Good evening. President Trump’s second term has been dominated by foreign trips and visits with foreign leaders. I talk with David Sanger about where that leaves “America First.” We’re also covering immigrants’ views of Trump’s immigration enforcement, and a big development in the world of progressive philanthropy. We’ll start with the news.
Why the ‘America First’ president keeps looking abroad
The message coming out of the elections this month could not have been clearer: Americans are worried about their economy. The moment might have called for President Trump to pack a bag and head for a Midwestern factory, or to hold a heartland round table about the falling price of oil. He did not (although my colleague Alan Rappeport reports that Trump plans to do more travel like that soon). And while he has made a point of talking about affordability, he currently appears keenly focused on matters further afield — just as he has for much of his presidency. This week alone, the president lavished praise and hospitality on Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia, waving away concerns about his role in the gruesome 2018 murder of a Washington Post columnist, Jamal Khashoggi. My colleagues reported yesterday that Trump has authorized C.I.A. plans for covert action in Venezuela, as the administration escalates pressure on the government of Nicolás Maduro that has led to the deployment of the largest U.S. aircraft carrier to the region. Beyond that, there was Trump’s $20 billion bailout for Argentina and, this summer, his bombing of Iran over objections from many of his isolationist supporters. This is fueling cracks in the MAGA firmament, and it’s worrying Trump backers who wanted him to avoid foreign entanglements. But my colleague David Sanger, the White House and national security correspondent for The New York Times, says that anyone waiting for Trump to turn inward might be missing the point. Earlier today, I asked David to explain what, nearly a year into Trump’s second term, “America First” seems to mean to the president. Trump, he says, is less an isolationist than a unilateralist who believes his dealings with foreign powers are the key to ensuring American prosperity. But his approach, David says, is creating political risks for Trump — and national security risks for the nation. Trump has promised that tariffs and trade deals would improve the American economy. How deeply has that belief shaped his dealings with other countries? Trump’s foreign policy is built around extracting commitments to invest in the United States. Over time, striking deals has come to replace having a big strategic view of American relations with major powers. We saw this when Trump met Xi Jinping, the Chinese leader, a few weeks ago. They focused on finding a resolution to a crisis Trump had created by raising tariffs on China, to which the country retaliated by cutting off rare earths, magnets and other critical material that China dominates. They made a deal — and Trump declared it a huge success — but what was missing was discussion of Taiwan, or China’s incursions into territory around the Philippines, or Beijing’s nuclear program, arguably the fastest-growing in the world. Fast forward to this week with the Saudi crown prince. We saw the same thing happen again. Prince Mohammed said he would invest nearly a trillion dollars in the United States — although he did not say over what period of time. In return, he got a commitment from Trump for access to F-35 stealth fighters and the world’s fastest computer chips, critical for artificial intelligence. And he managed to sidestep, at least for the next few years, the one big security issue on which Trump wanted progress: getting the Saudis to sign the Abraham Accords and recognize Israel. In other words: The business deals not only become the core of the Trump foreign policy, but they tend to edge out the larger security issues. Where does Venezuela fit into all this? At first glance, it doesn’t. Here we have the president, on the basis of concerns about drug imports to the U.S. and illegal immigration, going after Venezuela. The country is a source of cocaine, but not fentanyl. And it is hardly the biggest strategic challenge facing the United States. But there is one part of the Venezuelan story that has seized Trump’s attention and dominates his conversations with his aides, and that’s that the country is sitting on the world’s largest oil reserves. We have some indications that oil has been at the center of the back-channel negotiations between the administration and Maduro. Is that the reason that Trump is putting 15 percent or more of our naval capacity in the Caribbean? You could argue that we are seeing a return to the gunboat diplomacy of more than a century ago, when we and other powers, like the British and the French, would intimidate a smaller country with a naval fleet to force a deal. So, to Trump, critics who say