“T

hey used to call it NAFTA,” President Donald Trump said Monday in explaining his preliminary, bilateral update of the 25-year-old three-country trade deal between the U.S., Canada and Mexico. The North American Free Trade Agreement, he explained, had “a bad connotation” for the U.S. — perhaps because he had spent the last few years insisting to whoever would listen that it was the “worst trade deal maybe ever signed anywhere,” in contrast to the new agreement, which he bragged (patently falsely) was “maybe the biggest trade deal ever.”

We are by now accustomed to Trumpian hyperbole over everything from his personal wealth to the effectiveness of his nuclear negotiations with North Korea, so it probably is of little surprise that there is far less to this NAFTA renegotiation than he would have the public believe. Most of its provisions relate to the auto industry — an important manufacturing sector, to be sure, but a fraction of the trade covered by NAFTA. In 2017, the U.S. imported almost $90 billion in passenger vehicles from Mexico and Canada, compared to a combined $614 billion in total imports from those two countries (and $525 billion in exports to them).

And the specifics are likely to be marginally helpful to the U.S., at most. The tentative deal increases the share of “auto content” that must be made in the U.S. or Mexico in order to avoid tariffs from 62.5 percent to 75 percent. A mere three models of cars made in Mexico (the Nissan Versa Sedan, the Fiat 500 and the Audi SQ5) would become subject to tariffs as a result of the change. The deal also stipulates that 40 to 45 percent of the auto content must be made by workers earning at least $16 an hour, which might shift some parts production to the United States, though how much depends on the yet-to-be-released details.

Other parts of the agreement are similarly unimpactful. No doubt, intellectual property provisions needed updating for the digital age, and that could have been accomplished without threatening to blow up the entire framework of NAFTA. The environmental and labor standards the Trump administration announced are already covered by the Trans-Pacific Partnership,