Trump Refuses To Renew The Best Trade Deal Ever Made, Which He Made

The Filing

WASHINGTON. Citing deep and abiding concerns about a fundamentally flawed agreement, President Trump announced Wednesday that the United States would not renew the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement, the sweeping continental trade pact that he negotiated, signed, and for six years described as the greatest trade deal ever made.

In a statement delivered one day before the pact's first mandatory joint review, U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer said the administration would not approve the $1.6 trillion trilateral arrangement "in its current form," faulting the deal for producing exactly the kind of trade deficits and structural shortcomings that officials declined to attribute to the man who wrote it. The clause obligating the government to reexamine the agreement in 2026 was itself a Trump innovation, a sunset provision he inserted during his first term specifically so that a future president would one day be forced to confront the document.

The President, who in 2020 hailed the USMCA as a colossal upgrade over NAFTA and a triumph for American workers, has spent recent months reconsidering his own handiwork. "There's no real advantage to it. It's irrelevant," Mr. Trump said in January of the agreement he had once called historic. "We don't need anything that Canada has. We don't need anything that Mexico has, but they need everything that we have," he added last month, "and they have to treat us better."

Administration officials pointed to rising goods trade deficits with the two neighbors, which reached $197 billion with Mexico and $48.3 billion with Canada in 2025, as evidence that the arrangement had failed. Left unmentioned was that much of the Canadian gap reflects the crude oil that American refineries buy from their largest foreign supplier, and that the Mexican gap widened in large part because Mr. Trump's own tariffs on Chinese goods pushed supply chains south into Mexico. The President has meanwhile stacked 25 percent tariffs on Canadian and Mexican automobiles, 50 percent tariffs on metals, and 10 percent tariffs on lumber atop the very agreement he was now declining to renew, a combination officials said had left him skeptical any deal could work.

For the moment, the government clarified, nothing changes. The agreement remains in force, American and Mexican negotiators will convene for a third round of talks the week of July 20, and absent a new understanding the pact will simply continue running until it expires in 2036, a timeline that generously grants businesses more than a decade to plan around whatever the President decides next. Economists who study the region noted that the announcement's chief immediate export was uncertainty, a commodity on which North America now enjoys a commanding surplus.

At press time, Mr. Trump had vowed to negotiate a far superior replacement deal, ideally with someone tougher and smarter than the man who negotiated the last one.

Who Benefits

§President Trump, who manufactured a fresh, high-profile negotiation he can reopen, restage, and eventually reannounce as a brand-new personal triumph, replacing a six-year-old triumph that had grown stale.
§Trump the self-described dealmaker, whose political brand depends on a permanent supply of deals to be renegotiated and who has now guaranteed himself a renewable one.
§Jamieson Greer and the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative, handed sweeping leverage to extract concessions bilaterally from two allies with nowhere else to sell.
§The administration's tariff hawks, who prefer coercive, one-off leverage to binding multilateral rules and now command a continent's worth of it.
§Certain domestic metals producers, temporarily shielded behind 50 percent tariffs while downstream American manufacturers and consumers absorb the higher costs.
§China, whose long-term interest in a fractured, quarreling North American trading bloc is served each time the three partners are set against one another.
§Trade lawyers, customs brokers, and consultants, who bill by the hour and have just been guaranteed a decade of billable uncertainty.

Sourced to the public record · presented without editorial embellishment