Donald Trump, Avatar of his Class, Capitalism & the Decline and Fall of Bourgeois Democracy

[blindpig]

Trump 2024 (Vegas) vs. Trump 2016 (Bangor): Rhetoric and Cognition
Posted on June 19, 2024 by Lambert Strether
By Lambert Strether of Corrente.

Readers, this will be a short and, perhaps to some, overly sweet post. Over the course of campaign 2024, we’ve had a flood of digital evidence (some genuine) that many speculate can be used to diagnose cognitive issues that President Biden (81) may have. We have also had a smaller counterflood of digital evidence making the same claim about former President Trump (78). In this post, I will not sort out these claims and counter-claims[1].

I can, however, make one limited contribution to this debate: I saw then-candidate Trump on October 15, 2016, and posted on it (“Fear and Loathing at the Cross Arena in Bangor, Maine: Donald Trump Makes Headlines“) In this post, I will compare Trump then, at the Cross Arena, to Trump now, in Las Vegas on June 9, 2024. By comparing the two speeches, I will make a purely subjective judgment on whether Trump’s mental capacity has diminished, and then compare, at an overly high level, the appeal that Trump is making to voters as a politician. I will then zero in on a few concrete policy proposals that Trump makes in Vegas.

A note on method: Readers know I much prefer to work from transcripts over videos. For Vegas, I have a transcript (hat tip, alert reader marym for putting me onto it). For Bangor, the only possible transcript is from the miserably inadequate, then and now, closed captions of a YouTube live stream. So what I will do is set the Vegas transcript against my analysis of how Trump organized his Bangor speech, and my summaries of what he said.

Bangor v. Vegas: Trump’s Mental Acuity

Trump as a speaker is improvisational, unlike every other politician in America (so no wonder the political class has consistently failed to understand him, and resorted to mockery). In Bangor:

There was, in fact, a “policy” aspect to Trump’s speech (the trade deals), and Trump made seven points on trade; at least I think it was seven. (The crowd booed TPP vigorously; they did not need to have the acronym expanded for them.) For the purposes of this post, I want to focus on how he made the points: He didn’t just emit them in bulleted-list form. Rather, he treated them as waypoints. He’d state the point, clearly and loudly, and then begin to move away from it in ever-widening circles, riffing jazzily on anecdotes, making jokes, introducing other talking points (“We’re gonna build the wall”), introducing additional anecdotes, until finally popping the topical stack and circling back to the next waypoint, which he would then state, clearly and loudly; rinse, repeat. The political class considers or at least claims Trump’s speeches are random and disorganized, but they aren’t; any speech and debate person who’s done improvisation knows what’s going on.

Improvising like this is not at all easy. You have to be able to circle back to your starting point, otherwise you’ll simply seem to be wandering around, lost. The two key points are “riffing jazzily” and “circling back to the next waypoint.” Here is an example from Vegas, on Biden’s border policy (and you have to imagine Trump speaking, and not read this as if it were written). The waypoint is the border, which makes sense in Nevada:

[TRUMP:] What he signed means nothing. In fact, it makes it easier. In my opinion, it opens the border still further. We have people coming into our country. We’re going to end up making, and I say this and I say it all the time, November 5th will be the most important day in the history of our country. If Joe Biden truly wanted to sign an executive order to stop the invasion, right now, all he needs to do is say, I hereby immediately reinstate every single border policy of a gentleman named Donald J. Trump. He doesn’t need anything. He could have done this. He’s a little late, by the way. Number one, he’s late. Number two, it’s meaningless what he signed. It’s just a PR ploy. As usual, it’s disinformation, misinformation talk. They talk, talk, talk as our country goes down the tubes. Less than four years ago, I handed Crooked Joe the strongest, most secure border in the history of our country. We never had a border like that. We built 571 miles of border wall. It was unbelievable. We ended all catch and release. We had the remaining Mexico, safe, third country, and then we had also Title 42. You remember, everything was so good. If this guy just, you know he goes to the beach all the time.

Now comes the riffing, where Trump manages to insult Biden for the famous incident of the beach chair and insulate himself against charges of being too old:

[TRUMP:] Somebody thinks he looks good in a bathing suit; I don’t think so. And he has that little chair that weighs about seven ounces. It’s meant so children can lift it and very old people can lift it. And you know what? He’s not old. He’s incompetent. He’s not old. He’s not old. I know people that are 88, 89, 92. A man named Bernie Marcus, founder of Home Depot. Bernie Marcus is 95, I think. And he is 100, you talk to him, he’s 100% sharp. This guy, there’s just something missing. And there always has been, by the way. He always had the worst and dumbest foreign policy. There always has been. Under the Trump administration, if you cross our border illegally, we caught you and we brought you back. We took you back from where you came. It was very simple.

Trump circles back to the border waypoint.

An unexpected aspect in Bangor was Trump the comedian:

TRUMP (paraphrasing): We won more votes in the primaries than any Republican! More than Romney, Bush, Dole, Nixon, Eisenhower — though in all fairness, Eisenhower won World War II.

There was humor in Trump’s Vegas speech also. Beginning once again with the border:

[TRUMP:] We had the greatest… Think of it, all he had to do was leave my people in place, leave everybody in place, and he wouldn’t be going through this right now. I think it’s one of his many big problems. I think the Afghan situation was the most embarrassing day in the history of our country, actually.

The riffing begins:

He has a lot of bad days. I could name them. But we don’t have enough time. We only have a few hours. We don’t have enough time. And now, by the way, it’s 110, but it doesn’t feel it to me, right? So we’ll stay out here for a little while. If anybody gets tired, you’ll let me know. And if anybody goes down, if you start going down, we have people, they’ll pick you up right away. They’ll throw water. They were so worried. Everybody was so worried yesterday about you, and they never mentioned me.

Rodney Dangerfield: “I don’t get no respect!”

[TRUMP:] I’m up here sweating like a dog. The Secret Service said, “We have to make sure everyone’s safe.” I said, What about me? “Oh, we never thought of that.” They don’t think about me. I’m working my ass off. I’m working hard. This is hard work. Front-row Joe, front-row Joe.

Not possible that Trump could be alluding to Arnade’s “front row kids,” so a transcription error. And:

Under Biden, the invasion is a, just a disaster what’s happened.

Back to the waypoint.

My extremely subjective view, then, is that from Trump’s language, his mental acuity in 2024 is the same as it was in 2016: His techniques are the same; his humor is the same; the texture of his language is the same. You don’t have to respect Trump’s language, or even like it, but it has not changed. (It’s also very, very hard to imagine Biden improvising in front of a crowd for over an hour. Trump makes a lot of jokes about teleprompters, underlining this difference.)

Bangor v. Vegas: Trump’s Appeal as a Politician

I thought I would make word clouds of Bangor and Vegas, but unfortunately the software that did this, Wordle, seems no longer to be online. (Here is an example of a Wordle word cloud from 2016 for Clinton; beautiful!) However, after running through a bunch of sites that were impossible to use, or would process only 50 words, I was able to use an online, free substitute called WordCloud+ that would take the full speeches. Here are two.

First, using the text of the YouTube closed caption transcript, Trump in Bangor, 2016:



Second, using the text of the @Rev transript quoted above:



You can immediately see the similarities, helpfully annotated with red boxes: “People” and “Country,” from which I conclude that Trump is indeed a populist, though perhaps not quite as Thomas Frank conceives of the term. In Bangor, the subsidiary themes were jobs and trade, which played very well in a state like Maine where the mills kept closing (the crowd did not have to have what the acronym “TPP” meant explained to them). In Vegas, the subsidiary themes were the border, which played well in Nevada, with a marked disinction between “we” and “they.” As fascist legal theorist Carl Schmitt wrote in The Concept of the Political:

“The political is the most intense and extreme antagonism, and every concrete antagonism becomes that much more political the closer it approaches the most extreme point, that of the friend-enemy grouping.”

Of course, fascism is a richly furnished smorgasbord, and Trump is not the only one partaking of its delicacies.

Bangor v. Vegas: Policy

Stoller has a terrific post in his newsletter, “Why Has Trump Stopped Attacking Big Business?”

Trump’s 2024 economic frame is about nostalgia for the time he was in office, when he ran “the greatest economy in history” with cheap gas, high wages, low immigration, and cheap money. By contrast, the Democrats, he said, are “a party of misinformation, disinformation, cheating on elections, open borders, high interest rates, and high taxes.” Rents are up and incomes are down, he told voters, because of the open border policy and the illegal immigrants brought here by “Crooked Joe.”

What’s fascinating is that he does not criticize big business, and doesn’t much talk about jobs going to China or Mexico, though he does talk about tariffs. Instead, Trump has a couple of new themes. First, he argues that the war in Ukraine wouldn’t have happened if he had been in office, and more broadly global leaders like Xi Jinping respected him in a way they don’t respect Biden. (“So, Russia going into Ukraine would’ve never happened. None of this stuff that you see would’ve happened.”) Second, he complains nonstop about electric cars. Third, he is now making arguments about gender questions like trans people playing in sports. Finally, he often talks about drilling for more fossil fuels, tax cuts, and deregulation.

In other words, Trump sounds like he is the coalition leader of the Republican establishment. He’s still funny, and he’s still weird, and still iconoclastic in terms of his personality. But in terms of what he promises, he’s mostly stopped challenging big corporations, except in cultural terms acceptable to Wall Street.

All this is true (hat tip, Susie Wiles?). It also seems to be working at the polls (“That makes me smart”). Nevertheless, Trump did make a few concrete policy proposals in Vegas — and not in Bangor — that Stoller, from his 30,000 foot view — might not have seen:

[TRUMP:] So this is the first time I’ve said this, and for those hotel workers and people that get tips, you’re going to be very happy because when I get to office, we are going to not charge taxes on tips, people making tips. We are not going to do it, and we’re going to do that right away, first thing in office because it’s been a point of contention for years and years and years. And you do a great job of service. You take care of people, and I think it’s going to be something that really is deserved.

(Trump did, in fact, deliver on TPP to his Bangor audience, withdrawing from it in his first week.) Not taxing tips should play well among the Vegas casino workers. And:

They’re killing unions because the unions are not able to survive. They’re not able to survive this onslaught. It’s making them impossible. They’ve worked hard. They’ve worked long to get their salaries up a little bit. They’re not able to do it. Virtually 100% of the new jobs under Biden have also gone to illegal aliens. Did you know that? 100%. And these people, are so bad they will correct me when I say 100%. 100% of the new jobs have gone to illegal aliens. Can you believe it? And that’s where we are.

Trump is wrong on the 100%, of course. What’s interesting is that Trump frames this in terms of hurting unions, and Vegas is a union town.

And a fine example of jazzy riffing ending at the border waypoint:

Meanwhile, real wages of African-Americans and the workers from all over the world that came here legally, they’re down 6% under Crooked Joe. And I had an idea because it’s not as bad as I thought. I thought I’d be wilting up here. The only thing that pisses me off are the teleprompters. It’s so much easier. The only one that can’t read a teleprompter is Joe Biden. It doesn’t help him. But I thought what I’d do is I’d read if you want, should I do it? Because it’s about the border.

(I can’t run down the 6% figure, but see Ferguson and Storm here.) Again, interesting that Trump frames this in terms of real wages.

Regardless of whether the border is the driver — I don’t believe it is — the audience will hear that Trump won’t tax tips, wants real wages to rise, and supports unions. By definition, all that is attacking big business.

Conclusion

Trump gave a long speech, and I’m skipping over a lot (including his criticism of electric cars, which was trenchant and IMNSHO at least partially correct[2]). However, I think we can conclude that Trump’s mental acuity is undiminished, that his populism could be seen to have veered off in a Schmittian “friend and enemy” direction, but that his populism can also be said to include on “kitchen table” issues, like tips, real wages, and unions, the first two certainly distinguishing him from Biden. (At this point we remember that under the CARES ACT, poverty actually diminished.) Trump, for good or ill, remains unique…

NOTES

[1] For the record: I am a lonely voice in this regard, but because I’ve been blogging since the days of Terry Schiavo’s brain damage, when M.D.s speaking in Congress diagnosed Schiavo’s ability to regain consciousness by watching videos, I strongly oppose diagnosis via digital evidence in a politicized context. However, one can conclude that a candidate is too frail to be President without the diversionary and time-wasting specificity of a diagnosis, exactly in the same way that one can decide that an elderly relative should no longer be given the keys to the car (or, for that matter, the launch codes).

[2] Trump says:

There’s another thing, the truck is so heavy because batteries are very heavy. The truck weighs more than twice as much as a diesel truck. So what happens is they have to fix every bridge all over the United States to handle the weight. Every bridge has to be rebuilt because the weight is double and triple that of a gasoline or diesel tank truck. And you say to yourself, “Who are these people that are destroying our country.

This is the detail Trump would see, much as he disliked the Iraq War because of all the buildngs that were destroyed.

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2024/06 ... ition.html

******

Scandal at Trump-backer Epoch Times… Biden and U.S. establishment getting desperate over election?

Finian Cunningham

June 19, 2024

Digging up dirt using a money-laundering scandal makes perfect sense. Muzzling a pro-Trump media outlet is a bonus too.

With the U.S. presidential election only four months away, the incumbent Joe Biden White House and the Democrat Party are getting desperate. They can’t seem to close the gap in poll numbers showing Republican rival Donald Trump having a strong chance of regaining the presidency.

Such is the political crisis in the United States from voter indifference to both candidates that anything could happen. With Trump threatening a “bloodbath” if he loses in November, the prospect of national chaos either way is looming.

An increasingly frail Biden is calling on Hollywood A-listers to boost his flagging campaign. A recent $30 million fundraiser by Tinseltown big names including Julia Roberts and George Clooney warned of the “scariest” outcome if Trump were returned to the White House.

What’s of concern to the political and media establishment – which largely votes Democrat – is that Trump’s popularity seems immune to damage from scandal and legal prosecutions for financial corruption. His fundraising is also set to grow more robustly after the Republican Congressional leaders put aside any misgivings to bless his campaign.

The high stakes may explain the “big news” crackdown on alleged corruption by the chief financial executive at the conservative news outlet, The Epoch Times.

Its Chief Financial Officer Weidong “Bill” Guan is in court this week facing federal charges for money laundering and bank fraud to the tune of $67 million. Guan denies the charges but if convicted he is facing a 20-30 year stretch in jail.

The Epoch Times is a major supporter of “The Donald”. The weekly newspaper is published in 35 countries and 22 languages. It was founded 25 years ago and is affiliated with the Falun Gong movement, a secretive quasi-Buddhist religion that claims to have millions of followers in the U.S. and worldwide. The spiritual leader is China-born multimillionaire Li Hongzhi who lives in exile. Falun Gong is banned in China by the Chinese government which accuses it of cult practices and extortion of followers.

Following the arrest of Bill Guan by U.S. authorities earlier this month, the Falun Gong leader wrote two articles for Epoch Times, denouncing shady practices and partisan politics. The newspaper has denied any wrongdoing and has suspended its chief financial officer pending the outcome of the fraud trial.

The New York-based Epoch Times has been a useful proxy for U.S. governments since its foundation in 2000 following the exile of Li Hongzhi from China to the United States where “he found his American Dream”, according to the Wall Street Journal. Apart from its zany content which borders on superstition and sensationalism, the upside for the U.S. establishment is the publication is vehemently hostile towards the People’s Republic of China in its editorial line. It reflects the “anti-communist” views of the Falun Gong leader and in that way can be seen as a useful propaganda tool for Washington to drum up “anti-China” sentiments.

