Donald Trump said he had a "very productive meeting" with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, after the two leaders met at Trump's Florida estate Mar-a-Lago. 

The men discussed "many important topics", Trump wrote on his social media platform Truth Social, including fentanyl, illegal immigration, and trade. 

Earlier on Saturday, Trudeau told reporters he had an "excellent conversation" with the American president-elect but declined to answer any questions. 

Trudeau travelled to West Palm Beach as Canada seeks to head off the president-elect's threat to impose a 25% tariff on Canadian goods, a source has confirmed to the BBC.

Canadian media reported that Trudeau landed in Palm Beach International Airport on Friday evening to visit Trump at his Mar-a-Lago estate. 

The two spoke by phone earlier in the week after Trump announced that, upon taking office in January, he would slap an across-the-board tariff on all products entering the US from Mexico and Canada.

But much of Trump's Saturday afternoon statement following the meeting focused on the "drug crisis that has decimated so many lives". 

"I made it very clear that the United States will no longer sit idly by as our Citizens become victims to the scourge of this Drug Epidemic, caused mainly by the Drug Cartels, and Fentanyl pouring in from China," Trump wrote. 

"Prime Minister Trudeau has made a commitment to work with us to end this terrible devastation." 

Neither the prime minister's office nor Trump's team responded to the BBC's request for comment on the visit.

Leaving his hotel in Palm Beach on Saturday morning, Trudeau ignored questions from reporters about whether he and Trump had discussed potential tariffs. 

The trip was not included on Trudeau's public itinerary for Friday. 

Trump has been at his Mar-a-Lago estate meeting with his transition team. Trudeau is reported to be the first G7 leader to visit the president-elect since the election. 

The two men reportedly had dinner, alongside Trump's pick for commerce secretary Howard Lutnick and Canada's public safety minister Dominic LeBlanc. 

Trudeau has often underscored that the two countries were able to successfully renegotiate a major trade pact during Trump's first term, though the relationship between the two leaders has occasionally been rocky. 

On Friday, speaking at an event in Prince Edward Island, Trudeau said the two countries "rolled up our sleeves and were able to create jobs on both sides of the border".

He said looked forward to having many "great" conversations with Trump.

The Florida visit is the latest move by Canada as it seeks to avoid the hefty tariffs, which could have wide-reaching economic impacts. 

It remains unclear whether the incoming Trump administration will actually move ahead with the threatened tariffs, as analysts note that the president-elect has been known to use such threats in the past as a negotiating tactic to achieve his goals.

Trump - who has also threatened the same levy against Mexico - has signalled that they would remain in place until both countries work to secure their shared borders with the US.

Trudeau said on Friday that "when Trump makes statements like that, he plans on carrying them out". 

He said his goal was to point out the tariff would not just harm Canadians but also raise prices for Americans and hurt that country's economy. 

Trudeau was accompanied on the trip by Dominic LeBlanc, the minister in charge of border security. 

US media reported that Trudeau and Trump were joined at dinner by Howard Lutnick, Trump's nominee for commerce secretary; Doug Burgum, tapped to lead the Department of the Interior; and Mike Waltz, who has been selected as the next national security adviser.

Canada is one of America's largest trading partners and it sends about 75% of its total exports to the US. The two countries also share deeply integrated supply chains. 

After the phone call with Trump, Trudeau held an emergency meeting on Wednesday with the leaders of Canada's provinces and territories over how to manage the US-Canada relationship. 

Trudeau is promising to present a united "Team Canada" approach to working with the US to make the case against the levy. 

Several leaders of Canadian provinces have criticised Trump's plan, saying it would be devastating to the country's economy, including the oil and gas and automotive industries. 

Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum also had a phone call with Trump this week. 

• Canada’s oil patch rattled by Trump's tariff threat
• 'It's going to be hard': US firms race to get ahead of Trump tariffs

The number of crossings at the US-Canada border is significantly lower than that at the southern border, according to US Border Patrol data on migrant encounters.

During the 2024 fiscal year, there were around 23,700 apprehensions at the northern land border, while the southern border saw more than 1.53 million apprehensions.

But Canadian officials have said in recent days there is still joint work to be done to improve border security.

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cy8787nxl7do

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YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.

         Gus Leonisky

         POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.

PLEASE DO NOT BLAME RUSSIA IF WW3 STARTS. BLAME YOURSELF.

Trump’s dollar threat against BRICS shows the US hasn’t learned anything
The president-elect’s crude attempt to scare away de-dollarization is based on an illusion of Washington’s omnipotence

Donald Trump still has it, that old magic: Long known for using social media to great – or devastating – effect, the former and incoming US president has mightily stirred the bubble again. This time the target of his ire was BRICS+ (at this point an informal but commonly used label), an association of, in essence, non-Western states that dare organize and cooperate without Washington’s permission and outside its control. 

