Trump's tough talk might help Liberal Mark Carney win a full term as Canada's prime minister

TORONTO (AP) — Mark Carney's political career is only months old, and it's already been a roller-coaster ride. The former central banker appeared destined to become one of Canada's shortest-serving prime ministers until U.S. President Donald Trump picked a fight with the neighboring country.

Carney, who was sworn in on March 14 following Justin Trudeau's resignation and a Liberal Party leadership race, now leads in the polls heading into the April 28 parliamentary election, marking a dramatic turnaround for a party that seemed destined for a crushing defeat until Trump started attacking Canada's economy and sovereignty almost daily.

Trump’s trade war and threats to make Canada the 51st U.S. state have infuriated Canadians and led to a surge in nationalism that has helped the Liberals flip the election narrative.

In a mid-January poll by Nanos, Liberals trailed the Conservative Party by 47% to 20%. In the latest Nanos poll, which was conducted during a three-day period that ended April 20, the Liberals led by eight percentage points. The January poll had a margin of error 3.1 points, while the latest poll had a 2.7-point error margin.

“Timing is everything in politics, and Carney entered the political arena at a most favorable time,” said Daniel Béland, a political science professor at McGill University in Montreal.

Carney's opponent is Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre, a career politician and firebrand populist who has campaigned with Trump-like swagger, even taking a page from the “America First” president by adopting the slogan “Canada First.”

“This election is a test about whether Canada will embrace or reject populism," Béland said, suggesting many voters view Carney as reassuring because of his experience and calm.

“Without the Trump effect, the Conservatives would probably be in a much stronger position in the polls right now," he said. "If Trump wasn’t currently in the White House, it would be hard to imagine the Liberals being the favorites in this federal race, considering how unpopular they were just a few months ago.”

Carney navigated crises when he ran Canada’s central bank and when he later became the first non-U.K. citizen to run the Bank of England since its founding in 1694.

His Bank of England appointment won bipartisan praise in the United Kingdom, after Canada recovered from the 2008 financial crisis faster than many other countries.

Former U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson called it “extraordinary” that a country would choose a foreigner to head its central bank, and that it's a mark of how admired Carney is.

"He is calm and cool in a crisis,” Paulson said. “He’s a clear thinker and he understands finance cold. He’s very well prepared.”

Carney, 60, is credited with keeping money flowing through the Canadian economy by acting quickly in cutting interest rates to their lowest level ever, working with bankers to sustain lending through the financial crisis and, critically, letting the public know that rates would remain low so they would keep borrowing.

He was the first central banker to commit to keeping them at a historic-low level for a definite time — a step the U.S. Federal Reserve would follow.

Carney also helped manage the worst impacts of Brexit in the U.K. Paulson said that Carney has the “perfect background” for these challenging times.

“Everything he’s done, he’s excelled at. Every job — the Bank of Canada, the Bank of England,” Paulson said. “I don’t know anyone who has dealt with him that doesn’t respect him. Whether they agree or disagree with him, they respect him. He’s got a very, very nice manner.”

Both Conservative and Liberal prime ministers tried to make Carney their finance minister, the second-most powerful position in Canada's government. Former Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper named Carney the Bank of Canada governor and later offered to make him finance minister. Trudeau, Carney's Liberal predecessor, long wanted him as his finance minister.

Carney is a former Goldman Sachs executive. He worked for 13 years in London, Tokyo, New York and Toronto before being appointed deputy governor of the Bank of Canada in 2003.

He was born in Fort Smith, in Canada’s remote Northwest Territories. When he was 6, his family moved to Edmonton, where his mother taught school and his father became a professor of education history at the University of Alberta.

Carney earned a partial scholarship to Harvard University, where he was the backup goalie on the hockey team. Influenced by John Kenneth Galbraith, who pioneered the popular notion that economics should be accessible to the masses, Carney took up economics.

A married father of four, Carney earned a bachelor’s degree in economics from Harvard in 1988, and master’s and doctoral degrees in economics from Oxford University.