However, during the last Trump administration, The Epoch Times adopted a stridently pro-Trump line. It ran stories popular among the MAGA movement such as the Covid-19 virus being a plot by the Chinese Communist Party to destroy the United States, as well as QAnon conspiracy claims about Satanic corruption among the U.S. establishment.

When Trump lost in 2020 to Biden, the paper promoted the false claims that the election was “stolen” by Democrat-orchestrated voter fraud. Many Republican voters still believe that their man was cheated out of a second consecutive term by the deep state.

Nailing its editorial colors to the Trump electoral mast was a profitable move for The Epoch Times. Under the stewardship of Bill Guan – a protégé of Falun Gong guru Li Hongzhi – the media group’s revenues skyrocketed from $4 million a year to over $120 million. The Department of Justice indictment alleges that Guan raked in the proceeds through fundraising online scams using cryptocurrency and personal identity theft.

The association of Trump’s campaign with an alleged massive fraud operation run by a media group that can be easily painted as a weird cultist whack job seems to be the latest effort by the Democrat-supporting political establishment to tip the scales in favor of Biden.

There has been widespread American corporate media coverage of the fraud scandal implicating The Epoch Times and its Falun Gong network. The Washington Post, New York Times, CNN, and CNBC, among others, have been having a field day on the subject.

It appears odd that the U.S. establishment, which has indulged the Falun Gong movement and its anti-China news outlet for so many years, should abruptly ramp up negative coverage.

But bear in mind that Biden’s campaign is in deep trouble. His administration’s embroilment in the Gaza genocide perpetrated by the Israeli regime has earned bitter recrimination from Democrat voters and students who would have normally voted for Biden.

Another worry for the Democrat Party is Biden’s increasingly obvious physical and mental frailty. Even pro-Democrat media are openly commenting on how Biden’s mental health is failing as he stumbles from one public gaff or misstep to another. There is a sense of dread that when Trump and Biden go head to head in a live TV debate later this month, the incumbent president will be made look decrepit and unfit for office.

The Democrat campaign is amplifying attention on Trump’s conviction for fraud over hush payments to porn actress Stormy Daniels and his other forthcoming court trial over abuse of classified documents. It’s also talking up Trump’s dodgy financial accounts and business dealings as a former real estate magnate.

The scandal at The Epoch Times and allegations of defrauding millions of Americans through money laundering comes at a time when the Biden campaign needs all the help it can get to pile the dirt on Trump.

A legal crackdown on the newspaper’s financial dealings seems long overdue. Banks and tax authorities were flagging suspicious accounts from at least 2021, according to reports. Former employers of The Epoch Times have also commented publicly on the surprising delay in investigating the media outlet and its fundraising operations.

It seems strange that federal indictments are being brought now with much-hyped media coverage if the case were assessed merely on legal concerns about finances.

If the intensity of politics is factored though and the U.S. establishment’s fears that Trump might just pull off a spectacular reelection – with all the chaos that such a return to the White House will elicit – then digging up dirt using a money-laundering scandal makes perfect sense. Muzzling a pro-Trump media outlet is a bonus too.

https://strategic-culture.su/news/2024/ ... -election/

They oughta call it 'End Times'. A lot of apocalyptic hoodoo, culture war and yes a some pro-Trump pieces in a copy that fell into my hands a few years ago. The Chinese had the right idea about that outfit. Dunno nothing about the charges but these religious gangs are notoriously corrupt(ya hear me, Papa?) As stated, the Trump connection a bonus and probably not a primary motivation.

[blindpig]

Anti-Trump Anxiety Ignores History
June 20, 2024

Given the track record of U.S. authoritarianism, Nat Parry says it’s not surprising that Democrats’ calls for resisting the incoming Trump dictatorship ring hollow for many Americans.


Former U.S. President Donald Trump at a rally in Phoenix on June 6. (Gage Skidmore, Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0)

By Nat Parry
Special to Consortium News

With President Joe Biden’s poll numbers tanking, American liberals are doubling down on what they apparently consider the best hope for his re-election: a strategy that relies heavily on whipping up fears of a dictatorship led by Donald Trump — warning that he would not only trample constitutional rights but likely imprison his political opponents.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) recently raised this specter on a podcast called “On with Kara Swisher,” openly fretting that President Trump would throw her in jail if he wins the November election.

“I mean, it sounds nuts,” she said, “but I wouldn’t be surprised if this guy threw me in jail.” The self-described democratic socialist added that “he’s out of his mind,” pointing out that in 2016, his campaign was marked by frequent calls to “lock her up,” in reference to his Democratic opponent Hillary Clinton. “This is his motto,” Ocasio-Cortez said.

MSNBC primetime host Rachel Maddow took these concerns a step further, stating that she is worried about Trump using camps to detain his political enemies, not unlike the early versions of concentration camps that Adolf Hitler used in Nazi Germany.

Maddow claimed that Trump “is openly avowing that he plans to build camps to hold millions of people,” pointing out that the camps could be used for both illegal immigrants and high-profile political opponents.

Trump has indeed talked alarmingly about camps for illegal immigrants without due process, vowing that he intends to take aggressive action to carry out mass deportations should he be elected.

He has also at times issued threats to political enemies — particularly those who have pursued legal action against him — hinting that they should expect retribution in a second Trump presidency. He warned on Truth Social, for example, that “IF YOU GO AFTER ME, I’M COMING AFTER YOU!”

That he would put not just undocumented migrants into camps but political opponents too is, at the moment, just speculation. Trump has not indicated any intention to engage in large-scale political repression, and it’s doubtful that the U.S. political framework — with its vaunted, even if imperfect, system of checks and balances — would allow such a thing to occur.

To be sure, Trump has some disturbing policies. But many of them, especially his aggressive foreign policy, are in accord with the Democrats, who praised him as “presidential” when he bombed Syria in 2018.

So while these dire warnings of a Trump dictatorship complete with concentration camps may strike some people as over-the-top and somewhat paranoid, they have taken on the air of conventional wisdom in Washington, following nearly a decade of hand wringing over the alleged Trump threat.

As Trump entered the political arena eight years ago, pundits were already raising the alarm about the authoritarian menace he supposedly posed.

Many of these warnings try to emphasize that America has never before faced such a threat and that a concerted effort was needed to counter it, that somehow Trump is an unique evil.

In an article in March 2016 entitled “Donald Trump Poses an Unprecedented Threat to American Democracy,” columnist Jonathan Chait dug up an old interview that Trump gave to Playboy magazine in which he seemed to express admiration for the Chinese Communist Party’s repression of pro-democracy demonstrators at Tiananmen Square in June 1989.

“Many of these warnings emphasized that America had never before faced such a threat and that a concerted effort was needed to counter it.”

Disregarding Trump’s qualifying words that the Chinese response to the Tiananmen demonstrations was “vicious” and “horrible,” Chait cited his statement as “evidence of an authentic and long-standing ideology,” one that is “infecting healthy elements of the body politic.”

But although Chait was primarily concerned about Trumpism itself, he also fretted that overreacting to the perceived threat could provide fuel to the descent into authoritarianism. “The perception that Trump poses a threat to democracy legitimizes undemocratic responses — if you believe you are faced with the rise of an American Mussolini, why let liberal norms hold you back?” Chait asked.

More colloquially, if you fight fire with fire, you can still get burned.

Instead of resorting to violence to stop the Trump threat, Chait insisted that he “can and must be defeated through democratic means.”

Any Means Necessary


Street art in Washington, D.C., by Craig Tinsky. (Mike Maguire, Flickr, CC BY 2.0)

Events in subsequent years revealed that Chait’s concerns were more prescient than he might have imagined. It would become clear, indeed, that the priority of defeating Trump would embrace, to paraphrase Malcolm X, any means necessary.

It would also fall into a long line of similar periods in U.S. history in which the bipartisan state, in the name of preserving “liberty” and “American values,” veered out of control, repressing speech and demanding “loyalty.”

In Trump’s case, the political establishment employed a wide array of tactics to delegitimize his presidency, including a three-year investigation into alleged collusion with Russian President Vladimir Putin to influence the 2016 election — an investigation that conceded in March 2019 that it could not “establish that the [Trump] Campaign coordinated or conspired with the Russian government” — and an impeachment launched over a tactless phone call placed to the newly elected president of Ukraine in 2019.

In addition to these official proceedings, the liberal response to the Trump threat was marred by crackdowns on independent media, often portrayed as efforts to counter disinformation and “fake news.” The demonization of alternative media began in earnest with the blacklisting of some 200 outlets by the shadowy PropOrNot outfit and intensified with Hillary Clinton’s complaints that an “epidemic of malicious fake news and false propaganda” had cost her the election.

Under increasing pressure, websites were throttled by search engines and shadow-banned by the algorithms of social media companies, culminating in a massive purge of alternative media just before the 2018 midterms, when some 800 anti-establishment accounts and pages were removed from Facebook.

Twitter also engaged in widespread censorship. As was later revealed by reporting of the “Twitter Files,” government agencies such as the F.B.I. exercised direct influence over content moderation at the popular social media platform.

In addition, Democratic partisans engaged in concerted efforts to attack anyone deemed responsible for helping Trump get elected, especially WikiLeaks for revealing Democratic Party corruption in the 2016 campaign, as well as Green Party supporters and others who had refused to vote for Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, often portraying them as disloyal and traitorous.


Televised debate between candidates Trump and Clinton on Oct. 9, 2016. (GPA Photo Archive, Flickr, CC BY 2.0)

High levels of political violence also characterized the Trump presidency, with both right-wing groups such as the Proud Boys and left-wing movements such antifa and Black Lives Matter engaging in riots and assaults on those considered to be political enemies.

The intensity of the anti-Trump “resistance” was spurred by the perception that the threat posed by MAGA was unique. If allowed to develop unchecked, many Democrats wholeheartedly believed, it would surely mean the end of American democracy.

“The intensity of the anti-Trump ‘resistance’ was spurred by the perception that the threat posed by MAGA was unique.”

As Chait had warned, however, sometimes the responses to perceived threats can be more damaging than the threats themselves. The truth of this was revealed as the cumulative effect of the response to Trump became clear.

While it is debatable whether Trump and his MAGA supporters were ever truly the existential threats to democracy that his detractors claim, some of the responses to this alleged threat have clearly gone too far. The United States Supreme Court has pushed back on some of these efforts, for example, by reversing Colorado’s attempt to remove Trump from the ballot in the state.

With Trump positioning himself — once again — as the billionaire underdog standing up for traditional American values, his supporters tend to view the attacks on him as the sinister machinations of the “deep state,” rather than legitimate efforts to uphold the rule of law.

Even Trump’s recent felony conviction in the Stormy Daniels “hush money” case has had a negligible effect on his popularity, with most Americans — including 81 percent of Republicans — viewing the case as politically motivated.

Typical of US History


U.S. President Woodrow Wilson returning to New York harbor from the Versailles Peace Conference on USS George Washington, July 8, 1919. (Wikimedia Commons, Public domain)

What should also be appreciated is that even if MAGA Republicans are the unrepentant fascists that their detractors claim, the idea that this challenge is something utterly unique — a threat that requires an unprecedented response — is dubious. A cursory examination of American history reveals that from being unprecedented, in fact, anxiety over losing democracy is a defining characteristic of American politics.

Important lessons, in this respect, could be learned from earlier experiences, in particular how concerns over tyranny can at times lead to authoritarian excesses — in effect creating the very conditions that are purportedly being guarded against.

In the early 20th century, many feared that ideologies such as anarchism and socialism threatened to undermine the American way of life. Especially after the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution in Russia and a wave of bombings targeting politicians and industrialists in the United States, the U.S. government began viewing anti-capitalist movements as an existential threat to American liberty and launched an all-out crackdown on suspected subversives and radicals, in a campaign that came to be known as the Red Scare.

“In the early 20th century, many feared that ideologies such as anarchism and socialism threatened to undermine the American way of life.”

Initially seen as a reasonable and legitimate response to a domestic threat, excesses soon became apparent with American citizens persecuted, arrested, imprisoned, deported and sometimes executed often for little more than subscribing to a set of beliefs at odds with the dominant American paradigm and the policies of the U.S. government.

During World War I, Democrat Woodrow Wilson’s Espionage Act and his short-lived Sedition Act criminalized core First Amendment-protected activities, imposing harsh penalties for a wide range of speech that was seen as undermining U.S. war efforts.

American authorities then initially took a more accommodating approach to the rise of Nazism and fascism, gradually coming to see it as a threat that tested American democratic principles. In the 1930s, fascist sympathizers in the U.S. held huge rallies and championed their own leaders such as Virgil Effinger who led the Black Legion paramilitary organization which sought to establish fascism in the United States through revolution.

Americans of German descent established the Amerikadeutscher Volksbund, or German American Bund, in 1936. Operating nearly two dozen youth and training camps among 70 regional divisions around the country, the Bund boasted membership in the tens of thousands.


German American Bund parade on East 86th St., New York City, Oct. 30, 1937. (New York World-Telegram and the Sun staff photographer, Library of Congress, Wikimedia Commons, Public domain)

A rally it held in New York’s Madison Square Garden on Feb. 20, 1939, attracted 20,000 members and supporters who denounced alleged Jewish conspiracies and Democratic President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The rally was protested by thousands of anti-Nazis, held back by 1,500 New York City police officers.

In response to the growing threat from within, Congress passed the Alien Registration Act in 1940, which required all resident aliens to register with the Immigration and Naturalization Service. Of the nearly 5 million registrants, about 600,000 were Italian nationals, 260,000 were German nationals, and 40,000 were Japanese nationals.

Convinced the Germans in particular were dangerous, Roosevelt urged the Justice Department to intern them all, but Attorney General Francis Biddle balked, hoping to avoid the appearance of “mass internment.” Following the attack on Pearl Harbor, however, these concerns were largely cast aside.

On the evening of Dec. 7, 1941, resident aliens considered most dangerous were immediately taken into custody, and over the next several months, more than 5,000 Japanese nationals, 3,250 German nationals and 650 Italian nationals were detained as enemy aliens.

Furthermore, on Feb. 19, 1942, Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066, authorizing the forced removal of all persons deemed a threat to national security from the West Coast to relocation centers. Two-thirds of the 125,000 people displaced were U.S. citizens of Japanese descent. As many citizens were thrown into concentration camps, this was far more unconstitutional than Trump’s plans for undocumented immigrants.

Resident aliens who were not taken into custody were subject to curfews and restrictions on their freedom of movement, and were forbidden to possess radios, cameras, and weapons.


Japanese Americans in front of posters with internment orders, April 25, 1942. (Dorothea Lange, Wikimedia Commons, Public domain)

Literary Warnings

In this context, many fretted about threats to liberty from both internal subversives and the government. The ACLU’s then national executive director, Roger Baldwin, wrote in an open letter to President Roosevelt that his “unprecedented order is open to grave question on the constitutional grounds of depriving American citizens of their liberty and use of their property without due process of law.”

Baldwin argued that “the protection of our country” can be achieved without “a wholesale invasion of civil rights and without creating a precedent so opposed to democratic principle.”

The anxiety about the rise of authoritarianism and tyranny was also reflected in popular literature and film of the era, providing no shortage of evidence that concerns over democracies devolving into dictatorships have been deep-seated and widespread throughout modern American history.

Sinclair Lewis’ novel It Can’t Happen Here, a sardonic look at whether a Nazi-style dictatorship is possible in the United States, was published in 1935, kicking off a theme in popular culture of the totalitarian threat at home by outlining a detailed and convincing scenario for homegrown fascism taking root in America. Americans were fascinated by his dystopian vision, sending the book to the top of the charts with more than 320,000 sales.


