Late Friday night, President Donald Trump wrote on Twitter that he had managed to solve an international crisis between the United States and Mexico, after several days of threatening to impose tariffs between 5 and 25% on goods imported from Mexico.
“I am pleased to inform you that The United States of America has reached a signed agreement with Mexico,” Trump tweeted on Friday. “The Tariffs scheduled to be implemented by the U.S. on Monday, against Mexico, are hereby indefinitely suspended.”
The president's threat of tariffs was roundly criticized by both Republican and Democratic lawmakers and members of the business community. The move was ostensibly done to force Mexico to take bolder action on curbing the amount of irregular migration into the U.S., but according to reporting from The New York Times over the weekend, Mexico had already agreed to undertake the measures announced on Friday long before Trump threatened to impose tariffs.
“It’s the same story that we just keep seeing again and again,” WGBH News Analyst and CEO of the GroundTruth Project Charlie Sennott said during an interview with Boston Public Radio on Monday.
Sennott said that what occurred on Friday is part of a long history of the president concocting crises and then pretending to solve them, when no real problem existed in the first place. As an example, Sennott pointed to the president’s posturing on North Korea. During his 2019 State of the Union Address, the president claimed that his outreach to North Korean dictator Kim Jong-Un prevented a war between the two nations, despite no evidence a potential military stand-off between the U.S. and North Korea.
“We’ve seen this elsewhere,” Sennott said. “I would say we’ve seen it with North Korea, China, in relation to tariffs [in] Mexico.”
Trump has also been criticized for his fluctuating comments on the Bureau of Labor Statistics' jobs reports , which he frequently said were made up while Barack Obama was president, but embraced during his own presidency.
Sennot said that Trump’s tactic of manufacturing crises is not just losing the president credibility, but is masking the fact that there is a real need for a legitimate policy to respond to the growing number of migrants fleeing violence throughout Central and Southern America.
“The thing we can’t overlook is that it is a real crisis. There are a lot of people trying to get across the [southern] border right now,” Sennott said. “We have tactics without a strategy, and I keep coming back to that with this administration. It feels like there’s no strategy.”
In response to criticism that his threat of tariffs had accomplished nothing, on Monday morning Trump tweeted that in addition to the agreements revealed on Friday, the Mexican government had agreed to a secret deal to reduce the flow of migrants into the U.S. Later in the day, Mexican foreign minister Marcelo Erbard denied there was any secret deal in a news conference.
