Tommy Tuberville Is Writing Fanfiction for Trump’s Military Fantasies
Senator Tommy Tuberville is so excited for Donald Trump to keep chasing the Panama Canal that he’s now imagining his own fantastical version of events where the U.S. uses the waterway to wage war on China.
During an interview on Fox Business Tuesday, Tuberville got a little creative when cheerleading Trump’s outlandish push to take control of the trade route.
“We’ve gotta take the Panama Canal back, we’ve got to do something because if we’re gonna happen to go to war with China over Taiwan, and they were to shut the Panama Canal down, we’d have to go eight to ten thousand miles longer just to get things back to the war zone, if we had to go from the East Coast to China,” Tuberville said.
Sen. Tommy Tuberville: "We've gotta take the Panama Canal back. We've gotta do something because if we were to happen to go to war with China over Taiwan and they were to shut the Panama Canal down, we'd have to go 8 to 10,000 miles just to get things back to the war zone." pic.twitter.com/zNyH7Rn7US
While Trump was once friendly with Taiwan, he criticized it on the campaign trail. The president-elect argued that the island should have to pay the U.S. for protection, and accused it of stealing U.S. semiconductor manufacturing.
Trump also promised several times on the campaign trail that his administration would be a peaceful one, so his dumbest admiral airing his ideas about going to war seems at odds with that phony foreign policy.
Trump’s threat to claim the Panama Canal comes as he has upped the ante on several expansionist musings, including using economic forces to turn Canada into the fifty-first state and buying Greenland from Denmark.
France is warning Donald Trump against attempting to annex Greenland, saying that the European Union would not “let other nations in the world—whoever they might be—attack its sovereign borders.”
French Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot made the statement to public radio broadcaster France Inter on Wednesday, adding that he doesn’t expect Trump to invade the autonomous Danish territory. However, Barrot added that the world is witnessing a “return of the law of the strongest.”
Barrot’s words came after Trump refused to rule out using military force to retake Greenland and the Panama Canal in a rambling press conference on Tuesday. His son Donald Jr. also visited Greenland Tuesday in what appeared to be an attempt to legitimize the president-elect’s plans. The leaders of both Denmark and Greenland have said the territory is not for sale.
Antagonizing allies is a crazy, if typical, way for Trump to start his second term, especially a NATO member like Denmark that has boosted its defense spending, as Trump has demanded. Drawing the ire of France and the European Union doesn’t bode well for the future, especially with Trump planning to institute tariffs as soon as he is sworn in.
Trump is also threatening Canada with making it the “51st state” and angered Panama’s president with his desire to retake the canal. If he’s serious about any of his territorial ambitions, Trump might face serious opposition, with countries taking action against the United States.
A Fox News employee gave Trump’s team a set of questions in advance of an Iowa Town Hall in January, according to an upcoming book from Politico’s Alex Isenstadt. If true, this is a blatant violation of basic journalistic ethics—and yet another blatant example of Trump’s hypocrisy, given that he has accused Democrats of doing “cheating” at debates for years. That town hall, moreover, occurred at a crucial moment in the race: It took place as Trump’s Republican rivals for the party’s nomination were debating for the final time.
“About thirty minutes before the town hall was due to start, a senior aide started getting text messages from a person on the inside at Fox. ‘Holy [shit],’ the team thought. They were images of all the questions Trump would be asked and the planned follow-ups, down to the exact wording. Jackpot. This was like a student getting a peek at the test before the exam started,” writes Isenstadt.
Trump’s team proceeded to “workshop” their answers to the questions, which touched on political violence, his business activity,........
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