ADIOS, FUCKFACE

The EU and Mexico just signed an 86 billion euro trade deal with Trump's name nowhere on it. Call it what it fucking is: a standing ovation of middle fingers.

Picture the scene. Friday, 22 May, the National Palace in Mexico City. The Patio of Honor. Both national anthems playing back to back, the Mexican one and the EU one, like a wedding where nobody bothered to invite the prick who used to run the family. Claudia Sheinbaum, Ursula von der Leyen and Antonio Costa standing shoulder to shoulder, pens out, signing a trade deal a full decade in the making. Cameras flashing. Handshakes. The whole multilateral box set, and not one moth-eaten MAGA hat in the building.

And roughly 3,000 kilometres north, the most powerful man in the world is parked in an office his own courts keep telling him he is not legally allowed to run a tariff policy out of, refreshing Truth Social like a sad sack of a bastard who just got left on read by the entire planet.

Here is the bit the spray-tanned tariff troll desperately does not want you to clock, so let me say it slow and loud for the cheap seats. The EU and Mexico did not sign that deal despite Donald Trump. They signed it because of him. He is the reason it bloody exists. He is the glue. The dribbling old mongrel has accidentally turned himself into the most effective trade diplomat on Earth, and the punchline that should keep him awake at 3am gnawing the inside of his own cheek is this: every single deal he inspires is a deal that boots him clean out of the photo.

Let me set the scene properly, because the contrast is the whole shitting story.

▶ The EU and Mexico sign their trade deal and spell out exactly who they are routing around (DW News)

WHAT THE GROWN-UPS DID

The deal is not some piddly little handshake for the cameras. It drags an EU-Mexico agreement that has been gathering dust since the year 2000, back when that ancient version only covered industrial goods, and hauls it into the present. Services, government procurement, digital trade, investment, farm produce, the lot. It scraps tariffs on 99 per cent of goods traded between the two. Ninety-nine. They left one measly per cent on the table purely so it would not look like they were taking the absolute piss.

And the tariffs coming off were not bugger-all either. Mexico was whacking 20 per cent on European pasta, 20 per cent on cheese and chocolate, and a frankly deranged 45 per cent on eggs and pork. Gone, the lot of it. Mutual tariffs on electric vehicles and batteries, gone. The EU is tipping 5 billion euros of investment straight into Mexico. They have stood up a proper Investment Court System so the two sides can sort their disputes out like adults instead of via unhinged 4am posts in all caps.

Projected result? A 35 per cent jump in trade between the two over five years, stacked on top of the 86 billion euros they already turned over last year. That is not a press release, you drongos. That is two serious economies quietly deciding they would rather not have their national budgets held hostage by whatever shit mood a 79-year-old wakes up in.

And here is the part that should make the orange one spit the dummy clean across the Oval Office carpet. The deal comes loaded to the gunwales with binding commitments on labour rights, environmental standards, climate action and critical minerals cooperation. Every single thing on that list is something the Trump administration treats like a personal fucking insult. They did not just route around the silly old prick. They built a six-lane highway, paved it with everything that gives him the shits, and named the rest stops after it.

WHAT THE BLOKE UP NORTH DID THE SAME WEEK

Now hold that picture. Sheinbaum and von der Leyen, pens down, hands shaken, anthems ringing off the palace stone. Got it? Good. Because while all that civilised carry-on was happening, here is what Donald Trump’s trade policy was actually doing with its week.

Back in February, the Supreme Court of the United States looked at the emergency powers law Trump had been using to tax the entire bloody planet and ruled, six votes to three, that it gives a president no such power. Never did. The court basically told him that waking up in a shit mood is not, in any legal sense, a national emergency. That one ruling vaporised his big “Liberation Day” tariffs in a single hit.

So what does the geriatric trade-war LARPer do? Within hours, before the ink is even dry on the ruling, he digs up a completely different law and jacks the global tariff from 10 to 15 per cent anyway. Absolute toddler shit from a man old enough to remember the actual Great Depression he keeps trying to recreate out of nostalgia.

Then 7 May rolls around. A second court, the Court of International Trade, takes one look at the replacement tariffs and goes: yeah, nah, those are illegal too, mate. Twice. Two separate courts, in three months, have examined this dropkick’s signature economic policy and ruled it has roughly the legal standing of a servo hot dog. United States Customs is now processing refunds that could run into tens of billions of dollars, money his own government grabbed and now has to hand back with interest. The whole rickety structure expires in July unless Congress rescues it, and his own party currently could not organise a piss-up in a brewery, let alone a tariff bill.

That is the man. That is the terrifying negotiating adversary the EU and Mexico were supposedly shitting themselves over. A bloke whose entire trade policy is held together with sticky tape, a court appeal, and a prayer to a god who very clearly stopped taking his calls years ago.

THE PATTERN, FOR THE SLOW LEARNERS

Here is the thing that should genuinely terrify the wankers still standing around him, if a single one of them had the spine left to say it to his face. Mexico is not a one-off. Mexico is not bad luck. Mexico is a pattern.

This same European Union just brought the Mercosur deal into force, locking in trade with most of South America. It is doing a deal with India. An EU official stood up this week and casually mentioned that 97 per cent of the entire economy of Latin America and the Caribbean is now stitched up under preferential trade agreements with Europe. Ninety-seven per cent. There is no other region on the planet wired together that tightly, and Washington is not holding so much as a single thread of the needle.

Read that back slow, because it is the whole filthy game. While Trump has spent eighteen months screaming at allies, threatening 25 per cent tariffs on European cars, and treating every trading partner on Earth like a tenant three weeks behind on rent, the rest of the planet has quietly been speed-dating each other behind his back. The thick old mongrel genuinely believed that if he made himself unbearable enough, every country going would come crawling back to him on its hands and knees. Instead they all swiped right on somebody else and built a group chat the dickhead is not in.

