Trump Deportation Abuses and Tariff Threats Stirring Up Anti-US Sentiment and Responses

His policies should be making anti-imperialists happy

Handcuffed Colombian deporrtees head towares US military C-17 cargo plane for rforced return to Colombia (Twitter/X image)

The kindergarten I attended was located in a leftover WWII military barracks on the campus of the university of Connecticut. Not much to look at, it had a wonderful playground. The favored items in that play area were a metal slide that was quite large — the kind of thing that these days would not be allowed for safety reasons with no safety railings to keep you from falling (or being pushed) off the ladder to getting your legs burned when the sun was beating hot on the steel slide itself, and a huge white birch tree that offered, for a group of five-year-olds, the advantage of a couple of huge limbs that ran out from the trunk at a point only three feet above ground level, making the tree easy to climb into.

I was reminded recently of the place the last time I drove through my childhood home of Storrs, CT when I made a trip back there to give a talk about my book and documentary film about teenage Loa Alamos atomic spy Ted Hall at my old high school. The site of my old kindergarten is now the University of Connecticut Music Department, but the enormous birch tree, which had survived all the university expansion over the decades, had been cut down recently to a stump, no doubt because it had grown so old its huge spreading limbs had became hazardous.

I’m thinking about that kindergarten playground again now as I read that Columbia’s leftist President Gustavo Francisco Petro Urrego had sent fiery letter to President Trump, refusing to allow US military transport planes to fly thousands of deported Columbian immigrants from the US back to Columbia and daring him to slap a 50% tariff on Columbian exports to the US if he didn’t accept them.

My initial enthusiasm at that bold stance was shattered when less than a day later ai learned that Petro, a former guerrilla in the 19th of April Movement, had backed down and agreed to accept the deported Colombians.

Trump is now proudly boasting that he “defeated Colombia” in his first international use of his tariff strategy, and said “Finally America is respected again.”

Back in kindergarten, most of us little kids got along really well. I still have some friends who were there with me 70. years ago. I’m guessing some of them may still remember the same playground bully I’m remembering and might even remember his name, which I’ve long since forgotten. What I do remember was he was notorious for doing everything from pushing people ahead of him ons the slide ladder off and throwing sand in people’s faces.

He had our ‘respect” because he was big for his age and used his size and strength to intimidate the rest of us.

Trump is talking about that kind of respect — the respect of a bully — and he’s right that by thuggishly treating the world’s weaker countries like vassal states they may individually cower and avoid antagonizing him, there is another alternative response they may turn to.

In my kindergarten, the other kids— mostly the boys (myself included), finally decided we’d had enough. With the teacher supervising the playground not spotting and preventing this bully’s actions, one kid decided to fight back and pushed the bully off the ladder, and then kind of spontaneously we all piled on top of him, preventing him from getting up.

By the time our pig pile was cleared away by a teacher, the bully was so shamed that he stopped his bullying.

We are now, just 10 days after the start of the Trump 2.0 presidency, seeing signs of a collective front arising in Latin America and in Europe, and failing that a turning away from the US in favor of China and the BRICS group of countries that are working to break free of a dollar-denominated global financial system.

With Trump behaving like a mercurial autocrat, turning against even long-standing relationships like those between the US and Canada or Britain or the NATO Countries just because of some minor slight or disagreement,, many governments are starting to wondering whether a deal is a deal when it comes to the US under a Trump government, so why bother?

The good news for anti-imperialists is that Trump’s deportation antics and abuse of foreign nationals are doing more to stir up anti-Americanism than any tariff threats or or verbal bombast.