Trump’s Day of Hardball and Confusion on Nafta -<br />By BINYAMIN APPELBAUM and GLENN THRUSHAPRIL 27, 2017<br />WASHINGTON — For much of Wednesday, the Trump administration played hardball, spreading word<br />that it was considering the shocking step of withdrawing from the North American Free Trade Agreement.<br />But Mr. Peña Nieto also emphasized that he was “looking for a negotiation that is good for Mexico, a win-win.”<br />Mexico, like Canada, already agreed to substantial changes to Nafta as part of the now-discarded Trans-Pacific Partnership,<br />a broader trade agreement negotiated by the Obama administration that would have supplanted the older deal.<br />At the White House, Mr. Trump’s moderate advisers urgently tried to convince him<br />that even a first step toward an exit — his executive order would have begun a six-month waiting period before the United States could actually withdraw — could cause significant economic disruptions in all three nations, whose economies are increasingly intertwined.<br />By the time Mr. Trump was in the White House, his more moderate advisers — including Gary D. Cohn, his top economic adviser,<br />and the president’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, who communicates regularly with President Enrique Peña Nieto of Mexico — had persuaded him to temper his attacks on America’s trading partners.<br />White House officials quickly portrayed the confusion as a vindication of Mr. Trump’s management style<br />and said he had succeeded in bringing Mexico and Canada to the negotiating table — casting it as a signal accomplishment for a president hungry for victories.
