Quite the trade policy you've got there

 

Trump 2.0

Donald Trump’s family business is breaking ground on an accelerated project in Vietnam as the country’s government seeks an updated trade agreement with the United States.

The U.S. president’s tariff threats have driven Vietnam to seek a new arrangement with America, potentially including efforts to combat trade fraud, as the White House inches closer to a July deadline when Trump’s so-called “reciprocal” tariff measures will snap back into place.

  Independent UK

 Trump family graft.

[Trump] previously ordered a 90-day pause of his order imposing sky-high tariff rates on many countries, including Vietnam, which is set to face a 46 percent tariff on all exports to the United States on top of the Trump administration’s 10 percent across-the-board import measures.

[...]

[A] $1.5 billion Trump Organization development project outside of Hanoi has seemingly blown through the typical approval process, leaving locals enraged at the government and the president adding another layer to the onion of alleged self-dealing and kickbacks that has defined all four years and four months of Trump’s presidential tenure. According to documents published by the Times on the Trump Organization’s Hanoi development, the project skipped typical environmental reviews and cut short a local public comment period — one that had been dotted by fired-up local residents who’ve been informed that their land will be sold for less than half the value of what the parcels would have been worth prior to the alleged land grab.

[...]

Wednesday’s groundbreaking for the project took place just three months after the initial documents were filed, a process which experts told the Times usually takes at least two years. Some steps were reportedly skipped entirely, while others were still underway.

[...]

The area set to be developed for the project includes farms and nearly four square miles of riverbank property, all together totaling “hundreds” of residences.

One local, Le Van Truong, 54, was quoted byThe New York Times as saying he could lose farmland as well as the local cemetery holding five generations of his ancestors.

Will those farmers be able to get immediate relocation in the US like the Afrikaners?

Fun fact:

In one anecdote, the paper even noted that “the province is dotted with unexploded ordnance from the Vietnam War” and saw a 200-pound bomb recovered recently.

[...]

In an emailed statement to the Times regarding the Vietnam project, a White House spokesperson said: “All of the president’s trade discussions are totally unrelated to the Trump Organization.”

Sure, Jan.

The White House also insisted there was no conflict of interest because the president’s sons run the business.

LOL. Can you say, Hunter Biden?

Erasing all doubt about the project’s ties to official relations between the U.S. government and his own, Vietnam’s prime minister Pham Minh Chinh said at the groundbreaking ceremony on Wednesday that the project would “receive maximum support” to “further strengthen the relationship between Vietnam and the U.S.”

Retraction to come.

UPDATE 05/29/2025:

Trump uses tariffs for personal gain

 

He's not using tariffs to pressure countries to make deals for the US.  It's to make deals for Trump.

This day in history

 

March 16, 1968: Remembering the My Lai massacre heroes

Hugh Thompson, Glenn Andreotti, Larry Colburn.

Trump on his lack of military service (interviwer: Piers Morgan)

"Nobody heard of Viet Nam."  You might want to check with the French.  And maybe the John F Kennedy Library. 

"I think I make up for that.."  By 'that' I guess he means not serving, I guess.  Or maybe faking his way out of service with a false medical report.

"700 billioin I gave last year and this year 716 billion.."


...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

RIP Glenn Andreotta

Glenn Andreotta was one of two crewmen (the other was Larry Colburn) in the helicopter piloted by Hugh Thompson Jr. who saved the lives of Vietnamese victims of the My Lai massacre by putting themselves between US soldiers and their victims.  Thompson, Andreotta and Colburn were eventually awarded medals for their heroism, but Glenn's was posthumous, as he was killed April 8, 1968, four months after enlisting, in a crash in Quang Ngai province.  Sadly for Andreotta, he died being reviled as a traitor by fellow servicemen for his actions under Thompson's command at My Lai on March 16, 1968.




RIP, Glenn Andreotta.  You're a hero to many.

