The president* was in a ball-spiking mood early Monday afternoon. He had slapped a new decal on the fuselage of NAFTA, created an unpronounceable anagram for it, and was so emboldened by these towering achievements that he felt comfortable condescending to a woman journalist in the Rose Garden. From The Daily Beast:

Trump, seemingly misunderstanding the female reporter, hit back again—this time directly insulting her intelligence.

"Seemingly" is pulling an oxcart uphill in the snow by itself.

“That’s ok, I know you're not thinking. You never do,” the president said.

He's chuffed. You can tell. He went on to talk down his chin to another female reporter. He also threatened an unnamed Democratic senator about whom the president* said he Knew Things.

In a deflection from the constant questions about his Supreme Court pick, Trump dropped a bomb: He claimed to be aware of dirt on a Democratic senator in a “somewhat compromising” situation. “I happen to know some United States senators. One who is on the other side who is pretty aggressive. I’ve seen that person in very bad situations, OK? I’’ve seen that person in very, very bad situations,” Trump said. “Somewhat compromising. And you know, I think it’s very unfair to bring up things like this.” The veiled threat, which was made without naming the senator or providing any evidence, came in response to a question about whether Kavanaugh should be interviewed by the FBI.

If there had been a fly within easy reach, he'd have pulled off its wings and eaten them, right there behind the podium.

Chip Somodevilla Getty Images

To be entirely fair, there is a new trade deal for the three major countries of North America, and to be entirely fair it is no longer called NAFTA. It is called USMCA—pronounced, I believe, Uzmicka. From CNBC:

Taken as whole, though, the new pact, called the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement, looks a lot like the old North American Free Trade Agreement. What's different are the optics, which show a president willing to get tough on global trading partners despite what the critics say and the risks such a strategy pose. Prior administrations "weren't able to do it the diplomatic way, the old-school way," Garcia said. Trump "came in thinking outside the box. Some people thought he was a madman for wanting to slap tariffs on imports and threatening to increase tariffs progressively. I think those on the inside knew this was a means to an end. You've got to inflict real fear in the opposite party to get some substantive concessions, or they don't take it seriously." In doing so, Trump scored political points with two key constituencies: farmers, who had been hurt by soybean duties and the dairy impasse with Canada, and union members, particularly those in the auto industries.

The guts of the USMCA look a lot like NAFTA, and the issues between the U.S. and China run deeper than with the North American partners. "The US relationship with China is much more complicated than its relationship with Canada, and of course the stakes are considerably higher when dealing with China — the Chinese have leverage over the US that Canada simply doesn't have," Eric Winograd, senior economist at AB (formerly AllianceBernstein), said in a note. "I certainly wouldn't rule out an agreement being reached with China, but I don't think that the US Mexico Canada Agreement provides a template that can be used in discussions with the Chinese," he added. "That's a separate negotiation that will need to proceed along its own course."

Chip Somodevilla Getty Images

John Harwood of CNBC, bless him, pointed out that much of this new deal was sitting right there on the Resolute desk when its improbable new squatter showed up in January of 2017. Appearing on MSNBC, Harwood said:

Most of the improvements on the deal were on the president's desk the day he walked into office. They were negotiated by President Obama and his counterparts in Canada and Mexico as part of the Transpacific Partnership which President Trump quickly threw in the trash can...Mostly this is re-labeling. So, mostly the president who is a master marketer is putting his name on a deal that was already in place, and it's better than not having a deal.

I'm with that, I guess, although the king irony of this president*'s gloating over including elements of the TPP in his newly branded Uzmicka is going to take a while to get over. He said he'd renegotiate a trade deal and he re-negotiated it into a facsimile of itself with a new bell and a couple of new whistles. In The Washington Post, Paul Waldman pointed them out.

It seems a little silly to take a hugely complex agreement such as NAFTA, make a few tweaks to it, change the name, and declare that you’ve actually created something entirely new. But as Steve Benen observes, this is hardly the first time Trump has focused intently on what something is called, as though that were far more important than what it actually does. It’s not just because Trump is superficial and obsessed with image, though he is; it’s also that he’s obsessed with his image. If you make some changes to NAFTA but don’t change the name, then the result doesn’t give sufficient credit to him. If he could have called it TRUMPFTA, he would have, but short of that, USMCA will have to do.

So there's more than a touch of the Potemkin celebration to Monday's news, but the contempt with which he treated the uppity women who dared ask him questions that did not get him a slam dunk? That was real. Now you know why he's as stuck on Brett Kavanaugh as he is on Kim Jong-un.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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