Mexico sends more than 80 per cent of its exports to the United States. Eighty per cent. That is not a trading relationship, that is a hostage situation, and Sheinbaum knows it down to her boots. So what does a leader with an actual functioning brain do when she is that exposed to one volatile, unmedicated partner? She does not grovel. She does not kiss the ring. She opens, in her own words, other horizons. She gets up on a stage with Europe and signs a deal that means the next time Washington threatens her, she can fold her arms and say: and? We have other options now, sunshine.

SHEINBAUM, OR HOW TO HANDLE A BULLY

Let us talk about Claudia Sheinbaum for a minute, because the woman has been quietly running a masterclass that every leader getting shoved around by this administration should be sitting down and bloody well taking notes on.

She has not screamed. She has not begged. She has not posted a single grovelling letter at 2am. When Trump started mouthing off about military intervention in Venezuela, she did not hedge, mumble or wet herself. She stood up at a press conference and laid the principle down flat as a tack:

We condemn any intervention and are guided by the Constitution.

That is it. No tantrum, no theatrics, no spray tan, just a leader stating plainly that her country runs on the law and not on the whims of some foreign landlord having a sook. She has sat down with progressive leaders in Spain at a summit widely read as a polite, well-catered effort to kneecap MAGA influence around the globe. And then, with the EU deal signed and done, she turned to the press and called her agreements with Europe and with America “not contradictory,” insisting the lot of them strengthen Mexico, Europe and the United States all at once.

Now that, that is the kill shot, and she delivers it with a smile and a steady hand. She is not picking a fight. She is being gracious. She is being the absolute portrait of a calm, modern, outward-looking leader. Which makes Trump, by the simple violence of contrast, look like exactly what he is: the one tantruming dropkick in a room full of functioning adults. She did not have to call the bloke a single name. She just had to stand next to von der Leyen and let the cameras do the defenestration for her.

THE TACO IS GETTING COLD

For the newer readers, a quick refresher on the TACO framework. TACO. Trump Always Chickens Out. The man threatens, blusters, posts in screaming caps, slaps a hard deadline on it, and then, when the actual moment arrives, folds like a cheap deckchair and calls the retreat the single greatest victory in human history.

The trouble with running a TACO foreign policy is that eventually every bastard on the planet works out the recipe. And once they have worked it out, they stop standing around waiting for the tantrum to burn itself out. They just get on with their lives. They sign deals. They build courts. They play each other’s national anthems in palace courtyards while the man himself argues with a judge.

Trump posted, not so long ago, that von der Leyen had personally promised him the EU would cut its tariffs to zero. He genuinely thought he had her by the short and curlies. He thought the leverage was all his. And then she flew to Mexico City and cut tariffs to basically nothing, on 99 per cent of goods, with somebody else entirely, while he sat at home picking a fight with the courts. That is not a leader being out-negotiated. That is a leader being treated like a weather event. Something you check the forecast for, swear at, and then drive around.

The whole world has stopped negotiating with Donald Trump. They have started negotiating around him. And the gap between those two little words is the gap between being a superpower and being a fucking pothole.

TALLY THE SCORE

So let us tally the week, the way we always do round here, because the scoreboard never lies even when the man behind the podium does.

Mexico: signed an 86 billion euro trade deal, locked in a fresh market for its exporters, pulled in 5 billion euros of European investment, and posted Washington a quiet little note that reads “we have other friends now, champ.”

The European Union: bolted Mexico onto a collection that now covers 97 per cent of Latin America’s entire economy, looked like the last competent adult left standing in the global room, brought a brand new Mercosur deal into force, and did the whole lot inside a single week without once raising its voice.

Donald Trump: had his tariffs ruled illegal by a second court, started refunding tens of billions of dollars of other people’s money, watched two of his so-called negotiating opponents shake hands and play anthems without him anywhere in the frame, and is now sprinting around trying to rebuild his entire trade wall out of legal scraps before July, when the current sad pile of it expires.

Final score. The grown-ups: everything. The orange one: a refund slip, a court date, and the slow, dawning, horrible realisation that the entire planet has learned to drive around the stupid prick.

He spent his whole miserable life convinced the world revolved around him. Turns out it just quietly learned to take the bypass. Adios, dickhead.

IFLA ~ Gman

THE IFLA AUSSIE-TO-YANK GLOSSARY

For our American readers, who deserve to enjoy the savagery in full colour.

spit the dummy: To throw a full-blown tantrum. A dummy is what Australians call a baby’s pacifier. To spit it out is to chuck a complete meltdown. Used here because the man has the impulse control of a teething infant and the launch codes to match.

couldn’t organise a piss-up in a brewery: Spectacularly, almost artistically incompetent. A piss-up is a drinking session. If you cannot manage to get drunk inside the one building on Earth that exists purely to manufacture alcohol, you should not be trusted with anything, least of all a tariff bill.

servo: A service station, what Americans call a gas station. The servo hot dog, having rotated gently under a heat lamp since roughly the Clinton administration, is the Australian benchmark for something technically classified as food but legally indefensible. Much like a Section 122 tariff.

dropkick: A useless, hopeless, faintly tragic individual. A loser with delusions of grandeur. Mildly affectionate when aimed at a mate, absolutely lethal when aimed at a head of state.

having a sook: Sulking, whinging, carrying on like a wounded child over something minor. A sook is a sulky cry-baby. Essential vocabulary for describing a 79-year-old man’s relationship with a courtroom.