Fox News Bret Baier grilled Kevin McAleenan over Trump's claim of a brand new deal with Mexico that allowed him to backtrack on his reckless tariff threats against our southern neighbor over his inability to address U.S. immigration problems.
After Trump declared victory over Mexico, The New York Times rained on his parade by exposing his nonsensical claims over this sweet deal, which had already been agreed to in the past. This enraged Donald and he went on a blistering "fake news/enemy of the people" tweetstorm against them.
As Heather writes, "Not only did Trump backtrack on the tariff threats, but the actions that Mexico agreed to, which Trump is touting as new, were already largely agreed to months ago during secret talks in Miami between Kirstjen Nielsen, then the Secretary of Homeland Security, and Olga Sanchez, the Mexican Secretary of the Interior.'"
Guest host for Fox News Sunday, Baier wondered, "How much of this is new?”
McAleenan replied, "All of it is new."
Not one of Trump surrogates must tell the truth, ever.
McALEENAN: It’s very different.
No, it is not.
It's not new that Trump acted like a bully - it's not even new that when Mexico understood his proposed tariffs would hurt both countries and responded to the threats in kind, that Trump backed down.
During Trump's twitter parade on Sunday he tweeted this:
Baier asked, "The president tweeted this morning that any stories that said that this was not new, as you’re saying, are false, but he said there are some important things not mentioned and yesterday’s press release, one in particular.”
Trump's own DHS haD no idea what Trump meant either, so he made something up.
“Yeah, so the president tweeted out that this tariff has been suspended, that Secretary Mnuchin points it out that there’s a mechanism to make sure that they do what they promise to do, that there’s an actual result, that we see a vast reduction in those numbers..."
Say, what? Mnuchin will verify their supposed deal. That's supposed to be big news?
Was it, perhaps, this tweet?
Well, that was news to anyone involved in the talks, and also to, well...MEXICO. From Bloomberg:
Increasing Mexico’s purchases from the U.S. beyond current levels wasn’t discussed during the Washington talks, said the three people with knowledge of the deliberations who weren’t authorized to speak publicly.
Mexico has no state-owned agricultural conglomerate to buy food products or handle distribution, or a government program that could buy farm equipment for delivery to producers.
McAleenan also restated that further actions will be taken, which is not a real thing at all, but there is the idea of continuing talks in the future.
Another con job by Trump, as usual.
