Success Quote by Donald Trump

It’s the logic of a deal memo dressed up as foreign policy: if China benefits from Libya, China should pay for Libya. Trump isn’t arguing the ethics or strategy of intervention so much as renegotiating the invoice. The repetition of “billions and billions and billions” is doing more than emphasis; it’s a drumbeat meant to trigger taxpayer resentment and cast America as the sucker in an unfair arrangement.

The subtext is transactional nationalism. “Policing the world” frames U.S. military action as a service other countries freeload off, while “trying to take over the world economically” turns China into both competitor and cheater. That pairing matters: it lets him pivot from isolationist fatigue (“stop being the cop”) to aggressive bargaining (“make them carry the burden”) without committing to either a coherent non-interventionism or a clear interventionist doctrine. It’s flexible outrage.

Libya functions here less as a country than as a prop in a broader narrative about American decline and elite incompetence: we spend, others profit. The line “we don’t get oil from Libya” is a simplifying shortcut that sidesteps alliances, regional stability, and humanitarian stakes. The intent is not accuracy; it’s leverage. By reducing geopolitics to supply chains and receipts, Trump sells a worldview where power is measured in who pays and who gets paid, and where foreign policy success is defined by closing the kind of “bad deal” his audience already suspects they’re trapped in.