President set to release list of objectives for NAFTA talks

The poll was conducted July 10-13 among a random national sample of 1,001 adults reached on cellular and landline phones. The margin of sampling error for overall results is plus or minus 3.5 percentage points.

Trump took to Twitter to dismiss the poll as “just about the most inaccurate” survey and defended his son.

“Hillary Clinton can illegally get the questions to the Debate & delete 33,000 emails but my son Don is being scorned by the Fake News Media,” he wrote.

The counter-attacks followed a week of revelations about his son’s meeting with a Russian lawyer in June last year.

The emerging details suggest Trump Jr. agreed to meet Natalia Veselnitskaya after being told she had damaging information about Clinton as part of a Kremlin campaign to support his father in the election.

Later in the week Rinat Akhmetshin, a Russian-American lobbyist who once served in a counter-intelligence unit of the Soviet army, confirmed he was present at the meeting.

The result is a fresh slew of questions about whether Trump’s campaign was colluding with Russian efforts to swing the election his way.

All of this comes at a moment when Canadians are about to learn what the Trump administration wants to do with NAFTA. After campaigning and complaining about the trade deal with Canada and Mexico for two years, the president is poised to release a list as early as Monday revealing how he wants to change the deal.

American law requires that the administration publish a list of its objectives entering trade negotiations. The reason this could happen any day is because the administration hopes to start negotiations around Aug. 16 and the law requires this list be posted online 30 days in advance.

The U.S. has signalled wildly conflicting approaches.

Trump keeps threatening to rip up the trade agreement in the absence of a major renegotiation. His vicepresident, Mike Pence, just delivered a speech exuding collegiality and promising a new NAFTA that would be a “win-win-win.”

The signals to Congress have been equally contradictory.

In a leaked draft of a letter to lawmakers, the administration showed a desire to play hardball and seek changes that would be deemed non-starters by the other countries. It later released a bare-bones, modest version of that letter.

Those mixed messages are due in part to philosophical differences within Trump’s team about how aggressive to get on trade.