Even in a world where President Donald Trump clearly racks up foreign policy wins, CNN’s smug harpies desperately try to convince all eight of the network's viewers that he’s really losing.
CNN anchor Erin Burnett injected a hefty amount of spin into her reporting on Mexico and Canada collectively waving the white flag on their retaliatory threats against Trump’s tariffs and agreed to increase security on both the Southern and Northern borders respectively.
But in Burnett’s Trump Derangement Syndrome-afflicted worldview during the February 3 edition of OutFront, this supposedly constituted “Trump backing down twice in a day.” Huh? So “what changed,” asked Burnett. “Were these always empty threats or not?” No, Erin, they weren’t, or else Mexico and Canada wouldn’t have made the concessions they did.
Burnett took aim at White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt’s “characterization” that “Canada is bending the knee just like Mexico.” “But here’s the reality,” lectured Burnett. “The reason the markets were down so much is because Trump said he was going to do something. He was firm that he was going to do it. And then he did a complete about-face.”
Her evidence for this was a clip of Trump's vague answer to a reporter on whether anything from Canada and Mexico would cause him to reconsider putting his tariffs into effect: “No. nothing. Not right now,” and “We’ll see what happens.”
Apparently Burnett didn’t learn the principle of never tipping your hand in tough negotiation processes. When questioned by a reporter on the issue of arms control strategy, President Ronald Reagan emphasized the importance of keeping negotiation stances vague before a deal is firmly reached:
Well, I think when you refer back in that other question, the way it came at the time had to do with asking things that would have required me to state in advance negotiating positions. And I've had a lot of years experience in negotiating. Before I was ever in public life, I negotiated for about a quarter of a century the basing contracts of our union, the Screen Actors Guild, with management. And you can't talk about negotiating positions, because if you do, then they're no longer positions; you've compromised your own strategy.
In essence, by broadcasting the explicit parameters of a potential deal that would convince him to temporarily delay his tariffs to the world, Trump would have prematurely revealed his negotiation stance and compromised his own strategy. As Heritage Foundation economist EJ Antoni emphasized in a February 3 column: “In short, Trump holds all the cards, and he knows it.” Pointing to Canada as an example, Antoni analyzed that America’s neighbor would be absolutely crushed by a trade war, whereas the effect on the American economy would be the equivalent to running over a speed bump:
As economist Art Laffer has noted, there are no winners in trade wars, but the losers can face drastically different losses. Nearly all Canadian exports go to the U.S. but only a small fraction of American exports go to Canada. If international trade between the two slows dramatically, it’ll lead to a steep recession in Canada but will be more like a speed bump for the U.S.
Take a hike Burnett.
