 |
| Canada's Mark Carney meets with Donald Trump in the Oval Office (Getty) |
The prime minister of Canada met with Donald Trump in the Oval Office yesterday, and according to a report at politicususa.com, Mark Carney was the winner via knockout -- perhaps with a figurative blow to Trump's flabby midsection.
We probably should not be surprised that the White House meeting was one-sided. After all, Canada's leader has an accomplished record in academics and government service, while the U.S. leader . . . well, not so much. In fact, Mary Trump (Donald's niece) wrote in her best-selling memoir Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man that her uncle cheated to gain entrance to the University of Pennsylvania. (More on those subjects near the end of this post.)
Jason Easley, of Politicus, provides a blow-by-blow report on the White House encounter, under the headline "Canada's New PM Looks Trump In The Eye And Crushes Him; New Canadian PM Mark Carney put on the velvet glove of diplomacy while he crushed Trump's fantasy of Canada becoming the 51st state":
Mark Carney showed Canadian voters, during his first meeting with Donald Trump, they made the correct choice by keeping the Liberal Party in power.
Trump hit Carney and the assembled media with his sales pitch for Canada to become the 51st US state:
I still believe that it takes two to tango. But no, I do, I believe it would be a massive tax cut for the Canadian citizens. You get free military, you get tremendous medical care, and other things.
There would be a lot of advantages, but it would be a massive tax cut. And it's also a beautiful, as a real-estate developer, I'm a real-estate developer at heart. When you get rid of that artificially drawn line, somebody drew that line many years ago with 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. . . . I do feel it's much better for Canada. But we're not gonna be discussing that unless somebody wants to discuss it.
I think there are tremendous benefits to the Canadian citizens, tremendously lower taxes, free military -- which honestly we give you essentially anyway 'cause we're protecting Canada if you've had a problem. But I think it would really be a wonderful marriage because it's two places that get along very well.
They like each other a lot.
Carney was ready with a well-timed, thoughtful response when the subject of the U.S. annexing Canada came up, Easley reports:
When confronted with the idea of a U.S. president wanting to buy his country, Mark Carney had the perfectly measured answer:
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, Buckingham Palace that you visited as well. That's true. And having met with the owners of Canada over the course of the campaign in the past several months, it's not for sale.
It won't be for sale ever.
But. The opportunity is in the partnership and the and what we can build together. And we have done that in the past. And part of that, as the president just said, is with respect to our own security. And my government is committed for a step change in our investment in Canadian security and our partnership.
I'll also say this: The president has revitalized international security and revitalized NATO. We will be pulling our full weight in NATO.
Easley came away impressed with Canada's new leader. In a diplomatic environment, with an unpredictable counterpart, Carney hit just the right note. Easley writes:
A less diplomatic answer would have been to laugh in Trump’s face or make a counteroffer for Canada to buy Maine, but Carney didn’t do that. He firmly told Trump no, but he wrapped it in some of that NATO mumbo jumbo that Trump is so fond of.
Canada isn’t going to be the 51st state, and Trump also learned that he’s not going to bully Mark Carney.
In retrospect, we should have expected the first Carney-Trump summit to be one-sided, considering that Carney has an impressive academic and governmental background. As for Trump, his niece Mary wrote in her best-selling book Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man that Donald paid a proxy to take the entrance exam for him at the University of Pennsylvania. Donald's main talent since somehow getting through the U of Penn has been receiving more than $14 million in loans and other financial favors from his father.
According to Wikipedia, Trump graduated from Penn with a degree in economics in 1968. It is not clear, however, how he managed to graduate if he did not take the entrance exam. In fact, Trump reportedly distanced himself from Penn during his third presidential campaign.
This is from the Wikipedia entry on Canada's Mark Carney:
Carney was born in Fort Smith, Northwest Territories, and raised in Edmonton, Alberta. He graduated with a bachelor's degree in economics from Harvard University in 1987, then studied at the University of Oxford, where he earned a master's degree in 1993 and doctorate in 1995. He held roles at Goldman Sachs before joining the Bank of Canada as a deputy governor in 2003. In 2004, he was named as senior associate deputy minister for the Department of Finance Canada. Carney served as the eighth governor of the Bank of Canada from 2008 to 2013 and was responsible for Canadian monetary policy during the 2008 financial crisis. While governor of the Bank of Canada, he was appointed chair of the Financial Stability Board, a position he held for two terms from 2011 to 2018. Following his term as governor of the Bank of Canada, he served as the 120th governor of the Bank of England from 2013 to 2020, where he led the British central bank's response to Brexit and the early phase of the COVID pandemic.
We have found no reports of Mark Carney cheating to earn any of those roles.
No comments:
Post a Comment