NAFTA: North American Frack Trump Association

3 Amigos: Mexico’s Pena Nieto, Canada’s Trudeau, U.S.’s Obama

On June 29 in Ottawa, a jolly gathering of Trump haters shared their mutual animosity.

The U.S.

At their news conference following the NAFTA leaders’ summit, Obama issued a rant on how he, not Trump, is the true populist. This struck even TIME’s liberal David Von Drehle as off key. Von Drehle reminded readers that “as long as people are capable of hatreds, resentments, and small-mindedness, populism will never be as simple as Barack Obama would like it to be.”  In other words, Obama is better than the Trump populism of haters, resenters, and small minded.

Canada

Canadian legislators didn’t hide their U.S. election preferences at all. According to AP, Canada’s Parliament broke into chants of “four more years” when President Barack Obama wrapped up the first address there by a U.S. leader since 1995.

Mexico

At the joint press conference, Mexican President Pena Nieto stood by his previous comments comparing Trump’s language to that of Hitler and Mussolini, adding the end result in the 1940s was a “tragedy for mankind.”

Comment: The unseemly anti-Trump nature of the NAFTA summit, out of place in an international setting, drew little attention from the mainstream media, which simply relayed the leaders’ words.  Given Trump's anti-NAFTA statements, some response was in order, but from the head, not gut.