Last week, Trump said the work was just about done to designate Mexican cartels as terrorists.
When the announcement was made, Mexican leadership immediately balked and demanded to speak with U.S. representatives to discuss this before it became official.
At the time it was reported that nothing was set in stone, but the move was positively received by Trump’s base and would have come off as a very strong move on the part of Trump.
Not the Time
This is something that both Bush and Obama considered doing when they were both in office, but both of them decided against it.
Trump, at least for the time being, is now in that class as well.
On Friday, Trump stated, “We will temporarily hold off this designation and step up our joint efforts to deal decisively with these vicious and ever-growing organizations!”
The issue here is not really that Trump did not go through with the designation.
The problem is that he promoted it, then backed out of pulling the trigger on this.
Bad Optics
This makes Trump look bad on several different levels.
First, the announcement had been made right after nine Americans had been slaughtered by the cartel, including several children, at their Mexican base camp.
Because Trump is now not moving forward, for whatever reason, he is being made out to have just made the promise to grab some headlines related to a horrific tragedy.
The second is that the media will hit him for not following through on something again, which they love to do.
Trump should have kept this one under his hat until he had made a final decision.
Think about how different this would have been perceived if Trump had just this week made the announcement the paperwork was done and our government is now working with Mexico to bring down the cartels but if that is not successful, we are ready to designate them as a terrorist organization, which would then make swift action and targeting their finances much easier.
In essence, it is the same thing Trump did only with a different approach and much better optics.
Now, if the cartel does another heinous attack, the blame for it will be placed on Trump by the media, all of which could have been avoided if he just did not jump the gun with his initial announcement.
Source: Breitbart News
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