Who could possibly have predicted? Donald Trump’s signature trade achievement, the renegotiation intended to turn the North American Free Trade Agreement into the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement, is hitting a snag in Congress. A big part of that snag is Trump’s other signature trade … policy: tariffs.
Powerful Republican senators, including Chuck Grassley, “have begun insisting stridently that Trump lift steel and aluminum tariffs imposed on Canada and Mexico as a precondition to any congressional vote,” the Washington Post reports. Stridently, no less.
This is not the kind of challenge to which Trump has responded well in the past: ”The tariffs are going to come off because the president has a good agreement,” Grassley said Thursday. “It’s just a matter of his realizing that nothing’s going to happen until the tariffs go off. And so the tariffs come off if he wants to get a win.”
Canada’s approval of the deal is also held up by the tariffs question, while House Democrats have concerns about enforcement, with Speaker Nancy Pelosi saying that “You can say all the nice things you want in the world and write them up, but unless you have enforcement you’re just going down a path that isn’t going to be helpful to America’s workers.”
In short, this is a brewing Trump temper tantrum.