Trump advisers blast Trudeau with ‘unprecedented’ language: political scientist

VANCOUVER (NEWS 1130) – The barbs continue to fly from the Trump administration — as it presses the case that Canadian trade policy is hurting the United States.

“There’s a special place in hell for any foreign leader that engages in bad faith diplomacy with President Donald J. Trump,” Trump trade adviser Peter Navarro said on Fox News this weekend, following the G7 summit in Quebec. “To my friends in Canada, that was one of the worst political miscalculations of a Canadian leader, in modern Canadian history. All Justin Trudeau had to do was take the win. President Trump did the courtesy to Justin Trudeau to travel up.”

The comments from Navarro, and others from Trump’s top economic adviser Larry Kudlow, come amid a tense tariff dispute between the two ally nations.

“POTUS is not going to let a Canadian prime minister push him around on the eve of this,” Kudlow said on CNN in reaction to Trudeau’s closing news conference at the summit. “He is not going to permit any show of weakness on the trip to negotiate with North Korea.”

Related articles: 

• Trump’s top economic adviser accuses Trudeau of backstabbing after G7
• Donald Trump shows up late, disrupts G7 women’s empowerment session
• Trudeau to Trump: ‘Canadians won’t be pushed around,’ on NAFTA

Political watchers have described the escalating language in this trade feud as really remarkable. While many close followers have been left astounded by some of the rhetoric directed toward Trudeau on this trade issue, Political Scientist Hamish Telford with the University of the Fraser Valley expects our prime minister will now adjust his approach in dealing with the American leader.

“Up until now was unimaginable that a president would behave in this way. I think that Trudeau has tried the right thing, he’s been trying to use flattery and befriend Trump. He’s now going to talk tough, I think that’s the right think to do now.”

Telford admits he can’t remember seeing anything like this.

“He is an unprecedented president and he’s outside of all of the normal boundaries of behaviour for an American president. He’s really sabotaging the institutions that the Americans built up to govern the Western world after the Second World War.”

Of course, harsh language about Canada and its leader isn’t just coming from Trump’s advisers. The US president took to Twitter while on his trip to Singapore for the historic summit with North Korea to call Trudeau “Very dishonest & weak.”

His comments have drawn criticism from allies like German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

In response to initial tweets critical of her country and prime minister, Canada’s foreign minister, Chrystia Freeland, said her nation “does not conduct its diplomacy through ad hominem attacks.”