President calls the elected president of Colombia an 'illegal drug leader' on his social network.

OK. Pay attention. Sunday afternoon. The President is on his social network. He posts, in all capital letters: “AS OF TODAY, THESE PAYMENTS, OR ANY OTHER FORM OF PAYMENT, OR SUBSIDIES, WILL NO LONGER BE MADE TO COLOMBIA.” And then, as a matter of explanation, he calls the elected President of Colombia “an illegal drug leader.” Plus “low rated” and “very unpopular.”

Buddy. The elected President of Colombia. The country is a treaty ally. They have been our largest single counter-narcotics partner in the hemisphere for thirty years. Plan Colombia. The eradication budget. The DEA stations. The shared intelligence on the cartels. That entire architecture is built on the fact that the Colombian government, every administration, has worked with us, by treaty, to suppress the cocaine trade. The trade we want suppressed. The trade we are asking them to suppress.

The President of Colombia, Gustavo Petro, has had real disagreements with the United States this year about strikes the U.S. military has conducted in the Caribbean against vessels Petro says were not narco-trafficking, including one in which he claims a Colombian fisherman named Alejandro Carranza was killed. That is a real disagreement. It has been working through diplomatic channels. Diplomatic channels are how this is supposed to work.

What happened Sunday is not diplomatic channels. What happened Sunday is the President of the United States, on his phone, on a weekend, calling the elected head of an allied country an illegal drug leader. In writing. With his name on it.

I have run a casino floor. I have been called names. I have been threatened. You learn quickly: when a man calls you a name in writing, what he is doing is putting the name in the file so the next person who reads the file thinks it is true. The next person, in this story, is the rest of Latin America. By Monday morning the President of Mexico, the President of Brazil, and the President of Chile had all issued statements of concern.

You ever notice how bilateral relationships, which we spent thirty years building, can get set on fire on a Sunday afternoon by one man with a phone.

Petro responded the same evening. His statement was actually quite measured. “Mr. Trump, Colombia has never been rude to the United States.” That is a generous sentence. It is more generous than the sentence it was responding to.

I’m arguing with the television. The television is in Spanish.