He did it again. Trump “cancelled” his tariffs over Greenland. He always chickens out. So no big deal, right? Wrong.
Today we’re going to talk about risk. And how it matters to the world, economics, finance, and geopolitics.
Here’s why Trump backed down, by the way. In the last post, I taught you how trade wars escalate to capital wars, which is a sentiment, interestingly, that Ray Dalio echoed (he runs a hedge fund.) Trump backed down precisely because Europe taught him that this was a capital war he couldn’t win, that it holds the cards in terms of investment by its large funds and so forth.
What does all that mean? It’s a good thing that, LOL, Trump isn’t going to invade Europe tomorrow. But the question before us isn’t that, in the same way that saying, whew, I guess a planet-killer of a meteor not hitting is a good thing. The question is: how much damage has already been done?
It would be pretty naive to say: everything’s fine now!, wouldn’t it? No biggie guys, let’s be friends again! Go ahead and chuckle, especially if you’re European.
Here’s what I’m not telling you, and never have been. It’s going to be the Purge by way of Max Max tomorrow. Run for the hills everyone! That’s a caricature. We’re talking about risk. And if we’re going to take it seriously, then we are in a new world of it, and we need to manage it well. Havens is doing very well in terms of hard performance for precisely that reason, as those of you who’ve done sessions with me know, and I’ll talk more about that tomorrow.
Imagine that there was a business which used to be a titan. Well-managed, reliable, trustworthy. A safe investment. Only now…things have changed. The board is out to lunch, or playing golf. The CEO’s more interested in intimidation, coercion, and bullying than actually growing the business, or even really doing much business. There he is, sparking a trade war. There he is, blowing out its debt to infinity. Meanwhile, the shareholders, many of them, back all this, or at least turn a blind eye to it.
Would that be a good investment?
No! That’s what we’re talking about. It would be a bad investment, and you sense this intuitively, because it would place your capital at risk. Because this company was no longer well-managed. Now it’s very badly managed.
Countries aren’t companies. I’ll be the first to warn of that. But the principles of risk and management still very much apply.
Now. Let’s talk about Trump, intimidation, coercion, and “chickening out.” It’s true that he chickens out, but it’s truer that the damage is still done. Making good on the threat may be cataclysmic, but just issuing it is catastrophic.
It isn’t just that it corrodes trust and confidence, which it certainly does, but the invisible flipside, or what we call in economics, the “opportunity cost” is also very real: no positive or constructive leadership is happening here, and so things are going off the rails.
Just issuing the threat has all the following consequences. It poisons relations, it creates uncertainty in trade flows, it wreaks havoc with capital flows, it stalls investment, and it creates an atmosphere of enmity and hostility. All of those effects are very real.
We can see them every day at work in the global economy, reflected in the prices of every kind of asset and market. Now, markets are beginning to very much place a risk premium on America.
What is the correct price of risk? What we should always try to do is price risk. And it doesn’t have to be exact. Just as an order of magnitude kind of estimate. The math isn’t intimidating. Let’s say there’s a 10% chance of an event that wipes out half your, a country’s, a market’s wealth. The price of that risk is 5%. We can attach different sorts of prices to it, based on various probabilities, but the point is just to teach you that risk always has a price.
When Trump makes these kinds of lunatic threats, there are multiple kinds of risk at work. One is the risk of him making good. But just because he chickens out and that diminishes, for a time, it doesn’t mean that the other forms of risk have gone anywhere at all. And those forms of risk are all that we’ve discussed above. Their price is real, in the sense that the world wants to pay it less and less.
So just because Trump chickens out, doesn’t mean everything is remotely rosy, or back to normal. Far from it. See where the dollar is, compared to before Trump? That’s one simple way to estimate the price of all this risk, and if we calculated it across the entire US economy, it’d be enormous, about $3 trillion, in fact, and that’s just already. That’s about $10K per person, by the way, or $40K for a family of four.