He doesn't like people who were captured

That war wasn't about him.  I'm surprised he agreed to have that Kim Jong Un summit meeting in Viet Nam in the first place, considering his faked medical condition to get him out of serving and the obvious comparisons and jokes it would engender.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Stepping all over his own dick

The president defended Mr. Kim, saying he believed the North Korean leader was unaware of the gravity of Mr. Warmbier’s medical condition.

“He tells me that he didn’t know about it, and I will take him at his word,” Mr. Trump said on Thursday.

  NYT

Otto Warbier's parents, unsurprisingly, didn't appreciate Trump's claim that Kim Jong Un had nothing to do with Warmbier's torture and death.









Ha!  Sure you do, you asshole.

He wouldn't have tweeted this without that statement from Otto's parents going viral.  But even with that, he couldn't bring himself to call what was done to Otto torture, as he did when it was something he could use as a bragging prop back when he was shit-posting about Kim.  This time, it's "mistreatment".



He also said that those prisons are really rough, indicating someone in prison did something that caused Warbier's death.  That's not "hold[ing] North Korea responsible."

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Pod Save the World

Tommy and Ben explain why Trump's second North Korea summit was a total disaster. Then they discuss escalating tensions between India and Pakistan, Justin Trudeau's troubles in Canada, a can't-miss rant about Jared Kushner and Netanyahu's indictment.

Click here to listen

Poor Otto, he was only useful for two tweets

Mr. Trump said he and Mr. Kim discussed the case of Otto Warmbier, the American college student who died last year after being imprisoned in North Korea.

The president defended Mr. Kim, saying he believed the North Korean leader was unaware of the gravity of Mr. Warmbier’s medical condition.

“He tells me that he didn’t know about it, and I will take him at his word,” Mr. Trump said on Thursday.

Mr. Warmbier, a student at the University of Virginia, was arrested while on a trip to North Korea for stealing a propaganda poster. In 2016 he was sentenced to 15 years hard labor.

More than a year later he was released and returned to the United States gravely ill, with doctors saying he suffered a catastrophic brain injury. He died in June 2017.

Mr. Trump has taken credit for the return of Mr. Warmbier and a handful of other Americans held in North Korea. In the past, the president has pointed to Mr. Warmbier’s injuries as an example of the Kim regime’s brutality.

But on Thursday, Mr. Trump refused to place any blame on Mr. Kim.

“I don’t believe that he would have allowed that to happen, it just wasn’t to his advantage to happen,” Mr. Trump said. “Those prisons are rough, they’re rough places, and bad things happened. But I really don’t believe that he, I don’t believe that he knew about it.”

  NYT

So he wasn't "tortured beyond belief"?

In Hanoi, [Kim Jong Un] was congenial and diplomatic in his interactions with the U.S. president. But he stood firm in his refusal to give up the country’s crown jewels — its hard-won and expensive nuclear program — for an offer that the North would consider second-rate.

Not agreeing to a deal means North Korea can potentially carry out further work on its nuclear and conventional weapons programs, upping the stakes in future talks.

[...]

Kim may have overplayed his hand on sanctions, but he demonstrated he is capable of playing hardball — a capability Trump won’t likely forget. He walks away with arguably more legitimacy than he had before, having convinced the most powerful man in the world to come to Asia a second time in less than nine months. Even in announcing that the talks had failed, Trump continued to praise Kim, stressing that the summit had been generally friendly and constructive.

More importantly, Trump left the door open for negotiations to continue. Kim can work with that.

He has already made big strides toward undercutting support for sanctions in China and South Korea and can be expected to try to keep pushing them farther away from Washington’s increasingly fragile policy of maximum pressure.

[...]

Throughout the negotiation process so far, North Korea’s state media have been extremely careful not to criticize Trump directly, focusing their ire instead on lower-level officials like Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and National Security Adviser John Bolton. It remains to be seen how the North’s propaganda machine will spin the Hanoi outcome, but it would seem unlikely that their deference to Trump will change dramatically.

Wittingly or not, Trump has repeatedly helped Kim establish himself as a leader on the world stage.

[...]

