In his apocalyptic campaign speeches, Donald Trump routinely cited two catastrophic messes he would clean up as president: Obamacare and NAFTA. Then his push to undo Obamacare became his first policy fiasco in the White House.

Now Trump may be poised to repeat history with NAFTA.


Health care and trade don’t have much in common beyond complexity and political sensitivity. But there are striking similarities between Trump’s approach to Obamacare and his approach to the North American Free Trade Agreement, the 23-year-old pact with Mexico and Canada that he’s called the worst trade deal in history. The parallels include his over-the-top dystopian attacks on their disastrous stupidity, his over-the-top utopian pledges to replace them with a terrific alternative to be named later, and his blithe confidence that his negotiating partners would give him what he wanted.

The demise of the Republican bill to repeal and replace Obamacare has inspired a lot of mockery about “the closer,” about Trump’s inability to flex his “Art of the Deal” negotiating muscles in the Washington arena. But the failure of Trumpcare was mostly a failure of substance, not tactics. It was doomed not by Trump’s incendiary tweets or tone-deaf demands but by the impossibility of reconciling his exuberant promises with real-world plans, as well as his inability to compel cooperation or compliance from people who don’t work for him.

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If Trump fails to bully the Mexicans into massive NAFTA concessions, or even a face-saving NAFTA update reinstating the TPP concessions, he will face a similar choice: Muddle through with the status quo, or else walk away and blame others for the chaos. Getting a divided Congress to approve a revised NAFTA would be a daunting legislative challenge, but abandoning NAFTA would be quite simple; Trump would just need to give six months’ notice. He would be risking the demolition of North American supply chains, fury from farmers and consumers, a potential trade war, and a potential recession. To add insult to self-inflicted injury, tariffs would revert to their pre-NAFTA levels, which were much higher in Mexico and Canada than in the U.S. So in a sense, threatening to withdraw from the deal would be like pointing a gun at his own head and threatening to shoot.



http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/04/for-trump-nafta-could-be-the-next-obamacare-214979