It really feels strange, odd, yet unsurprising that the US is going from a globalist leadership to selfish nationalism.

So anybody that will follow, regardless of the person's policies won't matter fully, as that person itself will be replaced 4-8 years later.

Another Musk moment: most aluminum in the US comes from Canada. Most of Musk's vehicles are built with aluminum. These tariffs will directly increase Tesla manufacturing cost in the US, making them even less competitive.

It’s worse than that. This doesn’t suit the US. It suits Trump (or at least, that’s what his addled mind thinks).

It would be decidedly un-Canadian to leverage electricity, potash, or other commodities necessary for survival in trade negotiations -- despite what Ford may suggest. We're nice, but we won't bow to bullies. Elbows up, eh!

That is the fundamental problem. The only way out, is to make changes to the constitution to specifically prohibit the executive branch from having any of this power to arbitrarily change things on a whim. That is the only way international peer could in the future trust an agreement made with the USA.

As long as the US feels it is ok to sign an agreement and immediately violate it, nobody in their right mind will bother to negotiate any future agreements. Which is not a good state to be in.

In short, attenuate executive power.

As much as it pains me to say it as an American, little will change unless US citizens are negatively impacted. Trump is losing power and support in the US precisely because people are becoming more aware that he's hurting them.

And you don't have to ban them, just make them more expensive. Your US brethren did vote for tarriffs. With that comes higher prices.

There is only one chance the US has - they need to do what us Germans were forced to post-1945, rearchitect everything.

The US and UK are the only major countries that didn't undergo some sort of revolution, war or other reset of their constitution and legal systems and it shows everywhere.

If we Europeans (or anyone else) are supposed to ever trust the US again, we demand they properly fix their shit and prevent another madman's rise for good.

It’s Vietnam Hearts and Minds all over again.

Show us it isn't just lies and bad faith.

[edit autocorrect changed divisive to decisive]

Why do I single out the Democrats? Because after Trump, they're going to have the first chance to fix this so that it can't happen again.

Literally the only losing move was to mess with our relations to them.

They'd rather fall into Russian models of government where a single person can promise you the world and you give it the power to do so, rather than bother with things like "compromise" or "representation".

Re-electing somebody who openly attacked the institutions, instead of taking what happened on Jan 6th as a wake up call is the clear sign.

They are usually negotiated by a nation's crack team of experts. America just does not take any of this seriously anymore.

I mean, you still have the "every 4 years", or worse, "every few months". It's not at the pace that Trump changes things, though.

That's the reality of most mature democracies from UK to Germany to Italy.

If anything, that makes change slower and based on coalition consensus, not a single winner-take-all individual mood.

Which means that there isn't much to "work" as previous arrangements keep holding and they hardly change.

I would never exchange our democracy for a king electing one like in US, Turkey or Russia.

I'd rather have our democracies slower, the governments more unstable, but representative.

Afghanistan had a new constitution and legal system when the US pulled out.

As a Brit, my take away is that having a nicely laid out constitution doesn't matter if you don't have the culture there to back it up. The US did manage to deal with one term of Trump, so that's something.

Population aside, there's no system that fixes what's broken in the US in the 21st century.

Trump, sadly, is the symptom of deeper structural ills that have been building in America for decades.

European here: Oh hell no. The Brexit breakup drama was years of chaos with each of the braindead Prime Ministers somehow managing to make things worse.

Germany's first two constitutions quickly failed because they weren't democratic enough. The US constitution - despite its obvious flaws - has somehow managed to make it 250 years without causing huge issues, but it is now becoming quite clear that there should probably be a revision to prevent another giant mess like the current one from happening.

Trump caused a lot of suffering and damage even in his first term, his second term (especially "thanks" to DOGE) was orders of magnitude worse.

A good democracy can survive one direct hit, maybe two, but anyone with a working brain cell left can clearly see the cracks in the foundation one needs to exploit to become President - and there will be such exploitation attempts, unless by a huge wonder the next President will be a Democrat, have a majority in both chambers of Congress and prosecutes everyone involved in the Trump administrations.

It's absolutely fair to count how much lumber and oil and cars you're importing-exporting while ignoring how much services in technology, IT, space, software, cloud, finance, etc, you're exporting. /s

We still aren't doing border checks on EU imports.

Still, Boris Johnson wasn't as bad as Trump.

The EU-UK negotiations were mired in issues of EU maximalism; attempting to force each PM to agree a worse deal knowing not agreeing to it would cause short term pain for that PMs political situation. Its quite the thing that the UK managed to hold on as much as it did.

