Do you really think Trudeau could change Trump's mind on anything?
I think Trump was just posturing with the whole ripping up NAFTA rhetoric. He's a business man, he was starting at his end game and negotiating down. Threaten to rip it all up, slap on a tariff and once we see where things could be headed, he has all the leverage for a favourable negotiation.
Now he looks like he threw us a bone when he played us like a chump.
I don't buy it for a sec that Trudeau would change Trump's mind if Trump was actually serious about pulling out of NAFTA.
This is exactly it. These are his SMRT negotiating tactics. He is the deal guy. He is the art of the deal. He makes bigly bigly deals. He is a SMRT negotiator, the best negotiator. High energy negotiations. He is the greatest negotiator, probably the greatest of all time, nobody does bigly bigly deals like Donald, believe me folks.
No doubt when the negotiators meet, the American negotator is going to be "good cop" to Donald's "bad cop". He will say stuff like "guys, you gotta give me something here that I can take back to Donald. Donny's crazy, he's ready to blow this whole thing up. If you can move on the dairy issue, I might be able to go back to Donald and convince him this is a good deal. You have to give me something I can take back to Donald or he's going to blow the whole thing up."
This was just more crap from his handbook of alpha-male gamesmanship. Like his handshake trick, or when he went on Larry King and told King he had terrible bad breath. "That's how you get the edge," King realizes. Years later, King had Trump on the show again, and they talked about that incident, and Trump said this:
TRUMP: [...] but I took such heat because you were saying, "How do you put people off guard? What do you do to put people off guard?" And I said, "Well, Larry, your breath is absolutely terrible." And you even were offended by it, and you forgot the first part of your question.
-k