Trump's two-by-four foreign policy gets early wins

• On Sunday, after Trump threatened crushing tariffs and travel restrictions, Colombian President Gustavo Petro buckled and agreed to accept his country's nationals deported from the U.S.
• "Other countries began reaching out after that" to discuss accepting deportees, the White House official, who wasn't authorized to speak on the record, said without elaborating. "There is more of a willingness to take back their citizens and to express that."

Driving the news: El Salvador's president, Nayib Bukele, opted for the carrots. Three days before Trump's row with Petro, Bukele tentatively agreed with Trump to accept his citizens who are deported from the U.S., as well as Tren de Aragua gang members originally from Venezuela.

• Secretary of State Marco Rubio's first foreign visit, coming soon, will be to El Salvador.
• Trump "means what he says, and I think any nation that doesn't believe that is making very poor judgment," said Sen. Bill Hagerty (R-Tenn.), who served in Trump's first administration.

Reality check: One risk of swinging the two-by-four too often is that it disillusions allies.

• Trump's threat to buy Greenland from an unwilling Denmark, a U.S. ally, has rattled the Danes and the European Union, whose top general this week proposed sending troops to the island.
• It also has bothered some U.S. lawmakers.
• "Americans must view Greenland as an ally, not an asset. Open for business, but not for sale," Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) said Monday.
• Trump also is rattling sabers at another U.S. ally, Panama, over the influence of China-controlled companies at the Panama Canal.

Zoom out: Trump wants to showcase a new, aggressive foreign policy that hearkens back to the Monroe Doctrine and clearly establishes the Western Hemisphere as a China- and Russia-free zone. It's what makes him so focused on Cuba and Venezuela.

• Rubio, National Security Adviser Mike Waltz, Latin America envoy Mauricio Claver-Carone and Trump's choice for ambassador to Panama, Kevin Cabrera, are all anti-leftist foreign policy hardliners.

Zoom in: Waltz frequently travels with the president and was with him when Petro, at 3:41 a.m. Sunday, posted on X that he would "deny" U.S. military flights of deportees to Colombia.

• Trump was at his Doral resort near Miami, ahead of a meeting of House Republicans there. The resort is about a 10-minute drive from Rubio's home. Rubio hustled over, met with Waltz, and hammered out the outlines for a response to Petro.

• "They got a plan. They presented to the president. It was done by lunch," said a source familiar with the conversations.
• "Nat Sec at the speed of social media," a White House official added.

Between the lines: Petro's threats and capitulation almost seemed scripted for Trump ahead of the congressional GOP meeting in the Miami area where there's a huge anti-Petro Colombian-American community.

• Cuban-American hardliners like Reps. Mario Diaz Balart and Carlos Gimenez hail from Miami. They held a bilingual press conference in Doral event and a lit into Petro in English and Spanish.
• Other Republicans similarly praised Trump, including House Speaker Mike Johnson, who noted that Petro's capitulation included flying Colombians back at his taxpayers' expense.

"He did an about-face very quickly," Johnson told reporters. "And if he wants to send his own presidential plane to pick up his folks, we welcome that. It saves the American taxpayers money."

The intrigue: Trump's hardball immigration agenda isn't causing friction with some U.S. allies and trading partners.

• Even before Colombia was threatened with new tariffs, India's foreign ministry told Rubio it would accept thousands of Indians living illegally in the U.S., according to a press call with India's minister of foreign affairs.
• Before Trump took office, the Philippines said it would help repatriate migrant workers who have overstayed their visas in the U.S. with a financial assistance fund.