United States President Donald Trump has been at his most cynical and callous in recent days. In short order, he has starkly raised the stakes in his anti-immigrant rhetoric, and has also drawn his country into a trade war with China that is likely to escalate quickly.
On the immigration front, the President said on Tuesday that he would order the military to guard the Mexico-U.S. border – an extraordinary step that he justifies in part by whipping up fears of a “caravan” of illegal immigrants crossing Mexico on their way to storm the U.S.
“Getting more dangerous,” he tweeted on Sunday. “‘Caravans’ coming.”
There is indeed a caravan of about 1,200 Central Americans, most of them fleeing political violence in Honduras, who are traveling together through Mexico.
The vast majority only want a safe place to land in Mexico, according to their spokespeople. But Mr. Trump has been tweeting the lie that their goal is to cross en masse into the U.S., boosting his argument that he needs to call in the army until he can build his long-promised wall along the border.
His controversial militarization of the border overshadowed Monday’s news that Beijing will impose tariffs on 128 American products in retaliation for the President’s ill-conceived tariffs on Chinese steel and aluminum.
Beijing’s tariffs also serve as a warning shot designed to dissuade the President from seeing through his threat to put duties on US$50-billion worth of other Chinese products, a further escalation that he may well announce this week.
In one sense, this is classic Trump. Chaos, lies and bluffing are the only weapons in his arsenal.
But this week’s momentous developments are happening at the same time as a resentful Mr. Trump is beset by political and personal scandals, and as his inner circle shrinks down to a few hard-core nationalist voices (the incoming national security adviser, John Bolton, for example).
The President is engaged in a worrisome escalation of his pet issues without any evidence that he has the ability or even the inclination to reverse course if need be.
This is incredibly troubling. Unless by some miracle someone can rein him in, the chaos will only increase.