Politics and Money

[Elroy Jetson]

What’s next for Trump after G7: A supervillain alliance with Kim Jong-un, Xi Jinping and Putin?

Trump may actually consider replacing the trans-Atlantic alliance with a new anti-democratic team of despots



Trump was the only G7 member to show up late to a breakfast roundtable on gender equality. During an especially erratic press conference, he stood on foreign soil and criticized the American press while also blaming Russia’s invasion of Crimea on Barack Obama. He ultimately refused to sign the G7 communiqué and called upon the other leaders to reinstate Russia into the group, emphasizing how badly compromised by the Kremlin he appears to be. Trump rated the success of the summit as a “10.” Because that’s just what he does.

But Trump's most egregious move was to continue his laughable-if-it-wasn’t-so-stupid attack against Canada and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.

After bugging out of the summit early so he could meet with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un in Singapore, leaving the younger, better-looking and more capable North American leader behind, Trump referred to Trudeau as “meek and mild” and “very dishonest & weak.”

Trump is treating the prime minister of our closest neighbor and ally -- an ally that took in hundreds of grounded airliners on 9/11 and has invariably stood with us in wartime -- as if he’s our enemy, while jetting off to treat one of our most dangerous enemies like an ally. Don’t believe me? Peter Navarro, one of Trump’s top economic advisers, said “there’s a special place in hell” for Trudeau. Not a word about Kim.

Amid his blame-Canada tweetstorm, Trump claimed that U.S. trade tariffs “are in response to of 270% on dairy!” Trump doesn’t know this because he probably hasn’t read the Trans-Pacific Partnership deal, but that treaty addressed and resolved the Canadian dairy issue, in part by augmenting U.S. dairy exports to Canada. But, yeah, Trump canceled our participation in the pact. Oops. Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations, nored that U.S.-Canadian trade is more or less balanced, and that dairy represents a minuscule percentage of that trade.

Indeed, the White House’s own trade representative notes: “U.S. goods and services trade with Canada totaled an estimated $673.9 billion in 2017. Exports were $341.2 billion; imports were $332.8 billion.

The U.S. goods and services trade surplus with Canada was $8.4 billion in 2017.” So Trump is flat-out lying -- what a shock.

All told, we can safely assume that Trump’s base believes Trudeau is an enemy of the “America first” agenda, even though Trump’s grievances about Canada are almost entirely made up. Again, we’re talking about Canada. We’re also talking about an American president with a brainwashed, cult-like following, who has abandoned traditional governing in lieu of trolling and disruption. As long as the Red Hats keep chanting, Trump will keep dishing out the madness.

So where the hell do we go from here?

What’s become abundantly clear is that Trump’s well-documented fascination with overseas despots and dictators is emerging as a prime animator of his erratic, greenhorn foreign policy agenda. Trump appears to be actively penalizing and ostracizing our allies while tripping over his own tiny feet to appease our most brutal adversaries.

We’ve already observed his bootlicking of Vladimir Putin, and this week we can expect to see plenty of thumbs-up photo ops with Kim Jong-un, who is currently starving his people and has assassinated members of his own family using, shall we say, unconventional execution methods. This is who Trump bailed out on the G7 for. It’d be entirely in character for Trump to make up for the lost alliances by cutting deals with Putin, President Xi Jinping of China, Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey, Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines and others -- forming a sort of real-world Legion of Doom, with Trump as the costumed supervillain at the head of the table.