The UK was on the back foot in all negotiations having been forced into the Brexit outcome.

For all the nonsense printed in the UK and Continental presses, the UK had a surprisingly consistent position through the entire thing with clear threads of staff and policies still running to today.

It’s a rather diabolical form of control, democracy. “You have fake choices and you like … nay, you love what you choose”, quite literally. You have to love it, because you have to believe it’s true. And that’s where they latched onto your mind.

It’s quite ingeniou.

Each PM in the UK's neverending parade gained power by telling their electorate "I have this genius plan that'll totally let us cherry pick" only to be deflated when the EU held to its clearly stated position.

The problem with Brexit was that the Brits wanted something that was never on the table, they voted for Brexit under false pretenses and then got mad when they couldn't get what they wanted.

Please state the official "consistent" position regarding the main problem caused by your own decision to leave: the Irish border.

You can be like Norway and join the EEA: full access to the single market, but having to make a financial contribution, accepting most EU laws, and with free movement of people. You get an exemption on some laws, but you don't get a say in any of the rules of the single market.

You can be like Switzerland and join the EFTA: partial access to the single market (notably not the banking sector), still have to contribute, only have to follow EU laws when it comes to trade, and still free movement of people.

You can be like Turkey: a customs union meaning no tariffs apply to EU trade, but you have to apply EU tariffs on all other trades and have no say over them.

You can be like Canada: a comprehensive free-trade deal which covers the majority of goods, but it means having to follow EU standards and requirements without having a say in them, and it probably won't cover services.

The EU was never going to give every Briton a magical gold-shitting unicorn, no matter how much the UK was going to plead and beg for it. It was more than happy to negotiate a deal on any of the options like those above, but it was up to the UK to decide what Brexit was going to look like.

But the Brexiteers promised the voters they could have their cake and eat it - "Brexit means Brexit", after all. Everyone invented their own personal idea of a Brexit, and the various interpretations were always going to be fundamentally incompatibly with each other! The negotiations went so horrible because the UK had absolutely no idea what it wanted, and any option was going to be wildly unpopular as it did both too much and too little at once. And all of that is before you take Northern Ireland into consideration, where the wrong move would result in a literal civil war...

Brexit wasn't a negotiation. It was a therapy session to help the UK find itself.

"Forced into the Brexit outcome"

Cameron stepped down after he shat the bed, every PM was a Tory.

And yeah, the position was consistent. Before it was 'we could have all the benefits of being in the EU, with none of the down sides'. We could have soft Brexit, or the less popular hard Brexit.

Teresa Mays position was "Brexit means Brexit" and non of the others had a clue either. Because they promised everything to everyone. In the event we got a harder Brexit than the hardest Brexit discussed before the vote.

So if you want to say the UK was consistent, I say fuck you to the civil servants that consistently ignored the conversation prior to the vote.

Rose Garden

11:19 A.M. EDT

THE PRESIDENT: Thank you. Thank you very much. Please sit down.

It’s really great to see everybody on this beautiful, beautiful day in Washington, D.C. Some people say “the swamp,” but I will not say that today. (Laughter.) I refuse. This is too important, what we’re doing. One of the most important deals, and the most important trade deal we’ve ever made by far.

I want to thank Senator Joni Ernst for being here — Joni, thank you very much — of Iowa, and I’ll be there very soon. (Applause.) We’ll be doing something very important in Iowa. But this is maybe more important than all of it put together. Right, Joni? So I want to thank you for being here.

Congressman Holding, Congressman Roe, Congressman Newhouse, and Congressman Meadows, thank you all for being here. We very much appreciate it. You’ve been very instrumental. Thank you. (Applause.)

I am thrilled to speak to the American people to share truly historic news for our nation, and, indeed for the world. I want to thank Vice President Pence for joining us this morning. It is my great honor to announce that we have successfully completed negotiations on a brand new deal to terminate and replace NAFTA and the NAFTA trade agreements with an incredible new US-Mexico-Canada Agreement, called “USMCA.” It, sort of, just works: USMCA. (Applause.)

USMCA. That’ll be the name, I guess, that, 99 percent of the time, we’ll be hearing: USMCA. It has a good ring to it.

I have long contended that NAFTA was perhaps the worst trade deal ever made. Since NAFTA’s adoption, the United States racked up trade deficits totaling more than $2 trillion — and it’s a much higher number than that — with Canada and Mexico. It lost vast amounts of money, and lost 4.1 million manufacturing jobs, and 1 in 4 auto jobs. Lost about 25 percent of our auto jobs — even more than that.

