On the international stage, the United States is acting like brash huns, its president receiving gifts of gold as countries complement him and shower him in gifts in hopes of corruption as they beseech Trump to lift tariffs. In the short term, the U.S. has higher taxes on goods they import and difficulty selling abroad where foreign countries tariff back and where tariffs on imports into the U.S. make U.S. goods more expensive. In the long term, the U.S. reputation is tarnished and countries may never trust the country again as the country already elected Trump twice, and may always elect another one in the future. A world where the United States can’t be trusted is a worse world for the United States and Americans.
We can’t assume other people in history and in the current world think like us. Not everyone is a reasonable person who can be reached with diplomacy. Some people are ideologically psychopaths and are willing to kill many many people to get what they want. Such people can only be stopped by force.
“Asked by a reporter about Khashoggi’s murder during a press conference in the Oval Office, Trump defended the crown prince — who minutes earlier had pledged to increase his past commitment of $600 billion in investments in the U.S. to $1 trillion.
“He’s done a phenomenal job,” Trump said of Mohammed, adding: “Things happen, but he knew nothing about it.”
And, referencing Khashoggi, the president also seemed to offer an explanation for his murder: “a lot of people didn’t like that gentleman,” he said.
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Moments later, he went further and suggested that ABC should lose its broadcasting license over the reporter’s question.
It was not the first time Trump made excuses for Khashoggi’s murder, something he also did in 2018. And it followed the president praising Mohammed for his record on “human rights” and declaring that he and the Saudi crown prince have “always been on the same side of every issue.””
“In addition to easing weapons transfers, the agreement will open Saudi Arabia as a location to store U.S. weapons, and make the country eligible to bid on Pentagon maintenance and repair contracts and purchase depleted uranium ammunition.”
“On some days, as many as 20 drones might fly across the Egyptian border into Israel from different points. It does not matter that much if Israel shoots some of them down or uses electronic warfare spectrum weapons to get others to crash or land in an open field to be seized. As long as a certain percentage of the cargo gets through, the smugglers can make millions.
THE SMUGGLERS also learned that they could send a vast amount of weapons across the border. Some of these weapons might be for Arab Israelis or Bedouin. Still, others might be eventually destined for Hamas or even for being transferred to terrorist groups in the Palestinian Authority-controlled portions of the West Bank.”
Trump’s Saudi Arabia deal may be a lie. Multiple countries have promised to invest big money in the U.S. in deals with Trump, and many have not materialized. Is this a real deal, or a misleading press release?
As the U.S. backs away from clean energy and limiting global warming on the president’s false belief that climate change is a hoax, China is stepping in as a leader globally, leading on the issue and selling its technologies and products to countries around the world. Despite its leadership and its massive renewable production, it still uses a lot of dirty coal. China’s clean energy partnerships around the world give it influence. The Trump-led U.S. is banking on past fuels and energy, while China is advancing into the future.
“Both countries have been happy to cooperate with Washington against drug trafficking, but think that the decision to kill the suspected smugglers at sea is a step too far.
At least one of the people killed in the boat bombings was a Colombian citizen. “He may have been carrying fish, or he may have been carrying cocaine, but he had not been sentenced to death,” Petro said in a speech on Sunday, according to the Associated Press. “There was no need to murder him.” After Petro criticized the U.S. military campaign last month, the U.S. Treasury accused Petro of being complicit in drug smuggling and imposed financial sanctions on him, his wife, and his son.
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Another neighboring country whose citizens were killed, Trinidad and Tobago, has been more supportive of the campaign. “I have no sympathy for traffickers; the US military should kill them all violently,” Prime Minister Kamla Persad-Bissessar said in a September 2025 statement.
The Trump administration has acknowledged that it is choosing to kill suspects that it could have arrested otherwise. “Instead of interdicting [the boat], on the president’s orders, we blew it up,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio told reporters after the first boat strike in September 2025. He argued that arresting traffickers and seizing their cargo “doesn’t work” because cartels plan for those losses anyway. Administration lawyers argue that drug cartels are wartime enemies, so they can be killed rather than arrested, while also denying that the president is limited by constitutional war powers in this campaign.”
“Trump has championed coal, oil and gas and sought to squash clean energy efforts in the U.S. and abroad. He has removed the U.S. from the 2015 Paris climate change agreement, for the second time, and has used the threat of tariffs to try to bolster sales of American fossil fuels.
The speeches from a handful of leaders displayed, at times, the anger and dismay that countries feel about the U.S. breaking its promises and attempting to undermine the global effort to tackle global warming.”