Trump Capitulated

Trump announced a deal with Mexico late Friday afternoon that averts the imposition of tariffs on all Mexican goods that were scheduled to begin today. The deal -- though Trump promises there is more to it than has been revealed so far -- boils down to an expansion of the program to warehouse Central American asylum-seekers in Mexico and to an increase in Mexican National Guard troops along Mexico's border with Guatemala. Reuters reports that

The agreement would expedite a program known as the Migration Protection Protocols, which sends people seeking asylum in the United States to wait in Mexico as their cases are processed.

That program, announced in December, would be expanded across the entire U.S.-Mexico border under the terms of the agreement, according to the State Department.

The deal would also send the Mexican National Guard police force to its own southern border, where many Central Americans enter Mexico.

The American Civil Liberties Union is suing the Trump administration over the legality over the Migration Protection Protocols.

Trump is on the defensive because The New York Times reported on Saturday (see "Mexico Agreed to Take Border Actions Months Before Trump Announced Tariff Deal" by Michael Shear and Maggie Haberman) that Mexico had already agreed to take these steps back in March.

The press, at the same time, is heaping scorn on Mexican president Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO), for capitulating to blackmail. The bilateral deal will be evaluated in 90 days. In September expect to be right back where we were prior to Friday.

Given that Trump is trying to package the deal agreed on months ago as a breakthrough, conventional wisdom is that this is Trump's modus operandi -- bully and bluff and then brag about a fictitious win.

Something else is going on here. I think Trump really wanted to begin climbing the tariff ladder on Mexico. I think Mitch McConnell impressed upon him though that he was looking at a rebellion of the GOP caucus; that he was going to be overridden by the U.S. Senate. So Trump capitulated. A shrewd move politically, but not the triumph that he is making it out to be.