Trump won't shut up about his secret deal with Mexico that Mexico says doesn't exist

Trump’s playbook for tricking Americans into thinking he’s actually accomplished things in the White House is getting really old and really embarrassing.

It goes something like this: Home in on a crisis — usually one that appeals to his base’s racist instincts. Announce a solution to said crisis that only makes the problem worse. Back yourself into a corner by doubling down on the terrible solution. Lie about finding a solution to avoid the terrible solution initially proposed and hope the public is dumb enough to believe it.

Such is the case with Trump’s threats of imposing tariffs on Mexico.

Trump raised the specter of placing tariffs on imported goods from Mexico, the United States’ second largest trading partner, as a solution to the Central American migrant crisis. For reasons hard to understand, Trump thinks imposing a tax on American businesses and consumers will somehow get Mexico to stop the flow of the migrants into the U.S.

When members of Congress on both sides of the aisle, along with economic experts, all said that the tariffs would only hurt the American economy, Trump was forced to find a way out of making good on his threats.

He did so by claiming that an agreement made with Mexico months ago on immigration was new. And when he got caught in that lie, he made up another lie, falsely claiming there is actually a secret part of the deal that no one knows about.

“Biggest part of deal with Mexico has not yet been revealed!” Trump tweeted on Tuesday morning, part of a thread of tweets he sent while watching his favorite Pro-Trump morning show “Fox & Friends.”

Of course, Mexico is flatly denying there is any secret provision of an immigration agreement.

“They wanted something else totally different … to be signed,” Mexico’s foreign secretary Marcelo Ebrard said Monday. “But that is what there is here. There is no other thing beyond what I have just explained.”