Unlike Trump, who immediately boarded Air Force One for Washington, Kim isn’t rushing out of Hanoi after the summit. He is expected to stay until Saturday and will spend his remaining time sightseeing and meeting Vietnamese officials on what is being billed as a “friendly visit.” That gives him a chance to present to both the world and his domestic audience the image that his meeting with Trump was just one part of a larger, multipronged trip.

  AP

The Supreme Dealmaker outsmarted again.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

UPDATE 3/1:



UPDATE:





Ha!  Sure you do, you asshole.

He wouldn't have tweeted this without that statement from Otto's parents going viral.

Failure in Hanoi

Donald Trump has said that a summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un broke down over the issue of sanctions, after the talks in Vietnam ended early with no deal.

“It was about the sanctions basically,” Trump said at a press conference in Hanoi. “They wanted the sanctions lifted in their entirety and we couldn’t do that ... Sometimes you have to walk, and this was just one of those times.”

  Guardian

He really thought Kim was as easily flattered as he is, didn't he?  Republicans will be blaming it on the Democrats for holding the Cohen hearings while Trump was overseas trying to save the world.  One of them already tried to shame Cohen during his testimony for that very thing.

The US president said that Kim had offered to dismantle some parts of his nuclear infrastructure, including the Yongbyon nuclear complex, but was not prepared to destroy other parts of the programme, including covert uranium plants.

“There is a gap. We have to have sanctions,” Trump said. “They were willing to denuke a large portion of the areas we wanted but we couldn’t give up all the sanctions for that.”

So can we look forward to a return to the nasty rhetoric about "Little Rocket Man"?

“We spent all day with Kim Jong-un,” Trump said. “He’s quite a guy and quite a character. And our relationship is very strong.”

He even defended Kim over the death of US student Otto Warmbier, who had been sent back home from North Korea seriously ill in June 2017.

“He says he didn’t know about it and I will take him at his word,” Trump said, adding that North Korea was a big country and: “Those prisons are rough. They’re rough places and bad things happen.”

Not yet.

Trump said there was no plan for a third summit but made clear that the current status quo would continue, with North Korea continuing to suspend nuclear and missile tests, while the US would not take part in joint military exercises with South Korea, which the US president said he was opposed to anyway.

“I gave that up quite a while ago because it costs us $100 million to do it. I hated to see it. I thought it was unfair,” Trump said, saying South Korea should shoulder more of the costs. “Exercising is fun and it’s nice they play their war games. I’m not saying its not necessary. On some levels it is. On other levels it’s not.”

You don't know what you're saying. I think that's obvious.

He confirmed that the US side had confronted the North Koreans with the existence of covert nuclear facilities outside Yongbyon and demanded they be put on the negotiating table.

“They were surprised we knew,” he said.

I doubt that very, very much, considering that was widely reported in our news outlets after that first meeting.

The press conference came after a scheduled lunch and signing ceremony for the expected joint statement were both cancelled at short notice, as Trump and Kim left the summit venue and returned to their separate Hanoi hotels.

[...]

Signs of trouble at the second Trump-Kim summit appeared earlier on Thursday when Trump played down expectations of any kind of agreement in the Vietnam capital and urged the focus to be on longer term relations between the two leaders and the two countries.

[...]

“I’m sure over the years we’ll be together a lot, and I think we’ll also be together after the fact, meaning after the deal is made. We had very good discussions last night at dinner, and the pre-dinner was very good. And, there were a lot of great ideas being thrown about,” Trump said.

“So, I can’t speak necessarily for today, but I can say that this, a little bit longer term, and over a period of time, I know we’re going to have a fantastic success with respect to Chairman Kim and North Korea.”

[...]

Since the first summit in Singapore in June last year, Trump and his administration had claimed they were on the brink of a historic breakthrough in persuading North Korea to disarm, going beyond the agreements forged by former US presidents.

[...]

“No rush. No rush,” he insisted. “We just want to do the right deal. Chairman Kim and myself, we want to do the right deal. Speed is not important. What’s important is that we do the right deal. Thank you all very much.”

Maybe now he'll believe his intel agencies when they tell him Kim will never denuclearize.  (And why would he in today's world?)

