After Donald Trump’s “ Liberation Day” trade tariffs rocked the global economy and raised fears of a recession in the spring, the president who swore he wouldn’t change agreed to pause his agenda for a few months.
The plan, according to the White House, was to open the door to new negotiations and new international agreements. Americans were told to look forward to “ 90 deals in 90 days.”
Ninety days later, Trump’s failures appear unavoidable. Instead of reaching 90 deals, the president and his team have come up with a few frameworks with a few countries, but that’s it. The grant total of new, finalized trade deals negotiated during the administration’s pause is zero.
And that appears to have given Trump an idea: It’s time to redefine the phrase “trade deal.” As The New York Times summarized:
At his latest White House Cabinet meeting, for example, Trump told reporters, in reference to the tariff letters he’s begun sending to international trading partners, “We have a lot of them going out, but the deals are mostly my deal to them.” He added that striking actual trade deals is “just too time-consuming,” which was largely true — governing takes time and effort — but also an implicit acknowledgement that he couldn’t deliver on the White House’s promise.
It culminated in the president declaring, “I just want you to know a ‘letter’ means a ‘deal.’”
Except, this turns reality on its head. A trade deal happens when two parties negotiate, make offers, accept concessions, haggle over details and settle on a final agreement that both sides can accept. Trump’s approach, in contrast, is rooted in the idea that his administration tried to reach an agreement, found it too difficult, gave up, and left it to the president to simply tell other countries how and to what degree he intends to punish them with trade barriers.
In other words, Trump wants Americans to believe that “trade deals” and “failing to reach trade deals” mean the exact same thing, which is every bit as bonkers as it seems.
It comes against a backdrop in which the president recently suggested that “America First” means whatever he wants the phrase to mean at any given moment, which dovetailed with a related effort to convince the public that cutting Medicaid does not mean “Medicaid cuts.”
If this seems bewildering, that reaction is very likely the point: The more the public can be bullied into thinking words and phrases mean whatever Trump wants them to mean, the easier it becomes for the White House to advance its agenda and obscure the president’s failures.
Maddow Blog | After failing to strike trade deals, Trump tries to redefine ‘trade deals’ |
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