These aren’t just numbers games. They’re ways to estimate and price risk. Simple ones. I’m not saying they’re perfect and accurate. That can never happen. We never know the true price of risk until after the event has come to pass. And that is the point.
To stay ahead of all this risk.
So if people say to you, Trump always chickens out! So what! Doesn’t matter! I suggest that you take it with a grain of salt. Just doing what he’s done so far has already raised the level of risk into the stratosphere. Actually bombing Europe or whatnot would send into another galaxy, true, but that doesn’t mean anything is remotely fine or OK. And in the end, someone must pay the price for risk.
When I do my little calculation about how much it’s already cost the average American household, that’s one way to estimate it, and of course, it’s low, because I haven’t included effects on stock markets, bond markets, etcetera. The point is to stay ahead of risk. Always. In life, in economics, in finance. It is central to not just growing wealth, but staying sane, healthy, happy. In the end, this art is called wisdom.
Understand that we are in a new world of risk now. The probabilities rise by the day, as do the scales of the events involved. We all know that Trump’s obsession with Greenland isn’t likely to just go away. It’ll be back, next week, month, quarter. And in that sense, risk is here to stay.
The point is never that the most catastrophic outcome comes true. That is not what I say to you and I fail to teach you well if that is you take away. The point is this: that we have to even merely begin to expect it.
Then we are already paying a range of prices that place us in a very different world. A much less prosperous, happy, and secure one. And that affects everything from our finances to our lives. Let me put that another way. A few years ago, we didn’t have to remotely expect that America might invade Europe or Canada, or that it’d become their enemies, or that it’d attack the foundations of global peace and democracy at such severe levels. Now we do.
So the point isn’t that there’s a nuclear war tomorrow, or the financial system goes down tonight, or what have you. It’s just that if we even have to expect such things as invasions, hostility, enmity, coercion, or large-scale institutional and system failures, not to mention catastrophic climate change, the ongoing spiral of democracy, and more, then things have already changed dramatically, and now there is a new set of burdens to be borne.
Having to expect this new, much, much riskier range and set of possibilities is the problem. It is what we discuss here. Again, the point is never that the most extreme scenario will come to pass tomorrow. It is just that even if we have to contemplate it, now we are already all paying a price, the price of uncertainty, mistrust, disinvestment, and then the question becomes who will be the one that ends up paying it most. This is what concerns the world, and it’s why even if Trump chickens out, the damage is still very much done.
At the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, this morning, a visibly exhausted president of the United States of America rambled in angry free association in a speech before the world’s leaders. At one point, speaking of North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) dignitaries, he told the audience: “Until the last few days when I told them about Iceland, they loved me. They called me daddy, right, last time. Very smart man said, ‘He’s our daddy. He’s running it.’”
He meant Greenland.
The president of the United States went on to give a virulently racist, insulting, rambling speech in which he complained that people call him a dictator but that “sometimes you need a dictator.” More than anything, though, the speech demonstrated his mental unfitness for his position. Tom Nichols of The Atlantic wrote: “No one can be watching this Davos speech and reach any conclusion but that the President of the United States is mentally disturbed and that something is deeply wrong with him. This is both embarrassing and extremely dangerous.”
Andrew Egger of The Bulwark wrote of Trump’s hostility to traditional U.S. allies today: “As long as I live, I don’t think I’ll get over this pure, dumb fact: Trump told his fans he had to blow up the liberal order because it was the only way to secure the very benefits the liberal order was already bringing us.” Egger likened this to Aesop’s fable about the greedy farmer who butchered the goose that laid golden eggs.
Later, Trump backed off on the tariffs he had threatened to impose on the countries standing against his seizure of Greenland, claiming he had just had “a very productive meeting” with NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte and had “formed the framework for a future deal with respect to Greenland and, in fact, the entire Arctic Region. This solution, if consummated, will be a great one for the United States of America, and all NATO Nations.” Because of that framework, he said, he would not be imposing the tariffs he had threatened on those nations opposing his designs on NATO.
