TRUMP’S INSIDIOUS PLAN FOR EL SALVADOR

By dismissing charges, he could keep them there forever.

Trump was under pressure to bring Garcia back from El Salvador, but needed an excuse to save face. He conjured up a grand jury to indict Garcia on some charges, knowing that ‘a grand jury will indict a ham sandwich.’

Trump’s TACO image is on full display here. I’d like to add some letters to the acronym, but I fear you could come up with something better than this: TACO-SHOW (Says He Only Won). That is, even when he chickens out, he declares victory.

So now Garcia is back facing trial. I’d think any judge in his right mind would dismiss the charges, since there is no way Garcia can get a fair trial. Think of it – the President of the United States goes on national TV, saying what a horrible person Garcia is and how he committed all sorts of heinous crimes. Trump went so far as to fake that photograph with the phony MS13 tattoo. And then there are these ‘witnesses’ who are in jail but have been offered some kind of deal to testify. They can hardly be credible. This is a kangaroo court if I ever saw one.

It is possible that charges will be quietly dismissed. After all, Garcia has been returned and Trump has saved a modicum of face. The case can be silently forgotten.

But what about all those other deportees in El Salvador? Why not press for extradition of all of them back to the US? That would really be a big loss of face for Trump. So he now has a really insidious plan.

Many of the deportees have criminal cases pending against them. They could be extradited to the US. But the Trump plan is to dismiss charges against them. That way, there are no charges to extradite them on. They can remain in the Gulag forever. Brilliant! They are anonymous to everyone except a few family members, so they can be quietly forgotten in their lifelong torture.

I hear no hue and cry about these remaining deportees. It rather looks as though Trump has won his battle. Does this mean that there will be more such deportations without due process?

In fact, if this new Big, Beautiful Bill passes, the Republicans will guarantee that Trump & Co. cannot be held in contempt of any court, that is, he can ignore any court order, and deport as many innocent people to foreign hellholes as he wants, with total impunity. And his MAGA cultists will cheer him on.

DON’T CALL THEM ILLEGALS

I shouldn’t feel the need to write this, as everyone should be aware that ‘undocumented’ is not the same thing as ‘illegal’. Most of these immigrants crossed the border and applied for asylum. Because of the huge backlog of cases, they are released – legally – until their asylum hearing, which may be a year or two away. They are expected to report to Immigration Offices periodically to check in. This is the legal process.

In fact, under Biden the Congress tried to pass a law increasing the number of immigration judges and officers, in order to speed up the process, but Trump forced his GOP minions to vote it down. Trump wanted all those immigrants in the country in order to promote his anti-immigrant campaign.

So now, ICE shows up at the Immigration offices, where the legal immigrants are legally checking in, and arrests them, detains them, and prepares to ship them off to the torture camps in El Salvador or South Sudan.

Most of these legal immigrants are hard-working and have no criminal records. The very fact that they show up to check in at the Immigration Office is proof that they are legal. They are arrested anyway, and I see posts like this on Facebook:

              MAGA: Good! Arrest those rapists and murderers and ship them out.

Journalists:  But they haven’t committed any crime.

              MAGA: They are here illegally. That’s crime enough.

              Journalists: They are here legally.

The above conversation shows that one should use the word ‘undocumented’ to describe these legal immigrants.  Maybe ‘asylum seeker’ would be even better. Certainly NOT ‘illegal’.

ICE also barges into workplaces and arrests anyone who cannot produce documentation. These are mostly the ‘overstay’ immigrants. They are different from asylum seekers. Here is a description of the legal status of most of the overstayers detained by ICE, from workingimmigrants.com

civil violation vs misdemeanor vs felony in immigration law enforcement

Improper presence: If ICE arrests a person who has been in the U.S. for many years without committing any misdemeanors or felonies, but cannot provide evidence of legal status, they will likely face charges of civil violation of immigration law rather than criminal charges.  The person would likely be charged with being “unlawfully present” in the United States.

Therefore, even the word ‘criminal’ does not apply to these immigrants. But in these overstay cases, the word ‘undocumented’ applies.

Of course, there are many real illegals in the US, hiding under the radar. They are more difficult to find. What is starting to happen is that many legal asylum seekers are not reporting to their immigration appointments, for fear of being illegally arrested by ICE. The sad irony is that, by failing to appear, they become REAL illegals.