Sinclair Lewis and his wife in 1931. (Wikimedia Commons, Public domain)

Central to Lewis’ thesis was that if dictatorship were to come, it would assume the guise of defending American values and traditions. Wherever totalitarian ideologies pop up, Lewis observed, they always appeal to traditional notions of national pride and patriotism.

“In America the struggle was befogged by the fact that the worst Fascists were they who disowned the word ‘Fascism’ and preached enslavement to Capitalism under the style of Constitutional and Traditional Native American Liberty,” Lewis wrote.

Lewis also understood control of the media was essential. Much of It Can’t Happen Here is devoted to detailing the systematic co-optation of the newspapers and the dumbing down of journalism. Under fictional political leader Buzz Windrip’s rule, the newspapers “print almost no foreign news, except as regards the triumphs of Italy in giving Ethiopia good roads … but, on the other hand, never had newspapers shown so many comic strips.”

While insightful, Lewis’ visions of how democracy dies was somewhat incomplete. To fully appreciate this process, more attention would have to be given to the subtler systems of control in order to understand the nature of totalitarianism developing in traditional democracies.

The 1949 publication of George Orwell’s 1984 filled this void. Depicting a Western nation under absolute government control, perpetuated and empowered by a permanent war against ever-shifting external enemies, 1984 shows how the government can dominate its subjects through thought control. This is enabled by systematic manipulation of the English language and the shameless rewriting of national history to fit the ruling class’s amorphous agenda.


Orwell in 1940. (BBC, Wikimedia Commons, Public domain)

In Orwell’s dystopia, inconvenient facts were thrown down the “memory hole,” and if anyone questioned the government’s new narrative, they were subjected to torture.

Central to the ability of the government to exercise its power was the elimination of nuanced thinking, which it achieved in part through the introduction of a language called “Newspeak.” In this dialect, subtleties were eliminated, even going so far as to redefine the word “bad” as “ungood.” If something was really bad, it was called “doubleplusungood.”

By controlling the language and by manipulating the historical record, the state was able to prevent free-thinking and keep the people under absolute control.

Anti-Americanism

Although it was written as a warning of what might follow a socialist revolution — based loosely on Orwell’s observations of what he saw happening in the Soviet Union — 1984’s enduring value has been the insight it provides into the authoritarian tendencies of any government.

Many Americans over the years have cited Orwell’s warnings as particularly relevant to developments in the United States, which has used subtle means of control of the media to manage narratives and employed ridicule and repression to go after political dissidents deemed out-of-step or “anti-American.”

The very concept of anti-Americanism, critics point out, is drawn directly from the lexicon of totalitarianism. As American dissident Noam Chomsky has argued, combating anti-Americanism assumes that the society and its people are identified with state power, rather than the national culture, and when used as a rhetorical weapon against critics of state policy, it serves only to silence debate and marginalize dissent.

The result is not only a deformed democracy, but often, ruined lives and reputations — which serve in turn as a chilling warning to others.

Truman’s Loyalty Oaths


From left: F.B.I. Director J. Edgar Hoover with Truman and Attorney General Howard McGrath before the opening of the National Crime Conference in Washington, D.C., Feb. 15, 1950. (National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund, Flickr, CC BY-NC 2.0)

This was seen when the bipartisan ideology of anti-communism was institutionalized during the Cold War. In 1947, Democratic President Harry S. Truman issued Executive Order 9835, also known as the Loyalty Order, initiating a campaign to stamp out any “infiltration of disloyal persons” in the U.S. government, specifically communists and communist sympathizers.

An internal security campaign was subsequently launched in which 6.6 million Americans would be investigated, with the F.B.I. authorized to investigate federal employees to determine whether enough “derogatory information” about them warranted further review.

Loyalty boards — which lacked procedural safeguards, such as the right to confront critical witnesses — held hearings to determine whether “reasonable doubt” about their loyalty existed, resulting in the dismissal of several hundred individuals.

Several thousand more resigned and thousands more became the target of aggressive investigations and questioning before government or private-industry panels, committees and agencies, most prominently the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee, chaired by Republican Senator Joseph McCarthy.

Although many of the convictions of this period would later be overturned, the message was sent: dissent was tantamount to treason, and would not be tolerated by the state. Countless innocent people suffered loss of employment, ruined careers, and even imprisonment.

Covert Action

Over the next several decades, American democratic principles were further challenged by the excesses of the bipartisan Cold War. Government secrecy and covert action would become the norm, as would disinformation and propaganda, which would have long-term implications both at home and abroad.

The 1953 coup to overthrow the Iranian Prime Minister Muhammed Mossadegh and the 1954 coup that toppled the Guatemalan President Jacobo Arbenz, for example, provided the blueprint for clandestine activities around the world. The coup against Mossadegh eliminated what was considered a promising progressive democracy in the Middle East, and would set in motion decades of political Islam in the region.


Mossadegh taking his seat at a 1951 meeting of the U.N. Security Council in New York City. (Wikimedia Commons, Public domain)

The Iran coup led to the U.S. installation of the shah’s brutal dictatorship, which was overthrown in 1979 in Iran’s Islamic Revolution, leading to a hostage crisis resulting in the 1980 presidential election possibly being undermined by a treasonous dirty trick known as the “October Surprise.” The ensuing decades of U.S.-Iranian relations have been characterized by mutual animosity, a contentious situation that continues through today.

In Guatemala, the C.I.A. effort to overthrow the president, dubbed Operation PBSUCCESS, resulted in a civil war that killed more than 200,000 Guatemalan civilians from 1954 to 1990. The United Nations later found that in the four regions of Guatemala most affected by the violence, “agents of the state committed acts of genocide against groups of Mayan people.”

Despite the gruesome human toll, the intervention in Guatemala was considered an unqualified success by U.S. government leaders. According to an official C.I.A. study of the intervention, “its triumph confirmed the belief of many in the Eisenhower administration that covert operations offered a safe, inexpensive substitute for armed force” in dealing with leftist governments.


U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower meeting with Secretary of State John Foster Dulles at the White House, Aug. 14, 1956. (Wikimedia Commons, Public domain)

Those early coups against Iran and Guatemala set in motion decades of U.S. foreign policy characterized by covert action, assassination plots and overt military intervention.

As former State Department employee William Blum documented in his 1995 book Killing Hope, since the end of World War II, the United States has overthrown more than 50 governments, most of which were democratically elected.

Further, it attempted to suppress populist or nationalist movements in 20 countries and interfered in democratic elections in at least 30 countries. All in all, according to Blum’s count, since 1945 the United States has meddled in at least 69 countries.

A New Era


Sept. 12, 2001: President George W. Bush, center, with Vice President Dick Cheney and National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice looking over a brief together in the White House. (Wikimedia Commons, Public domain)

Following the Cold War’s end in the early 1990s, there were renewed hopes that the dark days of covert action and domestic repression were over. It didn’t take long, however, for those hopes to be dashed.

The government largely continued undermining democracy both at home and abroad, with the United States routinely providing military assistance to over 73 percent of the world’s dictatorships according to one count.

The terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 — widely seen as blowback for decades of foreign meddling, including the arming and training of the Mujahadeen for their fight against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan ?— ?ushered in a new wave of democratic backsliding, with the Bush administration’s response to the terrorist threat marked by controversial policies such as the Iraq invasion, indefinite detention, the Patriot Act, mass electronic surveillance, and an extraordinary rendition and torture program run by the C.I.A.

George W. Bush — who once joked that “if this were a dictatorship, it would be a heck of a lot easier, so long as I’m the dictator” — seemed intent on ushering in a new style of authoritarian rule. Characterized by novel interpretations of presidential power, including theories promoted by Bush proxies of a “unitary executive” and “presidential power at its absolute apex,” administration policies alarmed liberals and traditional conservatives alike.

Popular Culture References

With anxieties running high during the Bush years, popular culture reflected the concerns of many that the United States was devolving into a new form of dictatorship. The Star Wars prequels, for example, told a story of an interplanetary republic consumed by war, which an opportunistic chancellor cynically used to consolidate power and establish an empire.

In the name of providing security and defending democracy from internal enemies, the elected Chancellor Palpatine worked his way to a position of power, and used his influence to gain more and more authority. With the republic beset by sectarian conflict and secessionist movements, Palpatine took to the floor of the Galactic Senate in Revenge of the Sith and urged the body to grant him permanent emergency powers.

“In order to ensure our security and continuing stability,” Palpatine says, “the Republic will be reorganized into the first Galactic Empire, for a safe and secure society.” The senators applaud the appeal and subsequently grant him his wish.

Astute observers noted the timeliness of the film’s message and emphasized the relevance of its insight into how and why democracies devolve into authoritarian dictatorships.

The film, which came out several months into Bush’s second term, offered a solid analytical framework for understanding this phenomenon, based on a pattern that has been well-established throughout history, from Rome in the first century to Germany in the 20th, and as some Americans worried, the USA in the 21st.

Indeed, George Lucas’ prequel series was seen by many as a parable of what was happening in the United States since 9/11, and a warning of where the country could end up if it continued to trade civil liberties and constitutional rights for security and safety.


Lukas at the 66th Venice Film Festival, June 2009. (Nicolas Genin, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0)

Agence France Presse even called Revenge of the Sith “a galactic jab to US President George W. Bush” while Washington Post columnist Daniel Froomkin wrote that it was “a cautionary tale for our time.” Froomkin argued that at its core, the movie was “a blistering critique of the war in Iraq, a reminder of how democracies can give up their freedoms too easily, and an admonition about the seduction of good people by absolute power.”

New York Times movie critic A.O. Scott also emphasized the film’s relevance to contemporary American politics, particularly its warning of “how a republic dismantles its own democratic principles.” Revenge of the Sith, Scott wrote, is “about how politics becomes militarized, about how a Manichaean ideology undermines the rational exercise of power,” and should rightly be seen as an indictment of political leaders in the United States.

Scott pointed out one scene in particular that seemed to directly challenge the “with-us-or-against-us” mentality that the Bush administration had adopted in the war on terror. “At one point,” Scott wrote, “Darth Vader, already deep in the thrall of the dark side and echoing the words of George W. Bush, hisses at Obi-Wan, ‘If you’re not with me, you’re my enemy.’” The older and wiser Jedi Obi-Wan Kenobe responds that “Only a Sith thinks in absolutes.”

Challenging the with-us-or-against-us mentality of the war on terror was also a central theme in another Bush-era blockbuster, V for Vendetta. In this film, set in Great Britain in the not-too-distant future, at a time when “the former United States” is embroiled in civil war, a freedom fighter/terrorist (depending on one’s perspective) fights back against a totalitarian state, hoping to spark a revolution by assassinating all of the key government leaders and blowing up the Parliament building.

The defining traits of the regime he sought to topple were its total control over information, its use of mass surveillance technology, its systematic use of terror against its population, and its demand for absolute conformity? — ?with the slogan, “Strength through Unity. Unity through Faith.”

Important for both its warnings of how totalitarianism could take hold in a democracy and its seeming endorsement of violence to effect political change (“Violence can be used for good,” says the protagonist V at one point), the film was perhaps most significant for its box office success at a time of heightened fears of terrorism and expectations for fealty to the government.

Its popularity was seen by some as a rejection of the notion that citizens must obediently support government policies and unquestioningly accept official definitions of terrorism.

Correspondingly, the film was denounced by several conservative leaders. For instance, Ted Baehr, chairman of the Christian Film and Television Commission, called V for Vendetta “a vile, pro-terrorist piece of neo-Marxist, left-wing propaganda filled with radical sexual politics and nasty attacks on religion and Christianity.”

While conservatives attacked the film for being “pro-terrorist” propaganda, other observers pointed out its timeliness and its seeming parallels to modern American society. The Los Angeles Times noted that “with a wealth of new, real-life parallels to draw from in the areas of government surveillance, torture, fear-mongering and media manipulation … you can’t really blame the filmmakers for having a field day referencing current events.”

This included the “black bags” worn by political prisoners of the regime, seen as an allusion to the black bags worn by prisoners at Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo Bay, and the yellow-coded curfew alert system that London lives under in the film, which was seen as a reference to the U.S. government’s color-coded Homeland Security Advisory System.

Director James McTeigue confirmed that he hoped to make the film relevant to contemporary audiences, and had taken some liberties with significant adaptations of the graphic novel upon which the screenplay was based.

“We felt the novel was very prescient to how the political climate is at the moment,” McTeigue said. “It really showed what can happen when society is ruled by government, rather than the government being run as a voice of the people. I don’t think it’s such a big leap to say that things like that can happen when leaders stop listening to the people.”

Americans seemed to identify with this message, sending it to the top of the U.S. box office on its opening day, where it stayed for the remainder of the weekend. Over the next eight months, the film grossed over $70 million in the United States and $62 million abroad.

Its popularity seemed to reflect a worldwide appreciation for the chronic threat of authoritarianism, contradicting the consensus that prevailed in the Western world in the early 1990s following the demise of the Soviet Union regarding the inevitable march of democratic progress.

It also recalls that current-day concerns over the “unprecedented” Trump threat are not really unprecedented at all, and, more importantly, are oblivious to the dynamics of authoritarianism — ?particularly the need to protect against the response to a perceived threat becoming the very thing being defended against.

What is particularly curious about our modern discourse is to hear pundits and politicians deplore Donald Trump as a would-be dictator who considers himself as above the law, when he’s the only president to ever be tried and convicted of a crime, despite others, like George W. Bush, initiating an unprovoked invasion of a sovereign nation.

While several presidents have faced legal troubles, often for far more serious offenses than those that have plagued Trump, none have been convicted in a court of law.

Maybe that’s why the Democrats’ calls for resisting the incoming Trump dictatorship continue to ring hollow among so many Americans.

https://consortiumnews.com/2024/06/20/a ... s-history/

Something Parry overlooks, Americans love an outlaw. Nonetheless, only a fool would vote for him, or Biden. As it stands, given recent polling, videos of Biden faltering and the upcoming debate which I suspect will be a trainwreck for Biden it looks like Trump has the momentum. Still, I believe that the anti-Trump faction of the ruling class and their imperial management allies will find some way to keeping him out of office. If one thing was proved by his term in office it is that he cannot be managed like your run-of-the-mill politician and that's a red flag for the real bosses.

******

Project 2025: The US Far-Right Plan to Undermine Democracy and Rights Globally
Posted on June 20, 2024 by Yves Smith

Yves here. We are overdue on giving a full-bore treatment on Project 2025, but this post will hopefully serve as a starting point. Sadly, ambitious and well-organized right wing campaigns to greatly increase the acceptance of their social and policy agenda have proven to be extremely successful, witness the Powell Memo and the Project for the New American Century.

Trump is the explicit target of this Heritage Foundation scheme. Because the first Trump presidency was very much a “dog that caught the car” event, Trump had perilous little in the way of plans, and on top of that, weak cabinet members. For instance, Steve Mnuchin’s tax reform plan was an embarrassment, barely rising to the level of a napkin doddle. So after that misfire, the Administration took up the anti-tax lobby’s plan, include their off-the-shelf language. Trump might be a tad better prepared to be President if he wins again, but that does not make him any less receptive to pre-packaged programs from his fellow travelers. So this initiative very much bears watching.

By Diana Cariboni, who started writing for Tracking the Backlash in 2018 and is now openDemocracy’s Latin America editor. She was previously co-editor-in-chief of the IPS news agency and led its Latin America desk for more than ten years. She wrote the book ‘Guantánamo Entre Nosotros’ (2017) and won Uruguay’s national press award in 2018. Originally published at openDemocracy

Last month, populist leaders from around the world gathered for the Europa Viva 24 summit in Madrid. Headlines from the event were dominated by the big names in attendance – Argentinian president Javier Milei, France’s Marine Le Pen, Chile’s José Antonio Kast, and Italian and Hungarian prime ministers Giorgia Meloni and Viktor Orbán – and the fact it ended in a diplomatic row between Argentina and Spain.

