Trump’s ego is so fragile he sees Europe and Canada talks as a personal slight

There is an old – and deeply dubious – bit of playground wisdom: when a boy pulls a girl’s hair, it means that he likes her. This aphorism is showing its age. Few modern parents would now shrug off what many of them would see as an assault on their child at school. But more than that, boys are expected to grow out of these impulses pretty early. Even if you think hair pulling is charming at age six, it’s less so once you hit 20. Eighty-year-old Donald Trump seems not to have learned that lesson. For the past two years, he has alternately been insisting he would like Canada to become the USA’s 51st state, or else launching trade wars against its northern neighbour, close trading partner, and longtime ally. In recent weeks, the US-Canada trade war has intensified again after Trump imposed more auto tariffs. Shorts Faced with an erratic and unreliable primary trading partner, Canada has understandably done what most countries would in its situation – looked to build up relationships and increase its trade elsewhere. That diplomatic work delivered a win for the Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney on Wednesday, when Ursula von der Leyen, President of the European Commission, offered Canada “associate membership” of the European Union in a keynote speech. In reality, no one – including Carney and Von der Leyen – knows what “associate membership” of the EU actually means. EU parliamentarians had not been forewarned about the line in the speech, there is no existing political status with that name, and the early consensus is that the offer was more of a symbolic statement of intent than something material. All the same, Trump is mad as hell, and he’s not even trying to hide it. If the EU does a deal with Canada that Trump doesn’t like, he warned, he’ll introduce “very serious tariffs” or even “stop trading with Europe” altogether. The comments once again show how confused Trump is when it comes to trade, which he always seems to view with the suspicion of a paranoid man who thinks he’s being ripped off, even if he can’t work out exactly how. Carney with von der Leyen at the European Parliament in Strasbourg on Thursday (Photo: Pascal Bastien/ AP) The US has become the richest and most successful nation of the early 21st century by outsourcing low-value manufacturing and importing the cheap goods while selling high-margin services – especially through Big Tech – to the rest of the world. Instead of getting his head around this, Trump obsessively focuses on the USA’s supposed trade deficit with the world – thinking that because the US buys more goods from a country than it sells, it must be doing worse. As he threatened Canada and the EU, Trump said: “If we lose $50bn a year with a country, and we say ‘we’re not going to trade with you anymore’, we don’t lose $50bn a year. It’s very simple. Right?” By Trump’s logic, if the US immediately stopped trading with the entire world, it would be fantastic for the US economy. Almost anyone could immediately see the problem with that proposition, but it still seems to elude him. To put it another way, I spend about £3,000 a year buying goods from my local supermarket, and it spends nothing buying goods from me – meaning I’m running a trade deficit against it. But if I stop buying food until a supermarket promises not to run a deficit with me, I’m going to starve to death. If a credible US president didn’t want Canada to build closer ties with other nations, they would focus on wooing Canada with a charm offensive of its own – it might offer closer co-operation on defence and security, better trading terms and the like so Canada has no reason to look elsewhere. Trump seems determined to treat Canada roughly, but also insists it shouldn’t be allowed to make other friends in response. This is once again Trump trying to play geopolitics by the rules of the playground – he makes up his own rules as he goes along to suit himself, and he’s getting increasingly angry when others won’t just go along. This would be embarrassing for any president, but it is particularly humiliating for Donald Trump – the man who sold himself as the ultimate dealmaker, the guy who wrote The Art of the Deal (even if in reality it was ghostwritten). Trump seems to have forgotten, or never learned, the very basics of reciprocity. Neither has Trump learned the basics of how international trade works. That’s pretty embarrassing for his alma mater, the Wharton School, given his degree is in economics. It’s even worse for him, given he’s had nearly six years as president to absorb the lesson from one of his many advisers. Now, Trump’s zero-sum, confused world view is coming back to haunt him. Everyone else is getting on without him – what could be worse for a president who demands to be the star of the show?