White House economic adviser Larry Kudlow on Sunday said Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau had “stabbed us in the back,” gone “rogue” and “pour[ed] collateral damage on this whole Korean trip” with comments during a Saturday news conference following the G7 summit in Canada this weekend.
Kudlow blamed Trudeau — he once incorrectly called the Canadian leader by his father’s name, Pierre — for President Donald Trump’s alliance-rattling decision to reject a previously agreed-upon communiqué written by all attendees of the summit.
“Don’t blame Trump,” Kudlow said, jabbing his finger into the table as he spoke to CNN’s Jake Tapper. “It was Trudeau who started blasting Trump after he left, after the deals were made.”
He was referring to a press conference Trudeau held after Trump’s early exit from the summit; the President left hours early on Saturday, skipping an event on climate change and clean energy, among others.
In the press conference, Trudeau reiterated that Canada planned retaliatory tariffs in response to the new American tariffs on imported steel and aluminum. Canadians are polite and reasonable, Trudeau said, “but we also will not be pushed around.”
“These are things that the prime minister has said before, basically,” Kudlow acknowledged in a separate interview with CBS “Face the Nation” host Margaret Brennan. “But he didn’t say them before after a successful G7 communiqué where President Trump and the others all worked in good faith to put a statement together.”
He added later, referring to Trudeau’s press conference: “You want to say that right after a successful G7 meeting? Is that necessary? Where’s the good faith? Where’s the optimism?”
Kudlow called Trudeau’s comments a “betrayal,” and asserted that “POTUS is not going to let a Canadian prime minister push him around on the eve” of the June 12 summit between Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un.
“So this was about North Korea?” Tapper asked.
“Of course it was, in large part,” Kudlow said, adding: “One thing leads to another, Jake, they are all related.”
“Kim must not see American weakness.”
Kudlow added later: “[Trudeau] can’t put Trump in a position of being weak going into the North Korean talks with Kim. He can’t do that. And by the way, President Trump is not weak. He will be very strong as he always is.”
If not surprising, it was a forceful defense of an administration guilty of all of the transgressions for which it had punished its neighbor and close ally: Canada was responding to Trump’s tariffs on longtime American allies, and Trudeau’s condemnatory language was nothing compared to Trump’s daily tweets.
To that point, Kudlow delivered the administration’s canned response: “How many times has President Trump said, ‘If you hit me, I’m going to hit you back’?”
Watch below via CNN:
White House economic adviser Larry Kudlow says Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau “stabbed us in the back” #CNNSOTU https://t.co/ASsMQJXmjn https://t.co/cpPfpwfzpz
— CNN Politics (@CNNPolitics) June 10, 2018
Trudeau "went rogue" at the G7 summit and is "pouring collateral damage on this whole Korean trip," says White House economic adviser Larry Kudlow #CNNSOTU https://t.co/Dr4hCnSUCY https://t.co/UxKFwy6tSh
— CNN Politics (@CNNPolitics) June 10, 2018
