President Donald Trump attacked the news media in his defense of his deal with Mexico. | Alex Brandon/AP Photo White House Trump says there’s more in Mexico deal but doesn’t say what

There’s more to the U.S.-Mexico tariff agreement than meets the eye, President Donald Trump said on Sunday, as critics continued to suggest that the deal didn’t accomplish much.

“Importantly, some things..... .....not mentioned in yesterday press release, one in particular, were agreed upon. That will be announced at the appropriate time,” the president wrote in a string of four Twitter posts.


Trump was defending his newly announced agreement with Mexico in the face of reporting that much of what it contained wasn’t new. In his tweets, he directly attacked The New York Times and CNN, calling them “the Enemy of the People.”

While proudly defending the agreement and saying he expected Mexico to be “very cooperative,” the president said he could return to the threat of tariffs: “We can always go back to our previous, very profitable, position of Tariffs — But I don’t believe that will be necessary.”

Trump had threatened Mexico with a succession of higher tariffs on everything it exported here in order to push the country to do more to keep migrants from Guatemala, El Salvador and other Central American nations from reaching the U.S. border. Migrants have been arriving in large numbers for months, often, they say, to escape relentless violence in their home countries. It’s not clear how successful Mexico can be in stopping them from coming, even with additional security forces at the U.S. border.

Ambassador Martha Bárcena Coqui of Mexico, speaking Sunday on CBS’ “Face the Nation,” addressed Trump’s morning tweets by saying, “There are a lot of details that we discussed during the negotiations and during the conversations that we didn’t put into the declaration because there are different paths that we have to follow.”

The ambassador said adjustments would be made as the situation on the border evolved. “We will continue to have technical talks almost weekly,” she said.

Appearing on “Fox News Sunday” soon after Trump’s posts, acting Homeland Security Secretary Kevin McAleenan offered few details when asked about the president’s tweets.

“There’s a mechanism to make sure that they do what they promised to do, that there’s an actual result, that we see a vast reduction in those [migration] numbers,” he told the Fox host Bret Baier.

“There is, by and large, an economic migration that we need to stop with enforcement,” he said. “We need to be able to repatriate people successfully.”

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“People can disagree with the tactics,” McAleenan added, referring to the president’s tariff threats. “Mexico came to the table with real proposals. We have an agreement that, if they implement, will be effective.”

Sen. Roy Blunt (R-Mo.) also defended the deal on Sunday. Saying the president was “appropriately pleased” with the agreement, he pushed back on the notion that Mexico was already planning to send reinforcements to its southern border even before making the deal with Trump.

“I don’t know that they were. No deal is done until it’s done and announced,” Blunt told host Margaret Brennan on “Face the Nation.”

Some critics have suggested that the deal with Mexico ended a crisis that was partly or entirely of the president’s own making, a notion echoed Sunday by multiple Democratic presidential contenders.

“I think the president has completely overblown what he reports to have achieved,” former Rep. Beto O’Rourke of Texas said on ABC’s “This Week.” “These are agreements that Mexico had already made, in some cases months ago.”

Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota said Trump was “becoming the threatener-in-chief.“ On “Face the Nation,” she said the president was turning farmers into “poker chips at one of his bankrupt casinos.”

On CNN, Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont said Trump’s “erratic threats and trade policies are not the way to go.”

Speaking on “State of the Union,” Sanders said, “What the world is tired of, and what I am tired of, is a president who consistently goes to war, verbal war, with our allies, whether it is Mexico, whether it is Canada.”

Long a critic of NAFTA and other trade agreements, Sanders said he viewed Trump’s approach to revisiting such agreements as a bad one.

“You can’t have a trade policy based on tweets,” he told host Dana Bash.

Forty minutes after his Twitter posts, Trump made it clear he was feeling very much unappreciated.

“If President Obama made the deals that I have made,” he wrote, “both at the Border and for the Economy, the Corrupt Media would be hailing them as Incredible, & a National Holiday would be immediately declared. With me, despite our record setting Economy and all that I have done, no credit!”

Bob Hillman contributed to this report.