As Ron Filipkowski of MeidasNews noted, this was not a new deal, but Trump surrendering. The U.S. and NATO have always been free to do whatever they want in Greenland, but Trump had insisted he needed to own it for “psychological” reasons. Now he has reverted back to the original agreement.
Amongst all of Trump’s other lies and threats at his Davos speech, one stood out. Talking about Russia’s war against Ukraine, he said: “It’s a war that should have never started, and it wouldn’t have started if the 2020 U.S. presidential election weren’t rigged—it was a rigged election. Everybody now knows that. They found out.” This is Trump’s Big Lie, and it has been thoroughly debunked; the 2020 presidential election wasn’t stolen from him.
But then Trump went on to say: “People will soon be prosecuted for what they did. It’s probably breaking news but it should be. It was a rigged election. You can’t have rigged elections.”
This is an astonishing threat. It says he intends to prosecute Department of Justice officials and others for refusing to help him steal the presidency. The timing of this particular threat is not accidental. Tomorrow at 10:00 Eastern Time, former special counsel Jack Smith, who investigated Trump’s efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, will testify publicly about the evidence that led a grand jury to indict Trump and led Smith himself to conclude a jury would convict Trump.
Lately, Trump has been rehashing his grievances from that election, repeating debunked claims of rigged voting machines and so on. The issue is clearly on his mind. Jack Smith knows what happened, Trump knows that Smith knows what happened, and it appears Trump is eager to discredit him at the very least.
While Trump is in Davos, the violence from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and other federal agents that has been obvious for a while has ramped up in what appears to be an attempt to spark violence.
Yesterday Brooklyn Park, Minnesota, police chief Mark Bruley told reporters that the police were getting repeated complaints about violations of civil rights by ICE and that ICE agents were stopping off-duty police officers of color. He recounted that ICE agents had stopped an off-duty police officer, demanded her paperwork—she is a U.S. citizen—and then held her at gunpoint. When she tried to film the interaction, they knocked the phone out of her hand. Finally, when she identified herself as a police officer, they got in their vehicles and left.
“This isn’t just important because it happened to off-duty police officers,” Bruley said, but because “our officers know what the Constitution is, they know what right and wrong is, and they know when people are being targeted, and that’s what they were. If it is happening to our officers, it pains me to think [of] how many of our community members are falling victim to this every day.”
Yesterday Dell Cameron of Wired reported that internal ICE planning documents show that the agency is planning to spend up to $50 million on jail space and a privately run transfer hub in Minnesota for immigrant detainees from Minnesota and four neighboring states.
Today the El Paso County Office of the Medical Examiner ruled that the death of 55-year-old Cuban-born Geraldo Lunas Campos detained in Camp East Montana in El Paso, Texas, was a homicide. Camp East Montana is a tent encampment where migrants have reported poor conditions and physical abuse. Lunas Campos died of asphyxiation after guards put pressure on his neck and chest during an altercation during which Lunas Campos asked for his medication. Two detainees testified that they saw guards choking Lunas Campos, who repeatedly told them he couldn’t breathe. The Trump administration has since tried to deport the two witnesses.
Douglas MacMillan of the Washington Post reported that at least 30 people died in detention last year, the highest number in twenty years. Six people, including Lunas Campos and another detainee at Camp East Montana, died in the first two weeks of 2026.
ICE agents are hanging around schools, threatening children. Reg Chapman of CBS News in Minnesota reported today that ICE has detained a five-year-old preschooler after using him as bait to get someone in his house to open their door. Then ICE transferred him and his father from Minnesota to detention in Texas. His family has an active asylum case and it does not have an order of deportation, meaning they are in the U.S. legally.
Video footage from Minneapolis also shows a federal agent spraying chemical irritants directly into the face of a man agents had pinned and held to the ground. Other video shows Customs and Border Protection leader Greg Bovino throwing tear gas at peaceful protesters.