Carney has said that Canada's close friendship with the U.S. has ended, and he squarely blamed Trump.

Trump mocked Carney’s predecessor by calling him Governor Trudeau. He hasn't trolled Carney. But White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said this month that Trump hadn't changed his position that Canada “would benefit greatly by becoming the 51st state.”

Carney said that the 80-year period when the U.S. embraced the mantle of global economic leadership and forged alliances rooted in trust and mutual respect is over.

“There is no going back. We in Canada will have to build a new relationship with the United States,” he said.

If elected, Carney said that he would accelerate renegotiations of the free trade deal with the U.S. in an effort to end the uncertainty hurting both economies.

“President Trump is trying to fundamentally restructure the international trading system and in the process he’s rupturing the global economy,” Carney said.

“The core question is who is going to be at the table for Canada,” he said.

FILE - Canada Liberal Leader Mark Carney talks to the media as he leaves the prime minister's office and makes his way to a caucus meeting in Ottawa on March 10, 2025. (Sean Kilpatrick/The Canadian Press via AP, File)

FILE - Canada's Prime Minister Mark Carney arrives in Paris on March 17, 2025. (Sean Kilpatrick/The Canadian Press via AP, File)

FILE - Canada's Prime Minister Mark Carney, reflected in a mirror, speaks to media during a press conference at Canada House in London on March 17, 2025. (Sean Kilpatrick/The Canadian Press via AP, File)

FILE - Mark Carney, Leader of the Liberal Party of Canada, embraces Prime Minister Justin Trudeau after being announced the winner at the Liberal Leadership Event in Ottawa, Ontario, March 9, 2025. (Justin Tang/The Canadian Press via AP, File)

FILE - Liberal Party of Canada Leader Mark Carney delivers his speech after being announced as the winner of the party leadership in Ottawa, Ontario, March 9, 2025. (Sean Kilpatrick/The Canadian Press via AP, File)

FILE - Canada Liberal Leader Mark Carney visits the Sheridan College Police Foundations department in Brampton, Ontario, Canada, April 10, 2025. (Sean Kilpatrick/The Canadian Press via AP, File)

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump has arrived at a delicate moment as he weighs whether to order a U.S. military response against the Iranian government as it continues a violent crackdown on protests that have left more than 600 dead and led to the arrests of thousands across the country.

The U.S. president has repeatedly threatened Tehran with military action if his administration found the Islamic Republic was using deadly force against antigovernment protesters. It's a red line that Trump has said he believes Iran is “starting to cross” and has left him and his national security team weighing “very strong options.”

But the U.S. military — which Trump has warned Tehran is “locked and loaded” — appears, at least for the moment, to have been placed on standby mode as Trump ponders next steps, saying that Iranian officials want to have talks with the White House.

“What you’re hearing publicly from the Iranian regime is quite different from the messages the administration is receiving privately, and I think the president has an interest in exploring those messages,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters Monday. “However, with that said, the president has shown he’s unafraid to use military options if and when he deems necessary, and nobody knows that better than Iran.”

Hours later, Trump announced on social media that he would slap 25% tariffs on countries doing business with Tehran “effective immediately” — his first action aimed at penalizing Iran for the protest crackdown, and his latest example of using tariffs as a tool to force friends and foes on the global stage to bend to his will.

China, the United Arab Emirates, Turkey, Brazil and Russia are among economies that do business with Tehran. The White House declined to offer further comment or details about the president’s tariff announcement.

The White House has offered scant details on Iran's outreach for talks, but Leavitt confirmed that the president's special envoy Steve Witkoff will be a key player engaging Tehran.

Meanwhile, Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and key White House National Security Council officials began meeting Friday to develop a “suite of options,” from a diplomatic approach to military strikes, to present to Trump in the coming days, according to a U.S. official familiar with the internal administration deliberations. The official was not authorized to comment publicly and spoke on the condition of anonymity.

Trump told reporters Sunday evening that a “meeting is being set up” with Iranian officials but cautioned that “we may have to act because of what’s happening before the meeting.”

