USMCA

President Donald Trump has set Saturday as the deadline to impose 25 percent tariffs on Canadian and Mexican imports. From the Oval Office earlier this week, Trump explained that the move aims to push the US’s neighbors to take swift action to curtail illegal immigration and fentanyl, as well as to address growing trade deficits. The tariffs may or may not include oil, with Trump saying Thursday that determinations were still being made. Following Trump’s tariff feud with Colombian president Gustavo Petro Sunday, with the Trump forcing his Colombian counterpart to welcome deportees, his latest move signifies an expansion of his revamped “FAFO” foreign policy.

It would be great if the President was an icon of virtue and goodness, but he isn’t. As much as my Democratic friends want to parse otherwise, neither was Bill Clinton, but we overlooked Clinton’s repugnancy because we loved his booming economy. When you strip away the media noise, the fundamental question is: do you want a Trump or Biden economy in 2021 and beyond? Thankfully, both men have records in leading the country so the question isn’t a speculative one. Additionally, given that the states are experiencing dramatically different post-pandemic economic recoveries, we can see what a Trump economy is doing under conservative leadership and policies compared to what a Biden economy is doing under progressive leadership and policies.

Let's not mince words. President Trump and his loyalists were dead right. His threat of tariffs pushed Mexico to work harder to stop the Central American caravans, and the migrants who hope to exploit immigration law loopholes in order to receive asylum in the United States. And the bipartisan, Trump-loathing political, business and media establishments were all dead wrong. They warned that his strong-arming would ignite a trade war, disrupt the thick web of supply chains linking the American and Mexican economies, and risk a recession. Equally off-base was the establishmentarians' angst that Trump's gambit would endanger the revamp of the North American Free Trade Agreement (Nafta) that he has sought and which Mexico and Canada recently signed.

Donald Trump likes to brag about his deal-making prowess. During his visit to the United Kingdom, he’s touting the prospects for a ‘very, very substantial trade deal.’ But even as he dangles sugarplums before the British, he’s blowing up another agreement that he wanted to complete before the 2020 election — the United-States-Mexico-Canada Agreement, which is supposed to supplant NAFTA.His attempt to fuse national security and nationalism in the form of a tariff on Mexico could end up torching his own presidency. Trump’s big idea — concocted by his aide Stephen Miller — is that he can pressure Mexico to crack down on immigration by pressuring it with tariffs.

At 12:01 a.m. on Monday, President Donald Trump went a long way toward defusing a potential war – not with Iran, but Canada and Mexico, where Trump revoked tariffs he had imposed in the name of national security. Why the sudden bout of tariff reduction? The president is focusing on a one-front trade war with China. The restrictions began as two fronts of the same war. Trump imposed 25 percent tariffs on steel and 10 percent tariffs on aluminum imported from China last March. Then he extended those tariffs to the EU, Canada, and Mexico on June 1. But the president seems to have concluded that the US can no more fight a two-front war in trade than on the battlefield.