President Donald Trump is addicted to the fanfare of announcing his trade “deals,” but he doesn’t care about the details or what happens afterward. As trade policy expert William Reinsch told the Washington Monthly, “For Trump, the squeeze is more important than the juice.”
That’s a powerful character flaw for other nations to exploit. Take, for instance, the European Union.
Trump has been touting a new “deal” with the E.U. that’s more framework than substance. But again, he doesn’t care—it’s all about the flashy toplines. Among them: The E.U. will supposedly buy $250 billion worth of U.S. energy imports per year, for the next three years. That’s over three times what the E.U. imported last year from the U.S. However, with this deal, there’s no binding commitment, no timeline, no enforcement mechanism. It’s little more than a press-release number designed to impress. It’s not a real plan, just a fantasy dressed up as a win.
That big, shiny number sure looks like a victory. But as Reuters energy columnist Clyde Russell wrote, the pledge is “delusional,” calling it a “level of imports that the EU has virtually no chance of meeting, and one that U.S. producers would also struggle to supply.” At the link, you can follow the math.
And this isn’t isolated to the E.U.
Japan signed a vague promise to invest $550 billion in American industries, with at least some of that supposedly earmarked for energy. South Korea threw in another $100 billion. As The New York Times noted in its headline, “Countries Promise Trump to Buy U.S. Gas, and Leave the Details for Later.” The subhead was just as damning: “U.S. trading partners are committing to buy more gas than they need or than the U.S. can produce, at least in the short term.”
It’s easy to see what’s happening. Knowing that Trump doesn’t care about the substance, these countries promise the world. Big numbers. The biggest numbers.
And because these are just frameworks, there’s no legal requirement that these countries meet their benchmarks. Why would there be? Trump doesn’t give a damn. Any final agreement will inevitably lack enforcement mechanisms because everyone in the room knows those targets are impossible.
Trump just wants to yell that he’s making America great. And when the numbers inevitably collapse under scrutiny? Fake news!
This has happened before.
“The scale of the delusion probably exceeds what Trump and China agreed in their so-called Phase 1 trade deal in December 2019, under which China was supposed to buy $200 billion of additional U.S. energy by the end of 2021,” Russell notes. “The reality is that China never even came close to buying that level, and its imports of U.S. energy didn’t even reach what they were before Trump launched his first trade war in 2017.”
Trump knows it. His negotiators know it. Foreign governments absolutely know it.
The only ones not in on the charade are the MAGA cultists lapping up his bullshit.