U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer is questioned about the Trump administration strategy or lack thereof. “Yes, there’s a strategy,” Greer says in this new interview. “First of all, you don’t change 70 years of trade policy overnight. And second of all, when some people say, ‘Oh, well, this is chaos. What’s your strategy?’, what they really want to know is can we go back to how it was before? And that’s not going to happen.”

The interview is in an audio file presented by Politico and shared below. This is some really good information on the various free trade agreements and the regions represented by some of our largest trade partners. Well worth listening to as you go about your day and travels today. Embed below:

USTR Greer notes how the tariffs are being used, the upcoming Supreme Court decision, the need for congress to codify the tariff regime in legislation and the various regional strategies for the deployment of countervailing duties.

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In the world of Trumpian geopolitical trade stuff, three issues are very interesting to watch. (1) The strategic reset with Russia which could break the official western construct of financial control. (2) The proactive and defensive positioning of Mexico (desperate attempt to retain economic attachment), and (3) the certain dissolution of the USMCA what Canadians call CUSMA.

Canadian media are starting to realize something we have talked about on these pages for years; President Trump intends to end the USMCA because the USMCA was used as a fracture point to eliminate NAFTA.

Wall Street, the U.S. Congress, the massive K-Street lobbying network around the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the entire political apparatus of business and industry would never permit the end to NAFTA; too many trillions at stake. So, President Trump replaced NAFTA with the interim USMCA, which was better but factually more useful in elimination of the original.

Now, as we have discussed by highlighting President Trump’s no-so-subtle words on the issue, the Canadian media is realizing the USMCA will be dissolved in favor of two independently negotiated bilateral trade agreements; one with Canada and one with Mexico.

🚨MAJOR BREAKING

Trump signals that he could EXIT from USMCA entirely.

This is EXTINCTION LEVEL to Canada.

He going to do it. I have a strong feeling about this.

We’re talking about 400,000 jobs and an instant severe recession! pic.twitter.com/X2uIQaJLQ3

— Tablesalt 🇨🇦🇺🇸 (@Tablesalt13) December 4, 2025

(CTV) – U.S. President Donald Trump could decide next year to withdraw from the Canada-United States-Mexico trade agreement (CUSMA), Politico reported on Thursday, citing U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer.

“The president’s view is he only wants deals that are a good deal. The reason why we built a review period into CUSMA was in case we needed to revise it, review it or exit it,” Greer told Politico’s White House bureau chief Dasha Burns in a podcast episode that airs Friday.

Greer also raised the idea of negotiating separately with Canada and Mexico and dividing the agreement into two parts in the podcast, adding that he spoke with Trump about that possibility just this week.

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In an effort to return common sense, practicality and affordability to the American consumer base for automobiles, President Trump announced the elimination of Joe Biden’s Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards for manufactured cars and trucks.

Under the auspices of the “Green New Deal”, the Biden administration mandated ridiculous quotas for EVs and demanded lower power combustible engines, or pay a climate change tax. These CAFE standards resulted in a surcharge for large vehicles, large engine autos and SUVs, and essentially bifurcated the auto consumer into those who could afford to pay for efficiency and stability, and those who could not.

“We’re officially terminating Joe Biden’s ridiculously burdensome, horrible actually, CAFE standards that impose expensive restrictions and all sorts of problems, gave all sorts of problems to automakers,” President Trump announced from the Oval Office. “It put tremendous upward pressure on car prices, combined with the insane electric vehicle mandate. Biden’s burdensome regulations helped cause the price of cars to soar more than 25%,” President Trump said. WATCH:

(Via White House) – DELIVERING A WIN FOR AMERICAN FAMILIES AND AUTOMAKERS: Today, President Donald J. Trump is delivering major relief to American families by resetting the Biden Administration’s costly and unlawful Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards.

President Trump is returning CAFE standards to levels that can actually be met with conventional gasoline and diesel vehicles. The Biden Administration standards imposed unrealistic fuel economy targets that effectively resulted in an electric vehicle (EV) mandate.

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Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban not only represents a friendly European voice to the objectives of the Trump administration, but also Orban is a close personal friend of President Trump both in and out of office.

Trump and Orban have long held a very close relationship, including friendship with the family of First Lady Melania Trump.  They are all very close – Shinzo Abe-type close – both from the White House and time in Mar-a-Lago.

On November 7, 2025, Prime Minister Viktor Orban again visited President Trump in the White House, including dinner with the Trump cabinet.  Then, word of the Ukraine corruption scandal broke.

A week following the White House visit (November 14) Prime Minister Orban said, “The golden illusion of Ukraine is falling apart. A wartime mafia network with countless ties to President Zelensky has been exposed. The energy minister has already resigned, and the main suspect has fled the country. This is the chaos into which the Brusselian elite want to pour European taxpayers’ money, where whatever isn’t shot off on the front lines ends up in the pockets of the war mafia. Madness. Thank you, but we want no part of this.”

The direct and non-pretending remarks from Viktor Orban highlighted a sense of the issue carried by a majority of the commonsense people around Russia, Europe, America and the world in general.  However, soon thereafter, as President Trump, Steve Witkoff and Marco Rubio were delivering deliberate terms to finally end the conflict, the Western intelligence network leaked an intercepted phone call between Witkoff and Putin’s senior foreign policy advisor, Ushakov.

