First Trump 180’ed on NATO; Now He’s No Longer Backing Out of the Utter Disaster That Is NAFTA

Promises, promises.

Like any other slick politician, our president has now gone back on a whole lot of what he promised on the campaign trail would “make America great again” (except on the promised delivery of more foreign, empire-building preemptive undeclared wars of course, just like every other president since at least World War II — on that, Trump is totally delivering as promised).

As previously reported, just a week ago Trump completely 180’ed on of his multiple and repeated campaign claims that NATO is “obsolete,” you know, back during the election when he said he would “certainly look into” the U.S. pulling out of NATO?

Yeah, that’s not going to happen. Now Trump says America is going to help “upgrade” NATO. Oh goody.

Fast forward a week, and the same thing is happening with the utter disaster that is and has always been NAFTA.

During the campaign, Trump frequently rallied against NAFTA as one of his key talking points, calling out the Clintons’ for their “bad trade deals” and, in just one of many Trump anti-NAFTA examples, telling Hillary in this debate that NAFTA was quote, “one of the worst things that ever happened to the manufacturing industry”.

Well, now “one of the worst things that ever happened to the manufacturing industry” is going to continue happening to it because instead of withdrawing from NAFTA as Trump insinuated he would do throughout the election, he now agrees with Canadian and Mexican leaders that everyone should work together to “update” NAFTA instead:

In a statement, the White House said Trump had agreed with Mexico’s Enrique Peña Nieto and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada in separate calls on Wednesday to pursue the “renegotiation of the Nafta deal to the benefit of all three countries”.

“It is my privilege to bring Nafta up to date through renegotiation,” the statement quoted the president as saying. “I believe that the end result will make all three countries stronger and better.”

Since Trump has no understanding of the basics of free trade and is a mercantilist and protectionist do not expect anything positive out of these negotiations. It will be the most powerful US, Mexican and Canadian crony exporters that will gain at the expense of consumers.

Go ahead and try to argue that means somehow NAFTA will magically get better…

It won’t.

In fact, as the Wall Street Journal reported only a few weeks ago,

“According to an administration draft proposal being circulated in Congress by the U.S. Trade Representative’s Office, the U.S. would keep some of NAFTA’s most controversial provisions, including an arbitration panel that lets investors in the three nations circumvent local courts to resolve civil claims. Critics of these panels say they impinge on national sovereignty.”

But but… I thought he was the nationalist president?

Then again, he claimed to be non-interventionist as well and we can all see how well that is working out. How many agenda items are there even left for Trump to flip flop on at this point?

In fact, I’m not even sure how people can say he’s so much better than Hillary or Obama anymore, since he seems to be continuing all the same exact agendas, only with even more creatures writhing around the ever-expanding DC swamp…