President Donald Trump will most likely not attend the Group of 7 meeting on climate change which is to take place in Ottawa, Canada, the White House said on Thursday.
The decision comes as a result of recent spats with Canada and France whose leaders will meet vis-a-vis on Friday. The White House said President Trump will leave early on Saturday, a few hours before the meeting on climate change and the environment, and that an aide will take his place.
At the conference, Trump is bound to face criticism from U.S. allies France and Canada over trade policies and other matters. According to people familiar with the president’s thinking, Trump is confident he can win a “drag-out fight” with French President Emmanuel Macron and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, but would rather not wage it in person.
On Thursday, President Trump engaged in a back-and-forth on Twitter with the Macron and Trudeau, questioning as a result why he would attend a G7 meeting where he’s outnumbered on key issues like trade and climate change and raising the possibility that he may cancel his visit to Canada altogether. After being told that canceling the trip would amount to shrinking from a confrontation, the President decided to enter the talks, advisers said.
Earlier that day, Trump called Trudeau “indignant” for “bringing up the relationship that the U.S. and Canada had over the many years and all sorts of other things,” and accused the country of hurting U.S. agriculture. He also tweeted to complain about the trade practices of the European Union and Canada, who, Trump wrote, “have used massive Trade Tariffs and non-monetary Trade Barriers against the U.S.”
A Canadian government official responded late Thursday to Trump’s tweets, saying they would not “sugar-coat the fact that there are strong differences of opinion and there are going to be tough discussions on a number of things that we don’t agree on.”
However, before leaving for Canada, Macron and Trudeau offered a modest measure of support to Trump for his historic meeting in Singapore with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un.
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