What did Donald Trump do today?

He proposed to get a vital fertilizer from a sanctioned, landlocked Russian ally 6,000 miles away instead of Canada. 

According to a post on his private microblogging website today, Trump is supposedly "working on a massive Deal with respect to the purchase of Potash from Belarus." Potash is a mineral form of potassium salts, and is a key ingredient in fertilizer. The United States imports about 80% of the potash it uses from Canada, which is the world's leading supplier, and which is connected to the United States by a robust rail network.

    

Diversifying a country's suppliers of critical materials is generally a good idea. Canada, for example, is rapidly transitioning away from a reliance on trade with the United States, given the erratic and damaging trade policies Trump has pursued. But making the United States reliant on potash from Belarus is, to put it mildly, a terrible idea, for a few reasons.

• Belarus is under international sanctions. The Belarusian government is essentially controlled by the Putin regime, and is under international sanction for its role in the Russian invasion of Ukraine. This obviously doesn't bother Trump personally, whose obligations to the Putin regime are well known, but it would be a problem for American importers who need to do business with countries that respect the sanctions—which includes the entire European Union.
  
  
• Belarus is very, very far from the United States. Potash is sold by the ton, and it's not inherently expensive, currently selling for about $387 a metric ton. That means that shipping costs add a lot to the final price. Getting potash from Belarus would involve rail or truck transport across Russia, then a long sea voyage to an American port, and then another long rail journey across most of the United States to fertilizer production plants in the West. 
  
  Canadian potash, by contrast, goes directly in dedicated rail cars from Canadian depots to US customers.
  
  
• Prices don't work that way. Even if Belarusian potash weren't more expensive for American importers because of the increased shipping costs, the potash market is global, and the price is set by overall demand. Canadian potash is only expensive in the United States because of Trump has slapped import taxes on Americans in a quixotic attempt to somehow "win" at trade with the United States' largest trading partner. 
   
• Belarus doesn't export anywhere near enough potash. The United States imported about $3.6 billion worth of potash last year. Belarus' total potash exports came to $1.1 billion. Even if the United States instantly got access to every last ton of Belarusian potash, it would still fall more than two-thirds short of the needed supply.

And, as Belarus' president bluntly underscored today, the United States will not get any new Belarusian potash. Alexander Lukashenko immediately refuted Trump's claim of a "massive Deal" today, saying that "even if we wanted to supply [potash] to other, Western markets, we simply do not have those volumes—everything is contracted."

Trump has not elaborated on who, if not the dictator who controls Belarus, he was "working on a massive Deal with."

Why does this matter?

• Lying about supposed future "deals" doesn't change the fact that Trump's trade wars are making food more expensive for Americans right now. 

• It's bad if a president has a completely different foreign policy than the rest of the country.