Day: June 8, 2019

In a previous post, I was impressed that Trump had managed to use the threat of tariffs to get the Mexicans to take dramatic action to curb the passage of Central Americans through their country to the USA.

It turns out I, and pretty much everyone else, misread the situation. That would have been smart, but his real plan was even smarter and much more devious.

Whereas we had assumed that the Mexican promises were offered as a result of the tariff threat, it turns out that the truth was much more complicated. The Mexicans had offered these same promises many months ago, but no deal had been finalized.

So the net is this:

When everyone jumped on his tariffs as a monumentally bad idea, he was able to save face by saying he had used the tariffs to bring the Mexicans to the negotiating table, meanwhile accepting the offers which had already been on the table for months! (Some parts had been on the table since December, others since March.) That was smart. He came up with some pretty damned good spin, and a pretty clever way to make lemonade out of lemons and earn a political victory for himself. Slick!

Best of all, his machinations ended up with the USA in a better position, which has not always been true of his past shenanigans.

Now, you might think, “But Scoop, if your theory is correct, why didn’t he just accept the deals in the first place?” Think about it. If he had done so, he would have had to give credit to Kirstjen Nielsen, who negotiated those deals, rather than to Donald J. Trump, master dealmaker. Let’s assume for a moment that he did not want Ms Nielsen to get credit for these Mexican concessions, preferring to bide his time until he could come up with a Machiavellian ploy to get the credit himself. If that’s true, he pulled it off, and that would be some pretty slick politics worthy of Tricky Dick himself. I didn’t know Trump was capable of such strategic long-range planning. I’m kind of impressed. Now I’m thinking maybe he was smart enough to use the tariffs as nothing more than a ruse all along, neither intending to impose them, nor to gain leverage with them, but rather always intending to use them simply as a subterfuge to take personal credit for Kirstjen Nielsen’s achievements.

Of course that may not be the case, but if that is the case, I have to tip my hat to the sheer evil genius of that plan. Either he’s smarter than I thought, or he has found a conniving new counselor to whisper in his ear.