But away from all of this noise and fury was a lesser-known speaker: Roger Severino, a former official in Donald Trump’s administration and the vice-president for domestic policy at influential US think tank The Heritage Foundation.

In a six-minute speech delivered in Spanish, Severino described Trump as a victim of lawfare launched by “the lefties” and said young people are subjected to a “culture and a medical system” that tells them to “explore all sexual appetites at age of 10” and that “abortion is not about destroying babies but about healthcare”.

Adding that young people are also taught “that if you are uncomfortable with your sex you were probably born in the wrong body, and surgeries can fix that mistake”, he said: “I’m here to tell you that God doesn’t make mistakes.

Severino is one of the architects of the Heritage Foundation’s blueprint for a second Trump term, named ‘Project 2025’. This aims to reshape the federal state in 180 days, fire tens of thousands of public servants and replace them with people loyal to the conservative cause, undermine the separation of powers, attack public education, and erase or restrict the rights of women, LGBTQ people, workers, migrants and Black people.

It also seeks to dismantle policies to tackle climate change and push for an energy agenda reliant on fossil fuels.

Its plan for doing so is set out in the ‘Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise’, an 887-page playbook published by the think tank, whose mission is “to formulate and promote conservative public policies based on the principles of free enterprise, limited government, individual liberty, traditional American values, and strong national defence”.

It is not absurd to say that some of the Heritage Foundation’s suggestions may well become law if Trump is elected in November. The politically well-connected organisation was founded in 1973 and published its first ‘Mandate for Leadership’ as Ronald Reagan took office in 1981 – later boasting that Reagan had enacted more than 60% of its policy recommendations.

Severino, who was Trump’s director of the Office for Civil Rights at the Department of Health and Human Services, wrote Project 25’s section on health. Of the 199 times the word ‘abortion’ is mentioned throughout the document, 149 are in this chapter, which urges the federal government to remove (or restrict as much as possible) any sexual and reproductive healthcare and rights whose oversight it has responsibility for.

Severino suggests eliminating the approval of abortion pills and banning their distribution by mail; barring the use of federal funds to transport people seeking an abortion in a state where it’s illegal to one where it isn’t; cutting federal funding to Planned Parenthood and other abortion providers; and removing emergency contraception from workers’ health insurance coverage.

In contrast, it’s hard to find any proposals to tackle the US’s real public health crises: opioids, falling life expectancyand rising maternal and infant mortality rates. This is perhaps unsurprising; the Heritage Foundation sees the Supreme Court’s overturning of the 1973 Roe decision that protected abortion up to 23 weeks as a victory – but also as “just the beginning”.

In the two years since Roe’s repeal, 21 states have banned or drastically restricted abortion, and legislative and judicial battles are raging in others attempting to follow suit. But the number of abortions carried out annually has actually increased, according to multiple studies – and so grow the dystopian battleplans for the continued war on reproductive autonomy. Several US cities have made it illegal to use their roads to transport people seeking abortions from a state where abortion is prohibited to one where it is permitted.

Project 2025 wants the Department of Health to go further still, urging it to “protect life, conscience and bodily integrity” and place “strong respect for the sacred rights of conscience” at the top of its agenda. Severino’s chapter calls for legislation requiring states to record data on abortions, including the number of terminations carried out, the reasons for them, the method used, the length of the pregnancy, and the state of residence of the person seeking an abortion.

It also suggests that scientific research conducted with public money should focus on “the risks and complications of abortion” and on “correcting and not promoting misinformation about the health and psychological benefits of giving birth compared to the health and psychological risks of intentionally taking a human life through abortion”.

But Project 2025’s focus isn’t only on reproductive health.

The president who takes office in 2025, the foreword says, must “remove from every existing rule, regulatory agency, contract, grant, regulation, and federal law the terms sexual orientation and gender identity, diversity, equity, and inclusion, gender, gender equality, gender equity, gender, gender-sensitive, abortion, reproductive health, reproductive rights, and any other term used to deprive Americans of First Amendment rights” (which protects freedom of religion, freedom of speech and press, and the right to petition the government for redress of grievances).

The future government must also “immediately cease the collection of data on gender identity, because it legitimises the unscientific notion that men can become women (and vice versa) and encourages the phenomenon of the constant multiplication of subjective identities”, Severino adds.

An Anti-Rights Past and Future

The Heritage Foundation is not the only highly influential institute involved in the writing of Project 25. Of the 100 organisations that sit on its advisory board or directly contribute to the playbook, several have been crucial to the advancement of extremist agenda in the US in recent decades and years.

In 2018, four years before Roe was overturned, Mississippi banned abortions after 15 weeks in the state – with legislation modelled on a bill conceived by the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), which the Southern Poverty Law Center lists as an anti-LGBTQ hate group and which sits on the Project 25 advisory board. The law was challenged and stayed by two courts on the grounds that it was unconstitutional because it violated Roe.

The law’s promoters took the case all the way to the Supreme Court, aiming to challenge and ultimately overturn Roe. Their strategy relied on the court having a right-wing majority, which was ensured by Leonard Leo, a conservative lawyer and activist who has founded a network of groups and funding hubs. Leo, who had already been influential in the appointment of three other justices, successfully lobbied Trump to appoint three anti-abortion members to the court – achieving a conservative supermajority of six out of nine justices. Leo’s network of nonprofits has reportedly donated millions of dollars to organisations that sit on the Project 2025 advisory board since 2021.

The result has been that around a third of women of reproductive age in the US, as well as other people who do not identify as women but can get pregnant, now live in a state where abortion is banned or severely restricted, according to the Guttmacher Institute.

The Heritage Foundation, ADF and Leo didn’t answer our requests for comment.

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2024/06 ... bally.html

To be sure, some of the Heritage agenda will be dear to Trump's heart, like cutting taxes for the rich and gutting environmental regulations. Other aspects though could be problematical as they would run against Trump's façade of populism and his electoral ambition. And you don't see Heritage railing against immigrants, those rich scum like having a large pool of people for whom they can name the wage, however paltry.

No mistake, another Trump regime will really suck. But the the regime of the senile warmonger has sucked pretty bad too. All Joe has got to show is rivers of blood and a basket of broken promises made to every one of his supposed constituencies except the one that counts. He told that gaggle of rich folks,' Don't worry, if I'm elected nothing will change.'

Trump neither would nor could make such a promise.

One gets the impression that the extended history lesson above is intended to depict the Democrats as the greater evil but that is foolishness, both capitalist parties are equally evil, the nuances are relative small change.

Mebbe it's a small thing but it really gripes my ass that Trump and other more genuine conservatives call the Democratic party 'left'. That's defamation, and not of the Dems.

Vote socialist if you can or don't vote at all, either sends the message.

[blindpig]

Scott Jennings: Against Biden, Trump has a low bar to clear
Scott Jennings CNN

With the first presidential debate of 2024 upon us, a lot of us are thinking back to the last time Donald Trump and Joe Biden met on a debate stage — twice in the space of a few weeks, in fact.

Specifically, I think back to then-President Donald Trump’s disastrous performance in the first debate in September 2020 in Cleveland, Ohio. Trump effectively ended his campaign’s chances that night against Biden, badly misreading what the American people needed to hear from their president at that moment.

But you might have forgotten what happened in the second debate in Nashville, Tennessee, a few weeks later. A measured Trump offered a spirited and coherent defense of his administration’s record. And he rebutted and counterpunched Biden throughout the night without looking like a jerk.

Like the upcoming CNN tilt, that debate featured a mute button “that turned off each candidate’s microphone for the first two minutes of his opponent’s speaking time at the beginning of each debate topic.”

Look at this clip of Trump answering a question about opening schools — and ultimately the country — during the coronavirus pandemic. He delivered a deft summation of his position that was hard to argue with: “The cure cannot be worse than the problem itself.”

Trump masterfully walked through the societal ills of keeping schools and businesses closed. When Biden finished his answer explaining why keeping schools shuttered was, in his view, the right way to go (which, with the benefit of hindsight, was way off base), Trump responded with his own comment about New York having become “a ghost town” and the need to “protect our seniors, protect our elderly” as he finished. Perfect.

Substance aside, Trump delivered a performance that, had it come in the first debate, might have given him a chance to win reelection. He looked and sounded like a reasonable, composed leader who had command of the national situation. But by then, the American people had soured on Trump’s style, and millions had already voted.

As the first debate of 2024 approaches, the circumstances are different. This time, Biden is president, and the American people look like they want to fire him. His approval rating remains mired at around 38%.

The pressure is on Biden to change the trajectory of a race which Trump, according to forecasters, is now favored to win. There are near daily political stories citing Democratic leaders in a panic over Biden’s flailing performance.

Many Americans have concluded Biden is not up to another term. Trump wants to confirm that.”

Scott Jennings

Trump simply needs to replicate his performance from the second debate in 2020 to win this one. Remain calm. Be the president, not a member of the peanut gallery. Play the happy-but-determined warrior and let Biden lose his temper the way he has so often when confronted in public. Bring clear facts to exchanges on the economy and inflation, because Biden has struggled mightily to do so himself.

And think through each answer. So much of this will be decided on image. Many Americans have concluded Biden is not up to another term. Trump wants to confirm that instinct while appearing under control and plausible himself. Watching clips of the 2020 debates, it is shocking how much Biden has deteriorated in four years. Letting him dominate the screen is probably a good tactical choice.

Finally, try to keep the debate centered on the issues that work in your favor. Spend 90 minutes relitigating January 6 and you will lose. Spend 90 minutes explaining how inflation and rampant illegal immigration has destroyed American working families, and you win.

The correct frame for Trump is strength versus weakness, and there’s nothing stronger in politics than a measured, calm leader who knows how to contrast himself against a flailing, angry opponent.

Scott Jennings, a CNN senior political commentator and Republican campaign adviser, is a former special assistant to President George W. Bush and a former campaign adviser to Sen. Mitch McConnell. He is a partner at RunSwitch Public Relations in Louisville, Kentucky.

https://us.cnn.com/2024/06/24/opinions/ ... index.html

Yeah, the guy is a Republican wonk, but even broken clocks, ya know...This debate is Trump's to lose, and he's quite capable of doing so if he's feeling his oats and goes off script. Genocide Joe has got many problems documented on video including his deteriorating physical and mental condition. His support of genocide in Palestine, throwing $100 billion into the trash fire of Nazi dominated Ukraine, which btw is edging towards nuclear doom, his alienation of every constituency the Dems own except the wealthy leaves him with a very tough row to hoe. The half hearted caveats he has thrown to those folks have hardly surmounted the record and real effects or lack thereof. Having a strategy of depending upon your opponent making grievous mistakes is no strategy at all. Unless his side has an ace up their sleeve, be it via lawfare or other less savory means he's toast.

If Joe's performance is stinko there a very good chance that the convention will dump him. They could nominate that Kennedy instead, ho ho.

I dunno if any amount of lawfare can make the Republicans dump Trump, he plays the victim card convincingly to reality TV fans who have been persuaded to believe damn near anything. Unless the Supremes turn on him... I can see Roberts doing that but getting sufficient members of his majority to go along will be tough. Roberts is loyal first to the ruling class, not Trump, and it is clear that a majority of our owners do not want that unpredictable, unstable prick gumming up the works as multiple pimples come to a head in the very near future.

[blindpig]

Project 2025: 920 Pages of Irritable Mental Gestures, or a Blueprint for Fascism?
Posted on June 24, 2024 by Lambert Strether
By Lambert Strether of Corrente

If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. –Sun Tzu

Project 2025, a project organized by the so-called “scholars” at the Heritage Foundation, is in essence an aggregation of contemporary Conservative Thought, if I may so denote it, along with strategies and policies for carrying putting it into practice in a second Trump Administration. Project 2025 has been much in the news lately; see “Inside the Next Republican Revolution” (Politico), and “Project 2025’s Guide to Subverting Democracy” (The Nation). The House Democrats have set up a task force to be a “central hub” of opposition to it; here is the Heritage Foundation’s response. We can expect Project 2025 to be an issue in the 2024 campaign (no doubt, for Democrats, under the heading of “our democracy”).



The entire document (“Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise”) can be found here. (I will refer to the document as “Mandate”[1], so as to avoid confusing the project with the deliverable. From Mandate’s opening chapter:

We want you! The 2025 Presidential Transition Project is the conservative movement’s unified effort to be ready for the next conservative Administration to govern at 12:00 noon, January 20, 2025. Welcome to the mission. By opening this book, you are now a part of it. Indeed, one set of eyes reading these passages will be those of the 47th President of the United States, and we hope every other reader will join in making the incoming Administration a success. History teaches that a President’s power to implement an agenda is at its apex during the Administration’s opening days. To execute requires a well-conceived, coordinated, unified plan and a trained and committed cadre of personnel to implement it. In recent election cycles, presidential candidates normally began transition planning in the late spring of election year or even after the party’s nomination was secured. That is too late. The federal government’s complexity and growth advance at a seemingly logarithmic rate every four years. For conservatives to have a fighting chance to take on the Administrative State and reform our federal government, the work must start now. The entirety of this effort is to support the next conservative President, whoever he or she may be.

Sounds great. Makes you wonder why the Democrats can’t get it together to do something similar; they’re supposed to be the smart ones, after all.

Mandate is 920 pages long. That’s a lot of pages. In the time available I can’t analyze any of the policy proposals, although I hope to look at some of them in a later post (conservative thought on public health and the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic is especially horrid). My question is this: How can we be sure that Mandate is serious, and not some sort of diversionary tactic, like Biden’s much-ballyhooed “Unity Task Force” during the election 2020 transition? To that end, I propose two simple litmus tests: One for the spooks, and one for the Censorship Industrial Complex. If conservatives in power fail either litmus test, than Mandate is not what it purports to be (“a well-conceived, coordinated, unified plan”). In addition, following the epigraph from Sun Tzu, I will do a close reading of Mandate’s prose. Does Conservative Thought have a define its enemy? If not, then Mandate in particular, and Conservative Thought in general, is indeed reducible to a series of “irritable mental gestures.”[2]

Spook Litmus Test

On the spooks (or, as we say, the “intelligence community, or “IC”), from page 212:



I have helpfully outlined the litmus test in red: Firings. Hearings compelling testimony from Clapper, Brennan, and the 50 former (really?) intelligence officials on RussiaGate and the Hunter Biden laptop debacle would also be nice. If there are no firings, then Mandate is not a serious document. (Note that “firings” makes election 2024 existential for the intelligence community, but then you knew that.)

Censorship Industrial Complex Litmus Test

I am sure there are more components and institutions involved in the Censorship Industrial Complex (see Matt Taibbi) than CISA (the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency), but CISA will do to go on with:



I have helpfully outlined the litmus test in red: Firings. The test and the existential stakes are exactly the same.

Does Conservative Thought Know Its Enemy?

Let me once again quote fascist legal theorist Carl Schmitt from The Concept of the Political:

[T]he specific political distinction to which political actions and motives can be reduced is that between friend and enemy.

Taking Schmitt’s view, for the purposes of this post, as read, does Conservative Thought make this distinction successfully? As a vibe, yes. As a coherent doctrine, no. I present the Table 1, which I hope shows these conclusions.

I apologize for making you squint — you can skip over the table to the close reading, here — but I felt that the columns needed to be adjacent. For a designer, the table also exemplifies Tufte’s “small multiples”; it’s no accident that the “left” and “liberal” columns are almost the same length, and Marxist by far the smallest (For a full-size/full-resolution image of any example, Command-click (MacOS) or right-click (Windows) on the tables thumbnail and “open image in new tab.”)