This afternoon, Rebecca Santana of the Associated Press reported that ICE has been breaking into homes under the authority provided by a secret memo of May 12, 2025, signed by the acting director of ICE, Todd Lyons, saying that federal agents do not need a judge’s warrant to force their way into people’s homes.
The Fourth Amendment to the Constitution, one of the ten amendments that make up the Bill of Rights, says: “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”
As Joyce White Vance of Civil Discourse notes, courts have always interpreted that amendment to mean that a judge must sign a warrant to allow law enforcement to break into a home. Now the Department of Homeland Security says it does not need such a judicial warrant, but can simply use an administrative warrant signed by an official at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) or ICE if immigrants believed to be inside a home have a final order of removal.
The legal training manual for DHS itself quotes a 1984 Supreme Court decision that “the ‘physical entry of the home is the chief evil against which the wording of the Fourth Amendment is directed.”
Immigration law specialist Aaron Reichlin-Melnick noted that this memo is a big deal: it is “the federal government conspiring in secret to subvert the Fourth Amendment.”
Two ICE whistleblowers provided the memo to Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-CT), explaining that they were shown the memo. They suggested that ICE supervisors seemed to understand the order was unlawful, as the supervisors only told agents about the memo rather than sharing a hard copy with them, and that at least one long-time employee resigned rather than be forced to teach material they thought was illegal.
Blumenthal wrote a scathing letter to Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem and ICE acting director Lyons noting that the “new policy is based on a secret legal interpretation and is directly contrary to Fourth Amendment law and agency practice.” He demanded to know how many DHS agents had been trained on the memo and where the training had taken place, how many homes had been broken into under the terms of the memo, the legal determination for the memo, and so on.
“Every American should be terrified by this secret ICE policy authorizing its agents to kick down your door & storm into your home,” Blumenthal wrote on social media. “It is an unlawful & morally repugnant policy that exemplifies the kinds of dangerous, disgraceful abuses America is seeing in real time. In our democracy, with vanishingly rare exceptions, the government is barred from breaking into your home without approval from a real judge. Government agents have no right to ransack your bedroom or terrorize your kids on a whim or personal desire.”
“I am deeply grateful to brave whistleblowers who have come forward & put the rights of their fellow Americans first,” Blumenthal wrote. “My Republican colleagues who claim to value personal rights against government overreach now have an opportunity & obligation to prove that rhetoric is real.”
Senator Ruben Gallego (D-AZ), who at the beginning of 2025 was considered a moderate on immigration, wrote: “Yeah I am not voting to give whatever ICE has become more taxpayer money. It’s no longer an immigration enforcement arm of the US government.”
Now ICE has landed in Portland and in Lewiston-Auburn, Maine, where it claims to have 1,400 targets for arrest.
Trump Always Chickens Out—But the Damage is Already Done (Or, Risk, Catastrophe, and Finance)
Umair Haque wrote:He did it again. Trump “cancelled” his tariffs over Greenland. He always chickens out. So no big deal, right? Wrong.
Today we’re going to talk about risk. And how it matters to the world, economics, finance, and geopolitics.
This guy may be correct about a lot of things here, but he sounds as though he thinks he is talking to a bunch of no-nothing morons. I couldn't finish the piece because it sounded as narcissistic to me as some of Trump's comments.
I don't know who his audience is. When I discovered his writing, he was primarily focused on environmental collapse, which was more up my alley. At some point he began concentrating on exclusively economic issues, and as you say, he's often correct about a lot of things but he veers off sometimes and gets kind of self-centered. I trust people to do their own editing. I guess they can't all be Heather Cox Richardson
Kier Starmer has disappointed a lot of Labour members, myself included, over his treatment of Israel/Palestine and being deferential to Trump.
There has been talk of a challenge to his premiership for some time but no credible candidate is in the offing.
In order to be prime minister you have to be a member of parliament.
