In their article “Mexico agreed to take border actions months before Trump announced tariff deal”, Michael D. Shear and Maggie Haberman report today in the New York Times that the deal with Mexico that President Trump ballyhooed late yesterday was the same deal that Mexico already agreed to in March, and that the centerpiece of the deal — keeping asylum-seekers in Mexico while their cases are heard — was agreed to in December.
The stunt that Trump tried to pull this week was to force Mexico to modify the deal and to accept a treaty that would have given the US the legal right to reject asylum seekers from other countries if they had not applied to Mexico first.
Mexico said “no”.
So Trump caved, and announced his defeat as if it were a victory.
This is standard operating procedure for Trump. If you’ll recall in January, Trump caved during his government shutdown because he wanted a wall. This was another gigantic cave on Trump’s signature issue of keeping brown people out. As Joan McCarter reported here, Trump said back in January “I am very proud to announce we have a deal to end the shutdown…. Everyone knows I have a very powerful alternative.” Nope. Trump had caved, and everybody knew it. And Congress didn’t give him money for a wall, and everybody knew it.
Everybody should know this time, too. If your acquaintances mention yesterday’s Mexico agreement as evidence of Trump’s dealmaking, remind them that Trump threatened to raise taxes this week and temporarily tanked the stock market (and perhaps helped out some of his shady speculator friends and relatives) all just to fool his gullible base.