Throughout the campaign, I promised to renegotiate NAFTA, and today we have kept that promise. But, for 25 years, as a civilian, as a businessman, I used to say, “How could anybody have signed a deal like NAFTA?” And I watched New England, and so many other places where I was just — the factories were leaving, the jobs were leaving, people were being fired, and we can’t have that.

So we have negotiated this new agreement based on the principle of fairness and reciprocity. To me, it’s the most important word in trade because we’ve been treated so unfairly by so many nations all over the world. And we’re changing that.

We just signed a much better deal with South Korea. We had a horrible, horrible deal, and we just signed that at United Nations. And that’s worked out well. And they’re happy; we’re happy. It’s good for jobs. Good for a lot of things.

When that deal was signed, they said 250,000 jobs will be given be — by signing this transaction, and they were right. I’ve said it before. They were right: 250,000 jobs to South Korea, not to the United States. So that’s changed and very much for the better. And this one is a brand new deal.

The agreement will govern nearly $1.2 trillion in trade, which makes it the biggest trade deal in the United States’ history.

I want to congratulate U.S. Trade Representative Bob Lighthizer who has worked — nobody understands how hard he’s worked. (Applause.) No matter when you called him, he was in the office or he was in somebody else’s office doing the same thing. Bob Lighthizer is great; I’ve heard it for years. I said, “If I ever do this, I want to get Lighthizer to represent us,” because he felt the way I did.

And the entire team at the USTR, standing behind me, and some right here in the audience: I want to thank you all. Fantastic job. (Applause.) Peter Navarro, everybody. Thank you all. Thank you. Fantastic group of people. They love our country.

I also want to thank you Secretary Mnuchin, Secretary Ross, Secretary Nielsen, Secretary Perdue, Jared Kushner, Peter Navarro, and United States Ambassador to Canada, Kelly Craft. Thank you. Thank you, Kelly. Thank you. (Applause.)

I also want to thank President Peña Nieto of Mexico, who — we had a few disagreements, but I really like him a lot. I think he may like me, I’m not sure. (Laughter.) But I think he’s a terrific person. And he’ll be leaving soon, but he’s really done a good job and — a wonderful, wonderful person. And the Mexican President-elect López Obrador, who has given his support to this agreement, and we’re developing a really good relationship which I think is very important for our country, frankly, and for Mexico.

And so they worked together on this. This was done by both. I said, “Look, I don’t want to sign an agreement, and then a new President comes in, they don’t like it, and we have difficulty.” They worked very much together on it, and I appreciate it from both.

I have to, certainly, give my highest regards to Prime Minister of Canada, Justin Trudeau. A lot of stories came out about Justin and I having difficulty together, and we did over the trade deal. But I’ll tell you, it’s turned out to be a very, very good deal for both; and a very, very good deal for all three. It puts us in a position that we’ve never been in before.

It’s very good when you look at the world and what the world is doing and what — when you look at the unfair trade practices that countries are using against the United States, this is a terrific deal for all of us.

Once approved by Congress, this new deal will be the most modern, up-to-date, and balanced trade agreement in the history of our country, with the most advanced protections for workers ever developed.

If you look at the reviews, people that would normally not, under any circumstances, say good things — because automatically they have to say bad. Even some Democrats say, “That’s amazing.” We had some — they haven’t been given the soundbites yet, I guess, Mike. But actually, you had some Democrats say, “This is really amazing if he really got all of that.” But by tomorrow, I would suspect they’ll change their tune. But that’s okay, because people know how good it is. It’s an amazing deal for a lot of people.

Likewise, it will be the most advanced trade deal in the world with ambitious provisions on the digital economy; patents — very important; financial services; and other areas where the United States has a strong competitive advantage.

Mexico and Canada have agreed to strong new labor protections, environmental protections, and new protections for intellectual property. So important.

This new deal is an especially great victory for our farmers. Our farmers have gone through a lot over the last 15 years. They’ve been taken advantage of by everybody. Prices have gone way down. And we’re working on some other deals that are going to make them very happy also.

But this is a very, very big deal for our farmers. Mexico and Canada will be opened up a lot more than they are now. And I think there will be a better spirit between the three countries, which is important for our farmers.

The agreement will give our farmers and ranchers far greater access to sell American-grown produce in Mexico and in Canada.

The deal includes a substantial increase in our farmers’ opportunities...

Blah, blah, blah, blah...

Well, there was one thing that was crystal clear and consistent across the entire Brexit shitshow: out with the migrants.

Well, they got their wishes, and ended up with fruit rotting on the fields.