Did Trump learn his diplomacy skills from Stalin or did he learn them from Hitler? Diplomacy through bullying is the only diplomacy I think that Trump knows. Stalin ruled lesser nations with an iron fist.  Trump likes to rule as a tough guy but who he is being tough to is our friends and not our enemies. As I write this Trump is installing 25% tariffs on Mexican and Canadian goods. What it shows to the world is that the promises the United States makes and the treaties the United States negotiates are not worth the paper on which they are written.

We have had a North American trade agreement of some kind in place since 1994. It was negotiated by President George H. W. Bush in 1992, ratified by Congress in 1993, and went into effect in 1994. It was called the North American Free Trade Agreement commonly known as NAFTA.  The treaty was not the booming success its proponents wanted or the disaster that its opponents said it would be. Nevertheless, in 2005 then President George W. Bush negotiated the Central America Free Trade Agreement.  It seemed to ring true of Republican's principle of a free market. A principle I don’t think Trump ever agreed upon or believes in. One of the campaign promises by Trump in 2016 was he would renegotiate NAFTA. In November of 2018 Trump signed a new trade agreement with Mexico and Canada called the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement, USMCA. It was ratified by the legislatures of each country and went into effect on July 1^st,2020. Now Trump is breaking the very treaty he negotiated and the Mexican and Canadian governments ratified it in good faith. That is why I say that the agreements the United States now makes are not worth the paper that they are written on.

What will these tariffs mean? One thing you can guarantee is that it is going to be rising prices for everyone. Is it going to bring back manufacturing? Maybe, but that is a long way down the road. And that will do nothing to bring down prices. In the case of automobile manufacturing, I think we are going to see a very depressed market for quite some time and high prices. That will remain high for the rest of my lifetime. What about agriculture? Will it recover? What about produce in the grocery stores? Will those prices come down because much of our produce is imported from warmer climates, especially during the winter? Everything is going to be more expensive from electronics to shrimp to tomatoes. What I see is everything Trump is doing is just increasing what it will cost to live in this country. Trump said the first thing he was going to do was reduce prices. Do you see him doing anything to bring down prices? People voted for him so they could have cheaper eggs and eggs are skyrocketing. Denny’s Restaurant has started charging a $2 surcharge for eggs when you order them. Trump lied to the American People and there is no justification for the lies.  I hope that the American People are paying attention.

Trump doesn’t honor the agreements our country has entered into in the past. Trump also broke a commitment to Ukraine we made with Ukraine to give up its nuclear weapons.  After the fall of the Soviet Union, Ukraine was the 3^rd largest Nuclear Power in the World. Ukraine held one-third of the Soviet Nuclear Arsenal and it was the 3^rd largest in the world at the time, as well as being able to design and produce more. They had 130 intercontinental ballistic missiles with six warheads apiece and another 18 intercontinental ballistic missiles with ten warheads apiece, they had 33 heavy bombers, and their total nuclear warheads was 1,700. They gave all that up with a guarantee from Russia, the United States, Great Britain, and Northern Ireland for security. It was called the Budapest Memorandum. China and France followed suit.  They became a non-nuclear nation with security guarantees, which have been broken by Putin and Russia. The rest of them have not held up their end of the bargain either. Trump has completely turned his back on Ukraine.  Here again, is another agreement by the United States that is not worth the paper it was written on. The world was a safer place without the nuclear weapons in Ukraine but Ukraine is not safer because it has not had the security that it was promised.

Truth, Justice, and the American Way were just a line from a television show and we have shown the world just that. The American Vision for Democracy and Peace is just a farce. Our word has no meaning because it is something to just be broken. American exceptionalism is just now a punchline used around the world because we have turned our backs on the principles that we said defined us.