When the arsonist demands praise for his firefighting skills
Donald Trump is great at creating problems — and then pretending to fix them.
Donald Trump has made a habit of ginning up crises and then declaring victory when he “solves” them. We in the media must stop giving this arsonist credit for his firefighting skills.
The past two weeks have been fraught with international emergencies of the president’s own making — either problems that he pretends already plague us, or those he manifests into existence. This is the best way to understand his trade-war brinkmanship with Canada and Mexico.
Trump complains that Mexico and Canada take advantage of the United States on trade, despite the fact that he negotiated our current trade agreement with these countries during his first term. He even touted the 2020 agreement as “the best and most important trade deal ever made by the USA.”
His exact grievance alters by the day: Sometimes, he protests that we buy too much stuff from these places (typically using bogus numbers that inflate our trade deficit). Sometimes, he faults our neighbors for migration. Lately, his chief complaint is about fentanyl smuggling — a confusing allegation against Canada, given that a whopping 0.2 percent of U.S. border fentanyl seizures happen at the Canadian border.
Trump struggled to articulate what our allies could do to address these concerns, short of submitting to U.S. rule, putting these countries in a confusing bargaining position. But it turns out the trick to negotiating with Trump is to realize he has no idea what the facts are. Thus, Mexican and Canadian leaders offered Trump, as their supposedly painful “concessions,” promises to do what they’d already been doing.
Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum committed to station 10,000 Mexican troops along the border. Apparently, Trump was unaware that Mexico had already deployed 15,000 troops there, per Mexican defense ministry data, so he declared victory. Likewise, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau pledged to spend $1.3 billion on border investments, a commitment the Canadian government announced back in December. Trudeau also offered some meaningless gestures such as a “fentanyl czar” and “24/7 eyes on the border.”
The White House press secretary characterized these supposed concessions as “bending the knee” to the United States. In reality, Trump got rolled.
But that’s not how some U.S. media outlets covered the drama, at least not initially. Trump’s decisions to pause the economy-shredding trade wars that he himself had launched were supposedly “wins” for the president.
So was a similar, equally pointless spat with Colombia, one of our most important allies in Latin America.
During the Biden administration, Colombia regularly accepted commercial flights of deportees from the United States, without issue. But Colombia refused a deportation flight in January because Trump insulted our ally by sending a (needlessly aggressive and expensive) military jet instead. Tariffs and countertariffs were threatened; coffee prices spiked to record highs; and tariff threats were eventually withdrawn as both countries agreed to resume deportation flights.
Trump and his flunkies hailed this alleged triumph. Major news organizations declared that his erratic threats “worked.” In reality, Trump had only repackaged the status quo.
But in stoking these fights, Trump has lost the trust of our friends. He has proved the United States to be an unreliable ally just when we need international help to rein in actual adversaries and threats abroad, including in China.
Our usual friends in Canada are now booing our national anthem and boycotting American products. Meanwhile, economic uncertainty is paralyzing U.S. business, because Trump’s tariffs against our neighbors to the north and south have merely been “paused” for a month.
Trump’s manufacture and resolution of fake problems is hardly unique to international diplomacy. Recall the imaginary $50 million in condom shipments that Trump, supposedly, stopped from being sent to Gaza. (Four Pinnochios, per Post fact-checker Glenn Kessler.)
And then there’s the imaginary California water “valve.” While the Los Angeles area struggled with devastating wildfires and begged for federal assistance, Trump decided the real problem was that California had “turned off” its water supply. But ... no L.A.-destined water spigot had been turned off.
That didn’t stop Trump from signing an executive order requiring the release of water from two reservoirs in California’s Central Valley, both of which are more than 100 miles from Los Angeles — and don’t flow to the city. This “solution” nearly flooded local farms and wasted billions of gallons of water that farmers expected to use this spring and summer, given that the winter has been unusually dry.
“Everybody should be happy about this long-fought Victory!” Trump declared on social media.
Meanwhile, the administration continues to purge and defund congressionally mandated programs and destroy basic government plumbing, ostensibly to “fix” federal aid or scientific research or payment problems that don’t exist. The result: Medical researchers still can’t get paid. Neither can preschool programs around the country.
There’s a principle known as “Chesterton’s Fence”: Don’t remove a fence until you know why it was put up in the first place. Perhaps it deserves a corollary: Don’t firebomb a fence, ever, even if you think it will win you some positive short-term press.
Catherine Rampell is an opinion columnist at The Washington Post. She frequently covers economics, public policy, immigration and politics, with a special emphasis on data-driven journalism. Before joining The Post, she wrote about economics and theater for the New York Times. follow on X@crampell