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Is the emperor wearing any clothes? Trump’s Mexico deal will offer a real, quantifiable verdict

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Trump hails the deal as a major win. Critics suggest it will do little. The good news is: We’re actually going to find out.
President Trump and his supporters are hailing his new tariff-averting immigration deal with Mexico as a game-changer and a sign that Trump’s hardball tactics — which even his own party was wary of, in this case — can work.
Critics say the deal represents little more than warmed-over agreements that had already been reached before the tariffs were threatened. They say the measures will have little impact.
The good news is we’re going to find out who’s right.
The Mexico tariff standoff is merely the latest example of Trump’s tendency to conduct foreign policy at the end of a knife. Oftentimes, as the New York Times’s Peter Baker analyzed this weekend, the resulting deal amounts to little more than a face-saving gesture — something to allow Trump to semi-plausibly claim a win without actually changing many of the fundamentals:
The Times has suggested that that’s essentially what this amounts to. In a story Saturday, it reported that the deal struck the day before “consists largely of actions that Mexico had already promised to take in prior discussions with the United States over the past several months.”
What’s more, critics say even those steps are unlikely to be successful. “In general, I don’t think that this agreement stems the flow,” Ali Noorani, executive director of the National Immigration Forum, told The Post this weekend.

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