I should add that these masked ICE thugs usually do not have a judge-approved warrant to arrest anyone. They simply kidnap anyone they choose, call them illegals or criminals, and ‘disappear’ them. It could happen to anyone, especially anyone that Trump doesn’t like. It could happen to YOU!

WHAT’S GOING ON IN GAZA?

I wrote a couple of blogs over the past year, with the following hypothesis:

Hamas staged its massacre of Israelis in order to goad Israel into destroying Gaza. This would outrage the international community into finally wiping out the Zionists. To add to this strategy, Hamas stationed its troops in schools and hospitals, forcing Israel to bomb those hospitals and create humanitarian disasters. This would further enrage the international community.

For a while, the strategy worked, albeit with tremendous loss of tens of thousands of innocent Palestinian lives. Iran sent missiles against Israel, but they were intercepted. The Houthis bombed a lot of ships, but recently they have been subdued. Lebanon and the West Bank looked as though they might join the all-out fray against Israel, but Israel shut them down.

Just a few months ago, it looked to me as though Hamas had lost, especially when Israel assassinated their top leaders.

However, I note a resurgence of anti-Israeli sentiment. Indeed, the anti-semitism has spread to violent shootings and murder of Jews outside the Middle East, notably in America. This is happening just as Israel has recently assassinated another Hamas leader, (n.b. based in a hospital in Khan Younis). There is now the usual outrage that Israel bombed a hospital, killing innocent women and children. But even that outrage grows stale and boring. The world has become inured to such daily violence. The media used to publish daily numbers of civilians killed, but that reporting seems to have stopped. Too boring?

Further, the original massacre of Israelis has faded from memory, as Israel continues to destroy Palestine. There is renewed talk of ‘disproportionate response’. Yes, the destruction of Palestine truly dwarfs the number of Israelis massacred by Hamas. However, I often ask Americans, “If Cuba sent just one missile into downtown Miami, what would the US do?”  Clearly that would result in the total destruction of Cuba.

At this point, Hamas’ main goal is survival. The longer they survive, the longer they can present to the world the image of brave freedom-fighters standing up against the evil Zionists.

The media are not giving us the straight story (Surprise! Surprise!). I’m not hearing, for example, whether there is any electricity or water supply in Gaza. Is there any semblance of government? Is there transportation? Are there shops open for business?

The key element is the tunnel system. Has Israel dismantled most of it? Bombing a building doesn’t destroy a tunnel. The tunnels permit Hamas to wage ‘whack-a-mole war’.

I don’t see any real solution, but I can venture a prediction at the short-term outcome. Israel can never accept a cease-fire, because that would enable Hamas to restore the tunnel system and return the war to square one.

TARIFFS AND DEPORTATION — SCOTUS MAY DECIDE IN TRUMP’S FAVOR

The United States Court of International Trade ruled that President Trump did not have authority to “impose unlimited tariffs on goods from nearly every country in the world” and blocked Trump’s prized tariff program. Normally, only Congress can enact tariffs, but Trump had argued that the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) gave him the right to introduce the tariffs because the United States economy was in an emergency. What the court ruled was, in essence, that this is not an emergency, and even if it was, the tariffs were not correctly dealing with it.

Trump’s lawyers immediately announced their intention to appeal the decision, and it will probably go to the Supreme Court. Their arguments are twofold.

  1. This is an emergency. “These deficits have created a national emergency that has decimated American communities, left our workers behind, and weakened our defense industrial base – facts that the court did not dispute,”
  2. The courts have no right to define what is or is not an emergency, and in declaring that the tariffs are not dealing with the situation, the courts are deciding economic policy for the country. “It is not for unelected judges to decide how to properly address a national emergency.”

So one must ask whether there is a legal definition for ‘emergency’. In fact, the IEEPA actually spells it out: there has to be a threat to national security, foreign policy, or the U.S. economy; the threat must be “unusual and extraordinary;”

However, this definition leads circularly back to definitions. Who defines what is a threat, or what is ‘unusual or extraordinary’?

This is where the Supreme Court may step in. Trump’s buddies may agree with him that only he, and not the courts, has the right to define – as arbitrarily as he chooses — an emergency and how to deal with it.

Immigration

Normally, all persons in the United States, citizens or not, have the right to due process. However, Trump has cited an ancient law that says that due process may be waived if the United States has been invaded by a foreign country. He has invoked the Alien Enemies Act. passed in 1798 when America was feuding with France. It permits the president to summarily detain and deport citizens of countries with whom America is at war. 

