Doesn’t the “art of the deal” include giving your negotiating partner room to compromise? Mr. Trump made it impossible for Mr. Peña Nieto even to negotiate, all the more so after Mr. Peña Nieto went out of his way in August to invite Mr. Trump for a visit. That campaign stop helped Mr. Trump show he could stand on stage as an equal with a foreign leader, but Mr. Peña Nieto took a beating at home when Mr. Trump returned to Mexico-bashing.
When Mr. Trump visited the Journal in November 2015, we asked if the U.S. should encourage political stability and economic growth in Mexico. “I don’t care about Mexico honestly, I really don’t care about Mexico,” he replied.
.. Mexico’s main political parties have since traded stints in power, but both the PRI and the PAN have pressed economic reforms that have raised living standards and given Mexicans reasons to stay on their side of the Rio Grande.
.. Mr. Trump has accused Mexico of seeking a weak currency, but the central bank has been vigilant against inflation. The main reason the peso has fallen to 21 to the dollar from 17 in less than a year is Mr. Trump’s threats to destroy Nafta and start a trade war. The U.S. President is devaluing Mexico’s currency—the opposite of what he claims to want.
California Looks to Lead the Trump Resistance
Mr. Trump has reportedly chosen a retired Marine general, John Kelly, to run the Department of Homeland Security. He seems to fit the Trump pattern of seeing immigrants not as a resource to be tapped, but as a threat to be neutralized, beginning at the border. General Kelly, who led the United States Southern Command, warned Congress last year of the danger of terrorists and “weapons of mass destruction” coming in from Mexico. He admitted he had no evidence, but was clanging the alarm all the same.
The Carrier Deal and Trump’s Challenge to Democrats
the public’s attitude toward big businesses and their chief executives was extremely negative. Just twenty per cent of Americans, Greenberg explained, had a positive opinion of C.E.O.s. Many people regarded the country’s top executives as members of a self-enriching élite, which lines its pockets by cutting wages and shifting jobs overseas.
.. “We thought we were running against trickle-down. We now find ourselves running against a nationalist message focussed on making work for people.”
.. Last week, its chief executive, Louis Chenevert, left the company with a retirement package worth a hundred and seventy-two million dollars, most of it in stock and options.
.. shutting it down and moving production to Monterrey, where workers earn about fifty dollars a week, would have juiced United Technologies’ earnings a bit. That, in turn, could have given a boost to the firm’s stock price—and further enriched the huge remuneration packages enjoyed by Chenevert and other top executives.
.. Carrier, however, is still planning to relocate six hundred jobs from the Indianapolis plant to Mexico, plus seven hundred jobs from a second plant in Huntington, Indiana, which will be shut down. Taking the two plants together, more jobs will go than will be saved.
.. “The free market has been sorting it out and America’s been losing,”
.. In his 2012 State of the Union speech, President Obama proposed a series of measures designed to discourage outsourcing. They included eliminating the tax deductions that companies can take when they shift jobs abroad, and expanding tax breaks for investment in domestic manufacturing.
.. the Obama Administration never suggested that it would be possible, or even beneficial, to stop offshoring entirely. Instead, it stressed the need to educate the workforce; develop industries of the future, such as clean energy; and retrain displaced manufacturing workers.
.. since the start of 2009, when Obama took office, the economy has created more than eight hundred thousand manufacturing jobs.
Trump’s Carrier Talks Up the Ante for Ford
Auto maker, criticized during the presidential campaign, is well on its way to spending $1.6 billion to build a new factory in Mexico
.. Ford’s Mexico plan has been long in the making and is the only way that executives expect they can stanch the losses associated with small-car production.
.. Still, many industry participants see them as necessary to meet fuel-economy standards because they help bring down the fleet average. That is why cars like the Focus are referred to as “compliance cars” in the industry.
.. Mexican production not only cuts the labor costs going into a Ford Focus, it also opens up more markets for export seeing that Mexico has dozens of free-trade agreements. More export destinations lessens the potential for unused factory capacity, which is the most common reason that auto makers burn cash.
.. In 2009, as part of terms of its government bailout, the auto maker agreed to keep a small car plant open in Michigan. That factory operates well below its capacity, but it appears to be under no threat of closing.
.. Fiat Chrysler Automobiles NV doesn’t see small-car sales as a key method for meeting fuel-economy requirements. As a result, it is converting all of its U.S. car-assembly capacity into light-truck capacity. This means that Dodge Darts and Chrysler 200s are no longer made in the U.S. as of Friday.
.. About 17% of the Detroit 3’s North American output is currently sourced from Mexico
.. U.S. auto factory workers are relatively expensive and executives want them building their highest-margin vehicles.