LAST June, the United Nations slapped trade sanctions on UNITA, the Angolan rebel movement, for failing to comply with previous UN resolutions and carry out its agreement to disarm.
Then, to improve his standing in industrial states he failed to carry in 2000, Mr. Bush slapped trade barriers on steel imports, a step antithetical to free trade.
To help China, President Franklin Roosevelt slaps trade sanctions on Tokyo, which eventually responds by attacking Pearl Harbor.
After Japan invaded China in 1937, President Franklin Roosevelt reacted by slapping trade sanctions on the Japanese.
Last week, to French anger, the Americans slapped a trade ban on French foie gras.
It has slapped on trade sanctions, closed its waters to North Korean ships and resumed a long abandoned propaganda blitz across the border.
And even after the war officially ended, Washington continued to punish Hanoi, refusing to recognize the Vietnamese-installed government in Cambodia that had ousted the genocidal Khmer Rouge and slapping a trade embargo on Vietnam.
Major U.S. trading partners that signed on to the nearly 200-nation accord reached in Paris last year are already signaling that they will retaliate if the United States backs out, possibly by slapping environmental trade tariffs onto some American products.
Donald Trump has not built a border wall with Mexico, slapped punitive trade barriers on China, revived American coal mining jobs, drained the lobbyist swamp, repealed the Affordable Care Act or made America Great Again (except perhaps inside his own head).
Slap China with trade tariffs, they dump Treasury bonds and send interest rates higher for American corporations.
