This is a dream come true for all those blue-collar workers in the Rust Belt who voted for Trump. What more could they possibly desire when it comes to the trade deal that ruined their lives, except for a name change?



Speaking at the White House on Monday, President Trump said he wanted to change the NAFTA name to the U.S. Mexico Free Trade Agreement.

I don't know about you, but I'm relieved that a trade agreement with the name of NAFTA no longer exists. Because it was the name that was the problem, amirite?



After threatening for months to blow up Nafta, President Donald Trump seems to have settled for a modest rebranding — so far as trade with Mexico is concerned, anyway. His new “United States-Mexico Trade Agreement” would leave arrangements that have spurred innovation, growth and economic integration of the two countries mostly intact.

But wait! Trump doesn't just half-way rebrand. He's the kind of bigly president that will do something crazy and rebrand a product TWICE!



In a joint statement, U.S.Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer and Canadian Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland said the accord would be renamed the USMCA (United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement).

They asserted that USMCA would result in freer markets and fairer trade.

There you go. The problem with NAFTA, other than the name, was that it wasn't free trade ENOUGH!

To put this another way, the globalists are pleased.



Despite the new name (the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement, or USMCA) dropping any references to trade, let alone freedom, the tariff rates on imports from Canada and Mexico are still a mass of zeroes. The main new element – the abolition of a variety of milk Canada introduced last year to support its domestic dairy industry – is ultimately an anti-protectionist move. The main old element is some fiddling around Nafta’s rules on automotive trade which, as we’ve argued previously, aren’t likely to change much. That suggests an emerging playbook for the Trump administration’s trade agreements. As with the revised U.S.-South Korea deal announced last week, the achievement is declared to be historic while the changes made are cosmetic. That dynamic bodes rather well for the U.S.-Japan bilateral talks announced last week, not to mention the simmering trade war with China. For the globalists so often bashed in Trump-era rhetoric – and this columnist would count himself among them – that’s good news.

Hurray?

I'm certain all of those unemployed blue-collar workers were just waiting for a rebranded NAFTA, but with more TPP.



Note also that many parts of the deal are likely to bear a resemblance to TPP.

The brilliance of Trump is that he rebranded not just once, but twice.

I can think of only one other organization that rebranded twice in order to create more separation from the damaged brand - Blackwater.