The president controls the border and could certainly scuttle the deal if he wanted to expend the political capital. But everyone in the US and Canada knows that he won’t do it. Just the way everyone knew that he wouldn’t
yank every Canadian-made Bombardier plane out of the sky two weeks ago.
It’s more than the general acknowledgement that TACO Trump will always chicken out. He no longer has the bandwidth — mental or political — to enforce his own edicts. His popularity is in free fall, Democrats are massively over-performing in every off-year race, and, while he can certainly punish Republicans who fail to parrot his increasingly unhinged narratives, he can’t make them commit political suicide.
Trump
can’t shut down the bridge because it will blow back on Republican candidates in Michigan. He
can’t ground Bombardier planes when the company employs thousand of workers in Dallas, Tucson, Hartford, Wichita, and Opa-locka. And he
can’t impose an erratic scheme of tariffs that causes the price of every consumer good in America to go through the roof as they head to the polls.