tuesday’s Oval Office meeting with President Trump was Carney’s first opportunity to display strategic competence in the U.S.-Canada trade crisis. By meeting with key Western allies before heading to Washington, Carney underlined his case that Canada has economic and diplomatic options from which the United States has now walled itself off. He signaled that Trump needs to reverse his disastrous course by unpacking and resolving his grievances within the framework of the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement that the first Trump administration had negotiated, based on facts and hard numbers.
Carney’s comportment spoke volumes about the prime minister’s decision to focus on setting the scene for the more important discussion about the future of the USMCA while cultivating whatever threads of cordiality could be teased out of the encounter and protecting national pride. The prime minister and his advisers apparently have concluded that his best course of action is to bat away any distraction grenades that Trump lobs into the room for their infotainment value. In other words, he had to be the “adult in the room.”
Carney declined to declare USMCA dead, although Trump, who’d negotiated the agreement in his first term, opined that “it has served its purpose.” The review period formally opens next year, but whatever Trump is actually after is, as ever, muddled. Shortly before the prime minister arrived at the White House, Trump posted his oft-repeated nugget of misinformation about the trade deficit between the two countries, which is tens of billions of dollars less than the president says it is. Even though Canada is America’s largest trading partner, he complained that the U.S. doesn’t need Canadian products like cars, lumber, and energy—a particularly disingenuous example, coming off a winter when the earliest tariff threats alarmed the very New England and Midwestern states that are tethered to Canadian natural gas, hydroelectricity, and oil exports.
“The adult in the room,” as Carney is frequently described in Canada, had a noticeable effect on Trump.
Americans in the 34 states for which Canada is also their largest trading partner have become acquainted with that factoid over the past several months. If not, they will be, as the tariffs kick in and the thriving “Buy Canadian” boycott of American goods intensifies. Undaunted by this or any other reality, Trump described the U.S. as “a super luxury store, a store that has the goods.” “You’re going to come and you’re going to pay a price, and we’re going to give you a very good price,” he said. That super luxury store is on the brink of some serious inventory problems, along with sinking consumer confidence—and those luxury-seeking international visitors, now fearing entry problems, are already going shopping elsewhere.
Carney resisted unleashing a barrage of point-counterpoint fact-checks. He went so far as to call Trump “a transformational president with a focus on the economy and a relentless focus on the American worker,” without a hint of irony. He did concede that when it came to Canada’s defense posture, the nation had work to do to meet its 2 percent of GDP obligations on its NATO defense contribution, an irritant that predates the Trump administration. If anything, the saber-rattling has persuaded the prime minister to launch a re-evaluation of Canada’s defense plans, beginning with a review of the country’s F-35 fighter plane contract with Lockheed Martin.
By choosing silence and selective interjections over direct engagement, Carney made it difficult for an aggressive interlocutor like Trump to rile him up. It’s also more difficult for the supporting cast of players to intrude. Vice President JD Vance merely smiled when Trump commented, “This is not going to be like we had another little blowup with somebody else,” an oblique reference to the ambush of Ukrainian President Zelensky.
Not that Trump didn’t try. The president attacked Carney’s former boss, Justin Trudeau, the departed prime minister, as is his habit, and went after former deputy prime minister Chrystia Freeland (“She was a terrible person”) who worked on the USMCA pact during his first administration. (Now the transportation minister, Freeland is a friend of Carney, who is godfather to her son.) Carney’s face was a blank slate, though he couldn’t suppress a few sharp looks, some jaw-clenching, and, as the pool spray wound down, the brushing of imaginary lint from his pants.
“The adult in the room,” as Carney is frequently described in Canada, had a noticeable effect on Trump. The insults he showered on Trudeau never came Carney’s way. The president talked about the two countries’ friendship as if several months of disrespect had never happened. Trump did try to be cordial. White House–proud, he made sure to point out the new portraits he’d added to the “new and improved” Oval Office, “decorated with love” and “24-carat gold” throughout. He complimented Carney on his victory, adding that it was probably “greater than his.”
But in the end, Trump couldn’t resist a reporter’s question about his offer of statehood, repeating his “belief” that the country should consider it. Carney took a polite, if dim, view of Trump’s insistence on the issue. “As you know from real estate, there are some places that are never for sale: We’re sitting in one; you know Buckingham Palace, you’ve visited as well. Having met with the owners of Canada over the past several months, it’s not for sale, it won’t be for sale. Ever. The opportunity is in the partnership.”
Check and mate.
At a Canadian Embassy press conference later Tuesday afternoon, Carney described the closed-door White House meeting as “wide-ranging” and “very constructive,” two nondescript terms whose meaning won’t be clear until the participants publish their memoirs. Though no one expected breakthroughs before more formal discussions get under way to tackle the specific points of contention, there was no evident backsliding. When a reporter asked for his thoughts about Trump’s comments on “the artificial border” and Minister Freeland, Carney chuckled and said, “I’m glad that you couldn’t tell what was going through my mind.”
Another reporter wanted to know if he had asked Trump to stop calling Canada the 51st state.
Carney responded, “Yes.”
The president and prime minister meet next at the G7 summit in Kananaskis, Alberta, in the Canadian Rockies in June.
