Donald Trump Signs USMCA

For the first time in American History, we have replaced a disastrous Trade Deal that REWARDED outsourcing with a truly FAIR and RECIPROCAL Trade Deal that will keep jobs, wealth and growth right here in AMERICA! pic.twitter.com/bDe8IV9DyD

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 29, 2020

Sanders goes straight for Trump’s crossover supporters in his new ad

“Trump came in and said he was going to fight for workers. He was going to show that manufacturing stayed in the country. And they’ve all gone. They’ve all left.” https://t.co/SHfsiqKzxC

— Curt Mills (@CurtMills) January 28, 2020

Congratulations on tweaking and rebranding NAFTA. Now, Trump will own USMCA and the consequences in the 2020 elections. Maybe it will be different this time from the U.S.-South Korea free trade agreement that he renegotiated in 2018?

New York Times:

“WASHINGTON — President Trump signed the revised North American Free Trade Agreement into law on Wednesday, fulfilling a campaign promise to rewrite “one of the worst trade deals” in history.“

Today we are finally ending the NAFTA nightmare,” Mr. Trump said during a White House signing ceremony, calling the new trade deal a “colossal victory” for farmers, factory workers, and other countries.

Much of the new United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement simply updates the 25-year-old NAFTA, with new laws on intellectual property protection, the internet, investment, state-owned enterprises and currency.

But the 2,082-page pact also includes significant changes in several key areas, including provisions designed to incentivize car production in North America and open Canadian markets for American dairy farmers. …

Nafta required automakers to produce 62.5 percent of a vehicle’s content in North America to qualify for zero tariffs. The new agreement raises that threshold, over time, to 75 percent. That’s meant to force automakers to source fewer parts for an “Assembled in Mexico” car from Germany, Japan, South Korea or China.  “

This is a recurring pattern with Donald Trump.

He will identify a political grievance and loudly complain about it to create the impression that he is going to do something about it. Then he will either forget about the issue entirely (taxes, infrastructure, social media censorship) or make some minor change (trade, immigration, foreign policy) and declare victory and the status quo more or less continues. He gets away with this because his followers are too dumb, trusting and partisan to look at the details.

In 2016, he made a huge deal about how all of his political rivals were controlled by the donors and he was independent of their influence because he was self financing his campaign. Then after winning the presidency, he cut all the donors in during the transition when no one was paying attention. He made a huge deal about how “the hedge fund guys” were making a killing thanks to the carried interest loophole during the campaign. Then he signed the tax bill that included the huge corporate tax cut which conveniently dropped the pledge to eliminate the loophole. He declared that NAFTA was the worst trade deal in history. Then he signed a slightly modified version of it. He pulled troops out of Syria only to redeploy them to Iraq and the Gulf. He complained about our relationship with Russia only to pile sanctions on Russia, arm Ukraine, expand NATO and withdraw from the INF Treaty. He promised a big, beautiful wall only to end up refurbishing sections of George W. Bush’s fence while expanding guest worker programs.

Every negative trend that he complained about in the 2016 campaign – political correctness, trade deficits, legal and illegal immigration, our relationship with Russia, being sucked into endless wars in the Middle East, health care costs, decaying infrastructure, opioid overdoses and suicides – is worse while the people who were disaffected because of those issues are now satisfied and convinced that they are winning solely because Trump is the president. The military and the wealthy are more bloated thanks to tax cuts and government spending. Israel has been on an unprecedented winning streak. Homosexuality has been normalized on the Right. Meanwhile, social media censorship, Antifa violence, government persecution of dissidents, the corruption of the courts and FBI are all many times worse than in 2016.

Note: If Bernie Sanders wins the Democratic nomination, I am sure he will be monitoring our various trade deficits and making an issue of it.