Art of the deal! Or art of the bluff. Or art of the farce. Or art of the asinine. (All four.)
Less than 48 hours after threatening to torpedo Mexico’s economy with 25% tariffs (which had the potential to reduce Mexican exports by more than a quarter, imperiling some 15% of the country’s overall economic output), Donald Trump “paused” tariffs on America’s southern neighbor. Later, he granted Canada the same clemency.
Do note: The tariffs hadn’t even gone into effect yet, so “pause” really isn’t the right word. All Justin Trudeau had to do was appoint a “fentanyl czar” and implement a previously-announced border plan. Claudia Sheinbaum secured a reprieve with a promise to deploy troops to her border with the US. “We had a good conversation with President Trump,” she said Monday, unveiling what she called “a series of agreements.”
Notwithstanding his abrasive merger proposal for Canada, Trump’s primarily interested in squeezing Mexico, the source of criminal aliens, deadly opioids and, one can only assume based on his rhetoric, vampires and werewolves.
Regardless of what Mexico does to placate him, Trump won’t likely let them alone. This time around (i.e., in Trump’s second coming), Mexico’s the favorite scapegoat, supplanting China as the go-to MAGA rally piñata.
Sheinbaum on Monday said she’ll “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.”
I shouldn’t have to say this, but I will because Trump’s going to tout that effort as a meaningful deterrent: The Mexican military, and really all law enforcement of any kind in Mexico, is hopelessly, but not uniformly, corrupt. What I mean there isn’t that every policeman and army officer, across the board, is bought and paid for. Rather, what I mean is that someone, and typically several someones, in every agency and at every level of those agencies, is. Is beholden to the cartels, I mean. And that’s all it takes.
If the cartels have just one friendly in every agency (and they have more than that), then every operation’s going to be compromised, including Sheinbaum’s border deployment. That’s not lost on Sheinbaum, and it’s probably not lost on Trump either, which means this “agreement” is meaningless. It’s just another example of Trump wasting political capital that could be better spent working towards some kind of arrangement with the potential to actually effectuate change.
To be clear, I’m wholly skeptical of the idea that anything can be done. Mexico’s a narco state. The cartels are part and parcel of the culture. You can’t get rid of them, and you can’t purge their influence in government and law enforcement. They run patronage networks the scope of which it’s difficult to ascertain. You don’t know who’s paid off and who isn’t, and as such, you can’t really broach the subject in an effort to address the problem. Because if there’s more than one person in the room, there’s a very good chance someone in that room’s compromised.
Consider, for example, the following excerpt from CBS’s coverage of Ismael Zambada’s legal battle with the US government which has his son, Vicente, in custody:
The younger Zambada was charged himself and made a plea deal in the long-running and sprawling US prosecutions of Sinaloa cartel figures. He testified for the government at the trial of the cartel’s infamous and now imprisoned co-founder, Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán.
At Guzmán’s trial, Vicente Zambada recounted how his father and Guzmán ran the cartel together. At one point, he described corrupt Mexican politicians asking whether the syndicate could help them ship 100 tons of cocaine in an oil tanker.
That’s what the Trump administration’s dealing with down there: Politicians who hide 100 tons of coke in oil tankers. At any given time, and in any given room, any US delegation to Mexico is almost surely talking to officials with connections to the cartels.
(Oh, and if you’re unfamiliar, the elder Zambada sat above El Chapo in the Sinaloa organizational structure, which is to say at the very top. Guzmán made all the headlines over the years, but Chapo was, in some respects anyway, just the underboss. Zambada — “El Mayo” — was the boss. Given the Sinaloas’ status as the most powerful cartel post-2006, Mayo presided for nearly two decades as the de facto boss of bosses.)
Interestingly, Sheinbaum said Trump agreed to work on the flow of “high-powered weapons” from north to south, which is to say from the US to Mexico. She also said “our teams” will start work immediately on “security and trade,” without elaborating.
Trump’s version of the call was broadly similar. He described “a very friendly conversation” with Sheinbaum who “agreed to immediately supply Mexican soldiers on the border.” The troops, Trump said, will be “specifically designated to stop the flow of fentanyl, and illegal migrants into our country.”
Again: Those troops aren’t going to do a damn thing to stop drug trafficking. Some of them will actually facilitate it. I guarantee it. I’m not sure the reality of the situation in Mexico’s apparent to a lot of Americans. If you work in Mexican law enforcement, have a large family to feed and one of the cartels offers you bribes equivalent to five or six times your salary, paid in physical US dollars, are you going to refuse that offer? And what if it’s an offer you can’t refuse? What if they abduct one of your children off the streets pending your answer?
Trump said that over the next 30 days, Marco Rubio, Scott Bessent and that gunslinger Howard Lutnick will engage Mexico in an effort to strike some sort of “‘deal’,” which I had to put in double quotes because I’m quoting Trump, and he’s exhibiting his penchant for putting scare quotes around his own remarks, without realizing that in doing so, he’s mocking himself.
