Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue will travel to Canada later this week to meet with his counterpart. | Alex Wong/Getty Images Trump officials kick into damage-control mode with Canada

A day after President Donald Trump and his top advisers went on the attack against Canada, members of his Cabinet are taking steps to preserve and strengthen ties with the U.S.’ nearest ally.

In one sign of the change in tone, the Department of Agriculture announced Monday that Secretary Sonny Perdue would head to Canada later this week to meet with his counterpart Lawrence MacAulay.


The trip and photo-op is intended to showcase ongoing cooperation between the two countries on agriculture — and it will fall amid repeated criticism from Trump himself about Canada’s high tariffs on U.S. dairy products in particular that enter the Canadian market.

A USDA spokesperson pushed back against the idea that Perdue was heading north to patch things up with Canada, noting that the visit has been in the works for weeks and is part of an ongoing series of meetings Perdue's had with his Mexican or Canadian counterparts over the last year. But the warm overtures of the two leaders contrasts sharply with rhetoric coming out of the White House over the weekend.

In a tweet Monday morning, Perdue celebrated the trip, saying he was “looking forward to visiting my friend & Canadian counterpart @L_MacAulay at Prince Edward Island later this week.“ MacAulay replied in similarly warm fashion with a friendly photo of the two, saying he is “proud to be welcoming my friend“ to discuss ways to cooperate in the agriculture sector.

This weekend, however, Trump’s aides were roundly slamming Canada‘s leader during media interviews. White House trade adviser Peter Navarro antagonized relations between the two countries when he remarked on Sunday that “there’s a special place in hell” for Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who he said engaged in “bad-faith diplomacy” with Trump.

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Larry Kudlow, Trump’s top economic adviser who is normally a proponent of free trade policies, compounded the anger. In an interview on CNN, he complained that Trudeau “really kind of stabbed us in the back” after the leader said Canada would stick to plans to apply retaliatory tariffs to certain U.S. exports beginning next month.

By Monday morning, other Trump Cabinet officials were already working to push past the latest back-and-forth.

U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer spoke with his counterpart, Canadian Foreign Minister Chrystia Freeland, on Sunday evening to discuss the NAFTA renegotiation. Her spokesperson characterized the phone call as "productive and cordial."

A USTR spokesperson was also positive about the discussions: “We are continuing our negotiations with Canada and Mexico both separately and together. We are making progress and hope to reach agreement before too long.”

Freeland herself said Sunday that a meeting she had with Lighthizer on Friday was "good" and that they had agreed to continue NAFTA talks — despite repeated attacks from Trump and renewed threats that the U.S. will withdraw from the deal if it does not get the concessions it wants.

Freeland's outreach will also continue later this week, when she travels to Washington on Wednesday to meet, with members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee at the request of Chairman Bob Corker. She is not currently scheduled to meet with Lighthizer during that visit.

Some lawmakers also spoke up over the weekend to defend the U.S. relationship with Canada, countering the administration’s criticism to emphasize the need to preserve the two countries’ friendship.

Sen. Susan Collins, a Maine Republican, tweeted Sunday evening that while there have been some differences with Canada over the years, the country “remains our close ally, good friend, & one of America’s biggest trading partners.”

“Many border communities are truly intertwined,” she wrote. “We must preserve this friendship.”

On the House side, Minnesota Republican Rep. Erik Paulsen, who has been outspoken in his support of free trade, offered a sharp rebuke of Navarro for his comments, which he called "inappropriate and out of line."

"It shows he's the wrong person to be advising the president on critical trade issues," Paulsen said Monday.

Support for the U.S.-Canada relationship emerged from the private sector as well. The leaders of the U.S. National Farmers Union and the Canadian Federation of Agriculture issued a joint statement emphasizing the importance of certainty that bilateral trade ties provide.

"No heated rhetoric nor inflammatory remark could possibly represent the positive sentiment that American and Canadian farmers share for each other’s nation," CFA President Ron Bonnett and NFU President Roger Johnson said. "We urge our respective officials to engage in positive discourse that protects the strong trade ties that benefit American and Canadian farmers alike.”

Others sought to discount the damaging and lasting effects that the latest war of words could have over a partnership that has been one of the United States' closest and most important.

On one hand, "a certain amount of rhetoric coming out of this president is to be expected," said Scotty Greenwood, the CEO of the Canadian American Business Council. But she added that the shift from angry rhetoric to punitive and retaliatory actions, like Trump's tariffs on steel and aluminum, is beginning to spark concerns about the state of the bilateral relationship.

"It will be important to see what happens with dialogue between the U.S. and its closest allies and trading partners when the president returns from Singapore," she said. "There is too much at stake in the economy to get this wrong or to allow a war of words to get in in the way of our mutual prosperity."

Helena Bottemiller Evich contributed to this report.