All that flattery, wasted.



Will there be a Mission Not Accomplished sign on their return?



Wait.  Is Kim's chair bigger than Trump's?  Sure looks like it.  That's why the talks failed, isn't it?

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

The art of the deal

U.S. negotiators are no longer demanding that North Korea agree to disclose a full accounting of its nuclear weapons and ballistic missile programs as part of talks this week between President Donald Trump and Kim Jong Un, according to current and former senior U.S. officials.

The decision to drop, for now, a significant component of a potential nuclear deal suggests a reality that U.S. intelligence assessments have stressed for months is shaping talks as they progress: North Korea does not intend to fully denuclearize, which is the goal Trump set for his talks with Kim.

Disclosure of a full, verifiable declaration of North Korea’s programs is the issue over which the last round of serious negotiations between Pyongyang and world powers, including the U.S., fell apart a decade ago.

  NBC

Well, that's one way to get a victory.





Yeah, that's not going to be the boost he needs to counter the Cohen testimony.



What's he going to tell us about this trip when he gets back?






...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

According to the autocrat playbook

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.



Kudos.  Hopefully a trend.

Trump can now brag he went to Viet Nam

His bone spurs have healed.

President Donald Trump was looking to flatter his new friend in Singapore when he struck upon an unusual compliment.

He had known plenty of people who had grown up wealthy and whose families were powerful, Trump told Kim Jong Un, the despotic North Korean dictator whose father and grandfather held the same role.

Many of them emerged messed up, Trump said. But, he added, Kim wasn't one of them.

  CNN

To be fair, to Trump, that's not messed up.

Of course, Kim rules North Korea with an iron fist and a disregard for human rights. And his stature was gained through birth, not hard work. But Trump's choice of praise for his new negotiating partner, relayed by a person familiar with the conversation, reflects the US President's determination to flatter his way to nuclear peace in Asia.

Or maybe just to be flattered in return. Nuclear peace isn't a dream of Trump's. It would just go on the ledger for the Nobel Peace Prize committee's consideration.

Before the formal talks begin on Thursday, the two men will sit for a small dinner with only a select number of aides -- an intimate kick-off to a summit balanced on perhaps the world's most improbable diplomatic friendship."It's a very interesting thing to say, but I've developed a very, very good relationship," Trump told the nation's governors on Sunday evening before departing for Hanoi. "We'll see what that means. But he's never had a relationship with anybody from this country, and hasn't had lots of relationships anywhere."

[...]

Trump and Kim have forged a bond built on mutual displays of effusive praise. In back-and-forth letters over the past seven months, each has used flowery language to describe the other and appeal to his sense of ego, a trait both men carry in spades.

[...]

After the two men meet for dinner on Wednesday evening, they will sit for extended talks on Thursday, including a one-on-one session with only their translators present.

Will Trump forbid his translator to take notes or talk about the meeting?

With political hostility running high in Washington, Trump will find a more favorable reception in Hanoi, where signs have been erected around the city hailing the prospects for peace. T-shirts emblazoned with the instantly recognizable silhouettes of the two bombastic leaders are for sale at shops around town. In front of the hotel where Kim is believed to be staying, a bed of roses has been fashioned into the US and North Korean flags, with two hands shaking in the middle.

That's the type of reception Trump had been hoping for in calling for a second summit, which he believes will generate the same type of wall-to-wall television coverage of the first. Some of his aides have warned him that a second go-around would capture less attention, though Trump has largely discounted that advice.

Part of the attraction, Trump believes, is the unlikely affair he's developed with Kim.

Is he wearing his hair in the box shape that he adopted for a while after his first meeting with Kim?

The first sign of the budding pen-pal arrangement came when North Korea's spy chief arrived to the White House bearing a comically oversized envelope containing one of the first effusive missives.

Since then, Trump has taken to carrying around copies of his most recent letter from Kim in his coat pocket, withdrawing it to show both his friends and political adversaries.

Let me guess...it's full of effusive praise that Trump thinks is sincere.

