Trump's NAFTA stunt

The president isn't rewriting NAFTA. He's just renaming it.

President Trump.
(Image credit: Illustrated | Cinicus/iStock, ebstock/iStock, Scott Olson/Getty Images)

Has President Trump gotten his NAFTA deal?

After months of inconclusive negotiations, Trump announced Monday that the U.S. and Mexico have ironed out their major disagreements over the North American Free Trade Agreement. Without getting into the specifics, the president said the new bilateral agreement — which notably does not include Canada, the third signatory of NAFTA — is "elegant" and "very special" for farmers and manufacturers. He seemed most concerned, however, with the name itself. "We are going to call it the United States-Mexico Trade Agreement, and we will get rid of the name NAFTA," Trump said. "It has a bad connotation because the United States was hurt very badly by NAFTA."

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Jeff Spross

Jeff Spross was the economics and business correspondent at TheWeek.com. He was previously a reporter at ThinkProgress.