Mexican Trade and Tariffs are Giving Congress the Runs
I am not a big fan of learning. However, today while I was grinding up some lead to put in my gas tank (unleaded fuel is for losers), I noticed someone squawking on the radio about Mexico, where Trump just used the threat of tariffs to make their army guard our border.
As usual, this gave the Fake News Media a severe case of Montezuma’s Revenge and people like Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) have been flooding the internet with verbal diarrhea regarding why this is proof that the world is ending. I personally think Trump’s deal with Mexican President Obrador is awesome because it proves that it is officially easier for him to deal with foreign governments than Congress. However I do not want to get overly political because all politics are about the pocketbook. In my case, a pocketbook that could never afford the 5-25 percent increase these tariffs would have added to the two Mexican imports that power this blog:
What a save.
Anyway, this whole case of the tariff flu is a sideshow for two bigger battles, one of which is immigration, and the other is trade. More specifically, it is the US-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) that the Trump Administration negotiated to replace NAFTA, per Trump’s ten million promises during the 2016 campaign. We are about to get wet AF in it here.
This is one of the most underpriced bets on PredictIt. That is because Congressional Democrats have reacted to Trump’s presidency the same way that my body reacts to the barbacoa in Tijuana. Basically, Trump has given Democrats a raging political fever that has caused them to violently shit out condescending press releases about how dumb and racist Trump and his supporters are, as well as squirt policy positions into the political toilet bowl that have not had enough time to solidify into anything other than bile. Examples of this include the Green New Deal, the botched opposition to Brett Kavanaugh, and an extremely confusing civil war inside the party over whether or not Israel and Jewish people are still okay. Basically, Nancy Pelosi and House Democrats have been acting like they are the nation’s immune system and are responsible for cooking out the Donald Trump disease, even if that causes some serious abdominal cramps from 2016-2020.
Part of beating the Trump Bug is following the old wisdom to “feed a cold and starve a flu.” Or in this case, starving the President of any meaningful accomplishments, even if those accomplishments are things that many Democrats have wanted for years. The most obvious examples of this is Democrats’ long-standing priority to undo trade deals that have scalped more American workers than Pancho Villa.
This is some hard medicine to swallow because even though Bernie Sanders Democrats have big boners for Trump’s anti-trade position, the fact that they need to crush him like like a Mexican farmers’ rebellion means they now have to be against USMCA too. This is because Trump basically became a folk hero in manufacturing communities by promising to renegotiate the NAFTA treaty that lots of “Obama-Trump Democrats” thought was the reason their jobs had been deported to Mexico but their undocumented neighbors had not. Trump has spent about as much time plugging this message as he spent plugging his second wife:
Knowing how many times Trump promised a new NAFTA and knowing how seriously the Dems take their duty to destroy him makes it impossible to understand why anyone thinks that USMCA could get through Congress this year. Nancy Pelosi is one of the all-time most savage Speakers of the House. She knows how to crush, and that means she is woke to the fact that for her to win in 2020, she needs to do everything in her power to make sure that Trump and Republicans can’t service the voters who elected them. That means zero percent chance this trade package ever sees the light of day.
And tbh, if you disagree with me then you are a bigger moron than the 22 year old frat dogs currently snorting $100 bags of baking soda off their pinky fingers inside a Cancun bathroom stall. Get real. Even in normal times, free trade agreements take longer to finish than Ron Jeremy. George W. Bush negotiated the Korean, Columbian, and Panamanian Free Trade Agreements, and sent them to a Democratic Congress in 2007. No one bothered to ratify them until 2011. Every time House Democrats talk turkey about this bill, they complain about “enforcement,” “environment,” and “labor” provisions that probably can’t be fixed without renegotiating at least part of it with Canada and Mexico. The logistics of getting that done, then scheduling a controversial vote by the end of the year, which is when Congress is usually collectively losing its shit just to keep the government open, does not look good.
My prediction: this slides to 2020, then 2021. If Trump wins, they will let it pass like an unwanted kidney stone; and if he loses, President Warren or whoever is sitting in the Oval Office and brainstorming more inclusive names for it than, “The White House,” will just let it go like a fart in the Taco Bell parking lot.
But this is not happening in 2019. Take the money and run.
KEENDAWG.
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