William Watson: TACO Trump vs. CAFE Carney — Carney Always Funds Everything

U.S. President Donald Trump welcomes Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney outside the West Wing of the White House on October 07, 2025 in Washington, DC. Photo by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images

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TACO is the acronym for “Trump Always Chickens Out,” the conclusion many people drew when the U.S. president backed down from his first round of steep tariffs last spring after the stock market tanked. (You’d think the mnemonic for that would be TGIF-ISM: Trump’s Greatest Influencing Factor Is the Stock Market.)

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TACO is a dangerous formula for taunting an insecure egomaniac with manliness issues: remember the appalling allusions to penis size in the 2016 Republican primary debates? May U.S. politics never stoop so low again.

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Spendthrift to his gilded core, Trump has displayed frugality regarding only one thing: the spilling of American blood. Telling someone so thin-skinned he is a coward encourages the kind of deadly adventurism his TACO critics would instantly condemn.

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Might there be a defining acronym for Prime Minister Mark Carney? So far the best I can come up with is CAFE, with two possible meanings.

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One is “Carney Ambitiously Flies Everywhere.” In the last 30 days alone he was in France, Geneva, Vancouver (for soccer, among other things), Vancouver Island, Outaouais, Que., Vancouver (soccer again), Toronto, Kuujjuaq, Que., Edmonton, Vancouver, Calgary, Halifax, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Calgary. Following up a visit to Saudi Arabia with one to Calgary was slick, touching down in two world oil capitals in successive days. Albertans might want to judge which oil leader was shown the greatest deference: Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman or Alberta Premier Danielle Smith.

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No doubt Carney would argue that if his frequent flying is ambitious, those ambitions are for Canada and its place in the world, and, like it or not, do require group photo-ops and serial sit-downs with the same people at the G7, the NATO summit and various other gatherings. But even new politicians are seldom unambitious and it can hardly trouble Carney’s ego to have the Wall Street Journal run a two-parter about him called “The Canadian who steered Europe away from the U.S.” — though it clearly will trouble the big orange ego that these days counts most in geopolitics.

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The Journal’s headline surely credits Carney with greater influence than he actually has over the likes of British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, French President Emmanuel Macron, Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni and German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, all strong, independent people entirely capable of making up their own minds about Europe’s relationship with a rogue U.S. administration (even if Starmer never seemed to know quite who he was). In fact, Carney seems more intent on steering Canada, not Europe, away from the U.S. — defying tectonic movement that began 80-million years ago. We never got that UN Security Council seat that former prime minister Justin Trudeau wanted so badly, but Mark Carney now has us in the Eurovision song contest. Take that, Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin!

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The other meaning of CAFE that applies to Carney is “Carney Always Funds Everything.” A modest down-sizing of the federal bureaucracy does seem to be underway — even as more outsiders are brought in to supervise massive funding for new decision-making agencies designed to oversee or bypass established channels. But there have been very few high-profile cuts, Justin Trudeau and Jagmeet Singh’s new social programs are still being funded and in last spring’s fiscal statement all but two per cent of unexpected new revenues were spent.