In particular, Trump has threatened that any attempt to “move away from the Dollar” will lead to massive US punishment, specifically, “100% tariffs.” 

“There is no chance that the BRICS will replace the U.S. Dollar in International Trade,” the president-elect thinks he knows, and any country daring to challenge “the mighty US Dollar” – in the original over-capitalized, thundering Trumpese – “should wave goodbye to America.” Those who don’t want to fall from the good graces of the US, Trump demands, must not only abstain from abandoning the dollar but make a special commitment to not even try.

Let’s not dwell on the obvious: To be honest, who would not want to wave the US goodbye, if only we could? And for something that has “no chance” of happening, the idea of replacing or abandoning the dollar is getting Trump pretty worked up. Why so prickly about what he says is a non-starter anyhow?

Part of the answer – but only part – is psychological. Especially during America’s ongoing decline, its late-imperial elites, whether Democratic or Republican, are bound to be hyper-sensitive about anything that looks like defiance. Because they are still cultivating a delusion that they are “indispensable” and that we, the other almost 8 billion people on this planet outside the US, must accept their “leadership.”

But that complex explains only so much. Because what is special about BRICS is not what it has been trying to do but how successful it is, posing a challenge in the real world of power and geopolitics. Emerging barely two decades ago, just this year BRICS has doubled in size, and further expansion is certain. While it is a complex and evolving organization, one of its prominent concerns has been the escalating American abuse of the dollar as a geopolitical weapon. Hence, BRICS has been a platform for initiatives and discussions under the catch-all label “de-dollarization.” Indeed, according to Bloomberg, members of BRICS have been “leading the global debate over dollar exposure.”

That is what has triggered Trump, and not for the first time. Months before he won his comeback election, Bloombergreported that he and his advisers were thinking about and issuing threats against de-dollarization. In principle, it is not surprising that they are concerned. What a French finance minister once called “the exorbitant privilege” of the global dollar domination that emerged out of World War II has allowed the US to be profligate with debt. The basis of this anomaly is that, currently, almost 60% of all central bank reserves in the world are held in dollars, and nearly 90% of all foreign-exchange transactions are conducted in the US currency.

As a result, Washington has also been able to avail itself of what The Economist recently labelled “an enormous lever of power” by surveilling and obstructing global financial flows as well as imposing outright almost-confiscation (euphemized as “freezing”), as has happened to almost 300 billion dollars of Russia’s national reserves. In short, the dollar-as-it-still-is allows the US to live beyond its means at the cost of other nations and to make their lives miserable by the financial equivalent of blackmail, strangulation and, quite simply, robbery.

What is special this time is Trump’s hyperbolic tone and his explicit and public singling out of BRICS.

He has leveled his threat at an association that brings together two global powers, Russia and China, as well as several regional heavyweights, such as Iran and Brazil. It already represents at least 45% of the world’s population, and, in terms of the global economy, BRICS is a rising force that has already overtaken the G7, the declining club of Western/Global North rich countries. According to geopolitical analyst Kishore Mahbubani, at the end of the Cold War, more than a third of a century ago, the combined GDP of the G7 was the equivalent of 66% of global GDP. While BRICS did not exist yet, its future members were far from even getting close to matching the G7. By now, however, the G7 share stands at 45% and that of BRICS+ at 24%. That is, as long as you stick to the crude metric of nominal GDP. Once you adjust, more realistically, for purchasing power, the BRICS+ economies – with 34% of global GDP – have already beaten the G7’s 29%. 

Trump’s tweet, in other words, looks as if he were spoiling for an economic fight against two great powers – one of which is in the process of defeating the West in Ukraine – and a grouping of states that represents almost half of humanity and is powerful already while growing dynamically. What does Trump’s threat actually mean in that context?

To state the obvious, the president-elect’s sally squarely stands in the bipartisan US tradition of breathtakingly arrogant over-reach. Between sovereign states, to threaten other countries for potentially not using your currency, including in trades amongst themselves, is absurd. To demand that they promise not to even try makes you look like Tony Soprano on ecstasy, a weird mix between a bully and a crank.

But then, don’t blame Trump personally. This is not merely about him being his uncouth self. It’s a whole political culture – for want of a better term – speaking. The extraordinarily boorish pestering comes from the one, “exceptional” state on Earth that has got used to the idea that it can interfere in anyone’s business all the time and wherever it pleases. Be it by “secondary sanctions,” that is economic warfare designed to interfere with commercial relationships the US is not even involved in. Or the judicial insanity weaponized against Australian citizen and journalist Julian Assange, who was persecuted outside the US as if he had to obey American laws, while explicitly not granted even the meager protections that those same laws offer, at least formally, to Americans.  

