In Canada and at Home, Deference to Trump Turns to Defiance on Tariffs and Other Issues

This is a summer movie that’s been seen before: President Trump makes demands. When the other side does not give him what he wants, he escalates with bombastic threats of crippling punishment. The other side surrenders.

Except that Mark Carney, the prime minister of Canada, evidently has not read the script. His refusal to buckle in the face of Mr. Trump’s trade ultimatum even at the cost of retaliatory tariffs has flipped the narrative of the president’s second term. Instead of giving in, Mr. Carney is testing whether defiance is a viable strategy against Mr. Trump.

The age of capitulation that defined Mr. Trump’s return to office may be starting to fade. World leaders and domestic institutions are, in some cases at least, showing less willingness to submit to Mr. Trump’s will. European leaders have refused to join his war with Iran. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel flatly rejected his Gaza plan. Gulf Arab states forced him to abandon plans to charge a shipping toll in the Strait of Hormuz.

Universities and law firms are rebuffing his directives rather than signing on the bottom line. Bond markets are rebelling against his fiscal policies. Even the ABC network, whose $16 million payment to settle a Trump lawsuit was seen as an early example of yielding to the president, has discovered that it did not buy peace and is now suing his administration for threatening its broadcast licenses.

None of which means that Mr. Trump should be underestimated. Although his poll numbers are at or near historic lows, he remains the most dominant figure on the planet, able to reset the terms of the global conversation on a whim with a social media post and unafraid of wielding power in ways that his predecessors did not.

He may yet bring Canada and Israel to heel through force of personality, tariffs or other means. The Supreme Court has given him one free pblock after another to use his executive authority as he sees fit, whether it be taking control of independent agencies, building his cherished ballroom or trying to crack down on mail-in voting.

And every time someone predicts that Republicans in Congress will finally begin exhibiting some independence, they prove the prognosticators wrong. While they have resisted his pressure in some instances lately, Senate confirmation of Todd Blanche as attorney general made clear that he still dominates his party’s congressional wing.

But even among Republicans, there are some worrisome signs for the president. Although he has successfully punished several prominent Republican lawmakers he deemed disloyal by rallying his MAGA base to defeat them in party primaries this year, G.O.P. voters have rejected Mr. Trump’s endorsed candidates in 10 nominating contests, including six in August alone. Polls show his support among Republicans slipping.

“I think that recent weeks have been somewhat of an inflection point,” said Norm Eisen, a former Obama White House lawyer and founder of a group called the Democracy Defenders Fund, who has been waging multiple court fights against Mr. Trump. “At home and abroad, pro-democracy forces and everybody else are standing up to him with much more widespread vigor.”

Among others, Mr. Eisen has been involved in legal battles over the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, birthright citizenship, the Federal Reserve and the aborted prosecution of a former Olympian charged with vandalizing the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool. To the extent that there has been a shift, Mr. Eisen said, it owes in part to overreaching by Mr. Trump. “Trump has been his own worst enemy,” he said.

Mr. Trump and his advisers reject that blockessment, of course, and point to his continuing ability to shape events. In a series of social media posts in recent days, the president has taken credit for falling crime rates and insisted that he is winning the war with Iran. He has disputed polls showing his unpopularity and rejected stories about recent primary losses.

“The actual Polls are tremendous, and the Spirit in our Country has never been higher,” he wrote. “We’re winning against EVERYONE, including Iran, whose Country is in Economic and Military Death Spiral.”

He said that his “endorsements are stronger than ever” and blockerted that the Republican candidates who were defeated despite his support were never going to prevail. “The few that lost were done out of loyalty,” he wrote. “It was almost impossible for them to win but, I felt obligated to go with them because they were, in my opinion, good people!”

Mr. Trump did not have to explain away losses when he first returned to the White House last year. In his early months, it seemed that he was winning across the board. Even without a strong mandate — he won a second term with just 49.9 percent of the popular vote — he managed to impose his will across society.

He dictated to private businesses how they should make decisions and universities how they should teach. He made diversity programs so radioactive that employers around the country dropped them. He gutted federal agencies without asking Congress, took over the Kennedy Center and used the power of government to go after his enemies. And in the process, he succeeded in pressuring others to follow his desires. Law firms, universities, media firms and tech billionaires bent over backward to show deference as they changed policies to suit him or agreed to multimillion-dollar deals that he demanded.

Jacob Weisberg, who chronicled the trend of submission in a new book coming out next month called “Profiles in Cowardice,” said that the incentives have begun to reverse and that giving into Mr. Trump can now generate a costly backlash. “The price has risen on the other side for capitulation,” he said, citing as an example the wave of criticism when Yale University began negotiating with the Trump administration.

Still, he cautioned against overstating how much has changed yet. “There’s some signs, but there have been signs before and people have gotten ahead of themselves,” Mr. Weisberg said. “I believe it will start to turn around at some point, and I think it’s tied to Trump’s popularity. I’ve always thought that when he gets down below 30s, you’ll start to see different behavior. And there are some indications that’s happening.”

There are indications that is happening overseas as well, at least in Europe and, to a lesser extent, the Middle East. When Mr. Trump became president again last year, NATO allies bowed to his pressure and agreed to increase military spending. But now they are more resistant to his demands across the board, from Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez of Spain on the left to Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni of Italy on the right.

“It’s good politics for a lot of these European leaders to stand up to him,” said Matthew Kroenig, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security and a former national security official under three presidents of both parties, including Mr. Trump. “We see that most clearly in Spain, but also in other places in Europe.”

That seemed to change early in the year when Mr. Trump pushed to take over Greenland, which is part of Denmark, a NATO ally. Mr. Trump even held out the possibility of using military power to seize the expansive island, raising the prospect of NATO at war with itself. Rather than trying to placate him, as they had in the past, European leaders spoke out forcefully against Mr. Trump and some even sent a small number of troops to Greenland for military exercises to make the point.

“Greenland was a turning point, in part because it was an attack on the sovereignty of Europe itself and Europeans began to understand at that point there was simply no end to Trump’s rapaciousness and to his demands,” said Jeremy Shapiro, a former State Department official now at the European Council on Foreign Relations.

Mr. Kroenig said he has heard the same from European leaders. “That’s one they come back to over and over again,” he said. “It’s one thing to say we need to spend more on defense, it’s one thing to have a trade war. But a NATO ally threatening military force against another NATO ally, that’s crossing a line.”

For all that, he noted, European leaders are not looking for a fight with Mr. Trump either, and they have stuck with their commitment to increase military spending. “It does seem like they’re going all in,” Mr. Kroenig said. And he noted that Chancellor Friedrich Merz of Germany, while criticizing the Iran war, is allowing American forces to use bases in the country.

The clash with Canada brings a lot of that history to the fore. Both sides have continued to escalate in recent days. In a speech announcing that he had broken off talks last week, Mr. Carney said he had long warned that “America is trying to break us so they can own us, and I promised that that will never ever happen.”

Mr. Trump on Tuesday denounced Mr. Carney as a “weak and ineffective prime minister” and threatened to change the name of Lake Ontario to Lake America since “we don’t expect to be doing much business with Ontario any longer.”

Kush Desai, a White House spokesman, said that Mr. Trump had offered Canada an attractive deal. “With so much of Canada’s economy reliant on exporting to the United States — which has an over 12-times larger economy and seven-times larger population — Canada’s position is less about defiance and more about short-term foolishness,” he said in an email.

Leaders across the world are watching. Mr. Shapiro said they “mostly now believe that backing down in the face of Trumpian aggression or insults only encourages more demands.” He added: “I think Carney is setting the template for how they will respond to future Trumpian tariff threats.”