I don't know a lot about the Panama Canal, but in my former incarnation as a plastics recycler, we used it quite a bit to get recyclable and recycled plastic back and forth from Asia. Recycled plastic doesn't have a lot of intrinsic value. Recyclable plastic has even less. Yet, intermodal shipping (including via the canal) is cheap enough that the economics work fine, so long as the price of plastic is otherwise okay, which it isn't always, but that's another story.

Another thing I know about the canal is that for about the last year I've been pretty intense a bout watching videos made by sailing "cruisers" who sell their homes and live on their boats. Many of them use the canal to get from the Caribbean to the Pacific, and I've seen at least dozens of videos of the canal transit, as well as lots of videos of these families enjoying Panama while preparing to transit and after transiting.

It looks to me like the Panamanians who run the canal do a crack job. Everything is super professional and smooth, well oiled as it were.

And it looks like a lot of the canal workers make pretty decent money. They should! Why should there be an American controlled or owned zone from which Panamanians themselves are excluded or restricted?

That's a head scratcher.

Why should Trump and his buddies line their pockets? The canal is where it is for good reasons. It couldn't exist just about anywhere else.

The Panamanians are doing a really good job running the Canal and trying to deal with climate-change issues that it difficult to operate during drought conditions. Good for them!

They deserve to be rewarded for their work, considering it's actually their land.

Trump! Omg.