I know this is Trump, so the answer is ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. But over the past two weeks his wrath has been aimed at Denmark, Colombia, and now Canada and Mexico—all of them among our staunchest allies. You could hardly pick a group of better friends to the US than these.
On a concrete basis, Denmark has agreed to increase its defense spending to 2%, meeting a Trump demand. Colombia has been accepting US deportation flights for years. Mexico has agreed to reinstate Trump's beloved Remain in Mexico policy. And Canada has been cooperating on the fentanyl front even though nobody thinks there's very much it can do. The United States simply doesn't have any big gripes against any of these countries.
Shouldn't Trump try to pick on at least a few countries that we don't actually like very much? Why the focus on longtime friends and allies?
Because America is great when we don't have to depend on friends.
Or, alternatively, we should swap our democratic friends for our autocratic enemies.
No mystery as why Trump loves countries the rest of us hate, and vice versa. Trump likes autocracies, loves viscous dictatorships, and dislikes democracies. Plus he doesn't really believe in friendships, only in transactional partnerships, and then only when he wins and his partner loses.
Those sticky dictatorships are the worst kind.
To complete this: He wants to be a dictator himself, and other dictators will help him in that, while democracies will oppose it. Therefore for him it is better if the US has only autocratic allies.
Who better to pick on at minimal risk? They're well-disposed to us generally and have plenty of reasons to need to mollify him. As opposed to, say, Putin, who isn't well-disposed and now has almost no reason to make nice with him, or even more Xi, who's important enough to us that he can afford to do us and trump real harm.
As a bully-boy who only wants to be able to say he "wins" whatever he's talking about, trump goes for the easy pickings and avoids the real risks. Same as how he's done everything he can to pre-rig elections and how he cheats on his golf scores. Creating and exploiting asymmetries over "opponents" is his game.
I recall a story from long ago about a man who went to school with Trump. He amiably recounted that Trump liked to beat him up. The reason: he was smaller than Trump.
The surprise of this story is that he actually did it himself. In his years as a politician he's talked a lot about smashing people's heads in and reveled in violent talk but hasn't been able to even fire anyone face to face, let alone hit them. Maybe he didn't have the cash then to get anybody else to do it?
Since the '80s, he's been saying that the rest of the world is ripping off the USA. Someone should ask him how the USA has survived 40 years of being ripped off while remaining the richest superpower on the planet.
Why do we keep asking questions we know the answers to?
Because he’s an asshole?
Because the drama hooks viewers and keeps them tuning in.
I would change that to: Because he's an asshole. (no question mark needed) LOL.
That, too. Altoid captured it nicely a few days ago - he doesn't mind being the heel (WWF).
Denmark has agreed to increase its defense spending to 2%, meeting a Trump demand. Colombia has been accepting US deportation flights for years. Mexico has agreed to reinstate Trump's beloved Remain in Mexico policy. And Canada has been cooperating on the fentanyl front...
I'm gonna go with (1) he knows none of these things, (2) it has got in his head somehow that there is some way to look DOMINANT! by picking a fight with them, and (3) he's chosen (not necessarily for any good reason, or indeed any reason at all) to do it now.
If I had to guess, I'd say Mexico's been on his list for a long time because ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS!! arguably won the election for him and everybody knows that all illegal immigrants are Mexican, and I wouldn't be surprised if he's still pissed at Trudeau for out-muscling him in that famous grip-and-grin. Colombia of course dared to defy him, and he's been told Greenland has lots of rare-earth metal deposits, which gets to the JY-na thing. But it could be something else, or nothing at all. The guy is getting close to the age at which his father DIED FROM ALZHEIMER DEMENTIA, the risk of which is heavily influenced by genetics.
In any case, he doesn't base his actions on the policy or interests of the United States, and it would be best not to suggest even implicitly that he does.
Not close at all. Trump is 78; his father died at 93. That's fifteen more years; he will expect twelve of them to be in the White House.
Parental longevity is only ONE thing to look at in Trumps family history
He has only one living sibling Elizabeth Trump Gnau. One brother died at age 42, another at 71. Maryanne Trump Barry lived until 86.
Donald is at the tail end of his life for sure and his diet, and lack of exercise are not indicative of a person who would typically live a long life.
Did you happen to catch the news conference yesterday when he (mis)spoke about the airline tragedy in Washington? The camera's showed him leaving. His gait and walk were unsteady and timid.
I will stand by my prediction that Trump dies in office......
".. he doesn't base his actions on the policy or interests of the United States .."
That is very important.
Too many are trying to understand his actions based implicitly on the assumption that he cares about US and American people.
I think only his cult thinks he has their interests at heart. Trump is for Trump.
