Cracking the Trump bluster code (Warning: It’s worse than you thought)
Many years ago, I had a brief couple of stints at a negotiating table, and on the other side there was this one gruff lawyer who didn’t like to mince words. When the talks got heated, as they occasionally did, he would make a kind of fist with his thumb sticking out and sort of wave it around. I thought it was an odd gesture. A more seasoned negotiator on our side said it was a sure sign the guy was BS’ing.
If only there was a similar tell for Donald Trump whenever he opens his mouth or twiddles his Twitter thumbs about the North American Free Trade Agreement. Over the past couple weeks, as negotiations among Canadian, U.S. and Mexican officials have trundled along in what by most accounts has been a collegial manner, the American president has taken once again to NAFTA-bashing.
To anyone who followed the former reality TV show host on the campaign trail, it’s a familiar refrain: NAFTA is the worst deal ever, Canada and Mexico are taking the States for a ride, and if it doesn’t get fixed soon then maybe — maybe, mind you — the U.S. should just pull out and work to get a “real deal” (whatever that might look like). During a stream-of-consciousness address to a rally in Arizona, which took place immediately after he made toxic remarks about the racist protests in Charlottesville, Va., Trump said that he didn’t think negotiations were going to amount to anything and “we’ll end up probably terminating NAFTA at some point, okay? Probably.”
So far, the NAFTA counterparties seem to be responding to these presidential salvos by stuffing fingers in ears. After one Trump tweet, Mexico said it would not negotiate by social media; Canada has called the President’s bombast, basically, just so many words.
It’s not hard to see why. Trump has proven himself relatively ineffectual when it comes to following up bombast with action. He couldn’t get the push to repeal and replace Obamacare past the Senate floor. The trillion-dollar infrastructure program he promised is nowhere to be found. His recent renewed call for tax reform — he says he wants the tax code shortened and simplified, which is one of his very few un-bad economic ideas — has yet to materialize as either proposal or policy, and is likely to run into strong and divisive opposition in Congress.
Enemies surround him, not just among Democrats but also from within his own party and, seemingly, his own administration (if the steady stream of leaks is any indication). Pillars of the business community who sat on his economic advisory councils have abandoned him after Charlottesville; Steve Bannon, the eminence grise of Trump’s proto-nationalist base, has left the building. Meanwhile, the Russia scandal has only deepened. Trump’s approval ratings are at an all-time low.
As his failures mount, Trump’s statements get only more outrageous, and look only more desperate. So it’s easy to dismiss his anti-NAFTA beatings as scare tactics, or as last-ditch but ultimately meaningless efforts to appease his base. We do so at our peril. Sure, all those maybe’s and probably’s the president sprinkles around his NAFTA-bashing are textbook Trump — he likes to leave himself wiggle room. But I don’t find any comfort in his equivocation. In fact, I tend to think that when he’s addressing the Faithful, as he does at rallies and on Twitter, his equivocations always come with a nod and a wink. It’s as if he’s saying, “You know how it is, folks — John Kelly will rap my knuckles if I say too much. But you know where I’m coming from. You know what I really think.”
Sub in “very likely” for “maybe” and “definitely” for “probably,” and we might have cracked the Trumpian code. Remember, he kept the world guessing for weeks before pulling out of the Paris climate accord at the end of May — maybe he’ll stay, maybe he won’t, he’s looking at it closely, blah blah blah. Yet back in May 2016, he said he would, as president, pull the U.S. out of the Paris deal. And then, a year later, he did just that. Which would have been a crystal-clear outcome to everyone, if they hadn’t misinterpreted his previous statements as negotiating tactics or base appeasement that he doesn’t really mean.
Of course, it’s hard to put stock in the words of someone who prevaricates as much as Trump does. It’s also hard to believe he supports actions that run so clearly counter to the national or global interest. And yet he does. On his core positions, the ones that got him elected — that free trade is bad for America and that foreigners, inside and outside his country, are stealing American jobs — he has shown no signs of bending to reason.
I don’t see why he should change when it comes NAFTA, especially as his administration sinks deeper into scandal and legislative inertia.
Importantly, he has the authority to withdraw from trade deals without congressional approval; the raft of executive orders he has signed since taking office suggests that when he has the power to act unilaterally, he tends to use it.
Don’t dismiss Trump’s antiNAFTA rants as just so much finger-wagging and BS’ing.