Didn't the USA already have everything President Trump claimed to have struck a deal
Executive summary
The United States did not “already have everything” that President Trump claimed to have secured in the new North American deal; the USMCA largely preserved NAFTA’s duty‑free architecture while adding targeted changes — some modest and technical, some potentially meaningful for autos, labor enforcement, digital trade and dairy — producing a mixture of continuity and incremental reform CanadaAgreement" target="blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">[1] [2] [3]. Advocates hail those changes as wins for U.S. workers and farmers, while analysts and labor economists describe many provisions as cosmetic or limited in economic effect, so whether the U.S. “already had everything” depends on which line items one counts as decisive [2] [1] [4].
1. What stayed the same: duty‑free North American trade and broad continuity
The USMCA preserved NAFTA’s core duty‑free framework and the integrated North American market, so on the basics of tariff elimination and cross‑border supply chains the region remained largely as it was under NAFTA — meaning the U.S. didn’t gain a wholly new baseline of market access that it lacked before [1] [2] [5]. Multiple observers note that the deal “is based substantially on NAFTA” and keeps the same foundational structure even as it modernizes certain chapters, underscoring that many of the treaty’s economic foundations were carried forward rather than reinvented [1] [6].
2. What changed: targeted rules that mattered to specific industries
Where USMCA diverged from NAFTA were discrete, measurable rules: notably a higher automotive regional‑content threshold (75% up from 62.5%) and wage‑linked content requirements intended to shift some production incentives, new digital trade and IP provisions, greater U.S. dairy access to Canada, and procedural updates like a sunset/review mechanism [1] [3] [7] [8]. These were not wholesale rewrites but they were material for sectors such as autos, dairy and pharmaceuticals; in other words the U.S. gained some new leverage and protections that it did not have under NAFTA [3] [7].
3. The politics: claims of a big win versus critiques of cosmetic change
The Trump administration framed the USMCA as a fulfillment of campaign promises to “fix” NAFTA and keep jobs in America, and USTR called the agreement a “mutually beneficial win” for workers and businesses [2]. By contrast, several analysts — and trade scholars cited in neutral sources — argue that many changes were modest and the agreement was “very similar” to NAFTA with only limited macroeconomic impact, meaning rhetorical claims of a seismic triumph over prior policy were overstated [1] [6] [4].
4. Enforcement and dispute mechanisms: incremental but consequential shifts
USMCA introduced procedural tools absent or weaker in NAFTA — for example “rapid response” labor panels and updated dispute mechanisms — which advocates argue make labor provisions enforceable in a way NAFTA did not, but critics point out that enforcement depends on political will and implementation detail, so the practical difference may be gradual rather than immediate [5] [9] [3]. These institutional tweaks matter for targeted enforcement, even if they fall short of revolutionizing North American trade governance overnight [9].
5. Conclusion: not everything was new, but not everything was already present
The simplest answer: the United States did not literally “already have everything” Trump touted — USMCA codified specific new rules and enforcement tools that were not in NAFTA — but it also did not create an entirely new economic regime; much of NAFTA’s structure remained intact and many changes were incremental, leaving reasonable disagreement about how large a “win” the deal constituted [1] [3] [2]. Which narrative one accepts depends on whether incremental, sector‑specific gains count as the transformative victory the political rhetoric promised or as modest modernization of an existing framework [4] [6].