Trump Strikes Deal to End Immigration Crisis!

Or this: Donald Trump, a 1930s-style progressive protectionist who believes that U.S. consumers having more money to spend on foreign products than the consumers of other nations have to spend on American products is a bad thing for America, spent several days threatening to impose a big new tax on Americans — he called it a tariff on imported Mexican goods — unless the Mexican government complied with his demands for a “deal” (a favorite Trump vacuity) to solve the mass migration problem (the one Trump used a national emergency declaration to solve over the heads of Congress, though simultaneously admitting that there was no real emergency, i.e., that he was a lying tyrant happy to run roughshod over the constitutional separation of powers with impunity); then, having been resisted by his Republican establishment handlers on these Mexican tariffs, and needing a way to escape from the optics of failure without losing face (since of course, being nothing but a vain megalomaniac, “face” is what ultimately decides every issue for Trump), he managed to get the Mexican government to sign a little piece of paper promising to take some unspecified or ill-defined “steps” to help with the mass migration problem, thereby providing a pretext for declaring victory, and for his cult monkeys to squeal “Deal of the Century!” without actually having accomplished anything substantial at all — which, if you hadn’t noticed yet, is Trump’s preferred strategy in almost every situation: Create a “deal” of some sort (content is irrelevant) which you can then hold up as evidence that you are “making America great again,” proof that will be more than satisfactory to the groupies whose support he craves, since the word “deal,” when spoken by Trump, somehow never means “compromise” or “sellout” to these groupies, but only “lopsided victory for our one true god,” a judgment that is never, ever shaken by alternative interpretations or post-deal realities, e.g., North Korea.

Meanwhile, the Mexican president told his country that “thanks to the support of all Mexicans,” the Trump tariffs were “avoided.” Americans, then, should be thanking all Mexicans too, I suppose, for supporting the Mexican government’s efforts to give America’s infant emperor the out he needed to protect his ego without actually having to impose a huge new tax burden on Americans.