CHIEF CLOWN VOWS TO “MAKE AMERICA PAY” FOR HIS FAILURES: With His “Maliciously Incompetent” Immigration Policies in Shambles, Trump Promises To Punish American Consumers & Businesses With Tariffs On Mexico Having Nothing to Do With Trade!

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/30/us/politics/trump-mexico-tariffs.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share

Annie Karni and Ana Swanson report for the NY Times:

WASHINGTON — President Trump said Thursday that he planned to impose a 5 percent tariff on all imported goods from Mexico beginning June 10, a tax that he said would “gradually increase” until Mexico stopped the flow of undocumented immigrants across the border.

The announcement, which Mr. Trump hinted at on Thursday morning and announced on his Twitter feed, said the tariffs would be in place “until such time as illegal migrants coming through Mexico, and into our Country, STOP.”

In a presidential statement that followed, he said that tariffs would be raised to 10 percent on July 1 “if the crisis persists,” and then by an additional 5 percent each month for three months.

“Tariffs will permanently remain at the 25 percent level unless and until Mexico substantially stops the illegal inflow of aliens coming through its territory,” the statement said.

Mr. Trump’s anger over undocumented immigrants has been steadily increasing since January, after he failed to force Democrats to give him billions of dollars to build his long-promised wall along the southwestern border. Since then, he has moved to cut off all foreign aid to countries like Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador, and threatened to completely seal off the border with Mexico, in an attempt to punish countries he blames for the flow of undocumented immigrants into the United States.

His growing frustration of his own administration’s handling of immigration issues this year led to a purge of the top officials at the Department of Homeland Security, including its secretary, Kirstjen M. Nielsen.

Mr. Trump has previously threatened to tax cars flowing across the border with Mexico, saying in April that he would take such action if Mexico did not stop the flow of migrants and drugs into the United States.

“If the drugs don’t stop, or largely stop, we’re going to put tariffs on Mexico and products, in particular cars — the whole ballgame is cars. And if that doesn’t stop the drugs, we close the border,” he said at the time.

Mr. Trump’s announcement of tariffs came the same day that his administration told Congress it planned to seek congressional approval of the new trade pact with Mexico and Canada, known as the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement.

The president has used the threat of tariffs to try to pressure foreign leaders into taking a wide array of actions, like renegotiating trade deals as well as limiting the amount of metal or cars they ship to the United States.

In April, he threatened to place a 25 percent tariff on Mexican cars if the country would not take action to stem the flow of migrants through the southwestern border, walking back a promise he had made in the revised North American trade agreement to exempt Mexico from such a measure.

The president has told his advisers that he likes tariffs because they can be done immediately and unilaterally. But tariffs are typically used to counter trade-related violations.

Such a move would also risk derailing relations with Mexico and Mr. Trump’s revised North American trade pact, which preserves the ultralow tariffs the original deal put into place.

The announcement comes as the Trump administration started a congressional process on Thursday that both clears a procedural hurdle toward having Congress vote on the agreement and ramps up pressure on Speaker Nancy Pelosi and other Democrats who have called for substantial changes to the pact before it is ratified.

The White House sent a draft “Statement of Administrative Action” to Congress on Thursday. Under congressional rules, that clears the way for the administration to submit an enforcement bill to Congress after 30 days, which in turn starts a 90-day clock for an up-or-down vote on the pact.

That is likely to come as a challenge to Ms. Pelosi, who has recently told other lawmakers and union officials that Democrats are planning a study of the pact that could drag on well into the fall. In a statement, Ms. Pelosi described the move as “not a positive step. It indicates a lack of knowledge on the part of the administration on the policy and process to pass a trade agreement.”

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Wow! Just think of how far we have fallen as a nation. Let’s imagine that Obama, Bush, or Clinton proposed such idiotic, incoherent, nonsense, blatantly exhibiting something between total derangement and gross incompetence.

Journalists would be stunned, economists horrified. Politicians of both parties would be “talking 25th Amendment!”

Yet with Trump, it’s merely “ho hum, another day in nut-land” with only our country’s and the world’s future at stake. After all, he’s always threatening to take utterly insane, totally illegal actions. And, he only follows through about half the time.

Can we really survive this type of Clown Kakistocracy? Why won’t Mexico, China, Canada, India, and the EU just get together, negotiate some sound trade agreements based on real economics and sane diplomacy, and let the U.S. wander off into never-never land?

Yeah, I know, the economy continues to blaze away, markets are high, and unemployment low. But, remember the little warning line at the bottom of the prospectus of your most successful financial investment: Past results are not a prediction of future returns.

Well, there is some good news. At least there won’t be any suspense on who gets the “Courtside Five Clown Award” for this week. Who else but the Chief Clown! He’s earned it, and you can’t say that about much else in his tawdry life.

🤡🤡🤡🤡🤡

PWS

05-31-19

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