“If you make him unhappy, he responds unhappy,” so warned his trade minister. And ‘King Donald’ was mighty unhappy about a lot of things starting with that guy named Joe Biden.
He was angry that this “weak and pathetic man” had let that ungrateful Zelensky from Ukraine take money from Uncle Sam “like candy from a baby,” — a whopping $350 billion of it!
He was appalled that this pesky northern neighbor, Canada, had the temerity to turn down his offer to become his 51st state — “the only thing that makes sense” — to “make all Tariffs, and everything else, totally disappear” — and announce tit-for-tat steps against his tariff hikes.
He was peeved that his little friends in Europe across the big beautiful pond, who had for decades basked under its umbrella, had the gall to impose 50% levy on U.S. whiskey in retaliation against the new U.S. steel and aluminium duties.
An enraged POTUS threatened to slap 200% tariffs on European wine and champagne if the EU did not retreat before April 1, throwing alcohol — from French wines to Mexican tequila — on the front lines of a global trade war.
Resultant panic on both sides of the Atlantic sent the S&P 500 into its first correction since October 2023, with a decline of 1.4% raising fears that the U.S. may be heading into a recession.
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But an unflappable Trump underplayed such fears telling his favored Fox News, “I hate to predict things like that.There is a period of transition, because what we’re doing is very big. We’re bringing wealth back to America. It takes a little time. But I think it should be great for us.”
“I think the country’s got a big light over it right now,” added the POTUS reassuringly, suggesting even other foreign leaders from India’s Modi to a dozen other countries had told him so.
Meanwhile, he had to make peace between Moscow and Kiev though Russia wouldn’t have invaded Ukraine in the first place if he had been President at the time.
After his dressing down in the Oval Office, a chastened Zelensky had come back to the negotiating table with Ukrainian officials accepting a U.S. proposal for a 30-day ceasefire covering the entire front line after talks in Saudi Arabia.
Vladimir Putin of Russia too initially seemed to voice conditional support for a cease-fire but made it clear he was in no hurry and wanted to discuss things with Trump first.
As diplomatic back-and-forth continued, Putin hedged his bets calling on Ukrainian troops in the Russian region of Kursk to surrender leading Zelensky to cry foul. Putin only wanted to continue the war and had set so many preconditions “that nothing will work out at all or that it will not work out for as long as possible,” he insinuated.
Seems Trump, who “got along well with Putin” despite being “tougher than anybody’s ever been to Russia” amid “the Russia, Russia, Russia hoax, which was a very bad thing,” would have to get tough again to get things moving. “In a financial sense, we could do things very bad for Russia,” he wrote. “I don’t wanna do that because I wanna get peace.”
But Putin told Russia’s security council that he was working at restoring relations with the US, after they were “practically reduced to zero, destroyed by the previous American administration.”
“Overall, the situation is starting to move,” he said on relations with the Trump administration. “Let’s see what comes out of this.”
Back in Trumpiana, Trump was aghast that puny district court judges in courtrooms from Rhode Island to Seattle had the audacity to squish his mighty black pen’s executive fiats with their little gavels with nationwide injunctions.
Less than two months into Trump’s second term, district judges have issued nationwide decrees blocking a whole host of things — firings of civil servants, freezing of congressionally appropriated federal funding, end of nearly automatic citizenship for babies born on American soil and relocation of transgender women in federal prisons to men’s housing, to name a few.
With more than 100 lawsuits pending against the Trump administration, the POTUS approached the friendlier Supreme Court with a 6-3 Conservative majority, to clip the wings of these out-of-control federal judges.
“Before district courts’ burgeoning reliance on universal injunctions becomes further entrenched,” acting Solicitor General Sarah Harris told the apex court, “This court should declare that enough is enough.”
In addition to taking aim at nationwide injunctions, Trump’s appeal to the top court seeks to weaken the ability of states to file lawsuits against federal policies as many states with Democratic attorneys general have done.
Using more honey than vinegar — and an underlying threat to ruin them, as the New York Times put it, the Don has maintained his grip on Republicans. Whatever it was this time, Republican lawmakers in the House adopted a stopgap $1.7 trillion spending bill to keep federal funds flowing through Sep. 30 without Democratic support for the first time in years.
But Democrats threw in the towel on their own with Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and nine others crossing the aisle to advance the bill giving Trump wide discretion over how federal dollars are distributed. Some 90 minutes later Senate Republicans staved off a shutdown on a nearly party-line vote, just hours before a midnight deadline handing a major victory to Trump.
Even as Schumer defended his action as “a Hobson’s choice” between “a bad bill” and “allowing Donald Trump to take even much more power via a government shutdown is a far worse option,” he won praise from Trump.
“I appreciate Senator Schumer, and I think he did the right thing, really. I’m very impressed by that,” said the teetotaller POTUS before savouring his big beautiful victory — perhaps with a toast with a glass of milk or Diet Coke!