Trump’s Day of Hardball and Confusion on Nafta - By BINYAMIN APPELBAUM and GLENN THRUSHAPRIL 27, 2017 WASHINGTON — For much of Wednesday, the Trump administration played hardball, spreading word that it was considering the shocking step of withdrawing from the North American Free Trade Agreement. But Mr. Peña Nieto also emphasized that he was “looking for a negotiation that is good for Mexico, a win-win.” Mexico, like Canada, already agreed to substantial changes to Nafta as part of the now-discarded Trans-Pacific Partnership, a broader trade agreement negotiated by the Obama administration that would have supplanted the older deal. At the White House, Mr. Trump’s moderate advisers urgently tried to convince him 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. By the time Mr. Trump was in the White House, his more moderate advisers — including Gary D. Cohn, his top economic adviser, 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. White House officials quickly portrayed the confusion as a vindication of Mr. Trump’s management style 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.