To construct Table 1, I searched Mandate for the following terms: Left, Liberal, Marxist, and Radical. I collected 35 examples, which I believe are representative. If you will examine the examples, the incoherence — the “irritable mental gestures” — of Conservative Thought seem to me inescapable. I will refer to each cell by Column Heading and Number: For example, “Left #1” is the topmost lefthand cell.

TABLE 1: The “Other Side” in Conservative Thought

(See table at link. You can 'open in new tab' each individual box.)

Left #1 mentions “the other side” (that is, a Schmittian enemy). Does Mandate describe “the other side” coherently? Let’s find out, going column by column: Left, Liberal, Radical, and (dread word) Marxist.

Left is the enemy, but what is the Left? Left #2 tells us there is a “far” left, apparently different from special interests, and radicals (whoever they are, but presumably not the Left), in government. Left #3 gives us an example, Antifa, but surely Antifa is not a special interest (nor in government; they’re anarchists). Left #4 tells us swathes of the State Department’s workforce are left, but presumably not far left? Left #5 introduces “left-of-center,” but what is this center of which they speak? Not far, presumably, but what? Left #6 tells us that the left directs federal policy and elite institutions, but surely Antifa doesn’t do that? Left #7 identifies the Google and Ford Foundation “organizations” as working to advance “leftist agendas,” the former surely coming as a surprise to Silicon Valley libertarians. Left #8 identifies the left with “wokeness.” Left #9 reinforces “left-of-center,” but are there any centrists who are “woke”? Why or why not? Left #10 introduces “radical leftist organizations.” so presumably there are left organiztionas that are not radical, but who are they? Antifa? The Ford Foundation? The State Department workforce? Left #11 identifies the left as thinking “they are special.” I thought all God’s children were special. Now in Left #12 we have left “activists” (antifa?) and investors (!!) “who ignore the China threat,” so presumably a portion of the left is motivated by profit. Does that make them special, or not? Left #13 identifies a “bureacratic managerial class” (presumably not, however. a “workforce”). Finally, Left #14 identifies the left as insane. Surely insanity is not limited to them? These categories are by no means mutually exclusive and exhaustive!

Liberals are the enemy too, except when they’re not. In Liberal #1, “liberal democracy” is A Good Thing (only when carried out by Conservatives, I suppose). Liberal #2 identifies liberals as opposing conservative policies, but the left does that too, so why do we have two words for the same thing? In any case, are conservative who oppose conservative policies liberals? Liberal #3 identifies “liberal non-profits” and “radical Acorn-style pressure groups,” so is the Rockefeller Foundation liberal or left? And is the Green Revolution like Acorn? Liberal #4 seems to propose that the more liberals there are in a population, the more left it is, so NPR is to the left of PBS. There are radical liberals in Liberal #5; are they NPR listeners? Liberal #6 introduces an “illiberal chill,” so apparently it is again A Good Thing to be a liberal. Or are radical liberals from Acorn to be chilled? Liberal #7 proposes that liberals in the 1970s were socialists. I suppose that’s no longer true because the socialists were replaced by anarchists? Liberal #8 proposes “bold liberalization,” A Good Thing. Liberal #9 again frames the United States as a Liberal country, which is A Good Thing, but therefore the country would oppose conservative policies, which is The Bad Thing. Liberal #10 proposes that the identifying characteristic of liberals is the pursuit of absolute power, which is ahistorical to say the least. Perhaps the difference between Left and Liberal is that the Left is insane, but Liberals seek absolute power? Which one is Bernie Sanders, the socialist? Liberal #11 again claims the mantle of liberal democracy, A Good Thing.

Radicals are also the enemy. Radical #1 proposes radicals are woke, but so are liberals and the left, so now we have three words for the same thing. Radical #2 proposes “radical equality” as A Good Thing. However, Radical #4 distinguishes between the “far left” (PBS listeners?) and “radicals in government”, so presumbly we do not have three words for the same thing. Radical #4 identifies a “radical left” so presumbly the entire left (NPR listeners?) is not radical. Radical #5 proposes that there is a “woke faction” in the country: Madison would ask what property interest drives the faction. Radical #6 identifies “radical liberals” so I suppose the radical liberals are the Bad Liberals and the liberal liberals the Good Liberals?

Marxists, Lord help us. In Marxist #1, we learn that Marxists have infiltrated the military academies; this seems unlikely to me. Marxist #2 implies that China is weak and poor (that not what they meant, but it is what they wrote). Marxist #3 says, in essence, that critical race theory would turn over control of the means of production to the working class. That’s not the mainline interpretation, to say the least. Do the reading, for pity’s sake.

Conclusion

Summarizing: Table 1 shows pervasive irritable mental gesturing on Conservative Thought.

There remains the question of whether Mandate is a blueprint for fascism. I would need to understand Project 2025’s intentions for reorganizing the executive branch, especially the civil service, to answer confidently. However, there are two reasons to think that the answer will be in the negative.

First, I’ve referred to fascism is a smorgasbord from which both parties are freely partaking. The Democrats alliance with the intelligence commmunity, whether for election interference, or, together with the Censorship Industrial Complex, for creating an information bubble for which Joseph Goebbels would be proud, strike me as being as fascist as anything today’s Republican Party has proposed or done. So neither party owns the blueprint, if blueprint there is.

Second, when I, putting on my amateur’s political hat, try to recall two parties that very rapidly and very successfully took power with “a well-conceived, coordinated, unified plan and a trained and committed cadre of personnel” I come up with two: The Republican Party of the 1860s, and the Nazis. Both parties defined their enemies very clearly: The enemy of Lincoln’s party was the the Slave Power; the enemy of Hitler’s party was the Jews.[3] I think that Table 1 and a subsequent close reading show that today’s Republican Party has not defined its enemy clearly at all (supposing, with Schmitt, that to be the purpose of a political party)[4]. We can therefore conclude that Trump’s Republican party will not have the impact that Lincoln’s party did (or, for that matter, Hitler’s). A comforting thought!

NOTES

[1] Back in 2004, Bush the Younger, having been re-elected, claimed a mandate (“I have political capital. I intend to spend it“), and the press and the opinion havers began referring to “the Bush mandate.” Google bombing was still possible then, and I Google-bombed “Bush Mandate” to the website for Mandate Magazine; the front cover, as I recall, featured a jaunty young man wearing a sailor’s cap. Happy, innocent days!

[2] The full quote from liberal critic Lionel Trilling (1950): “[T]he conservative impulse and the reactionary impulse do not, with some isolated and some ecclesiastical exceptions, express themselves in ideas but only in action or in irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas.”

[3] Clearly the Bolsheviks and the CCP were successful and defined their enemies clearly, but the process by which they took power was protracted.

[4] It has occurred to me that Mandate, being an aggregation, aggregates the work product of various Republican factions and groupuscles, and so we have a rich sediment of verbiage laid down by different sets of policy entrepreneurs over decades; hence liberals here, the left there, Marxists over there, “woke,” the newest, sprinkled on top, and so forth. It may be that Project 2025 will be the vehicle to unify all this, Bolshevik-style; I doubt that very much. All Republicans would then be RINOs, just as all Democrats are DINOs.

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2024/06 ... scism.html

Nonetheless, Trump is The King of Irritable Gestures and his fans cry for more.

[blindpig]

Debate Despair
June 28, 10:40



Trump defeated Biden in the first presidential debate.
The content of the debate was almost zero.
The Democratic Party is considering removing Biden from the election and replacing him with Obama's wife.

https://colonelcassad.livejournal.com/9232580.html

Google Translator

On the one hand I doubt that the Dems would have Michelle Obama as their nominee, it's almost too pathetic even for them. On the other hand ya can't put it past them. Just as Biden has subordinated foreign policy to his election bid so Dem Central is capable of subordinating the government to partisan politics.

******

A freak show or a stand-up comedy: American political level has never been so low

Lucas Leiroz

June 28, 2024

The moral qualities and rhetorical skills of American leaders are diminishing as U.S.’ political power declines.

On June 27th, the first presidential debate between Joe Biden and Donald Trump took place. Both candidates made it clear how low the American political level is, with discussions being reduced to personal offenses, ad hominem rhetoric and all forms of disqualified attitudes. American voters will really have a hard time choosing which of the two options is the “least worst”.

There was no debate of projects or ideas by any of the candidates. In their presentations, they limited themselves to trying to “disqualify” each other with every possible type of personal attack. Comments were made about the physical appearance, age, sporting abilities and even the candidates’ sexual and private lives. Everything irrelevant, grotesque and unnecessary was said by Biden and Trump. No proposal for a solution to U.S. problems was shown. Nothing positive for the American people was proposed.

Biden and Trump have shown themselves to be almost at the same level of political disqualification, intellectual baseness and mental insanity. Almost – because Trump still has a slight advantage over his decadent opponent. Biden continues to show clear signs that his mental health is not in good condition, often appearing to not remember where he is or what he is doing during his public activities. It was no different in the debate. Biden appeared to act like an extremely fragile elderly man who clearly should be at home, away from any stressful and decisive public activities.

Trump was more energetic and aggressive, trying to address some sensitive topics, such as the Biden family’s crimes and the American president’s disastrous performance in the Ukraine crisis. Biden had no ability to respond to Trump’s accusations – for the simple fact that Trump was right -, which is why he limited himself to acting with rhetorical dishonesty, simply trying to offend Trump, without refuting the attacks. It is possible to say that Trump won the debate, which was already expected, given Biden’s fragile conditions already perceived in previous statements – there have even been some political moves in the U.S. to try to remove him from the presidency or the elections due to issues of mental health.

However, at the end of the debate, the American political situation seemed the same as before: no positive outlook for the future was presented by the candidates. No one has proven capable of “saving” the U.S. from its domestic and foreign crisis. Trump’s proposals are already well known, but he has failed to prove himself competent for carrying out his plans, having many doubts among voters and experts as to whether he can really defeat the pro-war lobby in the U.S.. Biden, in turn, did not show any change in perspective, appearing to be content with the country’s current disastrous situation.

The U.S. political level appears to have never been so low. Biden and Trump reflect the sad reality of a society polarized between leaders whose only quality is to pronounce jargon and mobilize childish sentiments. Eruditeness, intelligence, rhetoric, technical and analytical capacity and all the virtues that have always been linked to the image of great political leaders no longer have any room in the U.S.. In Washington, the president is decided by whoever performs best in a kind of stand-up comedy festival.

The deterioration in American domestic political quality explains its international decline very well. With such unprepared and weak leaders, it is impossible for Washington to continue maintaining a global hegemonic position. In fact, not even U.S. sovereignty is preserved with these leaders, there being a real risk of civil war in the future, given the high levels of polarization, poverty, ethnic conflicts and social chaos.

From all points of view, the American future is horrific – a freak show similar to that seen in the debate on the 27th. The advance of Multipolarity, de-dollarization and sovereigntist political movements around the world is the only hope of preventing all nations from being victims and suffering the consequences of this American political nightmare.

https://strategic-culture.su/news/2024/ ... en-so-low/

******

Trump made more than 30 false claims during CNN’s presidential debate — far more than Biden
By CNN Staff

Updated 10:43 AM EDT, Fri June 28, 2024

Both President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump made false and misleading claims during CNN’s presidential debate on Thursday – but Trump did so far more than Biden, just like in their debates in 2020.

Trump made more than 30 false claims at the Thursday debate. They included numerous claims that CNN and others have already debunked during the current presidential campaign or prior.

Trump’s repeat falsehoods included his assertions that some Democratic-led states allow babies to be executed after birth, that every legal scholar and everybody in general wanted Roe v. Wade overturned, that there were no terror attacks during his presidency, that Iran didn’t fund terror groups during his presidency, that the US has provided more aid to Ukraine than Europe has, that Biden for years referred to Black people as “super predators,” that Biden is planning to quadruple people’s taxes, that then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi turned down 10,000 National Guard troops for the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, that Americans don’t pay the cost of his tariffs on China and other countries, that Europe accepts no American cars, that he is the president who got the Veterans Choice program through Congress, and that fraud marred the results of the 2020 election.

Trump also added some new false claims, such as his assertions that the US currently has its biggest budget deficit and its biggest trade deficit with China. Both records actually occurred under Trump.

Biden made at least nine false or misleading claims in the debate. He used false numbers while describing two of his key Medicare policies, falsely claimed that no US troops had been killed on his watch, repeated his usual misleading figure about billionaires’ tax rates, baselessly claimed that Trump wants to eliminate Social Security, falsely said that the unemployment rate was 15% when he took office, inaccurately said that the Border Patrol union had endorsed him before clarifying that he was talking about agents’ support for the border bill he had backed, and exaggerated Trump’s 2020 comments about the possibility of treating Covid-19 by injecting disinfectant.

(Much more, detailed breakdown at link,)

https://us.cnn.com/2024/06/27/politics/ ... index.html

So, which lying sack of shit do you chose? The one that lies more or the one whose lies stymie left progress?

Lock them both up!

[blindpig]

WHAT RUSSIANS DIDN’T MISS — BIDEN BEAT TRUMP IN THE SPINACH DEBATE



by John Helmer, Moscow @bears_with

If you think that Popeye beat Bluto because he ate spinach, this US presidential cartoon, I mean debate, was for you.

That President Joseph Biden, handicapped as he was by Parkinson’s Disease and Lewy body dementia, won the 120-minute television fight with Donald Trump seems so obvious to Russians, they express surprise at the near-unanimity in the US that the opposite was the outcome.

While the Russian state propaganda organs are repeating the “Joe Must Go” line — the US-funded Russian opposition media also — military and intelligence analysts in Moscow are concluding that Biden and Trump proved they are equally dangerous for Russia, but that Trump is now the candidate for much bigger wars in the Middle East and against China. Replacing Biden, Russian sources believe, is now an operation of the Zionist and Taiwan lobbies in Washington.

“The Democratic party elites started to think of ways to get Biden out of the way,” according to one Moscow source. “so sending him into a long debate, so early in the campaign, was exactly meant to achieve this – he will look bad but there is enough time to replace him. Republicans have always been this racist but Trump says it more plainly. Biden has always been a wolf in sheep’s clothing but he can no longer find new words to keep up the charade. What is there to see? America has never been weaker. The important thing to see here [Moscow] is the reluctance to drive American imperial power off the cliff.”

“Despite Biden’s obvious handicap, I thought he won,” adds a second source. “Biden telling Trump ‘you have the morals of an alley cat’, won it as far as I’m concerned. He also called Trump out on the racism and fascism, something Trump had no answer for except to double down. Didn’t anyone notice Trump’s compulsive repetitiveness? He repeated the same lies and aspersions over and over again. He’s more lucid than Biden, but not by much. He’s an ageing, narcissistic, racist crook.”

The Russian sources also believe that support for Trump in Moscow is an oligarch operation with a similar fondness for Israel. That has been the line of Roman Abramovich since his abortive attempts to save himself from sanctions and defeat the Russian Army failed at the beginning of the Special Military Operation in March and April 2022.

“I believe,” said one source, “ ‘Joe must go’ because he expressed some trepidation regarding Israel. He was set up — the guns were loaded and cocked before the debate even started.”

There were nineteen references in all to Russia in the debate; seventeen to President Vladimir Putin. Leaving aside mentions by the CNN moderators of the debate, Trump referred to Russia fourteen times; Biden none. Trump named Putin seven times, Biden the same number. The Ukraine was named twenty-two times, Vladimir Zelensky twice. NATO was named thirteen times.

