How To Beat Trump

It was 2:37 on the afternoon of Tuesday, November 5th. Millions of US citizens were voting, and the winner of the presidential elections was yet to be determined. I was listening to the Fox News station on Sirius XM – a favorite of Trump’s followers – when it suddenly went to commercials. And then, to my great surprise, I heard an add selling Trump-branded watches.

It seemed odd. I took a screenshot and kept listening. How is it possible that on the very day of the election someone was selling watches linked to one of the presidential candidates? I went to the Web page in the add (www.GetTrumpWatches.com) and found all kinds of watches priced at hundreds and even thousands of dollars. Then came a warning that neither Trump nor his organizations were designing or selling those watches. It was a company that paid a licensing fee to use the Trump brand.

Whether he won or lost, candidate Trump was going to benefit. Trump or companies using his name have also been selling bibles, sneakers and commemorative cards, according to The Guardian newspaper. Yes, before anything else, Trump is a salesman.

Maybe those examples help to understand how Donald Trump, president-elect of the United States, operates and how he can be beaten or at least confronted with intelligence and without being steamrolled. Trump is transactional. Everything he does – everything – is to win something. And if he doesn’t win, he’s not interested.

What’s more, he’s a bully. He’s a master of the abuse of power, and when he feels in control or in a position of authority he exploits that to the max. And these days Trump feels powerful and immune. It seems that none of the criminal charges pending against him has any chance of moving forward because of the recent Supreme Court ruling giving him near-total immunity.

And the worst think you can do in the face of a bully is to show weakness. In Trump’s head everything combines to show his power. He won the election and the popular vote, the criminal charges are fading and he feels legally protected to do whatever he darn well wants. He feels at the top. And it is in this context that Trump has threatened to slap tariffs on Mexico, Canada and China.

There’s no shortage of evidence that tariffs and trade wars only generate inflation and unemployment and destroy the normal functioning of the markets. If Trump imposes a 25 percent tariff on products imported from Mexico and Canada and 10 percent on products from China on January 20, there will be a significant blow to the global economy.

But the worst part is that those measure will not stop the smuggling of fentanyl or the arrival of thousands of undocumented migrants. What’s more, it is possible that the three countries will respond by putting tariffs on products imported from the United States.

No one wins.

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But what can Mexico do? Show its power. And it has a lot of it.

Secretary of the Economy Marcelo Ebrard has said already that if the United States puts tariffs on Mexican products, Mexico will do the same with US products. But beyond that tit-for-tat in which both countries lose, Mexico holds the entrance key for the millions of Latin Americans who want to emigrate to the north.

That power – and the key to negotiations for the Mexican government – is to show Trump that he needs Mexico to control and regulate the flow of Central and South American migrants toward the United States. No one else can do that.

Former Mexico President Andrés Manuel López Obrador never understood that and gave in to all the pressures from the first Trump administration. President Claudia Sheinbaum should not make the same mistake. The United States needs Mexico to have a humane, legal and regulated path for migrants.

The immigration issue was central to Trump’s election, and at the same time his key weakness. If he does not manage to control the border, even his most fervent followers will criticize him. And to even partially control that porous, 3,145 kilometer border, the United States needs Mexico. The message from Mexico should be clear: or we all cooperate, Mr. Trump, or there’s no way to stop the fentanyl and control the flow of migrants.

When she does that, President Sheinbaum should push to provide respectful treatment of the Latin American refugees and protection of undocumented Mexican migrants from the mass deportations that Trump has announced. She must be the president of all Mexicans, in and outside the country. That’s what she promised during the campaign.

No, nothing is easy with Trump. But it is a mistake to see him as an ally or friend. He will do only what is good for him. We have to understand that for him everything is a transaction, everything is a sale. To achieve a win-win with Trump you have to stand up strong and not allow the bully to impose his conditions. If you let him do that once, he will never stop stomping on you in the next four years.

This article was published in Spanish in Confidencial and translated by Havana Times. To get the most relevant news from our English coverage delivered straight to your inbox, subscribe to The Dispatch.