The Trump-Colombia Crisis That Trump Deliberately Created and Then “Fixed,” Explained in One Paragraph
Media just fell for the oldest trick in the old brigand Trump's career-criminal playbook: the rope-a-dope. The fact that it did so confirms that it has learned nothing about how to deal with the man.
To receive free, unrestricted access to this publication’s 475+ exclusive reports for seven days, just click the red “free trial offer” button below. You can cancel your subscription at any time.
The Fake Trump-Colombia “Tariff War” in One Paragraph
Donald Trump has told American voters that he aims to slash the federal budget via Elon Musk’s DOGE. Of course the opposite—as is typical for Trump—is true, which is why he exploded the budget during his first term and was begging his party to raise the debt ceiling before his second term even began. The biggest budget-destroyer in President Trump’s policy agenda is his mass-deportation scheme, which polls show Americans dislike intensely and which Republicans first told voters would cost $3 billion when it will actually (they now admit) cost $86 billion. One reason the plan costs so much is that Trump has taken every chance he can to spend more money on it if doing so gives him a better story for nightly news coverage. So, for instance, it costs three times as much money to deport someone via a military flight than a civilian charter flight, which is why Democratic presidents Joe Biden and Barack Obama—who in fact both deported more people than Trump did in his supposed tough-on-immigration first term—used civilian rather than military flights. They wanted to save taxpayers money. But Donald Trump doesn’t care about taxpayers and never has; he cares only about his own image, and that’s been his story since he was a teenager. The problem with Trump using wildly expensive USAF flights for deportation purposes isn’t just that it’s outrageously expensive, however. It’s also that other countries have entirely understandable domestic laws about allowing foreign military aircraft in their airspace. So Colombia and other countries in South America have been balking at Trump’s military flights because they’re a pretty flagrant and grotesque sign of disrespect—the opposite of what diplomacy and even geopolitics writ large are supposed to be about. The kicker? President Trump knows this, and was almost certainly hoping a military flight would be turned away due solely to the fact of it being a military flight. He was trolling Colombia as a means to get some misleading but engaging news coverage here in America (something along the lines of, “Donald Trump gets tough on South American leader who’s balking at the president’s tough-on-immigration policies!”) and it worked; Colombia bit. So Trump issued some threats, and Colombia backed down, and the whole thing was entirely artificial and—guess what!—all that matters in any of this is that American taxpayers are paying 300% more for Trump’s immigration plan than they should. Why? Because for all that his political party will keep lying to voters and say they do, neither it nor he give a single damn about fiscal responsibility.
So why isn’t major media explaining any of this to American voters? Why must Proof do it, instead?
Fascinating. I wondered about the respective costs. You must be right then; only in order to provoke Columbian authorities' fear and pride, and to create a flex of his own borrowed, bone spur militarism would he prefer to use those planes.
Trump was flagrantly rude and insulting about the deported people, and Columbia said the equivalent of "we ask very little of you - only that you demonstrate to the world that you consider people of our nationality deserving of the minimum human respect" and Trump said "no, and since I am a huge bully suddenly endowed with a military and economic might I did nothing to create, I will smash you until you eat my coarse display of alpha dogging it over a much smaller country and economy". It was a shameful display of Trump making The Ugly American a world image again, and anyone who feels pride instead of shame at his needy posturing lacks any mature understanding.
More focus should be given to Colombian president Petro’s reason for his push back on receiving the planes (whose arrival he had initially approved.)
His reversal called attention to the indignity and unecessary humiliation of keeping these individuals shackled during those flights and would be such on display as they were to deplane.
Upon the threat of sanctions, president Petro immediately threatened back with sanctions on US imports to Colombia.
And when the “crisis” had blown over, Petro made the Colombian Presidential airplane available for repatriating such expelled citizens, where they would be handled with respect.
(Illustrates one of several strands of his motto “Colombia Potencia Mundial de la Vida”, respect for all forms of life - in this case human beings. Recall his efforts for the Amazon, etc)