Now Labour MP Andrew Gwynne has announced his resignation, causing a byelection in which mayor of Manchester Andy Burnham could stand.
He is a credible challenger, and very popular. (I voted for him to be leader when Jeremy Corbyn got in.)
He will stand up to Trump.
Vice President J.D. Vance was in Minnesota for the administration today, trying to regain control of the narrative about the violence perpetrated there by agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP). A new poll out today from the New York Times and Siena University shows that nearly two thirds of Americans, 63%, disapprove of how ICE is handling its job, while only 36% approve. Even among white Americans, 57% disapprove, while only 42% approve. Sixty-one percent of Americans, including 19% of Republicans, think that ICE agents have gone too far.
Just hours after ICE agent Jonathan Ross killed 37-year-old Renee Good on January 7, and long before there was any official investigation of the shooting, Vance was out in front of the news, blaming Good for her own death and claiming that the officer was clearly justified in shooting her.
But even MAGA voters don’t buy it. Podcaster Joe Rogan has compared ICE to “the gestapo,” and Greg Sargent of The New Republic noted that a majority of both young voters and those without a college degree, those who tend to be easy for MAGA to reach, disapprove of ICE enforcement. Media Matters reported that the senior judicial analyst on right-wing channel Newsmax, Andrew Napolitano, called the newly revealed secret ICE memo claiming the right to break down doors to arrest people in their homes “a direct and profound violation of the Fourth Amendment, which expressly says people are entitled to be secure in their homes and that security can only be invaded by a search warrant signed by a judge based on probable cause of crime.”
Today a jury in Chicago acquitted a man charged with trying to hire a man to kill U.S. Border Patrol Commander Greg Bovino. The Department of Justice claimed Juan Espinoza Martinez was a member of a street gang who had offered $10,000 to his brother and a friend to kill Bovino. Jon Seidel of the Chicago Sun-Times noted that 31 Chicagoans have been charged with nonimmigration crimes tied to the federal action there. With Thursday’s acquittal, Seidel notes, “15 of them have been cleared. None of the cases have led to a conviction, so far.”
Today Vance continued to defend ICE agents but walked back some of his earlier belligerence. He admitted that “of course there have been mistakes made, because you’re always going to have mistakes made in law enforcement,” although he added that “99% of our police officers, probably more than that, are doing everything right.”
The vice president also denied his words from January 8, when he said of Ross at the White House: “You have a federal law enforcement official engaging in federal law enforcement action. That’s a federal issue. That guy’s protected by absolute immunity.” Moving the goalposts considerably today after it turned out that Americans don’t particularly like the idea that masked agents can do whatever they want, he said: “I didn’t say…that officers who engaged in wrongdoing would enjoy immunity. That’s absurd. What I did say is that when federal law enforcement officers violate the law that’s typically something federal officials would look into. We don’t want these guys to have kangaroo courts.”
The New York Times/Siena poll had bad news for Trump more generally, too. It showed that his approval rating has fallen to 40%, while 56% disapprove of the way he is handling his job, and that 49% of registered voters think the country is worse off than it was a year ago, while only 32% think it is better off. In fact, the poll showed him underwater on every single issue: managing the government, Venezuela, immigration, the economy, relationships with other countries, the Israli-Palestinian conflict, the cost of living, Russia’s war against Ukraine, and the Epstein files, on which only 22% of registered voters approve while 66% disapprove. The only area where he is not underwater by double digits is on the issue of border between the U.S. and Mexico, where 50% of registered voters approve and only 46% disapprove.
