Discussion: Report: Trump Privately Says He Won't Compromise With Canada In NAFTA Deal

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Such a tiny, tiny thumb.

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Trump " I can’t kill these people"

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we should not get too concerned about this. If past is prolog this statement by Little Donnie means that he will compromise on every detail in the Canada deal.

He always does the opposite of what he says.

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Trudeau, unlike Trump, is a diplomat, with not a little realpolitik under his belt. Canada will eventually get a better deal than they hoped, by ‘tricking’ Trump into thinking he’s ‘won’. Trudeau statement.

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Dear Donnie:

Bloviating is a weak man’s way of negotiating.

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Trump couldn’t negotiate his way out of a wet paper bag without help from Putin…

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Oh, man, POTRUMPUS knows how bad the deal looks for the U.S.

  1. The dairy stuff is virtually nothing. Canada offered to deep six its program OVER 20 YEARS AGO, in the context of the last round of the WTO during the Bill Clinton admin.

Canada has had this federal provincial integrated milk industry production deal in place since the 1970s - crikey, back when Trudeau’s DAD was PM in Canada! - which isn’t strictly a subsidy but kinda WORKS the same as a subsidy, by effectively giving grandfathered dairy farms a guaranteed floor price. Part of that deal, going back to the 1970s again, depends on the feds in Canada imposing a barrier to various sorts of US milk products, especially raw milk. That way Canadian dairy farmers are able to command a captive market for milk and cheese etc, which in turn requires Canadian consumers to pay a higher price for those products than if, say, dairy farmers in upper NY state, Maine, Vermont, Wisconsin, Minnesota and Washington state had ‘free access’ to the Canadian consumer market, almost all of which is located wthin a few hours trucking of the US Canada border.

But OWNERSHIP in Canadian dairy farms even by the 1990s has become so corporate owned, much of multinational owned, much of THAT in the US, that Canadian consumers these days don’t pay much different for milk and cheese than US consumers do. And since BY NOW the ownership of Big Dairy is pretty much all integrated into multinational food store operations like Salt Lake City-based Safeway, there’s really no POINT to knocking down that barrier.

Except for health standards. Canada has 'em, we don’t. So the sole reason Canadian consumers might still hold some attachment to the barrier is stuff like infected milk, which in the US is a much bigger more pervasive problem than in Canada (well, most of Canada: not sure what the deal is with Quebec).

  1. The auto parts ‘dispute’ is EVEN MORE PHONY. Canada doesn’t give a crap about the Chevy Impala. Most of Canada’s auto manufacturing goes on in the Golden Triangle north of Toronto, and most of that industry is owned by multinational, much of it majority owned by auto manufacturers in the US. If Canada’s “culturally unique” auto makers went under tomorrow, no one would notice; Canadian consumers buy the same cars American consumers buy, just that they’re mostly built in Canada not the U.S. THE AUTO MAKERS DON’T GIVE A CRAP about this.

  2. The steel and aluminum tariffs are a whole other deal. Trump is trying to open up the fiction of a ‘need’ in the US for Russian produced steel and aluminum. To support that fiction - and for one other vital reason - Trump needs to effectively suppress aluminum and steel production in Canada. IOW, this ENTIRE RE-NEGOTIATIONS b.s. is to help out Putin’s oligarch buddies, mostly Oleg Derapaska.

Here’s the other vital reason: Trump wants a piece of the Russian to US steel and aluminum import action. He figures it help make him a billionaire.

  1. The last piece is the new dispute resolution process: Trump wants complete control over that - his way or the highway. NO established comprehensive trade agreement in the world works like that, because it’s basically based on bribing the boss.

It’s the last 2 pieces that Canada’s refusing to agree to, and that won’t change.

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Oh Donnie
You’re so smart! About 85 per cent of all vehicles and auto parts produced in Canada are shipped to the United States.
Another tax on the shlubbs who voted for you

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So who gives an interview to a news service just to say something obvious that they claim to want kept private.

Republicans don’t even lie plausibly. It’s a dominance tactic.

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Donald Trump doesn’t know the foggiest thing about win win negotiating. For him every deal is win lose. What usually happens is the other side gives him some minor PR victory he can shout to the roof tops while taking the lion’s share of the winning. He thinks he won, but in reality the other side cleans his clock.

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See this thumb? I’m going to stick it right up my ass!

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The Star obtained the comments from a Trump interview with Bloomberg News. Trump wanted the comments to remain private because otherwise “it’s going to be so insulting they’re not going to be able to make a deal.”

its nice to know that this myth is back.

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he thought that he was among friends.

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I’ve been puzzling about this. Naturally a sensible negotiator who didn’t want to divulge some potentially damaging information wouldn’t say it to anyone. But Trump can’t help telling people how he’s punking everyone. He just can’t help it, he’s compelled to do it, even when it can leak and cause him serious practical problems.

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I think he does it deliberately. And people don’t dare call him an imbecilic liar on purpose, so he gets the smug feeling of having bested them.

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Now he’s pissed off about it, he says, but I wonder if he doesn’t do it deliberately, too.

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Trump has friends?

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continue to work on reaching a win-win deal that benefits both countries.

There is only one win-win deal that actually benefits both countries, and that’s the removal of Trump from the Presidency.

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This is my take as well. People have been coming up with all kinds of convoluted explanations about how he made these comments knowing that they’d leak so that more pressure would come to bear on Canada, blah blah blah. If that was the case, he wouldn’t have made them off the record, he would have made them as “a source familiar with the president’s thinking”. None of his other specifically OTR comments have come out.

The simpler explanation, which is obvious based on his persona, is right in front of us - he simply can’t help himself because he has zero self-control. He’s kind of excited that he’s going to fuck them over and he feels compelled to tell the nearest person about it even though it’s going to screw up the actual plan. It’s the same reason he keeps confessing to crimes on camera. For some reason though a lot of people, especially reporters, are heavily invested in the notion that the president is not a complete idiot.

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