Which is what ya get with a Real Estate Guy from New York City as President TWICE…..
It’s about the ‘Long Green’ for America and of course?
Himself….
President Donald Trump ran for office promising to put America First. He has governed with an eye toward getting America paid.
In Trump’s transactional view of the world, the US is more like an interested party in a business deal than a beacon of capitalism and democracy. Efforts to extract tolls, impose tariffs or take ownership of resources in foreign countries, both allies and opponents, have been a notable focus of foreign policy in Trump 2.0. in which the president has also cast his expansionist vision to Greenland, Canada and the Panama Canal.
These things don’t usually work out according to plan, as the world learned during Trump’s first term when Mexico did not pay for a border wall like he repeatedly vowed it would. But the military might and economic heft of the United States are as ever, in Trump’s view, assets to be exploited. In recent months:
► He suggested — and then abandoned — a 20% toll for US protection of cargo passing through the Strait of Hormuz.
► He took over the sale of Venezuela’s oil by propping up what remains of the antidemocratic regime he decapitated and icing out the democratic opposition.
► He held up opening of a new bridge to Detroit, trying to squeeze something more out of Canada even though Canada paid to build the bridge.
“Based on highly productive conversations with Middle East leadership, I have decided to replace the 20% United States Reimbursement Fee with Trade and Investment Deals that the various Gulf States will be making into the United States,” Trump wrote in a social media post Tuesday, one day after first proposing the toll idea.
The underlying idea Trump may be trying to convey is that the US will be getting something in exchange for this foreign entanglement he started and has so far been unable to end.…
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Trump did not expand on what sort of investment Gulf nations will put into the US now that he has abandoned the toll idea, but he has repeatedly claimed that he has secured funding from foreign countries to be invested in the US. He frequently cites the enormous figure of $19 trillion in foreign investment that he has secured.
CNN’s Daniel Dale has tried and failed to find anything close to that level of foreign investment in the US during Trump’s term. But Trump continues to make the fictitious claim with regularity….
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Current problem: How to repay illegal tariffs
The backbone of Trump’s trade and economic policy was to impose tariffs on imports. These are effectively taxes paid on imported goods. While economists generally argue that it is American consumers who ultimately pay for tariffs in the form of higher prices, Trump has argued it is foreign countries that pay them.
In any event, the US government is currently in the process of paying back tariffs the Supreme Court ruled this year it should not have collected. In June, for instance, the US repaid more than $49 billion. Trump has said he will look for new ways to impose taxes on imports. Meanwhile, lawsuits from businesses and individuals to reclaim illegal tariffs are proliferating.
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NATO
Trump’s main gripe with NATO has been his argument — which has some basis — that European countries were not paying enough. Trump phrases the complaint as if the countries should be paying the US, when in fact NATO countries are supposed to be dedicating a certain percentage of their GDP to defense spending.
CNN’s Fareed Zakaria recently argued that Trump should get credit for making European nations spend more on defense, but also that it will have unintended consequences such as making European countries less likely to defer to the US. The old system, he said, “was stable, peaceful, and pro-Americ
“We have set off a chain reaction, and over time, Americans will come to miss the old NATO, not because it was fair, but because it was the most successful security system the world has ever known, with America at its center,” Zakaria said.
The same could be said for the rest of the world as Trump changes the way the world looks at the United States.
an.”….
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