After news of the poll dropped, Trump’s social media account posted that “Fake and Fraudulent Polling should be, virtually, a criminal offense. As an example, all of the Anti Trump Media that covered me during the 2020 Election showed Polls that were knowingly wrong. They knew what they were doing, trying to influence the Election, but I won in a Landslide, including winning the Popular Vote, all 7 of the 7 Swing States, the Electoral College was a route [sic], and 2,750 Counties to 525. You can’t do much better than that, and yet if people examined The Failing New York Times, ABC Fake News, NBC Fake News, CBS Fake News, Low Ratings CNN, or the now defunct MSDNC, Polls were all fraudulent, and bore nothing even close to the final results. Something has to be done about Fraudulent Polling. Even the Polls of FoxNews and The Wall Street Journal have been, over the years, terrible! There are great Pollsters that called the Election right, but the Media does not want to use them in any way, shape, or form. Isn’t it sad what has happened to American Journalism, but I am going to do everything possible to keep this Polling SCAM from moving forward!”
Trump’s social media account posted that he would add the Times/Siena poll to his existing lawsuit against the New York Times.
Trump also threatened to sue JPMorgan Chase and Jamie Dimon, its chief executive officer, claiming it had broken the law by closing his accounts in April 2021 after notice given just two months before, at the same time that many businesses were refusing to work with Trump after the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. The bank has refused to do further business with the Trump family, the lawsuit alleges, putting them on a “blacklist.” The lawsuit claims the family was “debanked” because of “political and social motivations,” and Trump wants “at least $5,000,000,000 in damages, an award of attorneys’ fees and costs…and any other relief this Court deems proper.”
JP Morgan Chase says the suit is meritless and that while it does not close accounts for political reasons, it does close accounts “because they create legal or regulatory risk for the company.”
The 2020 presidential election is clearly on Trump’s mind with former special counsel Jack Smith, who investigated Trump’s attempt to overturn the results of that election and delivered a grand jury indictment of him on four counts, testifying today before the House Judiciary Committee. Smith was sworn in and testified under oath. Unlike him, representatives are not sworn in for such hearings and are covered by the Speech and Debate clause of the Constitution that enables them to say virtually anything they want without legal repercussions.
That matters, as Republicans showed no inclination to engage with the evidence Smith uncovered that Trump conspired to defraud American voters of their right to choose their president and fraudulently seize another term. Instead, they appeared eager to discredit Smith and to fall back on Trump’s narrative that former president Joe Biden and former attorney general Merrick Garland weaponized the Department of Justice against Trump and MAGA Republicans.
Smith called the narratives spread about him and his team “false and misleading,” and said: “Our investigation developed proof beyond a reasonable doubt that President Trump engaged in criminal activity. If asked whether to prosecute a former President based on the same facts today, I would do so regardless of whether that President was a Republican or a Democrat.”
That Republicans were not willing to engage with the actual evidence apparently frustrated the president, who openly threatened Smith, posting that “Deranged Jack Smith is being DECIMATED before Congress. It was over when they discussed his past failures and unfair prosecutions. He destroyed many lives under the guise of legitimacy. Jack Smith is a deranged animal, who shouldn’t be allowed to practice Law. If he were a Republican, his license would be taken away from him, and far worse! Hopefully the Attorney General is looking at what he’s done, including some of the crooked and corrupt witnesses that he was attempting to use in his case against me. The whole thing was a Democrat SCAM—A big price should be paid by them for what they have put our Country through!”
Meanwhile, the Democrats on the committee offered evidence from the events Smith had investigated, playing, for example, the recording of Trump demanding that Georgia secretary of state Brad Raffensperger “find” 11,780 votes to steal the state of Georgia, which had voted for Biden, for Trump instead.
As The Guardian noted, when Brad Knott (R-NC) observed that Smith had charged only Trump, suggesting that Smith had singled out Trump for political reasons, Smith answered that he had been in the process of considering charging others when Trump was elected president again and the case was then closed. He said that he and the lawyers on the case believed they did have sufficient proof to charge other people.
This statement is likely to be uncomfortable for MAGA figures who were deeply involved in Trump’s efforts but who were not publicly investigated. In both the House and the Senate, members have been furious at the information that the Department of Justice got the permission of a judge to obtain toll records for Trump’s calls on and around January 6. Many of them were on those calls. Now they are falsely claiming they were “wiretapped” although toll records simply record the phones involved and the duration of the call.