“We’re watching the situation very carefully,” Trump said.

Demonstrations in Iran continue, but analysts say it remains unclear just how long protesters will remain on the street.

An internet blackout imposed by Tehran makes it hard for protesters to understand just how widespread the demonstrations have become, said Vali Nasr, a State Department adviser during the early part of the Obama administration, and now professor of international affairs and Middle East studies at Johns Hopkins University.

“It makes it very difficult for news from one city or pictures from one city to incense or motivate action in another city,” Nasr said. “The protests are leaderless, they're organization-less. They are actually genuine eruptions of popular anger. And without leadership and direction and organization, such protests, not just in Iran, everywhere in the world — it’s very difficult for them to sustain themselves.”

Meanwhile, Trump is dealing with a series of other foreign policy emergencies around the globe.

It's been just over a week since the U.S. military launched a successful raid to arrest Venezuela's Nicolás Maduro and remove him from power. The U.S. continues to mass an unusually large number of troops in the Caribbean Sea.

Trump is also focused on trying to get Israel and Hamas onto the second phase of a peace deal in Gaza and broker an agreement between Russia and Ukraine to end the nearly four-year war in Eastern Europe.

But advocates urging Trump to take strong action against Iran say this moment offers an opportunity to further diminish the theocratic government that's ruled the country since the Islamic revolution in 1979.

The demonstrations are the biggest Iran has seen in years — protests spurred by the collapse of Iranian currency that have morphed into a larger test of supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei's repressive rule.

Iran, through the country’s parliamentary speaker, has warned that the U.S. military and Israel would be “legitimate targets” if Washington uses force to protect demonstrators.

Some of Trump's hawkish allies in Washington are calling on the president not to miss the opportunity to act decisively against a vulnerable Iranian government that they argue is reeling after last summer's 12-day war with Israel and battered by U.S. strikes in June on key Iranian nuclear sites.

Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., said on social media Monday that the moment offers Trump the chance to show that he's serious about enforcing red lines. Graham alluded to former Democratic President Barack Obama in 2012 setting a red line on the use of chemical weapons by Syria's Bashar Assad against his own people — only not to follow through with U.S. military action after the then-Syrian leader crossed that line the following year.

“It is not enough to say we stand with the people of Iran,” Graham said. “The only right answer here is that we act decisively to protect protesters in the street — and that we’re not Obama — proving to them we will not tolerate their slaughter without action.”

Former Republican House Speaker Newt Gingrich, another close Trump ally, said the “goal of every Western leader should be to destroy the Iranian dictatorship at this moment of its vulnerability.”

“In a few weeks either the dictatorship will be gone or the Iranian people will have been defeated and suppressed and a campaign to find the ringleaders and kill them will have begun,” Gingrich said in an X post. “There is no middle ground.”

Indeed, Iranian authorities have managed to snuff out rounds of mass protests before, including the “Green Movement” following the disputed election in 2009 and the “woman, life, freedom” protests that broke out after 22-year-old Mahsa Amini died in custody of the state’s morality police in 2022.

Trump and his national security team have already begun reviewing options for potential military action and he is expected to continue talks with his team this week.

Behnam Ben Taleblu, senior director of the Iran program at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a hawkish Washington think tank, said “there is a fast-diminishing value to official statements by the president promising to hold the regime accountable, but then staying on the sidelines.”

Trump, Taleblu noted, has shown a desire to maintain “maximum flexibility rooted in unpredictability” as he deals with adversaries.

“But flexibility should not bleed into a policy of locking in or bailing out an anti-American regime which is on the ropes at home and has a bounty on the president’s head abroad,” he added.

Activists take part in a rally supporting protesters in Iran at Lafayette Park, across from the White House, in Washington, Sunday, Jan. 11, 2026. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt speaks with reporters at the White House, Monday, Jan. 12, 2026, in Washington. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)

President Donald Trump waves after arriving on Air Force One from Florida, Sunday, Jan. 11, 2026, at Joint Base Andrews, Md. (AP Photo/Julia Demaree Nikhinson)