"So, for instance, it costs
three times as much money to deport someone via a military flight than a civilian charter flight, which is why Democratic presidents Joe Biden and Barack Obama—who in fact
both deported more people than Trump did in his supposed tough-on-immigration first term—used civilian rather than military flights.
They wanted to save taxpayers money. But Donald Trump doesn’t care about taxpayers and never has; he cares only about his own image, and that’s been his story since he was a teenager. The problem with Trump using wildly expensive USAF flights for deportation purposes isn’t just that it’s outrageously expensive, however. It’s also that other countries have entirely understandable domestic laws about allowing
foreign military aircraft in their airspace.
So Colombia and other countries in South America have been balking at Trump’s military flights because they’re a pretty flagrant and grotesque sign of disrespect—the opposite of what diplomacy and even geopolitics writ large are supposed to be about. The kicker? President Trump
knows this, and was almost certainly
hoping a military flight would be turned away due solely to the fact of it being a
military flight.
He was trolling Colombia as a means to get some misleading but engaging news coverage here in America (something along the lines of, “Donald Trump gets tough on South American leader who’s balking at the president’s tough-on-immigration policies!”) and it worked; Colombia bit."
Media just fell for the oldest trick in the old brigand Trump's career-criminal playbook: the rope-a-dope. The fact that it did so confirms that it has learned nothing about how to deal with the man.
sethabramson.substack.com