The intelligence apparatus, likely originating from the U.K., purposefully wanted to disrupt all this peaceful resolution effort. The conflict has both benefactors and beneficiaries that do not want peace, both here and in Europe.

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This is a rather remarkable development that requires an understanding of what is true and accurate, versus what is stated as the justification.

In short, Prime Minister Mark Carney is conceding defeat to President Trump and positioning the Canadian economy to be compliant with U.S-Mexico trade regulations.

However, Carney is not saying that, indeed he cannot; he’s spent over a year telling Canadians that President Trump’s trade and economic demands are not going to be accepted by Canada.  However, what he is factually doing is exactly what President Trump has demanded.

Prime Minister Carney is saying he is restricting Steel and Aluminum imports from non-free trade agreement countries, and he is lowering the tonnage of Steel and Aluminum that will be permitted for import.  His claim is that this approach will help drive up “domestic demand” for Canadian Steel and Aluminum, but that’s ancillary to the real objective.

President Trump has demanded Canada stop importing cheap steel and aluminum mostly from China; including manufactured component goods that are made with steel and aluminum (think autos).  Canada would not stop, because they could not stop.  Their manufacturing base, green energy and climate change economy, is more of a component assembly system now.

So, President Trump hit Canada with a 35% tariff, and things got ugly.  In June Trump raised the tariff to 50%. The back and forth has gone on all year.

Carney now announces restrictions on imported steel and aluminum, as well as restrictions on imported derivative goods that come from steel and aluminum, in combination with a spending plan to bolster the Canadian steel and aluminum manufacturing base.  This ends up shifting the Canadian industrial sector to making steel and aluminum products without Chinese import dependency.

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Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent appears on Meet the Press to debate Kirsten Welker’s formatted corporate media talking points.  The source of most American division is found in the behavior of the media.

Video and Transcript Below:

[TRANSCRIPT] – KRISTEN WELKER: And joining me now is Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. Secretary Bessent, welcome back to Meet the Press.

SEC. SCOTT BESSENT: Kristen, good to be with you today.

KRISTEN WELKER: It’s great to have you here in person. Thank you for being here. I want to start right there on the discussion of affordability. You just heard Vice President JD Vance ask people to have, quote, “a little bit of patience” with the administration. Let me ask you, Mr. Secretary, how long do Americans need to be patient? How long do they have to wait for the cost of living to come down?

SEC. SCOTT BESSENT: Well, Kristen, in March of 2024, I – I wrote a piece, and I talked about the three I’s that were killing Americans: immigration, interest rates and inflation. The president’s closed the border, and the mass immigration is gone. And that was putting – a lot of the immigration was putting upward pressure on housing, downward pressure on wages. Interest rates are down. And now we are starting to see the affordability – we – the prices get better. We had a very big October for home sales. Energy prices, gas – gasoline is down. We saw – we believe health care is going to come down. We will see an announcement this coming week on that. And so across the board, prices are starting to come down. We’re having Thanksgiving week. This will be the lowest cost for a Thanksgiving dinner in four years. Turkey prices are down 16%.

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The govt shutdown made a mess of the economic data surveying and statistical analysis generally needed for accurate snapshots of the economy. However, the Bureau of Labor and Statistics (BLS) was able to release the September jobs report data {SEE BLS REPORT HERE}.

The geopolitical trade reset continues delivering domestic economic fluctuations, as each sector and specific international dependency reacts to President Trump’s shifts and turns in targeted economic policy.  The September jobs report caught the economic pundits off-guard, as it showed a much bigger gain in jobs than they expected.

As noted by MSM, “The US added 119,000 jobs in September, far more than the 53,000 economists expected, and unemployment unexpectedly increased to 4.4% from 4.3%.”  President Trump’s immigration enforcement continues to capture and remove illegal alien workers from the U.S. economy. This is also driving up domestic wages.

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President Donald Trump and Saudi Arabia Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman attended a U.S-Saudi investment forum and delivered remarks to the assembled business audience.

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Mohammed Bin Salman (MbS) is a forward thinking change agent for Saudi Arabia and the region.  As a key strategic ally Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman and President Donald Trump have a strong personal and geopolitical relationship.

MbS and President Trump hold a bilateral discussion in the White House and open the conversation to the press pool. MbS is a key participant in the peace deal between Israel and Hamas within Gaza. WATCH (video added):

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President Trump held an impromptu press conference aboard Airforce One heading to Florida for the weekend.  The audio is a little challenging, but the sound is better on the Forbes link than the White House link.

President Trump discusses his lowering the import tariffs against some products the USA doesn’t create. Additionally, President Trump notes his intention to sue the BBC for compensatory damages as a result of their manipulation of his J6 speech. WATCH:

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President Trump speaks at length about inflation. He is absolutely correct on the 2021 Biden cause and effect.

For those who did not pay attention to the details at the time when we were researching and writing about it, including the warnings and preparations that we suggested everyone should take – HERE IS A REMINDER LINK!  <- That is what President Trump is trying to deal with.

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