No surprise there, really. Trump may think he’s very different from the US establishment, but he appears steeped in its self-damaging and shortsighted routine hubris. Yet does his demand even make sense on its own, inappropriate terms? No, not at all, for three reasons.

First, Trump seems to underestimate the sophistication of current de-dollarization discussions centered on BRICS. They are not aiming at the introduction of a new currency akin to the dollar or euro. Indeed, Russia’s President Vladimir Putin has been explicit about the fact that the euro can only serve as an example of how not to do things. Instead, Russia aims at a more intelligent approach by setting up an international payments system, clearinghouse-style, taking full advantage of cutting-edge digitalization. China, importantly, agrees that it is modern technology that will allow for a gradual recasting of payments around the globe. Whatever will emerge from these initiatives, it will simply be too complex and smart to be amenable to the ham-fisted repression that Trump is trying to threaten.

Secondly, Trump’s tweet is self-defeating because the “100% tariffs” he waves about like a caveman cudgel are simply not believable as a threat – except, that is, the president-elect is prepared to inflict massive pain on the American economy and its consumers. Even his other tariff threats, against China, Canada, Mexico, and the EU, especially in conjunction with his unrealistic promises of tax cuts, imply rising prices and inflation in the US. And inflation played an important role in the defeat of the Democrats.

Finally, Trump’s approach is also self-defeating because it offers further incentives to de-dollarize, as even some Western experts acknowledge. The president-elect has illustrated exactly the kind of brutal and dumb overreach and, to put it simply, flagrant disrespect of other countries’ financial sovereignty that has antagonized the world in the first place. This kind of backfiring is precisely what the Russian presidency’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov has just warned the US about.

But perhaps, to be fair to Trump, there is another way to understand his threats against reducing dollar dependency: namely as a perversely misguided attempt to repair the enormous damage done by US economic warfare under previous administrations, including those of his two Democratic predecessors, Barack Obama and Joe Biden, and his own as well.

Most of that damage was done in Washington’s gargantuan yet failing campaign against Russia. Before exiting the White House in 2017, Obama had already increased sanctions against Russia “substantially.”Subsequently, there was a relative lull during the first Trump administration. Where Obama had added 458 sanction targets, Trump still added more – 273 – but at a “much lower rate”: In the US, moderation is doing the same bad thing but more slowly. Congress, meanwhile, made sure that the president would have found it hard to reduce sanctions, even if he had wanted to, by passing the Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act (CAATSA). 

During Biden’s rule after 2021, then, US sanctions against Russia went from bad to worse: After the 2022 escalation, Biden boasted that his sanctions were “the toughest ever imposed on a major economy.” And, as before, the US was leading an international assault, including the EU and other American clients, such as Canada and Japan. By February of 2024, together they had ramped up the total of sanctions launched with the explicit intent to destroy Russia economically to 16,500.

This historically unprecedented economic warfare attack has not only failed but backfired, as is well known. Western speculators, especially in the US, have enriched themselves (again) through a number of perverse side effects – or were they main effects maybe? – as a recent Jacobin article shows. The inflation backlash triggered may well have contributed to the Democrats smashing defeat in the presidential elections, as noted before. The poor of the world have certainly suffered. And so have major economies as well, especially in a EU-NATO Europe, whose elites have consistently sacrificed the interests and well-being of their own countries, as Russian president Putin has repeatedly and correctly pointed out.  So bad has the fall-out been that even the British Telegraph, as NATO-bellicist as can be, has long noticed.

Trump, facing this total fiasco, you could say, is now desperately attempting to contain one aspect of its continuing fall-out, namely the drive toward de-dollarization. But the tragedy – or irony – is that he is trying to do so by applying even more of the same stupid highhandedness that got us into this mess in the first place. Instead of doing what is obviously needed – drop sanctions and economic warfare in general, including via weaponizing the dollar – he is adding more crude threats. 

Ultimately, it seems, Trump not only has but obstinately cultivates the same mental blind spot as virtually everyone else in the current US elite: He implicitly believes that American power has no limits, and certainly none set by the power of other states. Trump does believe that Washington can make mistakes, because otherwise he could not claim to correct them and “make America great again.” But he cannot grasp that repairing America’s place in the world would take genuine cooperation with others outside the US. Instead, he is betting on yet more bullying. Good luck with that.

https://www.rt.com/news/608724-trumps-dollar-threat-against-brics/

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YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.

         Gus Leonisky

         POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.

PLEASE DO NOT BLAME RUSSIA IF WW3 STARTS. BLAME YOURSELF.