Dear reader,
Every premier, every columnist, every armchair strategist has a prescription: Carney should do this, Carney should do that. Poppycock. Team Carney is experienced, seasoned, professional. The harsh reality nobody wants to say out loud: they’re negotiating against a counterpart with no fixed position, no guardrails, and — per the reporting — no reliable capacity to hold one for more than a day.
We’ll show you the reporting. Judge the “Carney is failing” narrative for yourself once you see who’s actually on the other side of the table.
THE RESTLESS PRESCRIPTIONS
The pile-on has been constant. Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre sent Carney a public letter ahead of a White House meeting: “no more losing,” accusing him of broken promises and warning that “if you only return with excuses, broken promises and photo ops, you will have failed our workers, our businesses and our country.” Conservative MP Shuvaloy Majumdar piled on separately, demanding Carney “demonstrate what their plan is to conclude a deal,” calling the current uncertainty “unbearable for Canadians.”
At The Hub, columnist Sean Speer argued Carney “needs to get over his Europe obsession” and should redirect diplomatic energy toward North America instead. The Globe and Mail ran an opinion piece flatly titled “There is no appeasing Donald Trump, or deterring him” — arguing that Carney’s past concessions, including scrapping the digital services tax and revising the Gordie Howe Bridge terms, haven’t bought Canada anything, and that further concessions “would only be seen as weakness.” Canada’s National Observer went further, calling the Gordie Howe Bridge revenue-sharing arrangement “a glorified extortion racket” and arguing bluntly that “the concessions will have to continue until morale improves.” The Wall Street Journal’s read, cited widely this week: sixteen months in, Carney has avoided a “bad deal,” but critics say it’s come “at a cost” — a slow accumulation of concessions.
Even Washington piled on. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent publicly warned Carney not to “pick a fight” over trade policy ahead of the USMCA review, saying bluntly: “either you’re working for your own political career or you’re working for the Canadian people.” That’s a sitting U.S. Treasury Secretary lecturing a Canadian prime minister on how to behave in his own country’s interest.
And here’s the part that should embarrass every premier who’s demanded a plan: they can’t agree on one either. At the Council of the Federation meeting in Charlottetown this week, premiers emerged insisting on unity — Northwest Territories Premier R.J. Simpson: “I come out of there every time feeling very united. I think about the United States, they have nothing like this.” Carney invoked the Fathers of Confederation. Everyone smiled for the cameras.
Behind that, actual reporting tells a different story. A Yahoo/Toronto Sun column on the same meeting described it plainly: “Behind the public display of unity, each premier is still pushing a strategy tailored to their province’s interests,” with Ontario’s Doug Ford pushing an aggressive posture — cutting off potash and oil exports to “dismantle” the U.S. economy — while Alberta and Saskatchewan’s premiers pushed instead for staying at the table. This is a genuine, unresolved split on strategy, dressed up as unity for one afternoon in Prince Edward Island.
And here’s the detail that matters most for this report: even Doug Ford, mid-photo-op, couldn’t help but describe exactly the pattern we’re laying out here. Asked about negotiating with Trump, Ford said: “It’s very hard to deal with President Trump when he changes his mind every single day. One day, the prime minister is with him side by side, and the next thing you know, President Trump turns on him like a rabid dog.” That’s not us saying it. That’s a sitting Conservative premier, standing next to a Liberal prime minister he’s pressuring, independently describing the exact backstab pattern this whole report documents.
So: no Canadian should be asked to believe “united” when the country’s own premiers are publicly contradicting each other on strategy within days of the photo op, and one of them just confirmed our entire thesis without being asked to. We went deep on the premiers’ unity theatre specifically in our earlier Special Report, “Team Canada” Is a Line They’re All Still Reciting — worth a read if you haven’t already, since it lays the groundwork this section builds on.
Everyone has a playbook. Nobody’s asking whether a playbook is even possible against this particular counterpart.
WHAT THE POLLING ACTUALLY SAYS
Here’s what the prescription-writers are missing: Canadians aren’t buying the “Carney is failing” story. Pollsters cited by the Hill Times this week say Carney is largely shielded from political fallout over the stalled talks — because Canadians are placing the blame on Trump, not on him.
That’s worth sitting with. The loudest voices calling this a leadership failure are pundits and opposition politicians. The public, per the actual data, disagrees.
WHO IS TEAM CARNEY ACTUALLY NEGOTIATING WITH?
This is the part that gets lost in every “Carney should” column: the identity of the counterpart matters more than the strategy.
New York Times correspondent Maggie Haberman and Axios’s Jonathan Swan spent two years reporting their book Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump, built on extensive sourcing from people inside the administration. Their central finding, as reviewers have put it: a presidency exercising power “with few apparent guardrails.” The book’s reporting — some of it disputed by Trump himself, who called it “largely fiction” — describes a White House where meeting locations were reportedly altered to accommodate the president’s fatigue, and where decision-making has grown more erratic, not less, as the term has gone on. Fair to note: the White House disputes this characterization entirely, insisting Trump remains in “excellent” physical and cognitive condition.
Whatever the full truth, this much isn’t disputed: this is the same president who befriended, then blindsided, Saudi Arabia — a country he’d praised personally and repeatedly for years — reversing a signed nuclear deal over social media, without a phone call, in under 24 hours. Riyadh had built the deal up as the crown jewel of the relationship. Trump blew it up anyway. We detailed the full sequence in our sister publication, American Pulse, this week — worth reading in full for the pattern. It isn’t a one-off. It’s the same shape that’s played out with Spain, Greenland, and now, repeatedly, with Canada’s own missed deadlines.
If that’s what happens to a friendship built over years, in public, with genuine praise on record — what exactly is the “playbook” that’s supposed to work for Ottawa?