(4) he listens to people who wish to destroy the US -- or at least eliminate it as a constraint and humiliate it as payback for historical grudges -- and who are experienced at manipulating fools
(5) these people know that severing the US. from its allies and sowing chaos is the easiest way to achieve this
(6) he doesn't give a flying f*ck about the US anyway
You have to think like a mob boss. The mob boss has his territory (the western allies). He is fine with other bosses having their territory (Putin, Xi). Generally the bosses don't f--- with each other because that is dangerous and can start a turf war. To protect his territory, and to keep his place at the top of the heap on his turf, he has to intimidate the people in his organization, the people on his turf. So leave Taiwan and the southeast Asia territory to Boss Xi, let Putin exploit and extort his territory in Ukraine/Eastern Europe. But he has to assert his undisputed authority in his territory, terrify his own foot soldiers, keep his own people fearful. This is how the mob boss thinks.
This^, plus 1) He’s always cheated, in school, at golf; and like all cheaters, he justifies his cheating by believing that everyone else cheats, too. As applied to international relations, he always assumes that other nations are trying to gain unfair advantages over us, so we better go after them hard. 2) He has a reality-tv mentality, as I mentioned in another comment, so he wants an endless series of confrontations and conflicts, from which he must emerge the winner — on tv of course.
I see J. Frank Parnell said much the same thing as I, more succinctly.
+1. It's all theater to hide the fact that he's an incompetant, unintelligent oaf with no redeeming qualities at all.
The video of him pushing his way to the front of the crowd exemplifies this to a T. He always has to be the center of attention while lacking any attributes to have earned it.
🎯
God I'm sick of having to post a +++ comment of some kind instead of clicking on a little thumbs up thingy. Anyway, +++++, thumbs up, good call, + ∞.
Oh, another thing to understand about Donald is that his worldview is that of the child he was growing up in a mansion in Forest Hills in the 1950s. That's what MAGA basically is - make America great again like it was when I was a child.
MAGA members all have the emotional maturity somewhere between a toddler and a teen.
When defending his across the board tariffs on Canada, I assume that his claim that 'the US has all the oil it needs' is an admission that the Keystone XL was 100% unnecessary.
Likewise, when he claims the US has been subsidizing Canada and Mexico through trade deficits, he's avoiding (by distraction) having to admit that his USMCA boosted the trade deficit.
As with anything he says, he's reacting to whatever's been dangled in front of his nose, or a semi-random stream of consciousness in the moment (in response to something that he suddenly remembered), decontextualized from all reality and past actions.
The Keystone XL was meant to move Canadian oil to ports on the Gulf of **Mexico** so that it could be loaded onto ships and exported. Very little of that oil would have ended up in the US. It was actually Phase 4 of the existing Keystone pipeline system that feeds oil to the Midwest and ends in Cushing OK.
That may be so, but Republicans were using the argument that the oil would have allowed the US to stop importing Russian oil (at the start of the Ukraine war) and that the pipeline would have reduced prices at the pump.
I hope you're sitting down when you read this. They were lying.
He's pure myth. There's nothing genuine about him besides his extreme narcissism.
Oh Kevin, that 2% target is so first term.
if they were wise they would ramp way higher, the US is spiraling out of control.
Two or three percent is plenty; the GDP of the European Union is equal to that of the US, and ten times that of Russia.
The problem is that they don't have the long-range missile tech that they need. If they actually raised enough money and enlisted enough soliders and sailors to defend themselves, Putin would tell Trump not to sell them advanced weaponry, and he'd comply.
If the EU were to have to fight off a Russian invasion of one of its members, the hard part is preventing a nuclear exchange, so I don’t think long-range missiles are at issue. The imperative would be to crush a land force before it could gain significant ground — to stop them at or near the border. I would spend heavily on stand-off, fire-and-forget and limited-autonomous weapons, any and every technology which puts the fewest personnel at risk. That negates the Russian advantage of ‘meat wave’ attacks. To maintain the advantage, sanctions against Russia must continue, and stifle its acquisition of the technologies that enable the ‘automated battlefield’. It can be done — Taiwan is the choke point for the most advanced chips, and Netherlands for the tools that make them.
And they need other energy source(s) other than Russian fuels - and protect those. Putin and the US know that's a point of weakness.
Definitely. I don’t think they want to ever again be dependent on Russia for energy. They are already accelerating their transition to renewables.
"Meat wave" attacks against an enemy with roughly triple your population is a losing proposition. That's why Ukraine doesn't use that tactic against an enemy with roughly triple its population.
The EU's weapons technology is entirely equal to the US's. The EU has no need at all for advanced US weaponry.
Shouldn't Trump try to pick on at least a few countries that we don't actually like very much?
The countries we don't like very much are generally dangerous. That's a big part of the reason we don't like them. Trump, being a bully, doesn't pick on them. He picks on the weak.
Hey jasper- how do you get Italics in your posts?
