Wow this report is quite unbelievable and suggests that even Trump’s closest advisors are having trouble reining him in on trade:
NY POST – The personal appeal that President Trump said he received from Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau last month — leading him to renegotiate NAFTA — was only made after Trump’s son-in-law and top aide Jared Kushner called Trudeau’s office in Ottawa and begged him to talk some sense into the commander-in-chief, a report says.
The unconventional move was revealed Monday by the National Post, which spoke to several government sources familiar with the desperate pleas from Washington.
Toronto’s Metro newspaper later revealed that Kushner was the government official who made the phone call.
White House advisers had been worried that Trump would scrap the North American Free Trade Agreement — after he famously dubbed it the “worst trade deal ever” — and decided to phone the prime minister’s office to get Trudeau to change his mind, the sources said.
“You never know how much of it is theater, but it didn’t feel that way,” a senior Canadian diplomatic source told the Post of the call between Trump’s people and Trudeau’s.
“Maybe they’re just learning how to be a government,” the source said. “At least they were open to the conversation, and that stopped them doing something rash and destructive.”
If you recall, Trump did say that he got a call from both the president of Mexico and the Canadian Prime Minister that convinced him not to abandon NAFTA:
I received calls from the President of Mexico and the Prime Minister of Canada asking to renegotiate NAFTA rather than terminate. I agreed..
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 27, 2017
As I’ve said before, I don’t trust Trump on trade after all the ridiculous threats he’s made to car companies wanting to move to Mexico. But what I never expected was that his own closest advisors may not trust him either!
For Kushner to call other foreign heads of state, begging them to convince Trump to not abandon NAFTA – well it sounds like crazy town is happening in the White House.
Perhaps Kushner isn’t as big of a liability as some have made him out to be…