This is all a matter of perspective. Did he achieve anything meaningful? Of course not. Did he get Mexico to respond to an action that he did? Yes. Can he use the response (doesn’t matter what it is) to say his action is working? Yes. Again he doesn’t care about the response, Trump cares about optics.
Do the same thing with Canada. Trump impressed an action (the tariffs) that caused a response (Canada to implement their own tariffs). Can we apply the same logic to the opposite response? Did Canada do something(again doesn’t matter what) to an action trump did? Yes they did. Trump can now spin it and say look it’s working.
Of course, it’s working at doing something. Eroding our relationships with our neighbors. But he can spin it to his base anyway he wants because he can claim they did “it” (again the it is just the response, doesn’t matter what response) because of an action he took (imposed the tariffs).
His base is only looking at what Trump says not what was done. So if Trump claims it was successful, they believe it.
No, I guess I should have explored that option as well. The lack of response is still a response. So Trump can still claim to his base" see it’s working" and claim it as a win.
I know it’s difficult to imagine that in stakes so large, countries economies (hell the world economy) can be manipulated in such a way that no matter what factually and verifiability happens, it can be spun in a way to say it’s a win and there’s a group of people that take it at its face and says “yay! Keep going!”
Other countries are in a damned if you, damned if you don’t situation. As are the rest of the United States citizens that don’t support these actions (or can’t see them because they are believing the president of the US when he says “we’re winning”). The only thing we can do at this point is try to wake up trump supporters and hope that is done in time to affect change.
If not, we are at the mercy of whatever he does. Complaining about it and pointing out how obvious it is, does nothing. Go talk to some people that support him. Families that voted him in and have illegal immigrants in their family are getting a hard dose of that wake up call in their own. But until we get so many people that can’t be ignored, nothing will happen. It will become similar to Russia where the state controls the media and everything is a “win”, even invading acountry that did nothing to provoke invasion.