Trump’s quirky scrawled messages to Trudeau

Disclosure of quirky personal messages with Canada’s PM suggests Donald Trump harboured warm feelings towards him.

US President Donald Trump and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. Picture: AFP

In an exchange of messages ­involving pages torn from magazines, marker pens and smiley faces, Donald Trump developed an idiosyncratic form of diplo­m­acy with Canadian leader Justin Trudeau.

One of the US President’s handwritten notes was so unusua­l that the Canadian ambassador in Washington double-checked with the White House to make sure it was not a joke before sending it on to Ottawa.

Canada and the US are trad­itionally close allies but relations have cooled under Mr Trump, reaching their nadir at the G7 summit in Quebec last year when he left early, accusing his host of making “false statements” about trade.

Mr Trump, 73, who does not use email, places great store on written communications, as seen by his regular exchange of letters with Kim Jong-un, the North ­Korean leader.

The disclosure of a series of quirky personal messages with the Canadian Prime Minister suggests the President harboured warm feelings towards Mr ­Trudeau, 47, on a personal level, at least early in his presidency.

Mr Trump ripped off the cover of a Bloomberg Businessweek edition­ from May 2017 featuring a full-page photo of Mr Trudeau with the headline “The anti-Trump” and, using a marker pen, scrawled: “Looking good! Hope it’s not true!”

This was then stuffed into an envelope and dispatched via the Canadian embassy, where offic­ials checked with presidential aides to make sure it was genuine.

The magazine cover went through the National Security Council clearance process for written messages from the Oval Office. Some White House staff thought it inappropriate but decide­d “it was done in good fun and would be interpreted as positive outreach”, a source told the Axios website.

Mr Trump, an inveterate print reader, has a habit of tearing out articles that delight or annoy him, daubing them with a message and posting this to the author or subject. It is a tradition he has continued in the Oval Office, with the only deference to the digital age being he will have tweets printed out so he can sign them and send a copy by post to the tweeter.

It is not known whether Mr Trudeau responded directly.

He did come back the next time Mr Trump sent a similar message. He had told a rally in Florida in December 2017 that the US had a trade deficit with ­Canada and sent Mr Trudeau a document to show this. The President wrote “Not good!” on it, or words to that effect. However, Mr Trump had used a calculation based on the US deficit in goods without taking into account ser­vices­, which together make up an American trade surplus.

Mr Trudeau replied on maple leaf official notepaper: “It’s been a busy year! Enjoy the Christmas holidays: you deserve it.”

He enclosed a print-out of the Canada page from the website of the Office of the US Trade Representa­tive. He had underlined a section reporting that “the US goods and services trade surplus with Canada was $12.5 billion in 2016”. He circled the figure and drew a smiley face next to it.

A Canadian government official would not comment on the exchang­es, except to say: “There was a lot of back and forth. That said, it is certainly true there were disagreements between our two countries about the figures.”

The symbiotic relationship ­between the allies continued ­yesterday, with Mr Trudeau an­noun­­cing $28.9 million aid to im­pov­erish­ed immigrants seeking cit­iz­en­ship as the Trump admin­is­tra­tion said green cards could be denied if applicants for US citizenship used welfare benefits.

The Times