This episode does not illustrate that tariffs are good or that Trump is a fearsome negotiator.

This paragraph from Noah’s post is an apt summary of the Mexico tariff brouhaha:

It’s entirely unclear what triumph the MAGA movement is celebrating this morning. Trump promises sweeping and unavertable tariffs. Republicans wring their hands and beg Trump to back off, all while stocks collapse and the business community cries uncle. And after securing the hollow promises from the Mexican government, Trump reveals that his word means nothing. That’s a rare species of victory.

The huge victory was a phone call with Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum in which she reportedly promised Mexico would do more to secure the border.

This isn’t the first time Trump has done this. In November, after winning the presidential election but before assuming office, Trump said he had a “very productive conversation” in which Sheinbaum “has agreed to stop Migration through Mexico, and into the United States, effectively closing our Southern Border.” He said on Truth Social on November 27, “Mexico will stop people from going to our Southern Border, effective immediately.” By his own account, this problem was already supposed to have been solved.

He had already begun to threaten tariffs on Mexico before that. What happened today was basically a rerun of that same conversation from November, just as president rather than as president-elect.

The major concrete commitment to come from this, Sheinbaum’s reported promise to move 10,000 Mexican troops to the U.S.-Mexico border, is also a rerun. Mexico sent 15,000 troops to the border in June 2019 in Trump’s first term. The Biden administration secured a commitment for Mexico to send 10,000 troops to its southern border with Guatemala in April 2021, alongside Guatemalan and Honduran security forces combating illegal migration in their countries.

So, the huge breakthrough that Trump’s supposedly genius negotiating skills accomplished is not a breakthrough at all, and Trump already ran this same playbook with this same issue two and a half months ago.

Not only that, but Trump himself said on Friday that there was nothing Mexico could do to avoid the tariffs. Sheinbaum basically called his bluff on that. She made a commitment to improving border security that she already made to Trump in November and a commitment to use troops to improve border security that her country has made more than once in the past.

Trump did not extract anything new from Mexico with his threat of tariffs. This episode does not illustrate that tariffs are good or that Trump is a fearsome negotiator. It illustrates that Trump is a cheap date.