With a clear speaking style and lean, athletic build — he’s scrimmaged with Canadian professional hockey players — he looks like a cast member of “The Diplomat,” a man literally able to skate circles around Trump.

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The looks gap alone is enough to enrage Trump, but Carney’s determination to fight for Canada rather than succumb to his threats has further inflamed the US president. “WE DON’T NEED CANADA – THEY NEED US!” Trump declared on Truth Social.

“Trump wants humiliation,” says Brian Rathbun, professor of global affairs at the University of Toronto. “Ultimately, it’s about winning and it’s about power.”

The stakes of the new trade war are enormous.

North American nations have had wide-ranging free trade agreements in place since 1994, including the most recent, the US-Canada-Mexico Agreement (USMCA) negotiated by the first Trump administration in 2020.

But amid the current Trump administration’s tariffs and Canada’s countertariffs, total Canadian trade with the United States fell 4.8 percent in 2025 to $715.5 billion.

In the United States, the trade war is having broad effects on the national economy. But the impact has been especially acute in border states, from New England to the Great Lakes to the West Coast, where Canadians and Americans have long enjoyed family ties, bought products from each other, and crossed the border readily.

Now, Canadian tourism to the United States, whether for long stays — snowbirds going to the South and West — or day trips, has plummeted by 25 percent, according to Canadian government data.

Trump has tried to make trouble at one crucial border crossing. Objections from the White House this summer held up the opening of the Gordie Howe International Bridge between Detroit and Windsor, Ontario.

The bridge, paid for by Canada, is a soaring modern rival to the antiquated Ambassador Bridge, owned by the billionaire Matthew Maroun, a Detroit businessman who donated $1 million to a MAGA super PAC.

Days before the new bridge was scheduled to open in June, Maroun visited Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, according to The New York Times, after which Washington issued a series of demands before the bridge could open.

Those demands were never met. Canadian officials held their own ribbon cutting on July 24, essentially thumbing their nose at Trump, and opened the Gordie for traffic, including a flood of bicyclists and pedestrians.

The rebellion didn’t sit well with the president, who has bullied his way around the world, former Carney adviser Julian Karaguesian told me. After months of abusing Canada and getting pushback, “he wants the appearance of a win.”

Karaguesian suggests Carney might have been willing to give Trump just such a win in the latest talks to head off a trade war. But last-minute demands after Trump had announced a “DEAL” on his social media account, including a US demand that it dictate Canadian steel tariffs on other countries, caused the Canadians to walk.

“We cannot accept what they’ve offered, and we will not give what they’ve asked,” Carney said Saturday, when talks fell apart.

Until recently, it was difficult to imagine Canada breaking with its largest trade partner. But since the early days of his administration and the first wave of tariffs, Carney has assiduously courted the leaders of other nations including Japan, South Korea, China, and Singapore. In Europe, Spanish prime minister Pedro Sanchez has become a close Carney ally.

The Canadian prime minister calls the smaller countries “middle powers” and argued in a landmark address at Davos earlier this year that collectively, they can push back against the United States and negotiate collective trade agreements of their own. That’s popular in Canada, says Rathbun, the University of Toronto professor. “People like the defiance of it,” he says.

But Karaguesian is skeptical, arguing that Europe’s middle powers will only go so far in defying the United States: “If you have an American military base in your country, you’re not going to go against anything Washington wants.”

To many veteran watchers of US-Canadian relations, it seems incredible that one of the greatest friendships on the planet has become so fraught in just 18 months.

In his remarks Saturday, Carney said Canada’s previous relationship with the United States no longer exists. “We have been under no illusions. We recognized from the start that America has changed,” he said.

Rathbun believes Carney will continue to dig in his heels against Trump: “Precisely because he’s a statesman, and serious, he does not want to be the guy who gave up.”

Millions of Canadians — and Americans tired of seeing tariffs push costs up — are rooting for Carney to win the faceoff.