Watch the videotape and read the transcript of the debate here.


Top: the CNN transcript publication. https://edition.cnn.com/2024/06/27/poli ... index.html


Bottom: RIA Novosti, a state news agency, reported neutrally each of the specific references to Russia and the Ukraine war. Its headline reads: “Ukraine and the prospects of World War. Trump and Biden held a debate”. TASS, also a state news agency, reported “Trump’s presidential debate win puts final nail in Biden’s political coffin”. A third state news agency, Sputnik News, began its coverage by saying: “the Kremlin saw media reports about these debates and will familiarize with them in more detail, the official said, noting that this is an internal matter of the United States.’ ‘We are absolutely not going to evaluate these debates, this is an internal matter of the United States, this is the US election campaign. We have never interfered in United States election campaigns,’ he added.” Sputnik went on to report American experts and a California psychiatrist claiming a “Biden debacle”.

This count reveals that the war in Europe was significantly more important to both candidates than any other foreign policy issue. Compared to the war in the Ukraine, there were eighteen mentions of Israel; thirteen of Hamas; fourteen of China; six of Iran; one of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, one of President Xi Jinping. North Korean President Kim Jong-Un got three.

Both Biden and Trump claimed to be tougher and the other weaker in the war against Russia. Said Biden: “we found ourselves in a situation where, if you take a look at what Trump did in Ukraine, he’s – this guy told Ukraine – told Trump, do whatever you want. Do whatever you want. And that’s exactly what Trump did to Putin, encouraged him, do whatever you want. And he went in. And listen to what he said when he went in, he was going to take Kyiv in five days, remember? Because it’s part of the old Soviet Union. That’s what he wanted to re-establish, Kyiv. And he, in fact, didn’t do it at all. He didn’t – wasn’t able to get it done. And they’ve lost over – they’ve lost thousands and thousands of troops, 500,000 troops…If you want a World War Three, let him follow and win, and let Putin say, do what you want to NATO – just do what you want…I can’t think of a single major leader in the world who wouldn’t trade places with what job I’ve done and what they’ve done because we are a powerful nation…right now, we’re needed. We’re needed to protect the world because our own safety is at stake. And again, you want to have war, just let Putin go ahead and take Kyiv, make sure they move on, see what happens in Poland, Hungary, and other places along that border. Then you have a war.”

Trump: “As far as Russia and Ukraine, if we had a real president, a president that knew – that was respected by Putin, he would have never – he would have never invaded Ukraine. A lot of people are dead right now, much more than people know. You know, they talk about numbers. You can double those numbers, maybe triple those numbers. He did nothing to stop it. In fact, I think he encouraged Russia from going in…Russia – they took a lot of land from Bush. They took a lot of land from Obama and Biden. They took no land, nothing from Trump, nothing. He knew not to do it. He’s not going to play games with me. He knew that. I got along with him very well, but he knew not to play games.”

CNN didn’t ask, and neither man claimed to have an end-of-war outcome except more force from Biden, bribes from Trump.

In a telling detail Trump claimed: “It’s just like when you have a hostage, we always pay $6 billion for a – every time we sees hostage. Now we have a hostage. A Wall Street Journal reporter [Evan Gershkovich], I think a good guy, and he’s over there because Putin is laughing at this guy, probably asking for billions of dollars for the reporter. I will have him out very quickly, as soon as I take office, before I take office. I said by literally as soon as I win the election, I will have that reporter out. He should have had him out a long time ago. But Putin is probably asking for billions and billions of dollars because this guy [Biden] pays it every time. He took nothing from me, but now, he’s [Putin] going to take the whole thing from this man right here.”

CNN asked Trump and Biden: “Russian President Vladimir Putin says he’ll only end this war if Russia keeps the Ukrainian territory it has already claimed and Ukraine abandons its bid to join NATO. Are Putin’s terms acceptable to you?” Both avoided a direct answer.

When CNN repeated the question, Trump replied: “No, they’re not acceptable. No, they’re not acceptable…Every time that Zelensky comes to this country, he walks away with $60 billion. He’s the greatest salesman ever. And I’m not knocking him, I’m not knocking anything. I’m only saying, the money that we’re spending on this war, and we shouldn’t be spending, it should have never happened. I will have that war settled between Putin and Zelensky as president-elect before I take office on January 20th. I’ll have that war settled… I will get it settled and I’ll get it settled fast, before I take office.”

Biden replied: “The fact is that Putin is a war criminal. He’s killed thousands and thousands of people. And he has made one thing clear: He wants to re-establish what was part of the Soviet empire. Not just a piece, he wants all of Ukraine. That’s what he wants. And then do you think he’ll stop there? Do you think he’ll stop when he – if he takes Ukraine? What do you think happens to Poland? What do you think of Belarus? What do you think happens to those NATO countries? And so, if you want a war, you ought to find out what he’s going to do… We give them the weapons, not the money at this point. And our NATO allies have produced as much funding for Ukraine as we have. That’s why it’s – that’s why we’re strong.”

The Trump campaign has released its plan of terms for ending the war in the Ukraine on April 11. Trump repeated lines from the plan that if he had been president, the war would not have occurred. “The United States and its allies should have sent substantial lethal aid to Ukraine in the fall of 2021 to deter a Russian invasion. Instead, as an invasion appeared likely in December 2021, Biden ignored urgent appeals from Zelensky for military aid—especially anti-tank Javelins and anti-air Stingers—and warned Putin that the United States would send lethal aid to Ukraine if Russia invaded. Biden’s message conveyed U.S. weakness to Putin.”

The briefing papers and crib sheets both candidates had memorized ahead of the debate reflected the latest polling on the war which was available to them. Poll data from a February 2024 survey by the Harris organisation and a Washington think tank funded by George Soros and Charles Koch, show there is no statistical difference between Democrats and Republicans on war and peace terms, and not enough difference among independents for either Biden or Trump to make a pitch to them.


Source: https://quincyinst.org/

A few days later in a Gallup poll conducted between March 1 and 17, Democrat voters appeared to be relatively more supportive of doing more to back a Ukrainian victory in the war than Republicans.


Source: https://news.gallup.com/

Among the terms of the Trump plan noticed in Moscow but ignored in the US, there is a payoff promise – “some limited sanctions relief” — to the Russian oligarchs. Garbling this in the debate, Trump said: “Putin is probably asking for billions and billions of dollars because this guy [Biden] pays it every time.”


Source: https://x.com/bears_with/

In presenting himself as the more effectively violent of the two, Trump reversed the Gaza genocide and used a racist slur against Biden. “Israel is the one. And you [Biden] should them go and let them finish the job. He doesn’t want to do it. He’s become like a Palestinian. But they don’t like him, because he’s a very bad Palestinian. He’s a weak one.”

Kremlin spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, claimed that Putin slept through the live broadcast of the debate. He did not say Putin has not watched a replay. “I don’t think that you can expect the Russian president to set his alarm, wake up early morning and watch the debate. This isn’t a main event for us.”

A summary of the mainstream Russian media concluded that Russian officials and analysts saw what they already thought they knew. “There are several reasons Moscow would prefer a Trump presidency — the Republican candidate has threatened to pull the U.S. out of NATO and is skeptical of American aid to Ukraine — and Russian coverage generally maintained a neutral tone toward him [Trump], while being less generous with his opponent [Biden].”

Vzglyad, the semi-official security platform in Moscow, editorialized with a commentary on Biden’s medical condition, headlined “Biden confirms Alzheimer’s victory”, with a lengthy analysis of the medical treatments and the conclusion: “this does not mean that he cannot be elected president. Dementia is, again, a long–term disease. The question is when its progress will become impossible to hide or interpret as the malicious machinations of enemies.”

In a second editorial comment Vzglyad noted: “Why does Russia need a smart president in the United States? Russia needs normal relations with the United States to implement its own, Russian foreign policy strategy. And not a world war of all against all, in which we have serious chances to lose. Some people ask a reasonable question: What is the point for Russia to have an intelligent, strong and capable president at the head of the United States? The answer is not easy. The choice in politics is never black and white. It is hardly beneficial for Russia for the United States to be led by a strong president who has a tough and realistic strategy for the world order and knows how to effectively manage resources.”

By this measure, a Russian source concludes: “everyone in Moscow, including the Kremlin, General Staff, and the oligarchs, thinks the winner of the debate was Russia.”

https://johnhelmer.net/what-russians-di ... more-90063

[blindpig]

WHAT RUSSIANS DIDN’T MISS — BIDEN BEAT TRUMP IN THE SPINACH DEBATE



by John Helmer, Moscow @bears_with

If you think that Popeye beat Bluto because he ate spinach, this US presidential cartoon, I mean debate, was for you.

That President Joseph Biden, handicapped as he was by Parkinson’s Disease and Lewy body dementia, won the 120-minute television fight with Donald Trump seems so obvious to Russians, they express surprise at the near-unanimity in the US that the opposite was the outcome.

While the Russian state propaganda organs are repeating the “Joe Must Go” line — the US-funded Russian opposition media also — military and intelligence analysts in Moscow are concluding that Biden and Trump proved they are equally dangerous for Russia, but that Trump is now the candidate for much bigger wars in the Middle East and against China. Replacing Biden, Russian sources believe, is now an operation of the Zionist and Taiwan lobbies in Washington.

“The Democratic party elites started to think of ways to get Biden out of the way,” according to one Moscow source. “so sending him into a long debate, so early in the campaign, was exactly meant to achieve this – he will look bad but there is enough time to replace him. Republicans have always been this racist but Trump says it more plainly. Biden has always been a wolf in sheep’s clothing but he can no longer find new words to keep up the charade. What is there to see? America has never been weaker. The important thing to see here [Moscow] is the reluctance to drive American imperial power off the cliff.”

“Despite Biden’s obvious handicap, I thought he won,” adds a second source. “Biden telling Trump ‘you have the morals of an alley cat’, won it as far as I’m concerned. He also called Trump out on the racism and fascism, something Trump had no answer for except to double down. Didn’t anyone notice Trump’s compulsive repetitiveness? He repeated the same lies and aspersions over and over again. He’s more lucid than Biden, but not by much. He’s an ageing, narcissistic, racist crook.”

The Russian sources also believe that support for Trump in Moscow is an oligarch operation with a similar fondness for Israel. That has been the line of Roman Abramovich since his abortive attempts to save himself from sanctions and defeat the Russian Army failed at the beginning of the Special Military Operation in March and April 2022.

“I believe,” said one source, “ ‘Joe must go’ because he expressed some trepidation regarding Israel. He was set up — the guns were loaded and cocked before the debate even started.”

There were nineteen references in all to Russia in the debate; seventeen to President Vladimir Putin. Leaving aside mentions by the CNN moderators of the debate, Trump referred to Russia fourteen times; Biden none. Trump named Putin seven times, Biden the same number. The Ukraine was named twenty-two times, Vladimir Zelensky twice. NATO was named thirteen times.

Watch the videotape and read the transcript of the debate here.


Top: the CNN transcript publication. https://edition.cnn.com/2024/06/27/poli ... index.html


Bottom: RIA Novosti, a state news agency, reported neutrally each of the specific references to Russia and the Ukraine war. Its headline reads: “Ukraine and the prospects of World War. Trump and Biden held a debate”. TASS, also a state news agency, reported “Trump’s presidential debate win puts final nail in Biden’s political coffin”. A third state news agency, Sputnik News, began its coverage by saying: “the Kremlin saw media reports about these debates and will familiarize with them in more detail, the official said, noting that this is an internal matter of the United States.’ ‘We are absolutely not going to evaluate these debates, this is an internal matter of the United States, this is the US election campaign. We have never interfered in United States election campaigns,’ he added.” Sputnik went on to report American experts and a California psychiatrist claiming a “Biden debacle”.

This count reveals that the war in Europe was significantly more important to both candidates than any other foreign policy issue. Compared to the war in the Ukraine, there were eighteen mentions of Israel; thirteen of Hamas; fourteen of China; six of Iran; one of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, one of President Xi Jinping. North Korean President Kim Jong-Un got three.

Both Biden and Trump claimed to be tougher and the other weaker in the war against Russia. Said Biden: “we found ourselves in a situation where, if you take a look at what Trump did in Ukraine, he’s – this guy told Ukraine – told Trump, do whatever you want. Do whatever you want. And that’s exactly what Trump did to Putin, encouraged him, do whatever you want. And he went in. And listen to what he said when he went in, he was going to take Kyiv in five days, remember? Because it’s part of the old Soviet Union. That’s what he wanted to re-establish, Kyiv. And he, in fact, didn’t do it at all. He didn’t – wasn’t able to get it done. And they’ve lost over – they’ve lost thousands and thousands of troops, 500,000 troops…If you want a World War Three, let him follow and win, and let Putin say, do what you want to NATO – just do what you want…I can’t think of a single major leader in the world who wouldn’t trade places with what job I’ve done and what they’ve done because we are a powerful nation…right now, we’re needed. We’re needed to protect the world because our own safety is at stake. And again, you want to have war, just let Putin go ahead and take Kyiv, make sure they move on, see what happens in Poland, Hungary, and other places along that border. Then you have a war.”

Trump: “As far as Russia and Ukraine, if we had a real president, a president that knew – that was respected by Putin, he would have never – he would have never invaded Ukraine. A lot of people are dead right now, much more than people know. You know, they talk about numbers. You can double those numbers, maybe triple those numbers. He did nothing to stop it. In fact, I think he encouraged Russia from going in…Russia – they took a lot of land from Bush. They took a lot of land from Obama and Biden. They took no land, nothing from Trump, nothing. He knew not to do it. He’s not going to play games with me. He knew that. I got along with him very well, but he knew not to play games.”

CNN didn’t ask, and neither man claimed to have an end-of-war outcome except more force from Biden, bribes from Trump.

In a telling detail Trump claimed: “It’s just like when you have a hostage, we always pay $6 billion for a – every time we sees hostage. Now we have a hostage. A Wall Street Journal reporter [Evan Gershkovich], I think a good guy, and he’s over there because Putin is laughing at this guy, probably asking for billions of dollars for the reporter. I will have him out very quickly, as soon as I take office, before I take office. I said by literally as soon as I win the election, I will have that reporter out. He should have had him out a long time ago. But Putin is probably asking for billions and billions of dollars because this guy [Biden] pays it every time. He took nothing from me, but now, he’s [Putin] going to take the whole thing from this man right here.”

CNN asked Trump and Biden: “Russian President Vladimir Putin says he’ll only end this war if Russia keeps the Ukrainian territory it has already claimed and Ukraine abandons its bid to join NATO. Are Putin’s terms acceptable to you?” Both avoided a direct answer.

When CNN repeated the question, Trump replied: “No, they’re not acceptable. No, they’re not acceptable…Every time that Zelensky comes to this country, he walks away with $60 billion. He’s the greatest salesman ever. And I’m not knocking him, I’m not knocking anything. I’m only saying, the money that we’re spending on this war, and we shouldn’t be spending, it should have never happened. I will have that war settled between Putin and Zelensky as president-elect before I take office on January 20th. I’ll have that war settled… I will get it settled and I’ll get it settled fast, before I take office.”

Biden replied: “The fact is that Putin is a war criminal. He’s killed thousands and thousands of people. And he has made one thing clear: He wants to re-establish what was part of the Soviet empire. Not just a piece, he wants all of Ukraine. That’s what he wants. And then do you think he’ll stop there? Do you think he’ll stop when he – if he takes Ukraine? What do you think happens to Poland? What do you think of Belarus? What do you think happens to those NATO countries? And so, if you want a war, you ought to find out what he’s going to do… We give them the weapons, not the money at this point. And our NATO allies have produced as much funding for Ukraine as we have. That’s why it’s – that’s why we’re strong.”

