Trump uses trade wins as shelter from impeachment storm

Fresh off the “biggest deal anybody has ever seen,” President Donald Trump is expecting another soon.

“We’re doing another big one next week,” he said Wednesday at a White House ceremony attended by Chinese officials and business representatives before both nations sealed their phase-one trade accord.

The other big one is expected to be the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement, an update of the 26-year-old Nafta deal that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said may be approved in his chamber as soon as today.

McConnell is expecting bipartisan support and said passage will be good for the country. It cleared the House last month with the backing of Democrats and most Republicans after negotiations changed provisions on labor, environment, enforcement and drug patent protection. The bill to implement the deal has sped through GOP-controlled Senate committees this week.

It’s been a lengthy legislative process. The leaders of the three countries signed the initial USMCA in November 2018. If it arrives on Trump’s desk next week — in the middle of his impeachment trial — he’ll be able to cloak himself in trade wins with five of the U.S.’s top six trading partners: Canada, China, Japan, Mexico and South Korea.

Left out so far are the European Union and the U.K., but they’re next in line this year and may want to review the president’s approach.

Like Trump’s China deal, the pact with Canada and Mexico was among his 2016 campaign pledges. In each case, he threatened and applied tariffs during the negotiations to extract concessions.

That’s important to keep in mind regardless of whether Trump gets an opportunity to sign USMCA next week because of another important item on the calendar.

France and the U.S. gave themselves a deadline of next Tuesday to find a compromise on a digital-tax dispute that threatens a transatlantic trade war. Without a resolution, Trump is threatening tariffs on $2.4 billion of French products in response to a 3% tax President Emmanuel Macron’s government instituted on the revenue of large tech companies including Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon. The EU has vowed to retaliate against the U.S.’s retaliation.

As Trump reminded the crowd at the White House on Wednesday, he likes wielding tariffs because “otherwise we have no cards to negotiate with.”