The late Brian Mulroney got to know no fewer than 10 American presidents. Donald Trump, who has just wrapped up the Republican nomination process for another run at the presidency, was one of the ones he knew best. Or so he thought.
Their relationship, Mr. Mulroney told me in an interview last year, went back decades to when they saw each other a lot in New York. It continued in Palm Beach, Fla., where he had a residence close to Mr. Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate, which Mr. Mulroney and his family visited frequently.
He and Mr. Trump were such friends that shortly after Mr. Trump’s inauguration in 2017, he sang When Irish Eyes Are Smiling for Mr. Trump at a Mar-a-Lago reception. He’d sung it with Ronald Reagan at the Shamrock Summit in Quebec City in 1985.
In fact, Mr. Mulroney believed Mr. Trump could be a highly successful president, just like the Gipper. But Mr. Trump could fool a lot of people a lot of the time – even Brian Mulroney.
“I thought frankly that Trump would be kind of like a slightly different Ronald Reagan,” Mr. Mulroney said.
“I thought he’d enter the Oval Office and see the majesty of the place and the influence and the job he had to do. And that he would accommodate his own personality to that and he’d grow into the job. That’s what I thought.”
Here, he paused, before adding: “It didn’t work.”
Mr. Trump became, instead, much the opposite of Mr. Reagan. He hadn’t previously been strongly affiliated with any party, so Mr. Mulroney didn’t foresee the swerve to hard-right populism coming. He didn’t have the sense that Mr. Trump was an inward-looking protectionist who would threaten the North American free-trade agreement.
If Mr. Trump wins back the presidency, free trade could be under threat again. The authoritarian narcissist is talking like he wants to push the nativist buttons even harder.
And this time, Mr. Mulroney won’t be around to defend Canada’s interests. It is a huge loss. No leader in Canadian history has had more influence in the United States than Brian Mulroney.
In recent years, he was an important lobbying voice in saving NAFTA when it hung by a thread. He gave a spirited defence of the accord in 2018 before the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Then-Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell called him the next day to tell him how impactful his presentation had been.
While applauding the job that Justin Trudeau did in handling Mr. Trump while he was president, Mr. Mulroney said Canada is “out in the cold in America. We don’t have the ear of Washington any more.”
He always made it his high priority, he said, to know all the major players in Washington and to court them. He knew so much that the two Bush presidents referred to him as the “Karl Rove of the North.”
In our interview, Mr. Mulroney wanted to clear up a misconception: the idea that he was a johnny-come-lately to the idea of free trade. “Look, I had been president of the Iron Ore Company for nine years. And hell, the whole concept of the Iron Ore Company was trade. I was all over the world from Romania to China to Taiwan to Brazil, non-stop.”
While it’s true, he said, that in the 1983 Tory leadership campaign he stridently opposed free trade, it was because Canadians weren’t prepared to hear of it then and he couldn’t have won on it. “You have to remember the antipathy toward Reagan was horrific in Canada, disgraceful.”
Today, Mr. Mulroney dubiously contended, Canadians shouldn’t regard the ills that have beset America as mainly the fault of the Trump Republicans. You have to look also, he said pointedly, at “the capture of the Democratic Party by the extreme left-wing – The Squad and the unions. Joe Biden has been held hostage by the left wing of the party. And I know Joe well and I like him. But that’s what happened.”
He concurred that the U.S. democracy was in dire condition and the country brutally divided. “I understand all that, but that doesn’t change the reality that this is the greatest nation on Earth and that our prosperity is dependent on it.”
There’s no choice, Mr. Mulroney said, but to seek accommodation. Other trade options, he correctly observed, have been tried. They don’t work.
His vision, he said in closing, had been something much grander than NAFTA. ‘’I wanted a free trade area of the Americas, which would include 34 countries with a billion people and with Canada at the centre of this fabulous job-creating machine.”
“It hasn’t happened yet. But it will happen some day.”