Trump’s ICE rounded up Venezuelans and deported them to El Salvador, on grounds that Venezuela had invaded the USA and that we were at war with them. Here’s the wording of the AEA:  “[w]henever there is a declared war between the United States and any foreign nation or government, or any invasion or predatory incursion is perpetrated, attempted, or threatened against the territory of the United States by any foreign nation or government.”

The lower courts ruled that there was no ‘invasion’ and that the USA was not ‘at war’ with Venezuela, and therefore the deportations without due process were illegal.

Similar to the tariff arguments, Trump claimed that the court was overreaching; only the President can determine whether there is an invasion or not. Apparently, if a single Venezuelan sets foot on American soil, the President may consider that an invasion and start deporting thousands of Venezuelans to horrible gulags overseas.

The Supreme Court punted the first time around, but the matter will still come back to them. They will have to determine who has the right to define an ‘invasion’ of the USA, and they may well decide that Trump is the only person with that right.

There may be other cases in which the issue boils down to “Who gets to define *****, the courts or the President, or some other body?”

CAMBODIA’S S.T.E.M. PROBLEM

Let’s face it – STEM education in Cambodia is terrible.

First, some statistics: Countries the world are ranked by PISA scores of 15-year-olds in math and science. Of 81 countries measured (Africa excluded), the average score is 472, while Cambodia scores 336 in math and 347 in science – in both cases dead last, far behind its nearest competitors Dominican Republic and Uzbekistan, respectively. Neighboring Vietnam comes in at 469 and 472, respectively.

PISA itself says:

Since a high ranking on PISA corresponds to economic success, researchers have concluded that PISA is one of the indicators of whether school systems are preparing students for the 21st-century global knowledge economy.

OECD, the organization behind PISA, has published a list of 10 steps that a country may take to improve their PISA scores. www.oecd.org/en/publications/pisa-2022-results-volume-i_53f23881-en.html.  I won’t delve into these here. Rather I want to suggest another reason for Cambodia’s abysmal results.

My two opening paragraphs show a vicious cycle between school STEM education and university STEM education. Students do poorly in school math, and they graduate, saying, “I hate math and can’t do math.” So they won’t go into math at university level. With no university math graduates to teach high school math, the quality of school teaching is reduced to cook-booking through a textbook and memorizing some definitions and formulas without understanding them.

Poor school education leads to poor higher education which then reinforces the weakness of school education.

This vicious cycle also applies to other quantitative-oriented subjects, like accounting and finance. If university graduates in finance do not even understand compound interest, who is going to teach it to high school students?

I saw a useful solution to this problem in the tiny African country of Lesotho. They imported dozens of American Peace Corps Volunteers to teach math and science. These were STEM graduates from American universities. By teaching real math and science to remote mountain schools, they partially broke the cycle. We had actually real math and science majors at the National University of Lesotho, and most of them went into teaching.

It’s pretty embarrassing to compare Cambodia with Lesotho.

It must be said that Cambodia’s PISA scores have improved. They had been even lower at the previous measurement. Private schools are advertising their STEM programs to attract more students, but many of those STEM programs are just sham window-dressing – buy some fancy lab equipment to show off but never use, or pretend that your students are winning international gold medals (kind of like all those beers). At least, there’s an attitude that it’s good to excel at STEM subjects. That attitude may foster greater interest and incentive in those subjects.

Cambodia must address this problem seriously. The country risks falling behind the rest of the world in science-based achievement. We live in the age of the ‘knowledge economy’. Cambodia must either keep up with this trend, or else be relegated to a producer of agricultural products and other commodities.

WAS BIDEN TREATED?

First, I should say that I find the many attacks on Joe Biden in bad taste. He is no longer a political threat to anyone, so there is no reason to drag his name in the mud. Let’s just drop the matter.

Here’s what I, along with most average Americans, have concluded about the Biden situation, based just on what we hear on the news:

1.Cancers don’t just metastasize into the bones overnight. He must have had this cancer for quite a long time.

    2. Every President’s health is closely monitored with frequent and thorough check-ups. Prostate cancer is one of the first things they check for. His doctors must have known about the cancer and kept it hidden.

    Question:  could the doctors have kept the diagnosis hidden even from Biden himself? Is it conceivable that Biden didn’t know about his own cancer until May of 2025?