The Trump campaign has released its plan of terms for ending the war in the Ukraine on April 11. Trump repeated lines from the plan that if he had been president, the war would not have occurred. “The United States and its allies should have sent substantial lethal aid to Ukraine in the fall of 2021 to deter a Russian invasion. Instead, as an invasion appeared likely in December 2021, Biden ignored urgent appeals from Zelensky for military aid—especially anti-tank Javelins and anti-air Stingers—and warned Putin that the United States would send lethal aid to Ukraine if Russia invaded. Biden’s message conveyed U.S. weakness to Putin.”

The briefing papers and crib sheets both candidates had memorized ahead of the debate reflected the latest polling on the war which was available to them. Poll data from a February 2024 survey by the Harris organisation and a Washington think tank funded by George Soros and Charles Koch, show there is no statistical difference between Democrats and Republicans on war and peace terms, and not enough difference among independents for either Biden or Trump to make a pitch to them.


Source: https://quincyinst.org/

A few days later in a Gallup poll conducted between March 1 and 17, Democrat voters appeared to be relatively more supportive of doing more to back a Ukrainian victory in the war than Republicans.


Source: https://news.gallup.com/

Among the terms of the Trump plan noticed in Moscow but ignored in the US, there is a payoff promise – “some limited sanctions relief” — to the Russian oligarchs. Garbling this in the debate, Trump said: “Putin is probably asking for billions and billions of dollars because this guy [Biden] pays it every time.”


Source: https://x.com/bears_with/

In presenting himself as the more effectively violent of the two, Trump reversed the Gaza genocide and used a racist slur against Biden. “Israel is the one. And you [Biden] should them go and let them finish the job. He doesn’t want to do it. He’s become like a Palestinian. But they don’t like him, because he’s a very bad Palestinian. He’s a weak one.”

Kremlin spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, claimed that Putin slept through the live broadcast of the debate. He did not say Putin has not watched a replay. “I don’t think that you can expect the Russian president to set his alarm, wake up early morning and watch the debate. This isn’t a main event for us.”

A summary of the mainstream Russian media concluded that Russian officials and analysts saw what they already thought they knew. “There are several reasons Moscow would prefer a Trump presidency — the Republican candidate has threatened to pull the U.S. out of NATO and is skeptical of American aid to Ukraine — and Russian coverage generally maintained a neutral tone toward him [Trump], while being less generous with his opponent [Biden].”

Vzglyad, the semi-official security platform in Moscow, editorialized with a commentary on Biden’s medical condition, headlined “Biden confirms Alzheimer’s victory”, with a lengthy analysis of the medical treatments and the conclusion: “this does not mean that he cannot be elected president. Dementia is, again, a long–term disease. The question is when its progress will become impossible to hide or interpret as the malicious machinations of enemies.”

In a second editorial comment Vzglyad noted: “Why does Russia need a smart president in the United States? Russia needs normal relations with the United States to implement its own, Russian foreign policy strategy. And not a world war of all against all, in which we have serious chances to lose. Some people ask a reasonable question: What is the point for Russia to have an intelligent, strong and capable president at the head of the United States? The answer is not easy. The choice in politics is never black and white. It is hardly beneficial for Russia for the United States to be led by a strong president who has a tough and realistic strategy for the world order and knows how to effectively manage resources.”

By this measure, a Russian source concludes: “everyone in Moscow, including the Kremlin, General Staff, and the oligarchs, thinks the winner of the debate was Russia.”

https://johnhelmer.net/what-russians-di ... more-90063

[blindpig]

Project 2025 Architect Signals Bloodshed If Left Opposes Trump-Led ‘Revolution’
Posted on July 4, 2024 by Yves Smith

Yves here. This is not pretty, to put it mildly. This is not Steve Bannon speaking. The Project 2025 chief is the head of the Heritage Foundation, which once was a respectable if hard core conservative organization. A right wing contact agreed this statement was disconcerting, since one aim of Project 2025 was to develop lists of potential Trump Administration members who would not sandbag him, and not to go around rabble-rousing.

By Jake Johnson, staff writer at Common Dreams. Originally published at Common Dreams

The president of the right-wing group spearheading Project 2025 raised the specter of violence Tuesday against those who refuse to capitulate to what he characterized as “the second American Revolution” ushered in by presumptive GOP nominee and would-be authoritarian Donald Trump.

Kevin Roberts, head of the Heritage Foundation, said in an appearance on “Real America’s Voice” that the coming “revolution” will “remain bloodless if the left allows it to be”—a thinly veiled threat against those who resist the far-right’s efforts to seize power.

Trump said in April that whether there is violence surrounding the 2024 presidential election “depends” on the “fairness” of the contest and the outcome.

Watch Roberts’ remarks:

https://twitter.com/i/status/1808333789438877804

“We are going to win. We’re in the process of taking this country back,” declared Roberts, who has said Project 2025 is “institutionalizing Trumpism” in preparation for a possible victory in November.

The Heritage Foundation president also hailed as “vital” the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision earlier this week bestowing what analysts and critics described as king-like powers on the presidency—powers that Trump is already planning to exploit.

Project 2025, a sweeping 922-page document, provides Trump with a detailed blueprint to advance his far-right agenda, including by purging career federal civil servants and replacing them with loyalists and centralizing power in the executive branch.

Kim Lane Scheppele, a professor of sociology and international affairs at Princeton University, has called Project 2025 “a blueprint for autocracy,” characterizing it as “a direct copy of the plan that Viktor Orban used to take over the Hungarian government in 2010.”

“If it is carried out, Project 2025 will concentrate huge power in the hands of the president, giving him the power to control the whole federal government at his whim,” Scheppele added.

Scheppele’s assessment echoed that of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, which warned in an analysis published late last year that “the entire project is devoted to aggrandizing executive power by centralizing authority in the presidency, and a key aspect of democratic backsliding is viewing opposition elements as attempting to destroy the ‘real’ community, an essential aspect to quashing dissent.”

“Project 2025 paints progressives and liberals as outside acceptable politics, and not just ideological opponents, but inherently anti-American and ‘replacing American values,'” the analysis said. “Targeting vulnerable communities is a core tenet of Project 2025. Project 2025 is very clearly on a path to Christian nationalism as well as authoritarianism.”

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2024/07 ... ution.html

[blindpig]

Trump poses as a peacemaker for Ukraine after stoking the war as U.S. president

July 5, 2024

Peace in Ukraine will come when the U.S. imperialist rulers realize that Russia’s terms are the only acceptable option.

Well, at least one can say that Donald Trump is talking about ending the conflict in Ukraine. The Republican candidate for the United States presidency has lately been calling for the “horrible war” to end.

With his trademark brashness, Trump promises American voters that if elected on November 5, he can mediate a peace deal “within 24 hours”.

As for Joe Biden, the Democrat White House incumbent, he has repeatedly said he has no intention of seeking a diplomatic settlement, vowing to support the Kiev regime “until the last Ukrainian” in what is a futile war against Russia.

This week, the Biden administration pledged another $2.3 billion in military aid to the hopelessly corrupt Zelensky regime to keep fighting NATO’s proxy war. A war that has cost over 500,000 Ukrainian military deaths.

Biden is at one with the U.S. and European political establishments in his relentless warmongering. On both sides of the Atlantic, the dominant policy in Washington and Brussels – the U.S.-EU-NATO axis – is simply war, war, war. The militarist money racket and Russophobia are entrenched and incorrigible, overriding any common sense or moral decision-making.

Hillary Clinton, the former Democrat presidential candidate who embodies the U.S. deep state, this week urged Ukrainians to keep on fighting to get Biden re-elected.

Meanwhile, in Europe, there was alarm and apoplexy among various leaders when Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban flew to Moscow in an unscheduled visit to talk with Russian President Vladimir Putin about the prospects of a peaceful settlement. Orban was roundly condemned for daring to reach out to Putin.

So, against this background of inveterate warmongering it seems rather refreshing that Trump should at least be contemplating an end to the violence in Ukraine – the worst conflict in Europe since the end of the Second World War and one that risks escalating to all-out nuclear conflagration.

Asked about Trump’s peacemaking offer, President Putin responded politely this week, saying that he believed the American was sincere, but pointed out the lack of detail in Trump’s proposal.

That’s the rub. Donald Trump is not known for coherent details. His style is bluster and braggadocio. Taken with a large pinch of salt.

Russia’s ambassador to the United Nations, Vassily Nebenzia, was not convinced by Trump’s peace musings. Nebenzia indicated that the Republican candidate lacked the necessary understanding to resolve the conflict. That would involve an intelligent appreciation of history: the relentless expansionism of NATO, the treacherous backsliding by Washington over past security agreements, and the inherent workings of U.S. imperialism as an insatiable aggressor going back to the foundation of NATO 75 years ago.

There is more than a suspicion that “the Donald” is merely motivated by superficial electioneering. The former real estate magnate has acumen for tapping popular sentiment. The two American presidential contenders are neck and neck in the polls with less than four months until election day. Even after Biden’s disastrous TV debate performance last week, Trump has not capitalized on a decisive lead – which reflects how poorly both candidates are perceived by American voters.

Polls show that a clear majority of American citizens want the conflict in Ukraine settled by diplomacy. There is widespread misgiving over the enormous amounts of taxpayer money thrown at a regime notorious for its corruption, as well as the visceral fear that the conflict could spiral out of control into a nuclear World War Three.

Trump’s talk about brokering a peace deal before he is inaugurated on January 20, 2025, seems to be nothing more than an expedient bet that such a position might be enough to garner a winning edge among undecided voters and get him back to the White House.

Nothing wrong with that, one might say. After all, surely some attempt at peaceful diplomacy is better than none, no matter how cack-handed that attempt might be.

The trouble is Trump has no credibility. The last time he was in the White House (2016-20), he proved useless at standing up to the deep state despite his promises to normalize relations with Russia. Admittedly, his presidency was assailed by the baseless Russia-gate hysteria promoted by the U.S. establishment and its servile media to undermine him.

Nevertheless, on key issues, Trump showed himself to be a willing instrument for U.S. imperialist interests.

A major sign of weakness was Trump’s approval of sending lethal weapons to the Kiev regime. He broke a crucial taboo. Even his predecessor, the Democrat President Barack Obama, had refused to go that far. Obama and his then Vice President Joe Biden oversaw the CIA-backed coup in Kiev in 2014 ushering in a NeoNazi Russia-hating regime. But the sending of lethal U.S. weaponry to that regime was off the cards – so provocative was it deemed. Trump broke that taboo in 2019 when he ordered the supply of $47 million worth of Javelin anti-tank missiles to the NeoNazis.

That move emboldened the Kiev regime to ramp up its aggression against the ethnic Russian population in the Donbass region. That genocidal offensive eventually led to Russia intervening in February 2022 and safeguarding the region as a new part of the Russian Federation.

Moreover, it was Trump who scrapped two key arms control measures with Russia, the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF) and the Open-Skies Treaty. We can be sure that Trump did not personally initiate those provocative moves. He was obeying the deep state planners and their agenda of pushing confrontation with Russia.

By revoking the INF, the United States has found a legal way to supply medium-range ballistic missiles to Ukraine which are being used to strike Russia’s territory.

In that way, arguably, Trump played a pivotal and baleful role in stoking the proxy war in Ukraine that was primed in 2014 under Obama and eventually erupted in 2022 under Biden.

It should also be borne in mind that Trump gave his support to the massive $61 billion military supplement to Ukraine passed by the U.S. Congress in April this year. Trump caved in after making earlier gripes about the aid. That aid has prolonged the war unnecessarily.

Granted, Trump has at other times bickered about U.S. money being squandered on the Kiev regime. He has also repeatedly moaned about European members of NATO not spending enough, threatening to withdraw the U.S. from the military alliance if they don’t cough up more. This is typical Trump haggling and egoism that has nothing to do with questioning the principle of NATO as an instrument of U.S. imperialism. Trump just wants to do it more on the cheap and, like a Mafia don, get the European lackeys to pay more for the American protection racket.

Trump is an unscrupulous loose cannon who will do nothing to end the conflict in Ukraine. Besides, the U.S. and NATO planners are talking about “Trump proofing” their plans for aggression against Russia so that if he somehow gets back into the White House, he won’t deflect their bellicose policy.

Biden is decrepit and Trump is pathetic. Both are operatives of the deep state who only differ in their foul-mouthed style.

Peace in Ukraine will come when the U.S. imperialist rulers realize that Russia’s terms are the only acceptable option, as reiterated this week by Putin. Russia’s territorial gains from the artificial statelet that is Ukraine and the latter’s non-membership of NATO are non-negotiable.

Then diplomacy can begin. But it won’t be initiated by either Biden or Trump. It’s the unelected deep state in the U.S. that needs to come to its senses under the duress of defeat in Ukraine.

https://strategic-culture.su/news/2024/ ... president/

Republican control in the states could give Trump victory

Eduardo Vasco

July 5, 2024

The Democrats and the big American bourgeoisie have no one with the same popularity as Donald Trump, Eduardo Vasco writes.

The first electoral debate demonstrated to millions of American citizens that they are governed by a sponge. Perhaps the anticipation of the debates (in previous elections, the first debate only took place at the end of September) occurred precisely with the aim of testing the acceptance of Joe Biden’s (lack of) cognitive capacity by the general public so that there would be time to replace him by another candidate, if necessary. As in 2020, Biden carried out an internal coup in the Democratic Party, preventing competition and debates so as not to expose his complete incapacity to govern.

But all the voices of the American imperialist big bourgeoisie are now desperately calling for his replacement.

The most influential mouthpiece of the establishment, the New York Times urged in an editorial: “to serve his country, President Biden must leave the race”, praising the “admirable president”, under whose leadership “the nation prospered and begun to address a range of long-term challenges.” Because Biden is running against the devil personified. “Donald Trump has proven himself to be a significant jeopardy to that democracy – an erratic and self-interested figure unworthy of the public trust,” the newspaper opined.

However, the Democrats and the big American bourgeoisie have no one with the same popularity as Donald Trump. Most opinion polls point to the Republican as the favorite and the number of supporters of the ideas and policies he defends has been growing, such as combating immigration, sending weapons to Ukraine and “woke culture”. Research published in early January by the Washington Post and the University of Maryland indicated that 36% of Americans think Biden’s election in 2020 was not legitimate. Trump managed to raise 53 million dollars for his campaign within 24 hours after being convicted in May by the New York court and gained 3 million followers almost immediately after opening a Tik Tok account. It is an even more devastating phenomenon than in 2016.

Knowing, however, that it is not the will of the people, but rather the machinations of powerful interests within the institutions of the State that really decide the next president of the United States, it is necessary to analyze the structures of the American bourgeoisie and its tentacles and measure the strength of its sectors that are currently in clear contradiction. It is the correlation of forces within the US political and economic system that will decide which layer of the dominant classes, the upper or the lower, will have their representative in the White House in 2025.

The states where Republicans traditionally win the majority of votes for the presidency, that is, the “red states”, are Texas, Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas, Idaho, Utah, Wyoming, Oklahoma, Kentucky and Kansas. At least in the last three elections they gave the majority of votes to the Republican presidential candidate. In all of them, the state Senate and House are dominated by Republicans and only in Kentucky and Kansas are the governors not Republicans, but Democrats. This is the same scenario as states that are not “red” but are under strong Republican control: South Carolina, Missouri, Montana, West Virginia, Tennessee, South Dakota, North Dakota, Nebraska, Louisiana and Indiana. In Alaska, only the Senate currently has a Democratic majority, while all other points are in favor of the Republicans. In New Hampshire, although the majority of voters voted for Democrats in the last three presidential elections, the government, the Senate and the House are dominated by Republicans, which gives them greater control over the state machinery. In Florida, Ohio and Iowa, the government and legislature are Republican and voters have voted overwhelmingly Republican in the last two presidential elections. North Carolina voted for the Republican candidate in the last three presidential elections and both legislative houses are Republican – only the governor is Democrat.