Here’s a (completely serious) idea for Trump: If he wants to limit the flow of fentanyl into the US, he should negotiate directly with the cartels. If you think that’s ridiculous, I’d gently remind you that this is a president who once invited the Taliban to Camp David.
DT of the tiny hands doesn’t really care about the drugs. He only cares about enhancing the image that he is the world’s leading “deal maker,” as in, so who are you? What did you do today? At my boarding school back in the late 50s we were always short of spending cash so we students did some small maintenance chores after class and we had this crew of Hispanic laborers from Chicago who would come in in three old Chrysler limos we gave them (they came with the property) and these guys would roar around campus “fixing” stuff all day. At the end of the day they would sit around with their Jefe and one of our teachers, drink a couple cervsas and brag as in: “Hey, man I broke a hammer today, what did you do?” “I broke a pipe wrench.” “That’s nothing, I broke a truck.” Sound familiar? djt of tth said “I’m going to break a whole country…. “
Most of the folks who voted for the trump only heard tariffs will create US jobs. The rest who actually understood the implications never believed he would actually do it. Ignorance and arrogance. The WSJ article today asserting tariffs are dumb should have been published during the election cycle. The damage is done. The US is a bully.
Do illicit drug prices weigh into the Fed’s inflation measures?
As you say, nothing Trump does is going to stop the flow of drugs, but Trump is always and forever about optics. He’ll claim victory, his base will buy it, and he’ll flail from one manufactured crisis to the next. In the meantime, other nations that are run by more serious people will look for alternatives to the US knowing we are no longer a reliable ally.
I see Tesla took a bit of a hit today. I do wonder if Musk’s antics will start to impact his personal wealth. Glad to see Ontario rip up their starlink contract. Hopefully, many others follow suit. I can’t even begin to imagine what Musk is doing inside the Treasury Department with his cadre of recent college grads. I will not be surprised to see either the Musk squad or hackers steal and/or delete sensitive information and take down key payment systems. That chaos might be even more damaging than tariff man’s antics.
Obviously I am not privy to their true motivations but if you were designing media cover for doge this would be a good plan. Reuters briefly had it above the fold over the weekend but a scan of all major outlets this afternoon reveals only traces of their dismantling.
10,000 troops is a lot of physical deterrence, even given slippage from cartel influence. But take credit Walt, you guessed these tariffs would be temporary. One down, Canada next, which may be resolved with the next election, possibly as early as March, with the more likely than not election of conservative Poilievre.
And without a tariff but a threat of military force, I read that Panama has told Rubio it will not renew its belt and road agreement with China which should remove China’s commercial (and potentially military) ports from both ends of the canal and also their influence over the use of tugs and pricing.
And I read that his tariff on China has closed the $800 de minimus exception that allows drugs and their chemicals to be shipped by mail and enter without declarations, customs duties or inspections.
Early innings, but if you’re keeping score ….
The operation of the ports at both ends have been operated by a subsidiary of Hutchison Port Holdings since 1997. The company is a subsidiary of the publicly listed CK Hutchison Holdings, a Hong Kong-based conglomerate. That was long before the Belt & Road initiative was even launched in 2013.
There have been questions raised about how the government awarded and subsequently renewed the contracts in 2021.
BTW, Hutchison also runs major ports around the world, including in the UK, Rotterdam and Mexico.
So I’m not sure how the termination of Belt & Road agreements has an impact on the operation of the Panama canal. But it is early innings so keep your scorecard open!
Narco state. Perfect name.
One of Google’s answers to the “percent of fentanyl smugglers that are us citizens?” query is “86.4% were United States citizens” as noted at https://www.ussc.gov/sites/default/files/pdf/research-and-publications/quick-facts/Fentanyl_FY23.pdf The other interesting fact in this PDF is the “Number of Fentanyl Trafficking Offenses” chart that illustrates the enforcement efforts of Trump’s first administration vs the Biden’s administration record. Is it possible that the US is a ‘Narco state’ and Donald wants to be the Western Hemisphere Don?
Only 10,000 troops? Her predecessor appeased Trump with 15,000 last time. Assuming they ever even showed up, not that he’s going to be able to or care about confirming. He got the soundbite he wanted.
The double quote paragraph is gold, thanks H
Excellent analysis Mr H. All these theatrics along with mobilizing Mexican federales is unlikely to reduce the tragedy of fentanyl or other drugs coming across the border.
I’d put the chances of US military personnel occupying parts of Mexico in the next 2 years at 50/50. As others have said, Trump couldn’t care less about the human impact of the drug trafficking. The deciding factor is of Trump needs a big show to distract from his serial string of failures and how bad the prevailing narrative gets. Essentially if the impish manchild gets biggly embarrassed for one reason or another, he would look to distract with a huge (and moronic) stunt, whether the Mexican government agrees or not.