Trump Pushes Back Deadline for Mexico Deal

The United States will enter a 90-day negotiating period with Mexico over trade as 25% tariff rates stay in place, President Trump said Thursday. In a post on Truth Social Thursday, the president said a phone conversation he had with Mexican leader Claudia Sheinbaum was "very successful in that, more and more, we are getting to know and understand each other," the AP reports. Trump said goods from Mexico imported into the US would continue to face a 25% tariff that he has ostensibly linked to fentanyl trafficking. "The complexities of a Deal with Mexico are somewhat different than other Nations because of both the problems, and assets, of the Border," Trump said.

"Mexico will continue to pay a 25% Fentanyl Tariff, 25% Tariff on Cars, and 50% Tariff on Steel, Aluminum, and Copper," said Trump. (Tariffs, however, are not paid by nations but by the companies that import the goods, explains the New York Times.) He said that Mexico would end its "Non Tariff Trade Barriers," but he didn't provide specifics. Trump had threatened tariffs of 30% on goods from Mexico in a July letter, something that Sheinbaum said Mexico gets to stave off for the next three months. "We avoided the tariff increase announced for tomorrow and we got 90 days to build a long-term agreement through dialogue," Sheinbaum said in a post on X.

Some goods continue to be protected from the tariffs by the 2020 US-Mexico-Canada Agreement, or USMCA, which Trump negotiated during his first term. But Trump appeared to have soured on that deal, which is up for renegotiation next year. One of his first significant moves as president was to impose tariffs on goods from both Mexico and Canada earlier this year. He warned early Thursday that Canada's support for Palestinian statehood will make it "very hard" to reach a trade deal.

• Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer slammed Trump over his trade deals Thursday, including a deal with South Korea the president announced Wednesday, NBC News reports. "Instead of levering a 25% tariff as he threatened, Donald Trump says South Korea will face 15% tariffs," the Democrat said on the Senate floor. "And then he pretends like that's some kind of victory. 15% is far from a victory, because it is American families who are ones who are going to have to pay for it in the end."