Type
<i> Text in italics</i>
to get
Text in italics
It is just standard html.
thanks
Trump loves to stomp on little guys but doesn't understand the world enough to deal with a powerful adversary. Simply put, he folds when confronted by a person who projects power (real or imagined), such as when he wimped out during his debate with Kamala and in his dealings with Putin.
He fits the profile of a psychopath and in his rantings today he showed his intellectual deficit, emotional instability and his likely early dementia. This is a dangerous combination, particularly if his associates don't call him on his ridiculousness.
Because America's allies are less likely to pay outright bribes to him?
With regard to Denmark, I think he really does want them to cede Greenland to him. Why? It’s my understand that Mr. Spock attempted a mind meld with Trump and since then has been curled up in a corner shivering and crying. So I won’t even attempt to try to figure out why he wants Greenland.
With regard to Canada they weren’t receptive to his idea of it being a state. He’ll teach them a lesson they won’t forget.
With regard to Mexico, this is how “they” (I know) will pay for the wall.
With regard to Columbia he’ll teach them a lesson for defying him for even a few hours.
Greenland: Because his role models Putin and Xi are intent on territorial expansion? And Greenland is way bigger than the Donbas and Taiwan.
"So I won’t even attempt to try to figure out why he wants Greenland."
This one, at least, we don't have to try to figure out, because it was documented in real time. Back in Trump's first term, some cosmetics billionaire (Ronald Lauder) back in 2019 suggested to Trump that he should buy Greenland, and Trump (being an impressionable idiot) thought that if two rich guys think it's a good idea, the Danes would have to agree! Only they didn't, and Trump got angry that they (politely) blew him off, canceled a Danish diplomatic visit in a huff, and has nursed it as a greivance ever since.
Though it's entirely possible that Trump himself doesn't remember this sequence of events, that's what's going on.
(Plus, it's very unlikely that Trump understands what a mercator projection is, or could listen to and comprehend anybody trying to explain it to him, and so assumes that Greenland is absolutely colossal).
Is this some sort of decentralized, demented USxit? I know a lot of infrastructure still exists, but the scalpel is now a cleaver, maybe soon it'll be a machete?
Trump reminds me of Chaplin's Great Dictator romping with a balloon that looks like the world.
Supposing Trump cares about the national interest is a category error.
Because they don't pay as well...
Because America's friends don't kick back. It's as simple as that. Donald Trump is a craven coward who ALWAYS punches down.
+1
All I know is low-information voters and more independent/less partisan are going to be wondering why we're getting into conflicts with our two neighbors, especially Canada, and why we're talking about buying Greenland instead of getting high prices under control.
Or keeping airplanes from falling out of the sky.
I know it's only Week 2 of the Trump presidency, but people really need to be demanding that Trump do his fucking job and stop dicking around getting into fights with Colombia and Denmark, because otherwise the important work of the federal government is going to lapse and we'll see more disasters.
People ought to be demanding why Trump and Pete Hegseth let a military helicopter fly training maneuvers in the dark in the flightpath of landing planes at one of the busier airports on the whole atlantic seaboard.
Low information voters are, by definition, going to have no idea that Trump is getting into conflicts with Canada and Greenland.
This is widely reported, not just on the news but social media and late night comedy (which most people actually hear on social media), so no inside politics or hardcore news watcher required, and "by definition" makes no sense in the context of "low information voter", there is no standard definition and "low" can mean many things to many different people.
"Low information" =/= "zero information".
It is strange. Trump really seems to think that having allies is a weakness because the allies are not under our control. That he is trying to intimidate our friends should be no surprise I guess if you see his need to humiliate his allies in the Senate and elsewhere. The more interesting question is why he doesn't seem to see the same need to do power plays with our enemies. Or maybe he thinks he is when he threatens Hamas. It could just be that his being buffoonish towards our enemies is not news, but his being buffoonish towards are friends still is.
The Manchurian Candidate explanation usually explains Trumps modus operandi.
I know it's become unfashionable, but its always worked quite well.
America doesn’t have friends anymore. It (trump) has interests. And the most charitable description of those interests is “corruption”. You cannot be friends with a psychopath.
Trump is nothing if not a bully. Bullies are weak and cowardly. He won't start a confrontation with a country like Russia or China.
just build a Trump Hotel- Confrontation cancelled
The answer is obvious. He is a Russian asset and his goal is to weaken our alliances to Russia's advantage.
The fact that he is completely unaware of this fact is pathetic.
The fact that he is completely unaware of this fact is pathetic
Why should he care? He got elected- twice
He chooses countries that are already cooperating on the things he's complaining about but who knows about these things. So, he can point to all of the things you sited, which, again, were already happening, and claim the country backed down, acceded to his demands and Trump claims a massive victory and that is how Fox News and much of the rest of the media reports it. I mean who the hell knew how many deportation flights Colombia was already accepting per month? Approximately no one.
