I don’t know about anyone else, but this latest move by the Trump administration coming after the president threw the United States under a bus this morning in Helsinki is typical of what — to me — is par-for-the-course with our Twitter-in-Chief.
Every time Trump makes an ass of himself and America, he does something else to deflect the public’s response by getting the world to focus on another issue. And this is what I think is going on with the complaints that were filed against our trade partners.
“The actions taken by the President are wholly legitimate and fully justified as a matter of U.S. law and international trade rules. Instead of working with us to address a common problem, some of our trading partners have elected to respond with retaliatory tariffs designed to punish American workers, farmers and companies,” U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer said in an emailed statement, according to the Financial Post.
Canada’s Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland has said that Trump’s tariffs on Canadian metal exports are absurd and illegal because he has implied Canada’s metals pose a risk to U.S. national security. Yes, it even sounds stupid.
Trump has scoffed at Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s arguments that the tariffs on Canadian steel and aluminum are ridiculous and insulting to one of the U.S.’s closest allies, reports the Toronto Star.
It looks like all of America’s trading partners are on Trump’s “Bad guys list,” and Lighthizer seems to be describing the U.S. as not backing down from its actions against the rest of the world.
“The United States will take all necessary actions to protect our interests, and we urge our trading partners to work constructively with us on the problems created by massive and persistent excess capacity in the steel and aluminum sectors,” he said.
But right this minute, I see the WTO complaint against Canada and all our other trading partners taking a back seat to the audacity of Trump in kissing up to Vladimir Putin. I am just as shocked as the rest of the world.