Here it is, sorry about the paywall gents.

I’d like to make an important announcement to New York retailers: NEW JERSEY HAS AGREED TO IMMEDIATELY BEGIN BUYING LARGE QUANTITIES OF WHITEFISH SALAD FROM OUR GREAT PATRIOT GOURMET MARKETS.

What’s that you say? There was no such agreement? New Jersey doesn’t even have any kind of centralized purchasing mechanism for food products? I say fake news! Conspiracy by the deep state!

*Crosses legs.  Pulls skirt down slightly*

Listen asshole!  I live in Jersey and own/operate a somewhat legitimate business there, you have any idea what I can do with such a deal?  I’d corner that (((Market))) with cheap, plentiful whitefish and bagels to sweeten the deal.  I’d make a killing!

OK, you know that I’m not serious. But Donald Trump was serious when he tweeted this: “MEXICO HAS AGREED TO IMMEDIATELY BEGIN BUYING LARGE QUANTITIES OF AGRICULTURAL PRODUCT FROM OUR GREAT PATRIOT FARMERS!”

This tweet raises two immediate questions:

1. Why, like so many Trump tweets, does it read like a bad translation from Russian?

2. What the heck is he talking about?

Listen, I only pick on you every so often.  I don’t have that kind of time to go after everything you write, and quite frankly you have a long history of saying stupid things.  Nobody goes through every damn thing you throw into the ether, every twat, every article behind a fucking paywall, and asks you to explain this shit.  Is it not possible the President ate 6 pounds of cold McNuggets at 4 am and twatted out horseshit half asleep on the shitter?

There was, after all, no mention of agricultural products in the statement of agreement. And Mexico, while a big buyer of U.S. farm goods, is a market economy: Private businesses, not government officials, decide how much Iowa corn Mexico will buy in a given year.

For what it’s worth, my guess is that Trump vaguely remembered the terms of an abortive trade deal with China, which he claimed included a commitment by China to buy 5 million tons of U.S. soybeans. If my guess is right, Trump is confusing Mexico with China and has forgotten that talks with China have broken down.

Think about how much events like the Mexican standoff weaken America’s position in the world.

That’s racist.

To be a great power, of course you need the material basis for power — a big economy, a military big enough to make you a force to be reckoned with. But you also need to be a country others can take seriously — a nation that stands by its promises but also makes good on its threats.

So think about what just happened.

First, Trump recently negotiated a trade deal with Mexico — a deal barely different from the previous deal, which Trump called the “worst in history,” but put that on one side. The whole point of trade deals is that they’re supposed to provide some certainty. The United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement, like NAFTA, amounts to a promise by all three participants that they won’t arbitrarily impose new barriers to cross-border trade.

Then Trump went ahead and threatened major new tariffs on Mexico, not because it had violated its trade agreements but because he didn’t like something that was happening on the border, a situation that has nothing to do with trade policy. So the USMCA appears, in practice, to be a solemn promise by the U.S. government not to impose tariffs on Mexican products — unless it feels like it.

The wisdom of such as action is debatable, and one I not about to straddle my legs across.  Playing Russian Roulade with tariffs and reneging on trade deals is not the most practical or even ethical way to go about this.  That said, it did produce a result that in some circles is desirable.  That necessity of that result of course, is also up for debate.

If that’s what you get out of making a deal with America, why bother?

And then, after all the dire warnings of what would happen if Mexico didn’t give Trump what he wanted, Trump appears to have backed down in return for a declaration that Mexico will do pretty much exactly what it had already promised to do before the threats.

Like shoot Micaraguans?  You heard it from Winston’s Mom first.  Telemundo:  Mexican Army guns down migrants!

Now, the business world is extremely pleased that the trade war appears to have been called off. But it does look as if a Trump threat is worth about as much as a Trump promise: There’s no particular reason to believe that he’ll actually go through with it.

The only thing we can be sure of is that whatever happens, Trump will claim to have achieved a great victory.

Yeah, that has pretty much been his MO since the 80’s.

In the case of the Mexican standoff, this may not seem too bad. But think about what it means when foreign leaders know that the president of the United States is: (a) gullible (b) easily susceptible to flattery and (c) eager to proclaim victory and unwilling to admit that he didn’t actually get anything significant.

That’s still racist, you cock-tease.

Basically, this turns America into a systematic chump. Hold a summit, flatter Trump’s vanity, let him issue a communique claiming vast achievement, then go on doing whatever you wanted to do. Just ask North Korea’s Kim Jong Un, who snookered Trump into thinking he’d made major concessions, went right back to building up his nuclear attack capacity and still gets praised by Trump as our allies watch in horror.

You mean like Iran did with Obama?

Again, it’s a good thing that we seem to have avoided a Mexican trade war for now. But the China trade war still appears to be on. And I’m worried about confrontation with Europe, partly because European nations are democracies with free presses, which makes it harder for them to give Trump the kind of imaginary victories he craves.

In any case, the bottom line from the Mexico fiasco is that the U.S. is now significantly less credible and less respected than it was a few weeks ago. And things will probably keep getting worse.

I’m sure it’s not the Diet Coke that keeps Trump up at night.  Obviously, its deteriorating credibility he holds with European “Allies” and the wailing of journalists from Der Speigel think…because he doesn’t speak any German.  Now maybe he lies awake on the shitter thinking about the Guardian and how much they hate him…Now wait just a goddamn minute, that’s what journalists do here!