"I was all set to terminate": Inside Trump’s sudden shift on NAFTA

But Mexico — which was already on edge following Trump’s brief flirtation with attaching border-wall funding to a must-pass, short-term spending bill — quickly leapt to action. Two cabinet-level officials in Mexico reached out to their U.S. counterparts to deliver a blunt message: If Trump officially announced the U.S. intention to withdraw from NAFTA, Mexico would not return to the negotiating table.

Mexico would not, the officials warned, negotiate with “a gun to its head.”…

In the Oval Office interview, however, Trump repeatedly insisted that he was ready to pull out of NAFTA. At one point, he turned to Kushner, who was standing near his desk, and asked, “Was I ready to terminate NAFTA?”

“Yeah,” Kushner said, before explaining the case he made to the president: “I said, ‘Look, there’s plusses and minuses to doing it,’ and either way he would have ended up in a good place.”