President demands trade concessions
He warns allies they risk being cut off from trade with U.S.
QUEBEC CITY — President Trump said Saturday he has instructed U.S. officials not to sign off on the joint statement from this weekend’s meeting of the Group of Seven industrial nations, blasting Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau for what the president termed “false statements.” Trudeau early Saturday harshly criticized new U.S. tariffs on steel and aluminum from Canada, Mexico and the European Union.
The president ended his trip Saturday to the Group of Seven industrial nations with his strongest trade threat to date, warning allies to make major concessions or risk being cut off entirely from trade with the United States.
Trump said that in meetings with foreign leaders he’d floated the idea of countries dropping all import barriers, saying the United States would do the same in return. But he warned of severe penalties for countries that kept current rules in place, arguing they had taken advantage of previous U.S. administrations to rig the global system against U.S. interests.
“We’re like the piggy bank that everybody is robbing,” Trump said here at a news conference. “And that ends.”
But foreign leaders publicly and pointedly rejected Trump’s demands, raising the possibility of further escalation — particularly after Trump’s recently imposed tariffs on steel and aluminum from the European Union, Canada and Mexico and said doing so protected U.S. national security.
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau sharply criticized Trump’s tariffs and promised Canada would answer with its own July 1 unless the United States reversed course.
“Canadians, we’re polite, we’re reasonable, but we also will not be pushed around,” Trudeau said at a news conference. “I highlighted directly to the president that Canadians did not take it lightly that the United States has moved forward with significant tariffs on our steel and aluminum industry,” Trudeau said at a news conference at the meeting’s end. “Particularly, [they] did not take lightly that it’s for a national security reason that for Canadians ... who stood shoulder to shoulder with American soldiers in far-off lands in conflicts from the first World War onwards, it’s kind of insulting.”
At a summit aimed at renewing ties between members after months of trade threats, Trump heightened tensions with allies while reaching out to absent U.S. adversaries.
Trump, as he departed for the G-7 summit, called for Russia to be readmitted after it was expelled in 2014 for annexing Ukraine’s Crimea. He closed his summit with the threats before departing the summit early — skipping a discussion of global climate change — to fly to Singapore for a nuclear summit with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un.
Now, Trump and foreign leaders face a string of trade decisions that will either preserve the existing global economic system or reshape it, with millions of jobs and trillions of dollars hanging in the balance.
Trump cautioned other nations — those in the G-7 and around the world — that the size of the U.S. economy means other nations can’t win a trade war.
“We win that war a thousand times out of a thousand,” Trump said.
And though Trump described foreign leaders as receptive to his demands in private, Trudeau and others showed few, if any, public signs of caving.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s office released a photo of multiple leaders appearing to confront a displeased Trump. A Reuters photographer, meanwhile, captured a photograph Friday of the imprint that French President Emmanuel Macron left on Trump’s right hand after a handshake, suggesting the French leader used a forceful grip.
It was part of a broader approach by foreign leaders to the second G-7 meeting of Trump’s presidency.
Representatives from other G-7 countries said they felt as though they had made progress in conveying their positions to Trump, something many of them felt pressured to do by voters at home.
Despite the tension, the member states’ leaders were cordial in person, Trump included. He made first-name references to “Angela” and “Justin,” and he repeatedly insisted he blamed previous U.S. leaders, not foreign ones, for what he sees as the global trade imbalance.
Trump said the leaders discussed the question of Russia’s inclusion in the group but reached no conclusion. “We didn’t do votes or anything, but it has been discussed,” he said.