‘GROUNDHOG DAY ON TRADE AGAIN’
IT’S A TERRIBLE DEAL. WE GOT SCREWED. YOU’RE PAST YOUR PRIME. YOU’RE NOT A GOOD NEGOTIATOR ANYMORE. I DON’T KNOW WHAT IT IS, BUT YOU’VE LOST IT. I DON’T TRUST YOU. — DONALD TRUMP TO A FORMER WALL STREET INVESTOR WHO WAS BY THEN 79 YEARS OLD.
Fear, Bob Woodward’s bombshell account of the inner workings of the Donald Trump presidency, was released this week amid intense negotiations between Canada and the U.S. on a revamped North American Free Trade Agreement. The book is light on news, but it presents a colourful look at the internal debate over NAFTA that roiled the White House in Trump’s first months in office, giving readers direct insight into which officials wanted to preserve trade relations with Canada and why Trump’s impulse to withdraw from the deal eventually won out.
As both countries await a resolution, here’s a breakdown of everything Fear has to say about NAFTA.
TRUMP WANTED TO WITHDRAW FROM NAFTA ON 100TH DAY
One Tuesday in April 2017, three days before his awoke as president for the 100th time, Trump called Mike Pence, Jared Kushner, commerce secretary Wilbur Ross, trade adviser Peter Navarro and staff secretary Rob Porter to the Oval Office and demanded an executive order be written that would pull the U.S. out of NAFTA. None of the attendees at the meeting protested, Woodward writes, except for Porter, the most junior official of the bunch.
Aghast that Trump was even pondering such a move, Porter told the president that he couldn’t withdraw via executive order; he would have to give 180 days notice to Congress, during which a new agreement could be negotiated. He said no decision should be made without consulting Gary Cohn, Trump’s chief economic adviser, and treasury secretary Steven Mnuchin. NAFTA was a foundational pillar of U.S. relationships with Canada and Mexico, Porter argued, and it didn’t make sense to savage it without thorough deliberations.
“We need to have a process to make sure that we do this in proper order, that we’ve thought through these things,” Porter said, according to Woodward.
“I don’t care about any of that stuff,” Trump replied. “I want it on my desk by Friday.”
Cohn saved NAFTA (for the time being) by taking matters into his own hands
The following day, after national security adviser H.R. McMaster told Porter he was dismayed by Trump’s directive and John Kelly, then the secretary of homeland security, said at an emergency meeting that withdrawing from NAFTA would backfire, Trump called off the order to trigger the 180-day window — only to renounce that renunciation shortly thereafter.
The see-saw act began when Porter went to visit Trump in the Oval Office two days before the Friday deadline with Sonny Perdue, Trump’s new agriculture secretary. Perdue demonstrated to the president on a map of the U.S. that any retaliatory measures Canada and Mexico might take against American farmers and manufacturers would disproportionately hurt states that had voted for Trump — and crucial swing states at that.
Trump relented, later sending word to Porter through Kushner that NAFTA was safe for now. But he was persuaded to double back when Navarro walked into the Oval Office unannounced and blamed the lack of action on trade files on Porter’s emphasis on process. Trump beckoned Porter into his office, slammed him for his inactivity — “What the f--- are you stalling for?” the president asked — and ordered him to draft a letter proclaiming the American plan to withdraw.
Porter wrote the letter, but went to talk to Cohn out of concern that its contents would ruin relations with Canada and Mexico. Cohn proposed a solution: he would stroll into Trump’s office sometime after Porter dropped off the letter and remove it from the president’s desk. Without some sort of trigger, the two agreed — such as a TV segment that mentioned NAFTA or another appeal from Navarro — Trump might simply forget that he wanted to withdraw from the deal, perhaps forever.
GLOBALISTS AND PROTECTIONISTS FACED OFF FOR TRUMP’S SUPPORT
Like any disagreement in the Trump White House, officials rived the NAFTA debate by splintering off into multiple factions. Arguments over whether to pull out of the deal pitted Cohn and Porter against Navarro and Robert Lighthizer, the U.S. trade representative who is now Canadian Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland’s opposite number at the negotiating table.
On the protectionist side of the debate, Navarro — the rare academic economist, Woodward writes, who shares Trump’s views on free trade — argued at one Oval Office meeting that NAFTA had decimated American manufacturing, particularly steelworkers. “If you just shut the f--- up and listen, you might learn something,” Cohn responded, contending that Navarro’s position wasn’t supported by facts and that trade deficits were, if anything, positive to the U.S., since they enabled Americans to buy cheaper goods from elsewhere in North America.
In July 2017, a few months after Cohn plucked Porter’s draft notice of withdrawal off Trump’s desk, Navarro and Lighthizer cornered Trump in the Oval Office in a renewed bid to convince him to impose steel tariffs and to renegotiate NAFTA. Minutes after they began presenting their case, Porter walked in and rebuked the pair for venturing outside the process imposed by chief of staff Reince Priebus for reaching presidential decisions. Nothing could be decided without the input of Cohn, Mnuchin, Ross and others, Porter said, at which point Navarro and Lighthizer abandoned their exhortations.
LIGHTHIZER GOT HIS JOB AT ROSS’ EXPENSE
Lighthizer, for his part, had the stature to lobby Trump to withdraw from NAFTA because another negotiator fell out of favour with the president. In May 2017, when the U.S. reached an agreement with China under which the Americans would start importing poultry and exporting beef, Ross, the chief U.S. negotiator, hailed it as a “herculean accomplishment.” But critics said China had gotten the better end of the deal, stoking the president’s ire.
“It’s a terrible deal. We got screwed,” Trump told Ross, a former Wall Street investor who was by then 79 years old. “You’re past your prime. You’re not a good negotiator anymore. I don’t know what it is, but you’ve lost it. I don’t trust you.” Ignoring the commerce secretary’s attempts to justify his work, Trump soon concluded that Lighthizer should be the man to lead the U.S. into future NAFTA negotiations.
DEBATING TRADE WITH TRUMP IS LIKE THE MOVIE GROUNDHOG DAY
Woodward employs as a recurring metaphor the Bill Murray comedy in which an American weatherman is forced to live out the same day of his life in an interminable loop. Throughout Trump’s first months in office, the president maintained that blowing up NAFTA and forcing Canada and Mexico to scurry back to the negotiating table was the only way for the U.S. to attain the more favourable terms he sought. Cohn, worried the Canadians and Mexicans would simply decline to negotiate a new deal in that scenario, found that his defence of these economic relationships inevitably resulted in the same conversation.
“It was Groundhog Day on trade again,” Woodward writes at one point. Trump would declare his desire to impose tariffs or tear up NAFTA, Cohn would challenge him and the president would back off. Porter reluctantly drafted at least two orders to withdraw from trade deals; he or Cohn later snatched them from Trump’s desk. Trump never kept a list of tasks to be accomplished, which made him prone to forgetting anything he’d ever decided.
In July 2017, Cohn and defence secretary James Mattis tried to break this intractable cycle by inviting Trump to meet in the Tank, a windowless room at the Pentagon that would be devoid of distractions. Concerned that trade wars with trusted trading partners would threaten global stability, Cohn made an impassioned argument for free trade with those countries, Mexico and Canada among them. Near the end of his speech, he repeated his belief that trade deficits were good for the U.S. economy.
“I don’t want to hear that,” Trump said. “It’s all bulls---!”