Trump Negotiates NAFTA

Donald Trump recently had an interview with The Economist and talked quite a bit about NAFTA. Besides the almost entirely inarticulate discussion about his goals, one particularly interesting point is that Trump, the master negotiator, seems not to understand that the leaders of Canada and Mexico are coordinating against him.

Now at the same time I have a very good relationship with Justin [Trudeau, the Canadian prime minister] and a very good relationship with the president of Mexico. And I was going to terminate NAFTA last week, I was all set, meaning the six-month termination. I was going to send them a letter, then after six months, it’s gone. But the word got out, they called and they said, we would really love to…they called separately but it was an amazing thing. They called separately ten minutes apart. I just put down the phone with the president of Mexico when the prime minister of Canada called. And they both asked almost identical questions. “We would like to know if it would be possible to negotiate as opposed to a termination.” And I said, “Yes, it is. Absolutely.” So, so we did that and we’ll start.

What's amazing is that Trump thinks this is amazing, when in fact he's getting played.