ACTUALLY Trump Caved To Colombia. Sorry, MAGA.

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Deals guy.

For a minute there on Sunday, you might have thought that your daily grande drip coffee from Starbucks was going to start costing about 10 bucks, which you would have happily paid because you are degenerate caffeine addicts who cannot function in an even vaguely human way without your morning fix. You disgust us, you parasites.

Sorry, sorry, we don’t mean to be so harsh to you, our beloved readers. We just haven’t had our morning coffee yet. And for a minute on Sunday, we thought we were going to have to start selling our plasma or take out a second mortgage to afford a pound of that sweet, sweet nectar. And it was all going to happen because Donald Trump is a whiny bully who was momentarily thwarted in his quest to treat every foreign migrant in America like something he scrapes out of his golf cleats.

We’re still sorting through exactly what happened. But as best anyone can tell, last week the United States government, under its newly installed tangerine führer, began slapping shackles on many of the undocumented migrants it is rounding up and putting on military planes and flying out of the country. This is a break with past practices. Normally, deportees are put on charter or commercial flights back to their country of origin, or wherever the United States has decided to dump them like unwanted leftovers. It’s the minimal amount of humanity to show them.

Needless to say, the shackles and the military flights and perhaps the pictures the Trump administration made sure to distribute of handcuffed detainees shuffling onto a C-17 like Taliban fighters being transported to Gitmo infuriated Central and South American governments. The Brazilian government filed a formal “request for clarification” over the “degrading treatment” given to detainees on a flight to Brazil:

[T]he Brazilian government claims that the use of handcuffs and leg irons “violates the terms of the agreement with the US, which requires the dignified, respectful, and humane treatment of deportees”.

On the plus side, the six children on the flight to Brazil reportedly were not shackled. See, America can be humane!

That was Saturday. On Sunday reports emerged that the government of Colombia had refused to even let similar flights carrying shackled detainees land, as a protest against their being treated like human garbage. Seems like a fairly simple fix, right? Just don’t treat the deportees worse than you would a planeload full of cattle, and avoid a diplomatic crisis.

Instead, Trump threw a tantrum. He released a statement on TruthSocial threatening to slap tariffs of 25 percent on any imports from Colombia. The tariffs would rise to 50 percent in a week if Colombia continued resisting. Colombian coffee accounts for somewhere around 20 percent of all coffee beans imported to America. You can see where this might cause problems of both supply and cost.

Trump threatened to cancel diplomatic visas for members of the Colombian government and their families, as well as fully imposing “Banking and Financial Sanctions.”

The White House also managed to misspell Colombia as “Columbia” in the accompanying press release, which, no, you idiots, America is not deporting undocumented migrants to the apparel company that makes outerwear.

Anyway, that was why you were almost going to have to sell a kidney to afford a cup of coffee, even though you need your kidneys to balance the levels of fluid in your body after you drink something. Irony!

Colombia’s president, Gustavo Petro, immediately announced retaliatory tariffs of 50 percent on anything imported from America. He also absolutely roasted Trump in a long post on social media:

You can try to carry out a coup with your economic strength and your arrogance, like they did with Allende. But I will die true to my principles, I resisted torture and I resist you. ... You don't like our freedom, okay. I don't shake hands with White slavers. I shake hands with the White libertarian heirs of Lincoln and the Black and White farm boys of the USA, at whose graves I cried and prayed on a battlefield.

After what we assume were some frantic calls between smarter, more diplomatic officials in both governments — it is now such a low bar on the US side — the media reported they had reached an agreement. From The New York Times:

Colombia’s foreign ministry released a statement soon afterward that said “we have overcome the impasse with the United States government.” It said the government would accept all deportation flights and “guarantee dignified conditions” for those Colombians on board.

Meanwhile, the White House released a statement saying that Petro had acceded to all of Trump’s demands, huge victory for America, the rest of the world is on notice, blah blah blah. Which is how the right-wing media spun it, once they all finished wiping themselves off with the nearest towel:

“Brought to heel.” Like dogs! Ah, the magnificent dignitude of the right.

On “Fox & Friends” Monday morning, Steve Doocy was giving Trump the full “North Korea slobbering over Kim Jong-un" treatment.

We were going to say something to the effect of “Good God, man, have some dignity.” Then we remembered: Steve Doocy. (Also, we guess at least Steve Doocy understands that tariffs are a tax on the American consumer. He just thinks Americans are so racist they want to pay it.)

Somehow, Colombia reportedly managed to accept 475 deportation flights from the United States between 2020 and 2024 — the Biden administration — without, to our knowledge, one of them blowing up into an international incident. The difference here is that the Colombian government appears to have objected to how America started treating deportees under the Trump regime, with the handcuffs and shackling. The country was still willing to accept these deportation flights, so long as the Colombian citizens on them were being treated with whatever dignity past deportees have been treated.

Doing that, however, would conflict with the Trumpists’ eternal need to thump their chests and be the biggest bullies on the block.

Given that the Colombian government says the impasse has been resolved, here is what we think is the state of things: the agreement the two nations reached is that Colombia will accept deportees so long as they are not shackled and tossed on military planes, which was their original complaint, and the WH is ignoring the second part so it can spin the first part as a glorious victory.

In other words, Trump caved to Colombia, not the other way around, no matter how many Fox show hosts’ erections are tapping against the camera lens. At least that’s how the South American media is reporting it. We think they are right, and when White House spokesidiot Karoline Leavitt crowed in a release Sunday night that “Today’s events make clear to the world that America is respected again,” they are being complete morons. But they are getting the headlines and the framing they want in right-wing media and even in more mainstream outlets, and that is all they care about.

This is how Trump often resolves issues, as we saw throughout the first term. He throws a tantrum, then caves in exchange for a minimal concession that often isn’t even a concession so much as a re-commitment to the original deal, but that he and his lickspittles can still spin as a huge victory. It’s grotesque.

Presumably there will also be long-tail problems with this latest showdown. Other countries will not like the bullying, even though larger countries can resist it. Smaller countries in regions such as South America will grudgingly go along to avoid economic sanctions that could affect their access to the American dollar.

But those countries will also look elsewhere for trading partners, like to China. And China will only be too happy to expand its influence in the region at the expense of the United States’s relations with those countries. This, in the long term, is bad for the United States!

But Donald Trump got to preen in front of all his sycophants, so congrats to President Deals, we guess.

[The Guardian / NYT / Tiedrich]

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