TRUDEAU BECOMES TRUMP’S BROCCOLI.

The presidency has changed amazingly in a quarter century. Donald Trump’s Twitter feed spews out like bubbling lava the sulphurous contents of his soul and although CNN devotes most of its day to his morning’s offerings nothing much happens beyond that. By contrast, when George H. W. Bush was president, he once confessed to an interviewer he didn’t really care for broccoli and the whole world fell on him, with broccoli farmers leading the deluge.

Bush never lived it down. I was at a lunchtime speech he gave at a NAFTA retrospective a decade or so after leaving office. He spoke before any food was served, not the usual practice at such events. The reason, he explained, was broccoli. “If they serve broccoli, I’m outta here.”

NAFTA was Bush’s baby, of course. As a foreign policy practitioner since the 1970s, he saw the long-term benefit of locking Mexico into the North American orbit by helping impose external constraints on its legal system, even if that cost some American jobs. Only some jobs, mind you, not the “giant sucking sound” populist businessman Ross Perot warned of as he personally sucked enough Republican votes away from Bush in the 1992 presidential election to elect Bill Clinton.

I wonder how George H. W. would have handled Justin Trudeau’s passive-aggressive participation in Friday’s signing ceremony for NAFTA 2.0 outside the G20 meeting in Buenos Aires. Like a child miffed at having to miss playtime for the family photograph, Trudeau sulked, pointedly declining to hold up the document he’d just signed even as the presidents of Mexico and the U.S. proudly displayed theirs. “Look, no wall!” the grin of Mexico’s outgoing president Enrique Peña Nieto seemed to say.

Trudeau, by contrast, mimicked those captured sailors from the USS Pueblo who in 1968 used artful finger placements in the posed propaganda photos to make clear they were still resisting their North Korean captors.

George H. W. Bush was “the last gentleman,” as his biographer called him. So perhaps he would have understood and maybe even sympathized with Trudeau’s need to appear less than overjoyed for domestic Canadian consumption. New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd writes this week about her long, friendly correspondence with “Poppy” Bush despite her frequent evisceration of his president-son in print over the Iraq War and other transgressions. “Election coming in Canada. Gotta do what you gotta do,” George H.W. might have rationalized. After all, he’d done “Read my lips: No new taxes” in 1988, a pledge he broke in just his second year in office so as to get the federal deficit under control. Though the budget deal he brokered with a Democratic Congress set the stage for the Clinton boom, many Republicans never forgave him: You can go back on your word on plank 23 in your platform, but not plank 1.

Donald Trump is no Poppy Bush. If you rain on his presentation ceremony, he’s not going to forget it.

Trudeau’s funk in Buenos Aires may help the prime minister get re-elected but, one way or another, Canadians will pay for it. That a president would remember and resent such a minor slight may not be reasonable, but you’ve got to play with the president you’re dealt. If the one you’ve got leans to vindictive paranoia, you need to take that into account. Stand up to a bully, yes, but why annoy him needlessly?

Especially since we’re not out of the woods yet on the new trade deal and (sigh) may not be for some time.

Trump says he’ll soon give the required six-months’ notice for NAFTA’S cancellation, so that if Democrats don’t pass his replacement for it, we all go back to what North America had before: either the Canada-u.s. Freetrade Agreement, which would actually be great for us since under it we had preferential access to the U.S. market and Mexico didn’t; or basic WTO most-favourednation status.

Can the president actually do that? What I’ve read suggests he probably can, although since NAFTA doesn’t specify exactly how cancellation works, things could get messy. Nancy Pelosi, House Speaker-presumptive, might try to remind the president that the laws that implement trade deals are in fact laws, which only Congress makes. Or some self-appointed litigant may decide to take the NAFTA cancellation to court, where almost everything in modern America ends up.

Continuing uncertainty about NAFTA mainly serves Donald Trump. First, because he so clearly revels in mayhem but, second, because uncertainty about what happens at its borders makes the U.S., with its gigantic domestic market, a more attractive place to invest than either of its neighbours.

George H. W. Bush and his right-hand-man, James Baker, were no pushovers (ask the ghost of Saddam Hussein). Even so, the next year will have us wishing American foreign policy was still run by people who operated, as Bush and Baker did, according to pre-social-media codes of human behaviour.

RAIN ON HIS CEREMONY, AND HE’S NOT GOING TO FORGET IT.