Trump Revokes U.S. Endorsement Of G7 Statement From Air Force One, Resolving Long-Standing Concern That The United States Still Stood Behind A Document It Had Just Signed

The Filing

LA MALBAIE, Quebec. President Trump on Saturday revoked the United States' endorsement of the joint statement issued at the close of the Group of Seven summit, withdrawing American support for a document his own delegation had agreed to hours earlier, after watching the prime minister of Canada describe Canadian policy at a Canadian press conference.

The communiqué, a routine annual statement of shared positions on trade, the economy, and the environment, had been negotiated over two days and signed off by all seven member nations. Mr. Trump, who left the gathering early to fly to Singapore for a meeting with the leader of North Korea, instructed American representatives to remove the country's name from it while still in the air, citing remarks Prime Minister Justin Trudeau had made after the President's departure.

In those remarks, Mr. Trudeau had said that Canada would not be "pushed around" and would proceed with retaliatory measures against the steel and aluminum tariffs the Trump administration had imposed weeks earlier on national security grounds, a designation that classified Canadian metal as a threat to the United States. The positions were the same ones the Canadian government had stated publicly for weeks.

"PM Justin Trudeau of Canada acted so meek and mild during our meetings only to give a news conference after I left," the President wrote, describing the prime minister as "Very dishonest & weak." A senior official familiar with the President's thinking said the matter had been handled appropriately. "The President signed the statement, and then the President unsigned the statement," the official said. "Both were strong decisions."

By Sunday, administration trade advisers had taken to television to accuse Mr. Trudeau of betrayal, with one suggesting there was a special place in hell reserved for the Canadian leader. The dispute concerned a single non-binding paragraph about tariffs in a document that commits its signatories to nothing.

At press time, the President had arrived in Singapore, where he expressed his complete confidence in the word of the North Korean dictator he had just met.

Who Benefits

§Donald J. Trump, who converted a routine diplomatic document into a televised demonstration of dominance over a close ally and carried the resulting grievance into his summit with North Korea hours later.
§The administration's strongman branding, which recast the alienation of America's nearest neighbor as toughness.
§Domestic steel and aluminum producers, whose Section 232 tariffs on allied metal, the cause of the entire dispute, remained firmly in place.
§Vladimir Putin and the Russian government, whose readmission to the group the President had floated only days earlier, and whose interest in splitting the Western alliance advanced at no cost to Moscow.
§China, handed a fracturing bloc of industrialized democracies it did not have to lift a finger to weaken.
§Future presidents, who inherited the precedent that the United States may endorse a multilateral agreement and revoke its signature by social media post while the plane is still climbing.

Sourced to the public record · presented without editorial embellishment