Meanwhile, White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller suggested that he, too, is concerned about the law catching up to people on the Trump team. On social media, Miller posted: “Everyone serious understands that the justice system is rigged. Far-left prosecutors, magistrates, judges and juries unhesitatingly shield their violent activists and gleefully imprison their political opponents. Unrigging the system is necessary for the survival of the Republic.”
Billionaire Elon Musk, whose work with Trump led to the government’s dropping a number of investigations of his companies and lawsuits against them, chimed in: “Absolutely.”
Today the United States officially withdrew from the World Health Organization, leaving behind $278 million in unpaid dues. We joined the organization in 1948.
Tomorrow people across Minnesota will stay home from work, school, and shopping areas in an “ICE Out Day” to protest the federal agents in the state. The general strike has the support of businesses, unions, faith organizations, democratic lawmakers, and community activists.
“RECORD NUMBERS ALL OVER THE PLACE!” Trump’s social media account crowed tonight. “SHOULD I TRY FOR A FOURTH TERM?”
For the second time this week Prime Minister Mark Carney took aim at Donald Trump — this time directly biting back at the U.S. president's "Canada lives because of the United States" comments.
On Wednesday Trump addressed the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, where he complained that Carney should be grateful because "Canada lives because of the United States."
At the end of a nearly 30-minute speech Thursday kicking off the Liberal cabinet meeting in Quebec City, Carney took on the president's comments.
"Canada and the United States have built a remarkable partnership. In the economy, in security and in rich cultural exchange. But Canada doesn't live because of the United States," he said
"Canada thrives because we are Canadian."
The lines were added to his address and not part of his prepared remarks, said an official with his office.
'Canada thrives because we are Canadian'
Carney's pre-cabinet speech had the hallmarks of an election campaign speech. After addressing an international audience at Davos the day before Trump, Carney's Thursday remarks took a domestic turn, with a promise to protect Canadian values — emphasizing inclusivity and fairness.
"There are long periods of history when these values can prosper unchallenged. Ours is not one of them," said Carney, speaking from prepared remarks. He did not take reporters' questions.
The prime minister argued that "Canada must be a beacon — an example to a world at sea."
"In a time of democratic decline, we can show how rights can be protected, and equal freedoms endure," he said.
"In a time of rising walls and thickening borders, we can demonstrate how a country can be both open and secure, welcoming and strong, principled and powerful."
With eyes to Monday's return of the House of Commons, Carney reiterated promises to protect services such as child care, dental care and pharmacare, and stand up for the vulnerable "whether they are a newcomer, a person with a disability or a member of the 2SLGBTQI+ community."
"Our values must be fought for. That’s what we’re doing, and Canadians are up for it," he said.
His address kicked off two days of meetings with his front benches. The cabinet will be holed up behind the stone walls of the Citadelle, a storied military base and the Governor General's secondary residence that looms over the Quebec capital.
It was fortified in the 19th century in an effort to secure the city against a potential American attack, and in 1943 was the site of the Quebec Conference when Canadian Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt met secretly to plot a strategy for the Second World War.
Carney turned to some of that site's history in his address, praising the co-operation that came out of the battle at the nearby Plains of Abraham and saluting progress made by former prime ministers including King, Louis St. Laurent, John Diefenbaker, Brian Mulroney and both Trudeaus.
Carney lays out priorities for new year
Echoing the Liberal platform promises, Carney laid out his priorities for the coming Parliamentary session including better economic co-operation with the provinces and territories, widening the net for international trade deals, reforming the criminal justice system, fostering artificial intelligence and making massive investments in defence.
"Now we need to execute. Fairly. And fast," said Carney, likely a nod critics who have argued he needs to back up grand comments with more results.
Poilievre says Canadians have 'had enough words'
His fiercest opponent seized on those outstanding promises.