    These observations will not change anything; it’s all water under the bridge. There is one issue, however, that should be investigated. That is, if the doctors knew of Biden’s condition and kept it hidden, it looks as though they made no attempt to treat him. That i

    is, they allowed the cancer to progress to an advanced stage without doing anything. In fact, they may have even kept it all secret from Biden himself. I find this behavior reprehensible, and it may even be criminal if the doctors opted not to try to save Biden’s life.

    If true, this is behavior that both Republicans and Democrats should roundly condemn. But when Trump & Co. Try to make political capital from it, and the Democrats push back, the issue becomes relegated to just one more partisan standoff, where each side accuses the other of lying.

    I’m surprised that I’m not hearing in the media any comparison with Woodrow Wilson. He had a stroke during his Presidency, and was basically a vegetable during those final days. But his followers propped him up in bed and pretended that he was still compos mentis.

    In the Biden case, the government was able to continue running without the public suspecting the truth. Why? Because the President had intelligently selected his cabinet and advisers and Vice-President so that the team could carry on the work. That’s actually an important quality of a good leader.
     

    If anything should happen to Donald Trump, could we expect his cabinet and advisers and Vice-President to competently and efficiently carry out the running of the government?

    MUST A SYMBOL REPRESENT SOMETHING?

    Almost all Cambodian homes have a red cloth talisman, called a yantra (or yo-an in Khmer) hanging in their house. It is covered with all sorts of symbols, the most common of which is a squiggly spiral called an ounalome.

    Yantra with dozens of ounalome spirals

    The ubiquitous ounalome is a well-known and revered symbol in Cambodia, but if you ask homeowners what it symbolizes, they have no clue what it means. In fact, the literature tells you that it does have a meaning, namely, the path of life spiraling more and more narrowly upwards, until it reaches the straight path to enlightenment. However, almost no one knows this. It somehow retains its symbolic value, even though its significance it not known.

    Ever since I was in school taking literature and art classes, I have always asked the question, “Must a symbol represent something, or can it stand on its own?” For example, most high school students must discuss the symbolism of the raven in Poe’s famous poem. The discussion concludes with agreement that the raven is a symbol of grief and death.

    I prefer to think of symbols as evoking an inner experience, rather than representing something. Thus, for me, the Raven evokes the grief of the loss of a loved one. It’s like the definition of a Christian sacrament that I learned as a child: “an outward expression of an inner experience.”

    I recall going to a Christmas Eve candlelight service many years ago. At the end, everyone lit and held a candle while Silent Night filled the worship hall. I found tears streaming down my face, as the ritual was so moving, even though I could not have formally defined precisely what the candles and the hymn were representing.

    In fact, I would argue that the analysis of the meaning of a symbol moves the center of operation from the right brain to the left brain. In this way, the right-brained, holistic experience of the symbol is diminished. Thus, I would argue that the more explicit and obvious the meaning of a symbol is, the less effective it is as a true symbol.

    I used to puzzle over the lyrics of (Nobel laureate) Bob Dylan’s songs. Many of his lines seem to make no sense, and yet the listener comes away with an overall experience.  I used to try to figure out the lyrics to “All along the Watchtower”, which starts with the line:

    “There must be some kind of way outta here, Said the joker to the thief ”

    What the heck does it all mean? And yet, the overall effect of the song is quite powerful.

    Tom Taylor, in an article in faroutmagazine.co.uk, says it succinctly:

    it is the ambiguity and philosophical scope of such songs that makes them stand out as masterpieces in the world of modern music. 

    I once had to memorize a French poem by Paul Verlaine, and one line has always stayed with me:


     Rien de plus cher que la chanson grise
    Où l’Indécis au Précis se joint    .

    “Poetry is where the vague and the precise come together, as best described in a ‘gray song’.”

    All those literature classes where our left brains analyzed the ‘meaning’ of poems somehow missed the point. It is the holistic right-brain experience that counts, not whether a symbol represents this or that. Does the lotus represent yin or yang? I don’t care. It is a flower that evokes a sense of beauty within us.

    WHAT I’M NOT HEARING ABOUT JUDGE DUGAN

    Did she obstruct justice or not?

    The media have been eerily quiet about the arrest of Judge Hannah Dugan, the judge who ushered a defendant out the back door of the courtroom while ICE agents were waiting to arrest him at the front door. The government then arrested Dugan for obstructing justice.

