Trump’s unhinged proposal to take Gaza, “relocate” more than a million starving people to an unspecified locale, and turn their bombed homes into a resort for the wealthy didn’t go over well. Following his threats to Colombia, Panama, Mexico, Canada, Denmark, and Greenland, the civilized world is aghast at the madman at the helm, and has learned a new lesson: that America betrays her allies. It is a dangerous lesson from which the US may never recover.
Anti-American forces, on the other hand, are giddy.
Russia and China can stop infiltrating our social media with bots, Trump is doing their work for them. Putin has long known that Trump and Musk would destroy the U.S. government from within while abandoning our allies, and he is elated to watch his hopes materialize. China’s Xi takes a more economically calculated approach but likes what he sees. Even Islamist militants will thank Trump for breathing new life into their Great Satan propaganda.
Trump follows a consistent playbook
No one knows how seriously to take Trump’s insanity. It could all be a non-stop ruse to distract from his robbing the treasury as Musk dismantles it.
Last week’s outrage-du-jour, Trump’s tariff drama, was merely put on hold, which means we have to watch Trump cosplay as a “strong negotiator” all over again in just 30 days.
Trump craves attention like an addict craves opioids, so he manufactures drama on a closed loop feed. To his base, the only audience he cares about, Trump’s theater looks like governance. At least the playbook is consistent: 1. Declare an emergency 2. Blame someone. 3. Coerce the blamed to do or say something, anything, even if it’s the same thing they’ve said or done for years, or will worsen the problem. 4. Declare victory, no less impressive for being hollow. 5. Watch Fox and the oligarch-owned media fawn.
... [Even] The Wall Street Journal editorial board ... described Trump’s sloppy, across-the-board tariffs on Canada and Mexico as “The dumbest trade war in history.” They might have added, “for no legitimate reason.”
Trump’s tariff theatrics created chaos and uncertainty for two of our most important allies and trading partners. Stepping back from the brink, Trump claimed both countries made major concessions, no doubt calling him ‘Sir’ in the process, and agreed to delay the tariffs. Fox News fawned on cue, end of scene, on to the next act.
But ... those concessions [were a farce]..
The takeaway from the whole fiasco is that our neighbors’ leaders are smarter and more mature than ours is, and not just because they played Trump’s ego with token concessions. They also responded to Trump’s Neanderthalic hammer attack with a surgeon’s scalpel.
...
Sabrina Haake is a 25 year litigator specializing in 1st and 14th Amendment defense. Her columns appear in the Chicago Tribune, Salon, Raw Story, Out South Florida, Chicago Windy City Times.
