Carney and Trump come face-to-face as bilateral tensions mount

Perhaps the most telling moment of Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney's first meeting with President Donald Trump came after the two world leaders had concluded their awkward, occasionally tense sit-down: "I'm glad that you couldn't tell what was going through my mind," Carney said, after being asked by Toronto Star reporter Tonda MacCharles what he was thinking while listening to Trump extol the virtues of annexing Canada. "Oh, I could," MacCharles laughed.

With relations between the United States and Canada at an all-time low, and the president's agenda of sweeping tariffs wreaking acute damage on global finances, Tuesday's meeting between Carney and Trump offered both leaders an opportunity to feel one another out as they each asserted their shifting national priorities. The leaders emerged with diverging views on what they each achieved and where they go from here.

A 'decidedly different tone'

Carney's "mixture of flattery and firmness" during his first meeting with Trump represented an attempt to "deliver a principled resistance" that resulted in a "respectful repartee" between the two leaders, said The Washington Post. At one point, Trump insisted that annexing Canada as the 51st American state would be a "wonderful marriage." Carney responded: "As you know from real estate, there are some places that are never for sale." It was an attempt to "charm" the president while at the same time signaling to his "base of liberal supporters" that he was "up for the job of standing up to Trump."

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For much of their meeting, Trump took on a "decidedly different tone" than before, particularly after framing Canadians as a "bunch of freeloaders who couldn't survive without the United States" in a post on Truth Social shared just as Carney arrived at the White House, said The New York Times. While Carney may have "appeared to be walking into a lion's den," it was a "house cat he found there" instead. With an "uneasy grin pasted on his face," Carney "never quite dropped his guard" even as Trump appeared to be "coming face to face with the consequences of his own actions and not quite wanting to deal with them."

Although Carney is typically "not someone who suffers fools," his sit-down with the president showed there's "one colossal fool the prime minister will find a way to suffer quietly," said Shannon Proudfoot at The Globe and Mail. For Carney, the challenge was "always going to be" how he "juggled two very different audiences," said Andrew Chang at CBC: "one American, and one Canadian."

A 'test for US allies more generally'

Even though Trump "refused to back off" from his threats of sweeping tariffs and the annexation of Canada, he was "largely friendlier toward the new prime minister" than he'd been toward former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, with whom he'd had a "frosty relationship" for years, The Hill said. The result, said The Toronto Star, was a "more serious engagement than had been the case under Trudeau." Behind closed doors, Trump "sought Carney’s views" on a "range" of issues, including "China, Russia, Ukraine, Iran and the Middle East," the Star said.

Ultimately, Carney's largely hiccup-free meeting with Trump presented a "test for U.S. allies more generally" as they have "struggled to manage the president's upending of relationships around the world," said the Post. "Being too unyielding," like in the contentious sit-down with Ukraine's Volodymyr Zelenskyy, "risks getting kicked out of the White House," while "too soft an approach can be ineffective or prompt blowback from constituents."