Donald Trump has some strange ways of coming up with a foreign policy. From taco salads to talent competitions, he’s apparently been gleaning his ideas about global economics and international relations from some strange sources.
Last week, either convinced that he’d found the perfect way to do outreach to Hispanics, or the perfect way to troll the media into covering his Hispanic outreach for a full afternoon, Trump posted a photo to Twitter of himself celebrating Cinco de Mayo. He knows all about Mexico, you see, because he once ate a “taco bowl” on top of a picture of his ex-wife, Marla Maples.
It didn’t earn him much support from the Hispanic community—after all, taco salads are hardly authentic Mexican food, and building a taco shell wall around some sour cream doesn’t make up for threatening to wall off the southern border. But it did provide plenty of fodder for late-night and social media comedians at a loss for material.
On Thursday, when asked about his friendliness towards Russia—something uncommon among Republicans or Democrats vying for the Presidential nomination —Trump said that he’d learned everything he ever needed to know about Russia when he hosted the Miss Universe pageant there three years ago. “I know Russia well. I had a major event in Russia two or three years ago, Miss Universe contest, which was a big, big, incredible event. An incredible success,” Trump said.
Strangely enough, he was echoing a joke from the White House Correspondents Association dinner, where Obama accused Trump of counting a meeting with beauty pageant queens —”Miss Sweden, Miss Argentina, Miss Azerbaijan”— as meeting with foreign dignitaries.
Trump has claimed that he has “more foreign policy experience” than “virtually anybody.” So we wondered what else he might consider counting as “global experience.” French toast? Chinese finger traps? Swedish massages? The list is almost endless.