Belgian PM Slams 'Arbitrary' Tariffs Without Naming Trump, Days After Canada's Carney Tells US to 'Stop Doing Memes'

Belgian Prime Minister Bart De Wever stood in front of a Mumbai audience on Friday, September 4, and didn't need to say Donald Trump's name for everyone to know who he meant.

"More and more voices today are calling for barriers to go up, for markets to be shut off, for tariffs to be imposed," De Wever said at the India-Belgium High-Level Dialogue on the India-EU Free Trade Agreement, held at the Jio Convention Center. "Some do this entirely arbitrarily. They decide something on Monday, they revoke it on Wednesday, and they reinstall it on Saturday."

The room applauded. De Wever leaned into it. "Your applause tells me you know who I am talking about," he said, according to ANI and reported by the Economic Times, Times of India, Republic World, and Hindustan Times. He never said Trump's name.

De Wever, Belgium's prime minister since February 2025, was on his first official visit to India as head of government, a three-day trip alongside Defence and Foreign Trade Minister Theo Francken. According to Hindustan Times, he also took a swipe at a second kind of economic pressure without naming China either: "Others take a different approach and set out deliberately and structurally to distort markets... in order to make them dependent and turn them into vassals." Hindustan Times framed this as a dual jab at both the US and China; the other outlets in this batch focused only on the tariff line aimed at Washington.

De Wever wasn't there just to needle Trump. Modi and De Wever met Thursday, September 3, and set a goal of doubling bilateral trade within five years, signing a Letter of Intent on defence cooperation, according to Ground News. De Wever called the India-EU FTA, concluded in January 2026, "the mother of all deals" covering a market of 2 billion consumers and a quarter of the global economy. Commerce Minister Piyush Goyal called it a win-win; Maharashtra Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis said the state should become a showcase for implementing it. Hindustan Times also reported De Wever announced the Port of Antwerp-Bruges will send a full delegation to India in February 2027 covering logistics, chemicals, and energy.

De Wever repeatedly praised Prime Minister Narendra Modi, calling him "one of the most inspiring world leaders," per Republic World, and saying, "We live in a chaotic world... but if PM Modi speaks, you think we should do what he says." A separate report from the right-leaning Indian outlet Organiser, carried via Ground News, added that De Wever acknowledged Europe had ignored India's earlier warnings about excessive economic dependence and said the continent is now experiencing a "rude awakening" — a detail the other six sources in this batch did not include.

Canada's Carney Has His Own Complaint

De Wever isn't the only allied leader publicly frustrated with Washington's tariff posture right now. Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, speaking to reporters in Ottawa earlier this week, said US-Canada trade talks over automobile tariffs would only resume "when the Americans stop doing memes, stop throwing shade, stop trying to be tough, and start being serious," according to Fox News.

Canada suspended those talks on August 21. Six days later, on August 27, Trump signed an executive order renaming Lake Ontario "Lake America," per Fox News. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent posted that Canada couldn't go "tit-for-tat" with the US economy, and War Secretary Pete Hegseth posted a photo of two female Canadian military members captioned "this is real," which Carney called "beneath their office."

Carney laid out specific objections beyond the mockery: restrictions on Canadian sovereignty in future trade deals, and terms he said would turn Canadian auto industries into "subsidiaries" of US companies or gradually wind them down. Fox News noted Trump's trade team has countered that Canada walked away from what it called "the best deal," triggering 50% US tariffs as a consequence.

Two Separate Fights, One Common Thread

De Wever's comments in Mumbai and Carney's comments in Ottawa are unrelated events on unrelated timelines, not one coordinated pushback. Both point at the same underlying complaint: that Trump's tariff moves land as unpredictable to the trading partners on the receiving end.

Defenders of Trump's approach would argue that rapid tariff shifts reflect leverage in live negotiations, not incoherence, and that his trade team's own explanation, cited by Fox News, is that Canada rejected a deal already on the table. Neither De Wever nor Carney's criticism resolves that dispute. What's confirmed: Canada-US auto tariff talks remain suspended as of this writing, with no resumption date set, and the India-EU FTA that De Wever championed is moving toward implementation, with Belgium's port delegation scheduled to visit India in February 2027.