With his threatened Mexican tariffs now on the backburner, President Donald Trump was looking to claim victory even as some of his Democratic challengers for the White House criticised him for overselling a deal that mostly ramps up existing efforts.

“However,” he added, “if for some unknown reason” that doesn’t happen, “we can always go back to our previous, very profitable, position of Tariffs.” Business leaders and many Republicans had urged Trump against the tariffs, warning they would drive up consumer prices, hinder the economy and compromise the ratification of an updated North American trade deal.

Trump defended the agreement reached by US and Mexican negotiators to head off the 5 per cent tax on all Mexican goods that Trump had threatened to impose Monday as he tried to pressure the country to do more to stem the flow of Central American migrants across the US southern border. But he also dangled the prospect Sunday of renewing his threat if the US ally doesn’t cooperate to his liking.

“There is now going to be great cooperation between Mexico & the USA, something that didn’t exist for decades,” Trump tweeted before spending a second day at his Virginia golf course.

The tweets came amid questions about just how much of the deal announced with great fanfare Friday was really new. It included a commitment from Mexico, for instance, to deploy its new National Guard to the country’s southern border with Guatemala. Mexico, however, had already intended to do that before Trump’s latest threat and had made that clear to US officials. Mexican officials have described their commitment as an accelerated deployment.

The US also hailed Mexico’s agreement to embrace the expansion of a program implemented earlier this year under which some asylum-seekers are returned to Mexico as they wait out their cases. But US officials had already been working to expand the program, which has already led to the return of about 10,000 to Mexico, without Mexico’s public embrace.

‘‘They might have accelerated the time table, but by and large the president achieved nothing except to jeopardise the most important trading relationship that the United States of America has.” Another 2020 candidate, Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, chastised Trump for using tariffs as a threat and operating a “trade policy based on tweets.” “I think what the world is tired of and what I am tired of is a president who consistently goes to war, verbal war with our allies, whether it is Mexico, whether it is Canada,” he said.

“This is the first time we’ve heard anything like this kind of number of law enforcement being deployed in Mexico to address migration, not just at the southern border but also on the transportation routes to the northern border and in coordinated patrols in key areas along our southwest border,” he said, adding that “people can disagree with the tactics” but that “Mexico came to the table with real proposals” that will be effective, if implemented.