During heated talks with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer during this year's government shutdown, Trump whipped out the letter and threw it on the table.

"Read this," he instructed Schumer, before flinging the document over the table in the senator's direction.

Dear god. The fact that he thought that would impress Chuck Schumer is just another piece of evidence that he is absolutely clueless. Sociopaths can't read other people. Narcissists think everyone else sees them the way they see themselves. Trump is a narcissistic sociopath.

"We have a terrific relationship, and we'll see where it goes. Who knows where it goes. But we'll see," Trump said in a video recorded this weekend and played at an event held for the "Trumpettes," a group of supporters at Mar-a-Lago, his private Florida club.

They actually call themselves that!

Trump has [said] that he is in no rush to execute a nuclear deal with North Korea, and the absence of missile and nuclear testing means his diplomatic gambit is working. He's attributed the pause to his personal wooing of Kim, which in Singapore included warm moments like placing his hand on Kim's back and later showing him the interior of his heavily armored limousine (to some consternation from the US Secret Service).

A consummate braggart.

Last time they met, he told us the threat of nuclear weapons attack from Kim was over.

It was in that meeting that Trump first gauged his ability to deal with Kim in person. He had told reporters on his way there he was likely to appraise his interpersonal chemistry with Kim within the first minute of their encounter.

Asked how, Trump pointed to "just my touch, my feel."

Rather like Dubya looking into Putin's eyes and seeing his beautiful soul.

Kim, who had caught wind of the President's comment as he made his own way to Singapore, raised the comment with Trump about an hour into their talks.

[...]

So what did he think of him, Kim asked. Trump offered his thoughts, including his determination that Kim was sort of sneaky -- but not too sneaky.

"But do you trust me?" Kim asked. The President said he did, and that he must trust him if they were ever to forge a deal.

Displaying a quick wit, Kim turned to Trump's national security adviser John Bolton -- a hawkish skeptic of diplomacy with Pyongyang -- and asked if he trusted him, too.

Bolton said if Trump did, then he did, too.

From last June's meeting:

Trump also said he hopes to eventually withdraw US forces from South Korea, but said "that's not part of the equation right now."

"I want to get our soldiers out. I want to bring our soldiers back home," Trump said. "But that's not part of the equation right now. I hope it will be eventually."

  CNN

Maybe this time he'll put that on the trade table for some more hollow promises to denuclearize.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

That's a distinct possibility.  On the other hand, even without a victory, Trump declares victory.  So there's that.

Days ahead of his second summit with Kim Jong Un, President Trump is redefining success in his bid to force North Korea to relinquish its nuclear program, tamping down public expectations amid evidence that Pyongyang has done little to curb its weapons production.

Trump is hopeful that his bilateral meetings with Kim this week in Hanoi will re-create the international media spectacle of their historic first summit in Singapore last summer — and perhaps distract from mounting domestic political turmoil.

[...]

In recent days, Trump has sought to create the conditions to declare the summit a success regardless of the outcome. Having once demanded that the North give up its weapons quickly, Trump said last week he is in “no rush” as long as the regime maintains a testing moratorium on nuclear bombs and ballistic missiles that has been in place since November 2017. “I have no pressing timetable,” he said, adding that he expects his meeting with Kim in Hanoi won’t be their last.

[...]

Kim is likely to be well versed in how the summit plays into Trump’s domestic political imperatives. Their meeting Thursday will take place hours after Michael Cohen, Trump’s former personal attorney, is scheduled to appear on Capitol Hill in a public hearing to testify about his dealings with the president, including a campaign finance violation.

  WaPo

And Trump is betting on a long shot unless he knows for certain (somehow) that Cohen won't say something truly damning.

Trump will be eager to divert attention, and some foreign policy experts said that could provide incentives for the president to pursue a splashy announcement — such as a declaration to formally end the Korean War, which has been suspended in an armistice since 1953 — that includes no concrete steps toward curbing production of fissile materials for North Korea’s nuclear weapons.

[...]

