Hillary Clinton put it plainly on Monday, and the numbers back her up.
“The president is making US policy friendlier to North Korea and Russia than Canada and Oman,” Clinton wrote. “Are you kidding me?” The post landed the same week Trump ordered the Pentagon to scale back joint military exercises with South Korea, softening posture toward a regime that still refuses to give up its nuclear weapons program. It also landed two days before Trump’s 50 percent tariffs on Canadian goods, everything from lumber to hockey sticks to wine, are set to take effect, hitting close to $20 billion in Canadian exports.
Oman, meanwhile, is a longtime US ally that has hosted American
Forces for decades. Trump threatened this week to “bomb the st out of” the country if it “gets in the way” of the Strait of Hormuz standoff, the second time this year he’s made that exact threat.
Canada’s prime minister called the trade relationship “nasty,” a word Trump used first to describe Canadian leaders in a Las Vegas speech. Talks to avoid the new tariffs remain unresolved with the deadline two days out.
Clinton’s post cuts to something a lot of people have been feeling for a while. An adversarial regime gets softened rhetoric and eased military pressure. A trusted ally gets tariff threats and a bombing warning. That is not a coincidence of policy. That is a pattern, and Clinton just said the quiet part out loud.