When Donald Trump was holding his highly popular rallies around the country in his ultimately successful bid for president in 2016, one of his most famous lines was that he would build a wall on our southern border, and he would make Mexico “pay for it.”
While almost everyone took Trump seriously that he would do everything he could to build the wall, most reasonable observers thought the promise to make Mexico “pay for it” was a hyperbolic statement — a good laugh line for his enthusiastic audiences. A joke much like Speaker Nancy Pelosi saying she would vote for one dollar to pay for the wall.
Not surprisingly, the same national media that failed to hold President Obama to account for his repeated claims that “if you like your health care plan,” and “if you like your doctor,” you can keep both under his ObamaCare proposal, are now charging President Trump with lying about his facetious remark that Mexico would pay for a wall. Obama’s promise was used to sell the Affordable Care Act, and it was taken quite seriously by millions of Americans. No one took it as a joke. But we now know that was a brazen falsehood.
The media has charged Trump with breaking his promise to make Mexico pay for the wall because he is now demanding $5.7 billion from Congress to fund the wall’s construction.
Trump responded, “When I say Mexico’s going to pay for the wall … I didn’t say they’re going to write me a check for $10 billion or $20 billion. If Congress approves this trade bill (United States, Mexico, Canada, or USMCA), they’ll pay for the wall many times over. When I say Mexico’s going to pay for the wall, that’s what I mean.”
Now this is no joke. If Congress does vote for USMCA as a way to “make Mexico pay for the wall,” then it is a price far too high. It reminds us of the words of Jesus Christ, who said, “What does it profit a man if he gains the whole world, yet loses his own soul?” In this case, getting the wall in exchange for the USMCA managed trade deal would be like getting a wall by surrendering a huge chunk of our national sovereignty.
On one hand, Trump and America would get a wall, which in conjunction with other methods, would drastically reduce the illegal immigration problem of the country; but on the other hand, the USMCA is a trade deal designed to “integrate” our economy with that of Mexico and Canada. For the master of the “art of the deal,” this would be an extremely bad deal for America.
Despite all the ballyhoo and bluster of Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, with all of his strong rhetoric against NAFTA and other trade deals, his new deal with Canada and Mexico (USMCA) not only promises more of the same, but even portends more restrictions of private business than before.
Trump’s criticisms of NAFTA were a large part of his 2016 campaign, along with his promises that he would either make the trade deal with Mexico and Canada more in the interests of American workers and businesses — or he would scrap it. Early indications are that Trump has done neither, but has instead negotiated a trade deal that places even more regulations on American business, and further diminishes the national sovereignty of the United States.
The deal includes provisions that the governments of the United States, Mexico, and Canada will craft laws to offer “protection” to workers on the basis of sex, including sexual orientation and gender identity. In other words, business owners, if USMCA is approved, and Congress follows through with this provision, will have to contend with threats of lawsuits from employees charging discrimination against them due to some deluded man thinking he is a woman, or some woman thinking she is a man.
While Trump casts himself as a defender of certain values against encroachment by LGBTQ activists, the text of this agreement screams otherwise.
What is “free trade” about this? This is not “free trade,” but rather more government regulation of private business to advance the latest liberal cause. USMCA is a progressive globalist’s dream. It turns over more and more of the rights of Americans to determine their own social policies to a super-national trade bureaucracy. This is the very type of thing that is causing widespread dissension across Europe against the oppressive European Union (EU). What good is a wall if its price is that we lose our right as a people to rule ourselves?
Whatever good a wall on our southern border would do, it is not worth surrendering our sovereignty. Members of Congress who want a wall should fund it through the appropriation process. “Paying” for it with USMCA is simply too high a price.
Photo: U.S. Border Patrol