U.S. negotiators, who are in Hanoi for last-minute talks with their North Korean counterparts ahead of Trump’s arrival late Tuesday, said they are seeking a detailed road map for complete and verifiable denuclearization, while Pyongyang is aiming for relief from punishing international economic sanctions.

Which they've been enduring for eons, so where's the urgency for them?

Frustrated at the lack of progress in lower-level negotiations since Singapore, the U.S. team has signaled that it is backing off unilateral demands and is willing to consider something closer to the “step-for-step” process, sought by Pyongyang, in which both sides make concessions along the way.

Sounds like admission of failure.

Kim told Secretary of State Mike Pompeo last fall that the North would be willing to dismantle and destroy all of its facilities for plutonium and uranium enrichment at “a complex of sites” extending beyond Yongbyon, its main nuclear complex — which he put on the table in talks last year with South Korean President Moon Jae-in — if the United States reciprocates with measures of its own.

Kim has not stated that publicly, and the cost of such an offer is likely to be steep.

[...]

“I see a disturbing trend of talking about nonnuclear issues that will feed into the narrative of the summit already being a success,” said Jung Pak, a former U.S. intelligence official now at the Brookings Institution. “The problem with a peace declaration is that it will divert all the oxygen in the media.”

For Trump, that could be good enough.

If that's what he gets, it will be.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Always a dick

President Bone Spurs has no problem trashing other people even when he's guilty of worse.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Another chance for Kim Jong Un to make a fool of Donald Trump

Now Blumenthal can call him Da Nang Don.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

UPDATE:



UPDATE 2/8:  The date is February 27&28, and the place has been changed to Hanoi.

RIP Hugh Thompson

Hugh Thompson Jr, April 15, 1943 - January 6, 2006

"Trade wars are good and easy to win"

US v China: who wins? Vietnam!

Companies with thousands of factories in China are now racing to relocate out of the mainland, which seemed the only practical solution to avoid losses from higher tariffs that could take effect in a little more than a month. Earlier this week, Trump said it was “highly unlikely” that he would hold off on increasing the tariffs.

[...]

Importers and distributors, especially in the furniture industry, are confronting the hard truth that the U.S. president’s tariff strategy of bringing production back to the U.S. may not be compatible with a reality that has forced manufacturers to shift production overseas to ensure the low prices that shoppers demand.

[...]

Even though U.S. companies pay the duties when they bring in imports, the additional costs are usually passed right along to customers. As a result, many regard tariffs as taxes on consumers.

[...]

Some 9,000 miles away from the deepwater ports of China and new factory towns in Vietnam, American retailers are grappling with how much of the tariffs they can absorb.

Gao Jian, of the Vnocean Business Consulting Service in Vietnam, said he has guided about 40 Chinese enterprises per month to the more than 50 industrial parks he helps recruit for so far.

“Some companies can absorb a 10 percent tariff, but a 25 percent [tariff] would eat up their entire profit,” Gao said. “They would have to relocate and shut down their factories in China.”

[...]

The reality for many companies, though, is that the trade conflict could drag out for years or escalate quickly on Trump’s whims.

Already, about $200 billion worth of Chinese goods, which includes a range of furniture items and other consumer goods, are scheduled to see tariffs increase from 10 percent to 25 percent as of Jan. 1.

Combined with the initial $50 billion in Chinese imports that were sanctioned in July and August, 25 percent tariffs will apply to about half of all imports from China.

[...]

Foes of the tariffs, which include most major business and industry sectors, have argued that the additional costs are making it more expensive to sell to consumers and manufacture in the U.S.

[...]

After analyzing public comments, the U.S. Trade Representative decided in September to exclude nearly 300 products — mainly consumer goods from China — from the last batch of tariffs. Items exempted include smartwatches, bike helmets and highchairs.

Despite the reprieve, Strategic Sports’ owner, Norman Cheng, is ready to diversify by investing in a new factory with about 500 workers in Vietnam early next year.

“A lot of buyers are increasingly offering orders for factories in countries like Cambodia and Vietnam, due to the trade war,” said Cheng, who has 3,000 workers in China making 40 product lines.

  Politico

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.