In a statement Thursday, Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre called Carney's Davos speech "eloquently delivered," but said if "Liberal words and good intentions were tradeable commodities, Canada would already be the richest nation on earth."
"We have had enough words. Now, we need results. Now, we must unblock our resources. Now, we must approve pipelines," he said.
Poilievre also said while it's tempting to declare the relationship with the U.S. over, the reality is many Canadians' jobs depend on trade with our southern neighbour.
"We owe it to those workers, our family, friends and fellow Canadians, to ensure those jobs don’t go away," he said.
"But we must also remember that our trade and security partnership with the U.S. is centuries-old and will outlast one president."
Prime Minister Mark Carney refuted U.S. President Donald Trump’s comment that 'Canada lives because of the United States,' before heading to an intensive strategy retreat with his cabinet.
Lutnick calls Carney speech 'noise'
Prime ministers historically gather with their cabinets ahead of a new sitting to set priorities, although this year's tone is noticeably more stark.
It's the first time Carney and his ministry have huddled as one since the House of Commons rose for the holiday break in December, and it comes on the heels of the prime minister's nine-day trip to China, Qatar and Davos.
At Davos on Tuesday, Carney referred to "American hegemony" and said world powers are using economic integration as "weapons."
In that closely watched speech, Carney said middle powers like Canada must work together or end up "on the menu" of great powers that are weaponizing economic integration.
One of Trump's key advisers, U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, called it "political noise."
In an interview with Bloomberg, Lutnick suggested if Canada continues on a path of closer economic ties with China, "then when [CUSMA] gets renegotiated this year, in the middle of summer, do you think the president of the United States is going to say, ‘You should keep having the second-best deal in the world?'"
Finance Minister François-Philippe Champagne said Canada will continue to broaden whom it trades with.
"The prime minister said a lot of things that people thought, and he had the courage to say it out loud," Champagne told reporters from the blustery Citadelle.
"We will continue to see what we can do, but I think Canadians have understood by now that diversification is key."
The official agenda of the meetings said the cabinet will focus on the economy, affordability and security, and ministers and secretaries of state are expected to discuss progress on their mandates.
The White House posted a digitally altered image of a woman who was arrested on Thursday in a case touted by the US attorney general, Pam Bondi, to make it seem as if she was dramatically crying, a Guardian analysis of the image has found. [link]
The woman, Nekima Levy Armstrong, also appears to have darker skin in the altered image. Armstrong was one of three people arrested on Thursday in connection to a demonstration that disrupted church services in St Paul, Minnesota, on Sunday. Demonstrators alleged that one of the pastors, David Easterwood, was the acting field director of the St Paul Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) office. Bondi announced the arrests on social media on Thursday morning.
The homeland security secretary, Kristi Noem, posted an image of Armstrong’s arrest at 10.21am on Thursday, less than an hour after Bondi’s announcement. The image shows a law enforcement agent, face blurred out, escorting Armstrong, who appears to be handcuffed. Armstrong, dressed in all black, appears to be composed in the picture.
A little more than 30 minutes later, the White House posted another image of Armstrong’s arrest in which she is crying. The White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, reposted the image. The image posted by the White House is altered, a Guardian analysis found.
The Guardian overlaid the White House photo with the Noem photo and found that the law enforcement agents in both pictures line up exactly, confirming they are the same image. There are other similarities between the photos. An unidentified person can be seen in the same place behind the arresting agent. And the arresting agent’s arm appears to be behind Armstrong’s back in exactly the same position.
Asked whether the image had been digitally altered, the White House responded by sending a post on X from Kaelan Dorr, the deputy communications director.
“YET AGAIN to the people who feel the need to reflexively defend perpetrators of heinous crimes in our country I share with you this message: Enforcement of the law will continue. The memes will continue. Thank you for your attention to this matter,” he said.
The White House X account, which has around 3.5 million followers, has made at least 14 posts with AI since the start of Trump’s second term, Poynter reported in October.
