Dem
47
GOP
53
The Shield of Americas held its first meeting at Donald Trump's Doral golf club on Saturday. We wonder if Trump at least gave the leaders a discount on their rooms. Pretty much all the big players in the Americas showed up. Well, except for Brazil, Canada, Colombia, Guatemala, Mexico, Nicaragua, Peru, Uruguay, and Venezuela. Here is the happy American family:
The countries that did show up were the real heavyweights, like Argentina, Bolivia, Ecuador, Honduras, Paraguay, and Trinidad and Tobago. Our guess is that the leaders who did show up were holding their breath and crossing their fingers that Trump didn't decide to invade them next. Note the absence of the new U.S. envoy to the Shield: Kristi Noem.
Cuba also wasn't represented, and is now in deep doodoo. Trump said: "Cuba's at the end of the line. They're very much at the end of the line. They have no money. They have no oil. They have a bad philosophy. They have a bad regime that's been bad for a long time." It is true that the Cuban economy is in dire straits, but that is because the U.S. has had a total embargo on the country for most of the last 64 years. If that were lifted, the country would probably do as well as other countries in the region.
Trump added that Cuba is its last moments of life, so maybe an invasion is indeed imminent. He even went so far as to say that he planned to put Marco Rubio in charge, Rubio's down to only two or three jobs at this point, so why not add Viceroy of Cuba to the list? If the attack on Iran was to draw attention away from the Epstein files, then an attack on Cuba will be to draw attention away from the attack on Iran. Cuba is a small defenseless country, so an attack on it will be 100x easier than the one on Iran. Trump might well do it because it would be militarily easy. Then he could claim he is two for three (Venezuela and Cuba vs. Iran). Even Ted Williams never dreamed of hitting .667 (V)