Trump Backs Down on Mexican Import Taxes. Declares Victory by Solving His Self-Created Crisis for American Workers

Commerce Dept. Hearings July 2018 with Autoworkers Protesting Job Destroying Trump Tariffs.

By now the Trump Administration playbook is all too familiar. Faced with a report last Friday by his own Labor Department that that just 75,000 jobs were created*, and wages increased by 0.2% in May, he declared victory in his Mexican tariff war by cancelling them before they went into effect this week. (Trump Tariffs on Mexico – Job Destroying Taxes on Workers, David Schwietert on Trump Tariffs on Mexico – Job Destroying Taxes on Workers)

Automakers, farmers, the equity markets and his normally sycophantic Republican party were all protesting the reckless move. Thus adding  to the need to reverse the very course that Trump had set.

Never mind that Mexico had already promised to deploy its national guard several months ago. Trump dictated his own victory speech that conveniently ignored the fact that it was a defeat. Another part of his faux victory – a program to keep asylum seekers in Mexico as legal processes slowly unfolded – was agreed to last December by Mexico.

We’ll skip the nuances of the deal and resort to Trump Tweet mode: Everybody knows that this was a defeat for the narcissist in chief.

*The U.S. economy added 75,000 jobs in May notes the Harvard Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center and the Carnegie-Knight Initiative. “But those numbers are based on surveys, not counts. In fact, the BLS says it is 90% sure the actual change in the number of jobs for May is somewhere between a gain of 185,000 jobs or a loss of 35,000 jobs. And some of the data are preliminary — final estimates for employment changes in May won’t be out for another two months.”