This photo of Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney with Benedict Donald outside the West Wing is hilarious. Carney looks happy. Donald just looks annoyed. (Or maybe he's having a real Admiral Stockdale moment: "Who am I? Why am I here?" It would be nice if the press were as interested in Trump's cognitive abilities as they were obsessed by Biden's.)
But back to today's meeting. Some in the Canadian media speculated that however the encounter goes, Carney wins. If Donald behaves well, he's been cowed. If he doesn't, he just makes Canadians mad all over again and re-rallies them around their new government.
It also gives Carney the opportunity to employ a "gray-rocking" strategy, which some folks adopt when they encounter narcissistic (i.e., Trumpy) personalities. Narcissists manipulate people with deliberately outrageous behavior because they get off on others' reactions to it. Gray-rocking, however, short-circuits the process.
Gray-rocking narcissists "involves making all interactions with them as uninteresting and unrewarding as possible," one medical site explains. "In general, this means giving short, straightforward answers to questions and hiding emotional reactions to the things a person says or does... [to] cut off a person’s 'narcissistic supply' and cause them to lose interest in their target."
From what we've seen so far, it's working. Carney is calm, reasonable, and restrained, refusing to be baited by demented Donald comments like "51st state" and "We don't do much business with Canada."
His facial expressions as Trump blathered do give away some of his feelings, though. (Hilariously, and social media has noticed.) It's like watching Ron MacLean's reactions when Don Cherry spouted his racist, hateful, nationalistic bullshit on "Hockey Night in Canada." But all in all, we'd say Carney has outskated Trump today. We cats PURR.
UPDATE: At his presser this afternoon, Carney was asked, "What was going through your mind when Trump talked about erasing the border?" Carney replied, "I'm glad you couldn't tell what was going through my mind." LOL! (Oh, no, Mark — we could. We cats PURR again.)
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