Traditional conservative and political columnist Max Boot recently railed against President Donald Trump's degeneration of complex U.S. foreign policy into his own erratic impulses.
Speaking on the “Politics War Room” podcast hosted by Democratic strategist James Carville, Boot pointed out that the U.S. spent decades building a multifaceted back-and-forth of sensitive foreign policy directives that served the nation well. That is, until Trump came along and the Republican Party handed him the sole reins as international arbiter.
“This is not the foreign policy of the United States. This is the personal whims and preferences of President Trump,” said Boot, a frequent Trump critic. “He basically rewards allies and punishes critics. You see him imposing these massive 50% tariffs on Brazil to punish Brazil for putting his buddy, former president Bolsinaro on trial for carrying out Brazil’s version of Jan. 6 [attacks] while rewarding Argentina, which has a MAGA friendly president, with a bailout of $40 billion.”
“It’s striking that while Trump is cutting off U.S. foreign aid — and a lot of people are going to die as a result — all of the sudden we have $40 billion just sitting around to bail out Argentina for the financial mess they’ve made of their own country,” Boot added. “When you lay it out like that, it’s hard to add it up logically from a policy standpoint.”
“Really this is the whims of President Trump because there’s nobody in the administration or outside of it who can contradict him, so he gets to do what he wants, even if that doesn’t make a lot of sense.”
Boot went on to hammer Trump’s unilateral tariff with U.S. trade allies, and he called out Trump for overreacting to an ad produced by the Canadian territory of Ontario, pitting Trump against the more free-trade-oriented policies of former President Ronald Reagan — a longtime Republican icon.
“Donald Trump doesn’t want to hear [Canada’s argument on tariffs] because he has a big portrait of Ronald Reagan in his office. He doesn’t want to hear that his policies on trade are diametrically opposed to the Gipper’s, but that is the truth,” Boot said. “The Reagan Foundation somehow claimed this was misleading, but it wasn’t misleading, and then Trump used this as an excuse to add more tariffs on Canada.”
“It doesn’t make any sense but Reagan was right on tariffs and Trump is wrong,” Boot said.