Maggie Haberman Doubts Trump Knows What He Wants from Trade Negotiations: ‘I’m Not Sure That It’s Clear to Him’
President Donald Trump hosted the prime minister of Canada at the White House on Tuesday, while making it clear – at least to CNN’s Maggie Haberman – that he does not know what he wants from trade negotiations.
During their meeting, Prime Minister Mark Carney rejected Trump’s idea that Canada would become the 51st U.S. state, saying, “As you know from real estate, there are some places that are never for sale.” Carney also fact-checked Trump on U.S.-Canada trade relations. For his part, Trump said the U.S. does not want to import several crucial items from its northern neighbor.
“We don’t really want cars from Canada,” the president said while sitting next to Carney. “And we put tariffs on cars from Canada. And at a certain point, it won’t make economic sense for Canada to build those cars… We really don’t want Canadian steel, and we don’t want Canadian aluminum and various other things, because we wanna be able to do it ourself.”
On Tuesday’s AC360 on CNN, Anderson Cooper played that clip and asked Haberman, “Is it clear to you what kind of outcome he’s looking for?”
Haberman replied:
No. And I’m not sure that it’s clear to him what kind of actual, specific outcome he’s looking for, other than one where the U.S. can say we’re on top and somebody else is not. Whatever the outcome is with Canada, with most of these other trading partners, it will look like some kind of a framework of a deal. And Trump will say, “We won. This is what I wanted.” It won’t be an actual trade deal to the point you made earlier. Those take months and sometimes years to hammer out. He will take some kind of off-ramps, but I don’t think that he knows exactly what he wants to see, other than a headline that says success.
Trump has embroiled the U.S. in trade wars with most countries when he imposed sweeping tariffs on the vast majority of imports on April 2, which he termed “Liberation Day.”
Watch above via CNN.