WHAT’S ACTUALLY BEEN REPORTED
We want to be careful and precise here, because this is where a lot of commentary gets sloppy. We’re not diagnosing anyone. We’re reporting what multiple outlets have already reported, on the record.
The Daily Beast, the Mirror, and other outlets have tracked Trump’s Truth Social activity closely: 861 posts and reposts in May 2026 alone, a monthly record. An analysis found Trump active on the platform between 9 p.m. and 6 a.m. on 25 separate nights in April — suggesting, by that count, as few as five full nights of uninterrupted sleep that month. Sleep and psychology experts quoted on the pattern, including Dr. Ritz Birah, a psychologist and sleep expert, have said adults in their late seventies generally need seven to nine hours for healthy cognitive function, and that insufficient sleep “reliably affects attention, working memory, impulse control, and decision-making.”
Specific incidents have drawn wider coverage: a since-deleted early-morning post depicting Trump as a religious figure; visible moments of him appearing to close his eyes during public events and cabinet meetings; multiple visits to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center over the past year. The Daily Beast reported that some former staffers and allies have voiced concern, on background, that he’s “clearly not well.”
None of this is a diagnosis, and we’re not offering one. It’s a body of reporting from named outlets, with named experts, describing a pattern. Readers can draw their own conclusions about what it means for a government trying to negotiate a stable, lasting agreement with the man exhibiting it.
IF CANADA PUSHED BACK — WHAT DOES THE EVIDENCE SAY?
Given all this, some are calling for Canada to escalate rather than keep negotiating quietly. Is there evidence for what that would actually produce? Here’s what’s on record — not speculation, actual precedent.
Yale’s Jeffrey Sonnenfeld and Steven Tian, authors of an upcoming study on Trump’s negotiating style, describe his default approach bluntly: “escalation first, questions later.” They call him “a one-man incendiary force willing to scorch the earth before negotiations even begin.” But their own research includes a telling counter-example: after his “Liberation Day” tariff announcement triggered a nearly 20% stock selloff, Trump reversed course within days, abruptly announcing a 90-day pause. Real, forceful pushback — in that case, from markets, not governments — produced a fast retreat.
This isn’t a one-off. It’s tied to something widely and repeatedly reported about how Trump actually measures whether he’s winning — including in his own words. The Washington Post has reported he “considers market reaction a key measure of success,” and Trump himself confirmed it directly, explaining his push for a deal with Iran by telling reporters: “every time we talked about the possibility of peace, the stock market shot up like a rocket ship.” That’s the president naming the market, out loud, as his gauge for whether a diplomatic move is working. A Reuters analysis this month described it as having become “his scoreboard” — noting he’s personally, heavily exposed to it, with $212-695 million in stock trades in the first three months of 2026 alone according to his own financial disclosures. Asked about his own profits, his answer was blunt: “You know why I’m profiting? Because the stock market’s going up, everybody’s profiting.” The Week put the same point sharply this week: “Polls matter, but the stock market might be President Donald Trump’s favorite barometer of success.” Wedbush’s Dan Ives even framed Trump’s market-fixation as a kind of stabilizer: “It almost creates some natural guardrails” — the closest thing to a check on the man that anyone’s identified in any of this reporting.
Worth noting: he’s dropped the metric before, the moment it stopped flattering him. During a tariff-driven selloff earlier in his term, Trump told Fox News, “You can’t really watch the stock market... If you look at China, they have a 100-year perspective. We have a quarter.” That’s the same man who otherwise treats a rising Dow as personal vindication, waving it off entirely the instant it turned against him — one more data point in the larger pattern this report is built on: commitments, even to his own stated standards, that hold only as long as they’re convenient.
That’s the lever. If bluster and threats don’t reliably work, and reputational pressure is hit-or-miss, the one thing that’s demonstrably moved him fast, more than once — on tariffs, and reportedly on Iran — is the index on a screen. That’s not a moral argument for or against Canadian retaliation — it’s just what the record, in his own words, shows actually gets his attention.
That’s consistent with what’s already documented in the pattern across Spain, Saudi Arabia, and China in our reporting: sustained public pressure and reputational cost have moved him before. It’s also consistent with the risk: other analysts note that his diplomacy has, in several cases, coincided with sudden escalation rather than resolution, and that allies increasingly describe his approach as simply “mercurial” and “unreliable” — a style built for leverage, not stability.
The honest answer: there’s real precedent for pushback working, and real precedent for it backfiring. There’s no formula, because the man doesn’t operate on one. That’s not a Team Carney failure. That’s the actual operating environment — and it’s worth every pundit prescribing a fix admitting that first.
THE VERDICT
The “Carney is failing” narrative assumes a rational, consistent counterpart is available to negotiate with, and that the right strategy would unlock a deal. The reporting doesn’t support that assumption. It supports a different one: this is a government dealing with a partner whose commitments don’t reliably survive a news cycle, whose own team can’t always predict him, and whose pattern — documented now across multiple countries — is friendliness followed by reversal, sometimes within hours.
Team Carney isn’t failing a test anyone else has passed. Nobody has passed it. Not Saudi Arabia, which built a real friendship first. Not Spain. Not a Republican Treasury Secretary trying to manage his own boss’s temperament. The prescriptions aren’t wrong because Carney is right about everything — they’re wrong because they assume a stable target that doesn’t exist.
BEFORE YOU GO
1. Go paid. Special Reports like this one — dated, sourced, no punches pulled — are why paid subscribers get 2-3 of these a week, plus the weekly Pulse: The Podcast episode and Wednesday live chats.
2. Share this. If people around you are repeating the “Carney is failing” line, send them the reporting first.
3. Tell us what we missed. Is there a Trump-front we haven’t covered that belongs in this story? Drop a comment.
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