The banality of Donald Trump
Justin Trudeau showed just how little it takes to get under the president’s skin
Donald Trump may be angry over secrets revealed in John Bolton’s new book, which officially hits the shelves on Tuesday. But he can’t be annoyed with the book’s revelations about his relationship with Justin Trudeau.
The animosity described in “The Room Where it Happened” has been very public - the opposite of secret, in fact.
Bolton has given readers a peek behind the scenes of the now-famous G7 meeting in Quebec in 2018, which resulted in a stream of Trump invective toward Trudeau in the immediate aftermath.
The book describes Trump’s reaction after watching Trudeau’s closing news conference, during which the prime minister spoke out about the U.S. tariff war against Canadian steel, levied just days before the G7 gathering.
“He was throwing a fit about Trudeau’s using his closing press conference to score points against him,” Bolton writes in the book, a copy of which was discreetly supplied to me on Monday. “Trump had been gracious to Trudeau in his press event, and he was infuriated Trudeau had not reciprocated.”
Bolton then goes on to say how Trump ordered members of his inner circle, specifically his economic adviser Larry Kudlow, to publicly shame Canada’s prime minister on TV.
“Trump’s direction was clear: ‘Just go after Trudeau. Don’t knock the others. Trudeau’s a ‘behind your back’ guy.’”
Kudlow obliged, as did trade adviser Peter Navarro, saying on that same Sunday TV circuit that there would be a “special place in hell” for people who crossed his boss. (Navarro would retract that statement not long afterward.)
That Trump-Trudeau blow-up took place entirely in public, on TV, which is what appears to be the real sticking point with this president.
No big policy differences got under his skin, no clashes of ideology.
Trump wasn’t annoyed that the Canadian prime minister opposed the tariffs — it would be a surprise if a Canadian leader supported them, after all. The president didn’t like what he saw on TV, so he launched retaliation on TV.
This is the most striking feature of Bolton’s revelations about the famous blow-up of 2018 — how ultimately shallow it was. That little chapter might well be titled “The Banality of an International Incident.”
Bolton does report that Trump arrived in Canada without much regard for either Trudeau or French President Emmanuel Macron, “but he tolerated them, mockingly crossing swords with them in meetings.”
But Bolton never really explains what was behind this antipathy. He says, mistakenly, that Trump wanted Canada to ratify the new North American free trade deal, but his chronology is off — in June 2018, that deal was still four months away.
So what was it, then? Perhaps the relative youth or energy of his counterparts?
As Bolton reports about the G7 meeting itself, “Trump himself seemed very tired; in fairness, so were many others, but not Macron and Trudeau, and certainly not their aides, who were pushing policy agendas contrary to ours.”
Trump seemed oblivious to those policy differences. “I tried to judge whether Trump really wanted a G7 communique and would therefore make more concessions, or whether he was indifferent. I couldn’t tell, but Trump (who had not troubled to prepare himself) didn’t really have much of an idea what was at stake.”
Bolton likely wasn’t setting out to compliment Trudeau or Macron in this snippet from his book, but the lingering impression he leaves is of two energetic leaders getting the best of tired and distracted president, unable to defend himself in person or recognize differences until he saw them on TV.
Sources close to Trudeau have quietly and anonymously confirmed Bolton’s account of this blow-up, but the prime minister himself has said little about that incident. At the end of 2018, I asked Trudeau about it during an interview, and he said only that he resisted temptation to fight back personally.
“As satisfying as it might be to sort of let it rip in public or respond to personal attacks or personal comments with personal comments, does that help me do my job? Does that help Canadians? No. So I put that aside,” Trudeau said.
In “Fire and Fury,” another book about the Trump White House, author Michael Wolff described the early relationship with Trudeau in a more flattering light. Trump, in that account, was pleased with Trudeau’s smiling, pleasant demeanour. Again, though, nothing to do with meetings of minds - just style and image.
Bolton has been saying in his first flurry of book interviews that he set out to show that this president is not competent to hold office. This glimpse of what it took for Trudeau to get under Trump’s skin in 2018 - the banality of it all would certainly indicate a lack of deep thoughts in the Oval Office. But that too is not classified information.
Susan Delacourt is a national affairs columnist for the Toronto Star. Twitter: @susandelacourt