OK, but Kevin showed us the data, which was just as accessible to any journalist. If any such still exist, or are allowed to investigate, or publish factual information.
It's not bullying when you stand up to bad behavior.
If Denmark, Canada, Mexico, and Columbia would collectively tell America to Fuck Off, the world would be a better place.
While I agree with much of what was written above in re how Trump's character influences his decisions, one very significant attribute has been left out: cowardice. To the extent that there is blowback from any actions taken against allies, particularly the perceived weaker ones, Trump can quickly walk them back with little to no consequences at home and a friendly power willing to let sleeping dogs lie. But a hostile -- read, non-allied -- country? While Trump may still be able to execute a safe walkback at home, the countries in the second block will most assuredly not allow sleeping dogs to lie.
The piece of shite who loves to beat down on the weaker gets weak in the knees just thinking about having to take a punch himself.
Jane, get me off of this crazy thing!!!
He's a bully, and it's safe.
Those "longtime friends and allies" aren't friends any more. Canada has always had a strong strain of anti-Americanism, for various historical reasons (the United Empire Loyalists viewed Americans as rebels and traitors to King George III,; then the US invaded Upper Canada in the War of 1812; then threatened to invade again immediately after the Civil War), plus ongoing American arrogance. Until Trump came along, that anti-Americanism was fading, but now it's back stronger than ever. Mexico has likewise always had a strong strain of anti-Americanism for even better reasons than Canada, and it too was fading but is now back stronger than ever.
I don't think that Trump has grasped that the American economy is so intertwined with Canada's and Mexico's that anything that hurts Canada or Mexico will also hurt the US, and that's assuming that Canada and/or Mexico aren't trying to hurt the US. If those countries take retaliatory measures, they can HURT the US (at considerable cost to themselves, but they may view the cost as worth it).
"I don't think that Trump has grasped that the American economy is so intertwined with Canada's and Mexico's that anything that hurts Canada or Mexico will also hurt the US.."
Another example of somebody analyzing Trump based on the asumption that he cares about what good for the US.
That is idiotic. He obviously doesn't care at all whether it hurts the US or not.
Congress, on the other hand, does care about what's good for the US, or at least each Congressperson cares about what's good for their district. If Trump keeps screwing things up at the rate he's going, he's going to lose even the most MAGAtty Congresspeople, and collectively they have the power to hurt him.
Canucky agrees. I am a centre-right Canadian who admires USA - the constitution, the leadership, the optimism. I have a lot of American friends and family. For most of my life I have felt we were on the same side. I worried about the Chinese, the Russians (USSR) coming after "us". I am now at the point where I feel like we should say "okay - give us 100% tariffs - why not 200%? We will open our economy to trade and be friends with anyone - free access to the Canadian market for EU, Asia, China. If Donny wants to close our car plants, BYD might want to come in. Maybe a Chinese naval facility in northern B.C."
People will put up with a lot of shit from their enemies, and indifference from those we feel indifferent to. But when someone you thought was a friend attacks you, you feel betrayed. Betrayal changes people. I know my friends in the US feel even more alarmed than I am right now - they are the ones who are watching their country disappear in a cloud of pardoning murderous criminals, destroying guardrails, ICE agents at their kids' schools, gutting the federal public service, firing honest people for doing their jobs, removing security protection from public servants because they criticized Mr Maralago, re-opening Guantanamo Bay... the list goes on and on.
Canadians are pretty calm people, and obviously we cannot threaten the US economically or militarily, but I can sense that people here are getting really fed up (and most of the other allies as well). If we here in Canada are going to experience a lot of pain to restructure our economy, re-order supply chains, lose jobs, watch our currency tank - we may just say let's just bite the bullet and change everything. Start again, blank slate.
After all you can't just keep continue sucking up to a "friend", bend to their ridiculous demands (stop Fentanyl shipments from Canada?) to maintain the peace. Then when you think you have satisfied and proved your loyalty and bought some peace (Trump's own renegotiated NAFTA) the bully can just wake up again tomorrow in a bad mood and demand another pound of flesh.
There are lots of people up here who are not proud of our government the past ten years - they have been lax about immigration and law enforcement, smugly and preachingly progressive on the international stage, and we know we have not been carrying our share of the defence burden. There are plenty of people up here who could agree with the general direction of travel in the US - more accountability, more security, more order, more respect for merit, less tolerance for needless regulation. But when you have a friend/partner led by a guy who can wake up tomorrow in a bad mood and just take another swipe at you, how can you possibly trust them as any kind of partner? And if nice, loyal, centrist, easy going Canadians feel this way...
Maybe USA feels it needs no friends (I guess Donald has never had any), but it will be a damn lonely world for you all. Please - for the rest of us in this world - Make America Great Again - the way it really used to be - loyal, fair, open-minded, unselfish(ish). That is all your friends want.