he’s focused on foreign policy at the expense of the domestic economy are drawing a false dichotomy. He believes the two are related. Trump, at his core, understands that this is a global economy. To Trump, it’s all an effort to ensure that America remains the world’s dominant economic and technological power, at a moment when its status is threatened more than ever by China. What kind of political risk does he face as a result of this approach? There’s huge political risk here for him. Remember George H.W. Bush? He had a huge American victory in the Persian Gulf war, which ratified the strength of the United States as the Soviet Union was collapsing. Yet he lost in 1992 because people thought he wasn’t paying attention to supermarket prices. And are there security risks, too? In Trump’s first term, his national security strategy focused on turning the United States away from counterterrorism, and toward a focus on the rise of China and Russia. It’s very hard to square what Trump is doing in Venezuela now with that strategy. That aircraft carrier’s presence near Venezuela means that it’s not in the Middle East, where it was defending Israel from Iranian missiles earlier this year. And it’s not in the Indo-Pacific. As Xi Jinping watches this military buildup off Venezuela, he must be delighted, because that buildup was supposed to come in the Indo-Pacific to defend Taiwan. I don’t believe the Chinese thought the U.S. would tie up this much of its military force in the Caribbean. So yes, it creates strategic risks as well as political ones. Our conversation was condensed and edited for clarity.
QUOTE OF THE DAY “I don’t know if we’ll ever fully know the absolute narrative of what happened there.”That’s Senator John Thune, the majority leader, on the 2018 killing of the Washington Post columnist, Jamal Khashoggi. In fact, a U.S. intelligence report in 2021 found that Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia had approved the operation that killed Khashoggi. Thune was responding to a question about President Trump’s remarkable defense of the crown prince during his visit to Washington this week, in which Trump appeared to reject the U.S. report and said that “a lot of people didn’t like” Khashoggi. More on the crown prince’s visit to Washington:
Got a tip? The downfall of a liberal dark-money firmThere’s big news in the world of progressive philanthropy this week. My colleague Theodore Schleifer explains. For years, conservatives have made a concentrated, intentional push to turn a fairly obscure consulting firm called Arabella Advisors, which advises liberal donors and nonprofit groups, into a boogeyman. This week, its critics scored a victory. Arabella announced that it was effectively dissolving, and that the liberal funds that it had advised would take over much of its work. (I am skipping over a lot of details that make this transaction complicated, but basically: The clients are becoming the manager.) This amounts to a major shake-up in the world of liberal philanthropy, and it suggests that the conservative strategy of demonizing the work of firms like Arabella has been effective. Arabella tried to laugh off the right’s argument that it was essentially creating a liberal Koch network through a spider web groups. But Arabella and its allies have been rattled by the attacks, especially as Trump targets the left’s infrastructure. I reported this year that the Gates Foundation, which is wary of getting crosswise with the Trump administration, had quietly stopped backing Arabella. Arabella had a brand issue, and now Republicans won’t have it to kick around anymore. But they are already promising to go after its successor organization, Sunflower Services. ONE NUMBER
60 percentThat’s the share of immigrants who support President Trump’s border policies, according to a new survey of immigrants from The New York Times and KFF. Ruth Igielnik, The Times’s polling editor, explains. Most citizens and noncitizen immigrants approve of President Trump’s policies at the southern border, including about half of undocumented immigrants. Perhaps most striking, 39 percent of immigrants who otherwise disapprove of Trump’s job performance approve of his actions at the border. But Trump’s aggressive deportation efforts are less popular — both among immigrants and the general public. Just 42 percent of immigrants said they approved of Trump’s increasing efforts to deport those living here illegally. That includes roughly one-quarter of undocumented immigrants. At the same time, the share of immigrants who think enforcement has been too tough has nearly doubled to 41 percent, up from 19 percent two years ago.
TAKE OUR QUIZ The Trump administration recently released more than 4,600 pages of documents related to Amelia Earhart, the aviator who vanished in 1937 while trying to become the first woman to circumnavigate the world. Why did Earhart experts say the collection was a dud? |