    That arrest seems, at first glance, perfectly logical. Dugan did, indeed, prevent ICE from arresting the defendant. Case closed?

    However, several disturbing questions are not being answered —  let alone asked — by the media:

    1. Even from the rear exit, the defendant had to enter the public main hallway or take the elevator or go out the main door of the building. He had no chance to escape, and she knew it. The ICE agents quickly caught him, so the ‘obstruction’ of going out another exit from the courtroom lasted only a matter of seconds. Not much of an obstruction, I’d say. Can you really label this an ‘obstruction’ at all? A felony?

    2. Why was Dugan arguing with the ICE agents visibly standing by the front door (still outside the courtroom and therefore still legally in a public space)? I think this is an important question. Here are two scenarios:

     A) Was Dugan upset that the agents were intentionally intimidating the judge, the defendant, and everyone else in the courtroom? She would be justified to be angry with this outrageous but perhaps legal display of intimidation, but not justified in obstructing them.

    B) Was Dugan claiming that the agents were there illegally? Apparently they showed a warrant to arrest the defendant (for a crime unrelated to the crime for which he was on trial). However, that warrant was issued by ICE itself, not by a judge. This appears to me to be illegal. Let me elaborate:

    It is absurd for any body — police, ICE, you or me — to issue its own warrant. They  must first go to a judge to show probable reason to arrest. Or perhaps they could claim that some misdemeanor, like a speeding ticket, doesn’t require a warrant. But issuing their own fake warrant is acting in bad faith. In fact, issuing the fake warrant would be a crime in itself. If Dugan saw the fake warrant, she would be legally justified in trying to avoid a false arrest.

    If the police broke into your home with a fake and illegal warrant for your father’s arrest, you would be within your rights to resist that crime by ushering your father out the back door. It sounds to that something like this may have happened in Judge Dugan’s courtroom.

    3. What happened after Dugan’s arrest? Was she arraigned and charged before a judge? The media say that she was ‘released’, but they don’t make it clear whether she was set free of charges, or whether she was released on bail, to face charges later. The media are not mentioning her current status: free or charged?

    Now the whole event seems to be out of the news cycle and forgotten. Here are my conclusions:

    The ICE behavior was simply staged theatre. They didn’t need to stand visibly and intimidatingly in the door of the courtroom. Highly improper, but legal. However, they showed only an ICE warrant, not a real one, so Dugan was correct to claim they had no right to be there.
     

    Judge Dugan delayed the arrest of the defendant by a few seconds. Her arrest for ‘obstruction’ and (perhaps illegal) perp walk sound like more theatre. Vintage Trump — stage an event for the cameras to show that you are serious about arresting immigrants and clamping down on ‘woke’ judges.
     

    Trump and Cash Patel and Pam Bondi have made their point to their MAGA cultists, and the case may well disappear, especially if Dugan can show that ICE agents were in her courtroom illegally.

    “He hates the same people we hate.”

    Anyone outside the US would think that Trump is in serious trouble. His promise to reduce the price of eggs on day one has backfired, and even his most hard-headed cultists are beginning to see that the tariffs are raising prices, not lowering them. His promise to end the Ukraine war within 48 hours has also backfired, as he is now saying he’s going to ‘give Ukraine a pass’. Signalgate has mushroomed into such a scandal that it is almost universally held that Hegseth & Co.  have probably made hundreds of hackable calls and divulged volumes of top secret information to Russia and China.

    And yet, Trump’s overall approval rating remains constant around 50%. (even though on certain issues it has tanked.) The majority of Americans are pretty much OK with all these scandals. How can this be? How could anyone tolerate such awful behavior?  I watched an interesting discussion on CNN’s ‘Smerconish’. He pointed out that Trump has masterfully diverted public attention away from the disasters mentioned above to the areas where he is strongest. To wit:

    1. Immigration/racism.  The deportations to El Salvador have focused the news cycle on the deportation of many innocent men to that concentration-camp gulag . All non-Aryan, of course. ICE kidnaps a Hispanic with tattoos, declares without evidence that he is a terrorist/gang member, and ships him off to the Gulag forever. This action should be beyond the pale for any democracy-loving American, but it isn’t. These non-Aryans are all horrible people — ‘rapists and murderers’, ‘dog and cat eaters’, ‘poisoning our blood’, ‘worse than animals’. Hooray for Trump! Ridding us of these non-white vermin. How dare those ‘woke’ courts try to protect these awful people?

