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Well, our Washington correspondent, Simon Marks, has been monitoring this extraordinary meeting
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Simon, this was surreal beyond belief, wasn't it? Absolutely surreal, Andrew. For 33 minutes, Donald Trump kept the made-for-TV show going
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and you could see Mark Carney and the other members of his delegation absolutely itching to put it behind them so that they could get on
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with the serious, substantive conversation that the Canadians want to have with the US government
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about the future of Donald Trump's trade war and his tariffs. Time and again, after Mark Carney initially shut down the idea
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of Canada becoming America's 51st state, Donald Trump kept going back to the issue
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kept being shut down by Mark Carney. At one point, a Canadian reporter in the room asked President Trump
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what concession he was looking for from Canada, to which he answered simply and rather confusingly friendship
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The reporter pointed out that friendship didn't feel like a concession. Surely friendship actually existed
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That led to a riff about the importance of friendship between the two countries by the US leader And the president was also asked whether there was anything that Mark Carney could do today that would result in the immediate alleviation
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of Canada's tariff burdens. And that reporter was told flatly by Donald Trump
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absolutely not, it is what it is. Every indication that he is digging into
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a much more hostile relationship with Canada, the way he was paved for that 24 hours ago
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by his own Commerce Secretary, Howard Lutnick, who was raging on the Fox Business Network about Canada's socialist governing tradition
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even suggesting that the future of the US-Mexico-Canada free trade agreement is in doubt
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And the president breathed his own air into that argument during the course of that meeting today
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So after 33 minutes, they finally went behind closed doors. They're having lunch together at the White House
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there is no joint press conference scheduled on this occasion between the two leaders
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But again, the notion that the Canadian Prime Minister was being put through this
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reality TV hazing when all he wanted to do was going get on with the business of diplomacy
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was agonizing to watch So Simon just bring people up to date on where we actually are in terms of this trade war between the US and Canada because during the election of Mark Carney there was lots of fierce
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words were said. And before that, parts of Canada had imposed their own tariffs and threatened to
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jack up the price of energy and much else. Where are we now? Yeah, well, absolutely. And the fierce
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words continued. I mean, even while Mark Carney was preparing to head to the White House this
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morning, Donald Trump took to his social media account and insisted the United States needs
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nothing from Canada, an opinion that he voiced again, with the Prime Minister flanked alongside
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him. President Trump insisting that Canada has a massive trade deficit with the United States
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that he says is tantamount to America subsidizing Canada. But there's nothing the United States
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needs. We don't need your cars. We want to make the cars here. We don't need your steel. We want
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to make the steel here. It all flies in the face of reality, as we discovered when the Premier of
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Ontario threatened to cut energy exports to the United States, a move that, had he followed
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through on it would have left major parts of the northeast of the United States without power literally in the dark But this is what Mark Carney now Prime Minister is having to deal with So it is perfectly possible that this is going to get much
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uglier before it gets any better. I wonder if at some point somebody's going to lean across in the
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Oval Office and hand President Trump a copy of Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations
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Well, the person most likely to do that is his Treasury Secretary, Scott Bersent
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who, while this meeting was taking place at the White House today, was giving testimony on Capitol Hill
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and was stumbling in attempting to justify the trade war to members of Congress
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He also pulled the rug out from his own president because, under oath, remember
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he testified that there were no negotiations taking place between the United States and China
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And President Trump has repeatedly in recent days indicated that direct talks were underway between those two countries, despite the fact that China has denied it
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So Donald Trump found out by that event up on Capitol Hill this morning, even as he was preparing to sit down with Canada's new leader
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Well, the way things are going, it seems to me that American politics needs a kind of global translator
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And I think you're doing a very, very good job indeed, Simon. Thanks so much