In turn, Democrats have control of the state machinery in all the “blue states”: California, New York, Massachusetts, Illinois, Maryland, Washington, Oregon, Hawaii, Rhode Island and the District of Columbia. Only in Vermont – also a “blue state” – is the government in Republican hands. New Jersey, Connecticut, Delaware, Colorado and New Mexico, although not “blue states”, voted for Democratic candidates in the last three presidential elections and have the government and both legislative houses controlled by Democrats. In Minnesota, Republicans share the Senate with Democrats equally, but every other point made in this article gives Democrats an overwhelming advantage. In Maine, two of the last three elections have elected an equal number of Republican and Democratic delegates to the electoral college, but otherwise the entire advantage belongs to the Democrats. In Virginia, the governor is Republican, but both legislative houses are Democratic, as is the presidential voting record in the last three elections.

Among this year’s swing states, Republicans control the political machine in Georgia (government, legislature and history of two of the last three presidential elections), while Democrats control Nevada (with the exception of the government) and Michigan (where they did not win in only one of the last three presidential elections). The other three “swing states” are where control is much more balanced: Democrats hold the governorship and the House of Pennsylvania and have won two of the last three elections there, but Republicans have won one of the last three elections and control the Senate; Democrats govern Wisconsin and have won there in two of the last three presidential elections, but Republicans control both legislative houses and have won in one of the last three elections; and in Arizona, Democrats won one of three elections and hold the government, but Republicans won the other two elections and dominate the legislature.

All of this means that, taking into account control of the state political machine, Republicans are expected to win in all “red states” and in 17 other states, including the “swing state” of Georgia. They will thus be guaranteed 255 delegates for the electoral college, in addition to the total number of delegates that each of these states are entitled to. Democrats, on the other hand, tend to win in all the “blue states” and in 10 more states, including the “swing states” of Nevada and Michigan and the states of Minnesota and Maine, where, unlike all the others, the party that get the majority of popular votes in the state do not automatically elect all delegates, but have their own rules – our calculation takes into account that Democrats control the political machine in these two states, therefore they are able to manage the results of the elections. The Democrats will thus obtain 243 delegates to the electoral college.

For its candidate to be the winner of the presidential elections, a party must have at least 270 delegates in the electoral college. Hence the essential importance of “swing states” where political control is not defined (Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Arizona). To be elected, it will be enough for Trump to win in just one of them (Pennsylvania), or, if he loses in Pennsylvania, if he wins in the other two. The Democratic candidate will be forced to win in Pennsylvania and in one of the other two key “swing states”.

Considering, therefore, the control of the political machine in the states, added to the tendency of greater preference among voters in polls of voting intentions, Donald Trump has a greater chance of being elected president than the Democratic candidate.

https://strategic-culture.su/news/2024/ ... p-victory/

******

After an embarrassing presidential debate, people in the US seek a third option

The disastrous televised debate between presidential hopefuls Biden and Trump has many seeking a alternative to the two-party system

July 05, 2024 by Natalia Marques


Claudia De La Cruz, running for president against Biden and Trump in November, agitates crowd at pro-Palestine protest outside of first presidential debates of 2024 in Atlanta, Georgia (Photo via Party for Socialism and Liberation)

For many people in the United States, the televised debate on June 27 between the presidential candidates of the country’s two major parties was an unwelcome realization about the two men most likely to become the 47th president. Although incumbent Joe Biden’s mental fitness has long been the butt of jokes in the country, his disastrous performance set panic among leading Democratic leaders, donors, and the mainstream media.

Polls increasingly show that fewer and fewer people trust in Biden’s physical and mental fitness to continue running the country, especially Democratic voters. And despite debate watchers largely agreeing that former president Donald Trump had the strongest performance, under half said that his performance was good or excellent (40%).

Following the debates, more and more Democratic voters simply want Biden to be replaced. According to a Reuters/Ipsos poll from earlier this week, one in three Democratic voters now think that Biden should pull out of the presidential race entirely. A CNN poll from July 2 found that an overwhelming majority, 75%, of US voters say that the Democratic Party would have a better chance of winning the election without Joe Biden as the nominee, with most voters favoring Trump over Biden.

Even before Biden’s disaster at the debate, and before his unconditional support for genocide in Gaza, he was an unpopular candidate among those who should makeup his base. According to a CNN poll from September of 2023, 67% of Democratic Party-leaning voters said they wanted a different candidate to run on the party’s presidential ticket.

A third option?
Both the Democratic and Republican parties remain firmly rooted in the establishment politics of the country, and third party candidates, due to both legal repression and media blackouts, are still relegated to the margins of politics. But third party candidates present a clear political alternative in a political system that just 4% of US adults say is working extremely or very well, according to Pew Research Center polling from last year.

“We are witnessing something historic—in huge numbers not seen in a generation, people are turning away from the two-party system,” says Claudia De La Cruz, a socialist running against both Biden and Trump on the ticket of the Party for Socialism and Liberation alongside her running mate, Karina Garcia. De La Cruz is a South Bronx-born educator, activist, theologian, and mother, from a Black Dominican background. Garcia also has a working class, immigrant background, growing up in a Chicano family in California. De La Cruz’s campaign has reported “a huge surge of interest” since the debate, with “more and more people are signing up to volunteer, petitioning for ballot access, and helping spread the word about our socialist program.”

“On the one hand we have a genocide-enabling career politician who can’t even string a sentence together, and on the other we have a racist billionaire promising to shred people’s rights. But there is no reason we have to settle for the lesser of two evils,” said De La Cruz. Her political program, with eight major points united under the slogan “end capitalism before it ends us,” contains a vision for the future that goes far beyond what the two major political parties have ever proposed. Her first proposal is to seize the 100 largest US corporations and turn them into public property, to “serve as the foundation for a total reorganization of the economy in a way that guarantees that everyone in society will have their basic needs met, massively rebuild urban and rural infrastructure, and bring down prices and rents.”

Thus far, the third party candidate that has captured the most attention in the media is the controversial Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., of the famous Kennedy political family and the nephew of former US President John F. Kennedy. Also known by his initials RFK, he has generated significant buzz for a bold independent presidential campaign, but also for his contentious views against vaccines and other medical views, which many say border on conspiracy.

Another candidate that has captured the attention of many seeking an alternative to the two-party system is Cornel West, who has for many years been a celebrated scholar and activist on the left. West also identifies as a socialist, and is running independent of any political party or organization. West’s running mate is Dr. Melina Abdullah, who is a founder of the Los Angeles chapter of the Black Lives Matter movement, and the Director of Black Lives Matter Grassroots.

In response to the presidential debate, West wrote on X, “This presidential debate is pure farce! Trump’s lies, contempt and hatred are beyond appalling! Biden’s lies, senility and emptiness are pathetic! Both are simply living in worlds far removed from the realities of America and abroad! Both will continue the barbaric genocide in Gaza! Is America now addicted to self-destruction?”

West also has a radical platform, addressing many issues that the two major establishment candidates leave unaddressed, such as Black maternal health in a nation where Black mothers experience disproportionately high maternal mortality rates. On economic issues, West pledges to work towards numerous measures to eliminate wealth inequality, such as the eradication of poverty and homelessness. West also advocates for a USD 27 per hour minimum wage, far above the current rate of USD 7.25 per hour. “If a person works, they deserve to live—not merely survive but to live with dignity, in communities where this wage is the floor, not the ceiling, of their aspirations,” West’s campaign website reads.

Physician and activist Dr. Jill Stein is once again running for President of the United States with the Green Party. Following the Biden and Trump’s debate, Stein also reported a “surge” in support for her campaign, as well a fourfold jump in donations. Stein seeks to create an “economy that works for working people, not just the wealthy and powerful” through measures such as guaranteed free public education, including preschool, trade school, and graduate school, as well as abolishing student debt and guaranteeing free childcare.

Bipartisan domination maintained through legal repression
Despite the fact that third party candidates with radically different and transformative visions of the United States are increasingly capturing the attention of masses of people, the electoral system remains rigged against those not running as Democrats or Republicans. The legal hoops that independent and third party candidates must jump through to even get a spot on the ballot are numerous, often necessitating major spending or numerous hours of hard work to gather enough signatures to get on the ballot in each state.

Ballot access in one of the most populous states in the country, New York State, has now become nearly impossible for working class, anti-establishment candidates. In 2022, the state increased the required signatures for ballot access for independent candidates from 15,000 to a whopping 45,000, to be collected in the span of six weeks. Even for candidates who might be running on a third party ticket, the barrier of entry in New York for a “group” to qualify as a “party”, thus gaining automatic ballot access, has become almost insurmountable. There is no procedure for a group to transform itself into a party in advance of an election, a process that exists in 39 states. For a group to qualify as a party, it must poll 2% in elections for state Governor or US President, which in 2020 was 172,337 votes. This makes ballot access in New York State essentially impossible for candidates who don’t have an excess of money to spend on petitioning drives.

These difficulties are compounded by the often deliberate efforts made by establishment parties to keep alternative candidates off the ballot. In 2022, Jacobin published a piece about the shocking attempts by Democrats to block the Green Party from the North Carolina ballot, including going to someone’s house to persuade him to remove his name from a ballot access petition for the Greens.

Nonetheless, establishment political leaders will have a formidable threat to contend with, as alternative candidates have managed to secure ballot access in dozens of states, including states which will be the site of pitched battles between Trump and Biden such as Georgia.

“In many states, the petitioning threshold is so high and the ballot access rules are so ridiculous that it is clear they are not designed to facilitate the exercise of democracy, but instead to obstruct it,” said De la Cruz, in a statement regarding ballot access. “Instead of having multiple parties who represent the same imperial foreign policy consensus, we need multiple parties that challenge it. I have proudly stood with Jill Stein and Cornel West on many platforms over the years in the mass movements for peace and justice and will continue to stand with anyone that is working sincerely to stop the siege and destruction of Gaza.”

https://peoplesdispatch.org/2024/07/05/ ... rd-option/

[blindpig]

Is stopping World War Three the Donald’s ‘trump card’ for winning the White House?

Finian Cunningham

July 4, 2024

The Donald’s “trump card” for peace in Ukraine is another worthless deuce, Finian Cunningham writes.

Donald Trump seems to have hit on a winning plan for returning to the White House – by convincing voters he is the candidate to prevent World War Three.

The Republican candidate is lately pitching the importance of ending “the horrible war” in Ukraine to prevent the United States from sliding toward a nuclear conflagration with Russia.

Trump is slamming Democrat rival Joe Biden for fueling the conflict by recklessly supplying U.S. weapons that are provoking Russia and risking the start of World War Three. That’s true enough.

After Biden’s disastrous TV debate with Trump last week, the polls are showing Trump slightly pulling ahead. The Democrat campaign is in panic mode after the incumbent president’s shaky performance confirmed public misgivings about his deteriorating mental health.

Still, however, Trump has not capitalized on taking a decisive lead in the polls. The Republican is at most a couple of points ahead of Biden – even after the latter’s slow-motion car-crash TV debate.

Trump could pick up a lot of ballots among large numbers of undecided voters and propel his return to the White House by posing as the “anti-war candidate”.

At election rallies, the former president is touting his supposed ability to bring an immediate end to the war in Ukraine. Trump is saying he would cut off military aid to Ukraine and call on the Kiev regime to negotiate with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Trump is boasting that he could broker an immediate peace deal if he wins the election in November and implement a settlement even before his inauguration in the Oval Office in January 2025. Thereby preventing World War Three between the nuclear-armed U.S. and Russia.

That might seem like a sound campaign plan. A large majority of Americans – some 70 percent – want their government to find a diplomatic solution to the two-and-a-half-year war in Ukraine. This reflects public opposition to the perception of another endless American war and the growing apprehension over an escalation in the conflict between nuclear powers.

Astutely, Trump is tapping into those legitimate concerns.

On the other hand, Biden’s administration is pushing ahead with military support for the Kiev regime in a way that seems insanely reckless. This week, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin announced another $2.3 billion in military aid to Ukraine. Biden has said he will support Ukraine for as long as it takes and shows no sign of backing away from military confrontation. The president has approved the supply of longer-range missiles to Ukraine and given his permission to strike Russia.

The issue of war and peace – and without exaggeration the issue of world peace and survival of the planet – could be the one that wins the White House for Trump.

Biden does not have a reverse gear when it comes to his policy of supporting Ukraine in a futile war that it is losing badly and only provoking Russia.

Such madness is bound to be a vote loser and yet Biden and his administration appear to have no way back from the abyss. Combined with Biden’s appalling policy of supporting Israel – especially for younger American voters who would normally lean toward a Democrat – Trump could exploit the anxiety over Ukraine to his electoral advantage.

It’s not just about the danger of an all-out war with Russia. The American public is rightly incensed by the vast amounts of taxpayer money – over $100 billion at least – being shelled out for a corrupt regime in Kiev while so much public need is neglected at home.

The trouble is Trump’s lack of credibility. Ordinarily, a presidential candidate declaring his opposition to starting World War Three would be a clear winning platform, one would think.

Recall the first time Trump ran for the White House back in 2016 when he promised all sorts of splendid things about making America great again by stopping endless U.S. wars around the world and putting an end to “American carnage” at home.

Trump did not deliver then despite all his braggadocio about “draining the swamp”. During his presidency, Trump broke the taboo of supplying lethal weapons to Ukraine. In 2018, he approved sending $47 million worth of Javelin anti-tank missiles to the Kiev regime while it was attacking the ethnic Russian population in the former Ukrainian territory of Donbass. That military backing of the Kiev regime led to the current conflict after Moscow intervened in February 2022 to stop the merciless killing of the Russian population.

On Trump’s recent bragging about how he would quickly end the war in Ukraine, Russia’s ambassador to the United Nations, Vassily Nebenzia, dismissed it as empty “subjective” talk. That’s a diplomatic way of saying Trump hasn’t a clue about resolving the conflict.

Trump is all about the expedient winning of votes, not about winning genuine peace. The only way to create a peaceful resolution in Ukraine and elsewhere is for the U.S.-led NATO military bloc to scale back from Russia’s borders and eventually disband in conformity with international law. NATO is a self-appointed war machine to serve Western imperialist power and one that is in flagrant violation of the UN Charter and the upholding of international law. NATO exists to enforce U.S. power unilaterally without any respect for international law – despite the American and European rhetoric about “rules-based order”.

The war in Ukraine is but one symptom of the United States as a failing and frustrated imperialist power. Washington’s hostility towards Russia is consonant with its relentless belligerence towards China and its support for Israel’s genocide in a desperate bid to control the Middle East. Trump is on board with U.S. imperialist power projection against China and slavishly supporting the Israeli regime. His talk about criticizing NATO expenditures is just carping to get Europeans to pay more for the American protection racket. The only thing different from Biden is a superficial matter of style and a seemingly more reasonable view of the conflict in Ukraine.

Posing as a candidate to avert World War Three over Ukraine might be enough to get Trump back to the White House. It might work as an electioneering ploy. But it won’t change a damn thing about stopping U.S. imperialist violence and the constant threat to world peace that Washington and its NATO war machine engender. The Donald’s “trump card” for peace in Ukraine is another worthless deuce.

https://strategic-culture.su/news/2024/ ... ite-house/