    Proud American patriot

    Here’s a thought:  suppose ICE randomly rounded up 1000 non-Aryans, declared them terrorists, and ‘disappeared’ them to the gulag. Suppose that only 2 of the 1000 were later found to be criminals, while the lives of the other innocent 998 and their families were forever ruined. Would Trump & Co. still boast, “We got rid of 2 dangerous criminals. Americans’ lives are safer now. You should thank us.” ?

    2. Eastern private universities.  Hotbeds of ‘woke-ism, these institutions have DEI practices that accept and hire blacks and women and foreigners. Americans hate these liberal, elite seats of woke indoctrination. Hooray for Trump! Attacking these effete libtards and expelling or deporting those snowflakes who disagree with good ol’ Aryan American policies. Of course, he would never attack any of those red-state, jock schools like Alabama or Ohio State. In fact, I was hoping that when Trump invited the OSU football team to the White House, the mostly Afro-American OSU team (How DEI can you get?) would refuse in order to call out Trump’s blatant racism.

    3.  The IRS.  Everyone hates the IRS. The more Trump cuts back or eliminates the IRS, the more we can cheat on our taxes without being audited. Hooray for Trump! Allowing us to underpay our taxes and cause the US public debt to skyrocket.

    Trump has managed to focus the news cycle on these three issues in order to mask his gross failures. He hates the same groups of people his followers hate. This emotionality allows them to support illegal and unconstitutional acts simply out of blind hatred. Anything Trump does to persecute these hated groups is fair game. Courts, the Congress, laws, and the Constitution must not get in the way of these noble actions. Call Trump a dictator if you will, and point to his moral failings, but he is ridding America of this scum, because the courts, etc. are not doing their job.

    To these supporters, Trump is coming out smelling like a rose.

    TRUMP’S TARIFF FORMULA AND CAMBODIA

    Trump slapped Cambodia with one of the highest tariffs, because, he claimed, Cambodia poses 97% tariffs on the US. When you look at a list of Cambodian tariffs on US imports, you see meats and food products at 15%, with other products at 7-15%, nowhere near the 97% calculated by the Trump team.
     

    So I went looking for the Trump formula, which is

    This formula has nothing to do with a country’s tariffs, but rather, its trade balance with the US.  So I looked up Cambodia’s trade figures, which show 320 million in exports to the US (xi in the formula), and 12 billion in imports (mi in the formula). That’s about a 3% ratio of exports to imports, so the Trump claim would be that Cambodia charges 97% tariffs on American goods.

    This despite official figures showing most tariff items  at 7-15%, making the 97% claim look ridiculous.

    I started reading about other countries. Lesotho had the highest tariff on the list, because its exports of diamonds far outweigh imports at virtually 0, since Lesotho imports most food, etc. from South Africa.

    Also Vietnam:  Vietnam-US bilateral trade in 2024 neared US$150 billion, with Vietnam enjoying a substantial surplus of US$124 billion.

    But then the penny dropped. Wait a minute! Cambodia has a huge deficit ratio with the US, while Lesotho and Vietnam have surpluses. In fact, if you look back at that formula, you see that  xi – mi for deficit Cambodia is actually negative. The formula calculates that Cambodia has a negative tariff of 97%, whatever that might mean.

    I can only conclude that that erudite formula has no meaning at all, but uses all those fancy Greek letters to impress readers and make it appear that the designers had some idea what they were doing, which they obviously don’t.

    So why should Cambodia, with its trade deficit, and Vietnam, with its trade surplus with the US, be lumped into the same high tariff rate of about 46% assigned by Trump?

    The answer is found in one word: China. Trump doesn’t want China evading tariffs by channeling its goods, or producing them through Southeast Asia. Therefore, he slaps a high tariff on all Southeast Asian countries so that they cannot be used as staging by China.

    I’ve got news for you — China is going to use Cambodia anyway. China will be making a lot of products which it can no longer sell to the US, and will be looking for other markets. Cambodia, on the other hand, may not be able to import its meat and food from the US, so it will turn to China. Thus, a greatly increased trade between China and Cambodia can be expected.

    Trump is using the trade war as a personal bargaining chip, in hopes that countries will concede something to Trump’s personal bank accounts. Already, Cambodia’s leaders have written to Trump, bending the knee and begging him to lower the tariff, expressing their willingness to cooperate with the almighty Trump.