President Trump’s vendetta against Amazon, whose chief executive and founder, Jeff Bezos, owns The Post, is a loser. “If Trump were to take action that caused Amazon’s shipping costs to go up, the relevant stakeholders — including nearly a hundred million American customers — would be broadly united on Amazon’s side of their business dispute with Trump. It would be a political nightmare for the president. Whatever Democrat runs against him in 2020 would be able to run as the candidate who would bring back free shipping. No issue unites Red America and Blue America like free shipping.”
Trump’s grudges never seem to involve Russians. “The State Department says that a number of Russian diplomats expelled from a Russian consulate in Washington state could be replaced by other Russian officials, noting that the same is true for a number of American officials recently expelled from a consulate in St. Petersberg.” So this is meaningless, huh?
Trump’s enmity toward foreigners comes with a cost. “The United States is granting fewer visitor visas to people from around the world — not just Muslims — as President Donald Trump ratchets up his anti-immigration rhetoric. By one measure, the U.S. granted 13 percent fewer visitor visas over the past 12 months when compared with fiscal year 2016, according to State Department data analyzed by POLITICO — a downward trend that appears to have accelerated in the past six months.”
Trump maintains his spelling-addled feud (“Little Jeff Zuker”) with CNN. The network responds: “The personal political beliefs of CNN’s employees are of no interest to us. Their pursuit of the truth is our only concern. Also, Jeff’s last name is spelled Z-U-C-K-E-R. Those are the facts.” Ouch.
Trump’s rancor toward Mexico is misplaced. “That caravan of migrants Trump was tweeting about? Mexico stopped it.” Oh.
Spreading animosity around the globe. “President Donald Trump on Tuesday warned that the North American Free Trade Agreement was ‘in play’ and threatened to end aid to Honduras and other Central American countries if an organized protest march of 1,000 asylum seekers traveling through Mexico reaches the U.S. border.” There is no country he cannot pick a fight with.
A bitter lesson: You cannot make a deal with a man whose word is meaningless. “President Donald Trump and congressional Republican leaders, frustrated they had to work with Democrats to pass a fiscal 2018 omnibus spending measure, are mulling a way for their party to effectively cut some of the funds they just approved. The idea would be to deploy lesser-used provisions of the 1974 budget law to roll back spending by impounding some of the appropriated funds. . . . Getting 50 Republican votes to roll back spending the Congress just approved might be a long shot given the delicate nature of crafting the omnibus itself.” Good grief.
His hostility usually gets refocused on another topic. “I am skeptical the president has the focus for a sustained political effort against a popular American company that may be the first to reach $1 trillion in market value. America’s megaplatforms are national assets that other countries envy. . . . American companies being subject to the whim and caprice of angry politicians is hardly a pro-growth environment over the long term.”
