Some good news on the economic front: the ill-conceived Trump tariffs on Mexico, and Mexico’s retaliatory tariffs announced in response, are on pause for one month.
We’re still waiting out the fate of the similarly not-thought-out tariffs that Trump put in place over the weekend on Canada and China.
For now, what we have is the U.S. and Mexico agreeing on Monday morning, in a phone call between Donald Trump and Claudia Sheinbaum, the president of Mexico, to work together to address the flow of illegal drugs and illegal guns across their borders.
The illegal drugs part of the story is what supposedly motivated Trump to threaten, and then follow through on, the 25 percent tariffs on Mexican goods.
Mexico has been pleading with the U.S. for years to get its gun manufacturers to stop sending guns across the border to the drug cartels that use the weapons to fight back against Mexican authorities trying to fight the drug war within their borders.
Seems to me that the two are interconnected, but what do I know.
I’m also left to wonder aloud here how much the negative reaction of the stock market to the tariff war had to play into Trump feeling the need to hit the pause button on the tariffs.
The Dow Jones had fallen, at its lowest point, 665 points in early trading on Monday, and the S&P 500 had shed, at its lowest point, 1.93 percent of its value, ahead of the news on the pause coming down later in the morning.
Apparently, the tariffs weren’t polling well, either. A Quinnipiac poll had 51 percent of those surveyed opposing the tariffs announced by Trump, with just 38 percent – basically, the hardest of the hard-core in MAGA world – approving.
For all the power that we ascribe to Trump, he’s demonstrating today that he is aware that he is not immune to market forces and public opinion.
How you can tell most directly: consider this mealy-mouthed statement from Trump on social media.
“I look forward to participating in those negotiations, with President Sheinbaum, as we attempt to achieve a ‘deal’ between our two Countries,” Trump wrote on his Truth Social vanity project website.
Trump and Sheinbaum each independently confirmed that they had talked by phone Monday morning.
Trump called it a “very friendly conversation,” Shinebaum called it a “good conversation.”
The agreement that they worked out will have Mexico “immediately reinforce the northern border with 10,000 members of the National Guard to prevent drug trafficking from Mexico to the United States, particularly fentanyl,” per a statement from Sheinbaum, with the U.S. “committed to working to prevent the trafficking of high-powered weapons to Mexico.”
The latter has long been a priority of the Mexican government, which has struggled on its own to stem the flow of an estimated 500,000 U.S.-made guns a year getting into the hands of its drug cartels.
Trump, notably, didn’t touch on that part of the give-and-take in his statement on the agreement hashed out on Monday ahead of the tariff pause.
It will be interesting to see if the MAGA-friendly media (Fox News, Newsmax, OAN) report on that part of the give-and-take, or try to present the pause as a capitulation on the part of Mexico.
I’d take the under.
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Chris Graham
