Claudia Sheinbaum Es La Presidenta De 'El Arte Del Trato'
Ella arrebata los aranceles de las manitas naranjas de Trump.
How much have we missed Donald Trump’s signature “whine like a baby and wave your tiny hands in the air until some foreign leader picks you up, burps you, and puts you back down in your baby swing that plays gentle instrumental covers of Lee Greenwood songs” style of governance? Not even a little tiny bit, we’re not members of the White House press corps.
Nonetheless, that’s what the people voted for — or what voter suppression voted for — so that’s what America is getting good and hard.
And as in the giant baby’s first term, the president of Mexico — Claudia Sheinbaum — is soothing him with nothing gestures in order to keep him from slapping giant tariffs on her country’s exports to the US and thereby tanking both economies:
Mexico has deployed almost 15,000 soldiers and National Guard in the north of the country to stem the flow of illegal immigration across the border into the United States, the head of the Mexican Army said on Monday. [...]
Former Mexican national security official Gustavo Mohar said Mexico's security forces had not been used this way before, describing the development as "sad."
Mohar blamed the change on Trump's threats to impose tariffs.
Whoops, our mistake. That quote is not from today! That quote is from the first time Trump pulled this move back in 2019, when Mexico had a different president and the tariffs were going to start at five percent. Sheinbaum, who has only been in office for four months, learned the lesson well. On Monday she announced that Mexico will send 10,000 new troops to its northern border to help slow the flow of drugs across the border that Trump and Stephen Miller see in their Nazi fever dream nightmares.
That is actually 5,000 fewer troops than former Mexican President Andre Manuel Lopez Obrador got away with sending in 2019. In return, Trump announced that he will postpone for one month the 25 percent tariffs on Mexican goods that he signed into existence over the weekend.
Perhaps Sheinbaum is the real la presidenta de El Arte del Trato.
Trump also promised that the US would work to stop the flow of high-powered weaponry south to Mexico. That promise will probably last as long as it takes the gun nuts in the GOP to get in his ear about impinging on their Second Amendment rights to mount .50-caliber chain guns atop their Cybertrucks, and even a genuine effort would probably be about as effective as deploying Neosporin to cure chlamydia, but it’s a nice thought nonetheless.
Trump couldn’t wait to brag about his big deal on his Truth Social rage-board (though he didn’t mention the part about stopping all our guns from going to Mexico, huh):
All Sheinbaum did is restart a policy that Mexico had during Trump’s first term. And which for all we know never ended, but we don’t have information about Mexican troop deployments to the border since 2021. Though we can be pretty sure if the US got Mexico to put any there, they did it quietly, without Joe Biden throwing himself to the floor and kicking his feet in the air.
The point is, Sheinbaum perhaps would have done the same thing if Trump had asked nicely. But Trump being Trump, he had to have a sustained angry outburst about the situation, so that he can now spin this to his MAGA base as some sort of huge win that only he could accomplish.
It is a pattern we have seen over and over and over again with Trump. We have already seen it with deportations. In that example, the nation of Colombia, which has been accepting deportation flights from the US for years, objected to passengers on those flights being handcuffed and shackled and generally treated without an ounce of human dignity. Trump responded with all sorts of insane threats, then quietly accepted to stop the shackling while the White House loudly trumpeted that Colombia had caved to all of the president’s demands.
We fully expect that in one month Trump will post on TruthSocial that he’s already seeing a slow-down of drugs and migrants coming across the Mexican border (whether it is true or not), and therefore he’s putting the tariffs off indefinitely while negotiations continue.
One other fun thing about Sheinbaum’s move is that she just got Trump to pause the tariffs while she moves troops to the border that Trump has been threatening to send Special Forces across to stop drug cartels. He’ll probably back off that threat now that Mexico is sending troops, not because he’s afraid the Mexican National Guard can stop teams of Navy SEALs, but because he thinks his threats are getting results. Meanwhile, there will be 10,000 more Mexican soldiers in the region to get in the US military’s way if Trump does do the “sent in covert Special Forces” option.
Everything is still very bad and dangerous and America is again a laughingstock because we are being led by one of the dumbest people to ever walk the Earth, but there is sliiiiiight comfort in seeing the rest of the world is still not fooled by this asshole.
[Semafor]
There has never been a better time to support independent media like yr Wonkette!
I simply love the fact that nobody unnerves these fucks more than a smart woman.
Mexico has always caught more migrants at the border than ICE has. It’s transparent bullshit.