Deal or no deal

Zack and Alex are joined by a special guest — Weeds host Dara Lind — to discuss the way President Trump makes deals with foreign countries. They break down the big news of the week on nuclear negotiations with North Korea and NAFTA talks with Mexico and Canada, and point to a common thread: Trump announces an agreement that doesn’t actually solve the problem it’s supposed to, and might not even work, forcing his aides to scramble and clean up the mess. Zack channels Jenn while she’s on vacation, Dara explains NAFTA by referencing Avril Lavigne, and Alex explains that 2 and 3 are different numbers. References! We dig into Alex’s reporting this episode. Here’s his full piece on the promises made at the North Korea summit in Singapore. And here are the four points Alex also mentioned. The whole team discussed this piece out of Tokyo Business Today. Dara’s been on Worldly since, but here’s the episode she mentioned where they talk about the rise of Trump’s war cabinet: Dara gave us a quick primer on NAFTA, but if you’d like to go into more depth, Zack recommends this piece. Alex started to dig into some of the details about the new NAFTA negotiations. You can read more about those here. As Dara mentioned, the NAFTA “deadline” of Friday is set by an artificial concern: The three countries want to ink a deal with the current president of Mexico, Enrique Peña Nieto, before he leaves office December 1. More on the Canadian and US all-night negotiations that Dara mentioned. Alex and Dara brought up Trump’s beef with Canadian dairy. Zack described this Cabinet meeting, and we heard Jeff Sessions speak. Dara reminded us that Trump is extremely over Sessions, because he doesn’t think Sessions’s praise is pleasing enough to the ear (apparently the AG “talks like he has marbles in his mouth”). We quoted the final Trump-Clinton debate twice. Here’s a full annotated transcript of that debate. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices