This month, President Donald J. Trump — the great innovator, the great instigator, above all the great disrupter — conjured up a new tool of tumult: Take one highly incendiary issue and employ it as a battering ram to win concessions on an even more contentious matter.
By using tariffs — on an escalating schedule that would have begun at 5 percent and threatened to grow to 25 percent — as a tool to pressure Mexico to reduce immigration at the southern border, Trump did what no American chief executive has ever done.
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