Donald Trump
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‘Trump’s Second Presidential Run and the Francis Scott Key Bridge Collapse Have a Lot In Common’
Many of us will have seen the horrifying footage of the collapse of the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore harbour last week, after a huge container ship, the Dali, rammed into one of its supporting pillars, apparently after losing power on board.
One of the most shocking aspects of the disaster, in which six construction workers lost their lives, was how quickly most of the bridge fell, even though only one element of the structure suffered a direct impact. It was a reminder that even the sturdiest-looking construction has its weak points.
The disaster was a perfect metaphor for the kind of crisis we may be facing in Europe if Donald Trump is re-elected as US President in November.
He is the large container ship threatening to ram into the foundation of European security established after the Second World War – the NATO alliance. Trump was reportedly only narrowly dissuaded from pulling out of NATO during his first term in office. During the current presidential campaign, he has again hinted at his unhappiness with the organisation – and raised doubts about whether he would be willing to come to the defence of those members who, in his view, do not contribute enough to its funding.
President Donald Trump with Vladimir Putin at the 2019 G20 Japan Summit. Photo: Shealah Craighead/UPI
Recognising the danger a second Trump presidency may present to NATO, the usually divided US Congress came together in late 2023 to pass legislation preventing any president from withdrawing the United States from NATO without the approval of the Senate or an Act of Congress.
But the damage may already have been done.
Trump does not actually need to withdraw the US from NATO to cause it fundamental harm. Through his words alone, he has already weakened the alliance by undermining its very cornerstone – the notion that an attack on one is an attack on all – represented by the Article V commitment that all members will come to the aid of any country which is under attack.
NATO, which depends on the US for most of its funding and the vast majority of its military capability, is nothing without US leadership.
Perhaps Trump does not mean it in practice. Perhaps, faced with a real invasion of a NATO member, Trump will command the US military into action. But perhaps not.
In this uncertain environment, Vladimir Putin might be tempted to test the limits, not just by doubling-down on his aggression against Ukraine and neighbouring states such as Georgia and Moldova, but even by moving against a vulnerable NATO member such as one of the Baltic countries. Would Trump come to the aid of Estonia, Lithuania or Latvia? I’d like to believe so, especially since NATO has deliberately stationed multinational forces in each country, as well as Poland, to act as a tripwire. But I am no longer so sure – and it is precisely this element of doubt which creates risk.
Perhaps an even stronger metaphor arising from the bridge disaster concerns the vulnerability of Western democracies to critical collapse. Speaking about why the bridge fell down, US Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said that “a bridge like this one, completed in the 1970s, was simply not made to withstand a direct impact on a critical support pier from a vessel that weighs about 200 million pounds – orders of magnitude bigger than cargo ships that were in service in that region at the time that the bridge was first built”.
By the same token, most Western democratic systems were designed in a different era and may not forever be able to withstand today’s assaults upon them – whether by hostile foreign actors seeking to sow chaos through spreading misinformation or buying influence through corrupt means, or by homegrown populist leaders, stoking up divisive cultural wars, or undermining vital institutions, such as an independent judiciary, strong media, and neutral civil service, for their own nefarious ends.
The Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore in 2021. Photo: Jeffrey Kahan/Alamy
Ultimately, democracy, like the NATO alliance, relies upon trust – in NATO’s case, that every member will uphold its commitment to come to each other’s rescue in their moment of need; in democracy’s case, that leaders will not exploit loopholes in their systems, but always act with integrity, and adhere not just to the letter of the law, but its spirit also.
Public trust is eroded, and our entire democratic system weakened, when any one party or faction starts to chip away at those unwritten norms and values.
Engineers are already discussing how to rebuild the Francis Scott Key bridge so that if one part of it ever again suffers major damage, it will not trigger the collapse of its entire span. They call this “building redundancy” – the practice of adding back-up systems or components to ensure that a system or structure can continue to operate in the event of a failure. This will also include installing stronger barriers around each pillar to buffer ships (called 'dolphins’) away from ramming into them in the first place.
We need to do the same both for NATO and our democracies.
NATO needs to build more redundancy into its system, with every member state increasing their own military capabilities and military contributions to the alliance so that it is not so dependent on America.
Western democracies need to build redundancy by building more guardrails into their systems, including through tightening their financial controls, making stronger efforts to combat disinformation and the misuse of artificial intelligence, protecting free speech and civic activism, and shoring up the independence of the media, judiciary, and civil service.
In the UK’s case, we also need to install our own version of dolphins – by adopting a written constitution, with much stronger guidelines on ethical behaviour in office, and stronger penalties for transgressions, as a way to deter such violations in the first place.
Alexandra Hall writes an exclusive column, 'An Englishwoman Abroad’, for the monthly Byline Times print edition. Subscribe now
How Trump is Following Hitler’s PlaybookYou’ve heard...
How Trump is Following Hitler’s Playbook
You’ve heard Trump’s promise:
TRUMP: I’m going to be a dictator for one day.
History shows there are no “one-day” dictatorships. When democracies fall, they typically fall completely.
In a previous video, I laid out the defining traits of fascism and how MAGA Republicans embody them. But how could Trump — or someone like him — actually turn America into a fascist state? Here’s how in five steps.
Step 1: Use threats of violence to gain power
Hitler and Mussolini relied on their vigilante militias to intimidate voters and local officials. We watched Trump try to do the same in 2020.
TRUMP: Proud Boys, stand back and stand by.
Republican election officials testified to the threats they faced when they refused Trump’s demands to falsify the election results.
RAFFENSPERGER: My email, my cell phone was doxxed.
RUSTY BOWERS: They have had video panel trucks with videos of me proclaiming me to be a pedophile.
GABRIEL STERLING: A 20-something tech in Gwinnett County today has death threats and a noose put out saying he should be hung for treason.
If the next election is close, threats to voters and election officials could be enough to sabotage it.
Step 2: Consolidate power
After taking office, a would-be fascist must turn every arm of government into a tool of the party. One of Hitler’s first steps was to take over the civil service, purging it of non-Nazis.
In October of 2020, Trump issued his own executive order that would have enabled him to fire tens of thousands of civil servants and replace them with MAGA loyalists. He never got to act on it, but he’s now promising to apply it to the entire civil service.
That’s become the centerpiece of something called Project 2025, a presidential agenda assembled by MAGA Republicans, that would, as the AP put it, “dismantle the US government and replace it with Trump’s vision.”
Step 3: Establish a police state
Hitler used the imaginary threat of “the poison of foreign races” to justify taking control of the military and police, placing both under his top general, and granting law-enforcement powers to his civilian militias.
Now Trump is using the same language to claim he needs similar powers to deal with immigrants.
Trump plans to deploy troops within the U.S. to conduct immigration raids and round up what he estimates to be 18 million people who would be placed in mass-detention camps while their fate is decided.
And even though crime is actually down across the nation, Trump is citing an imaginary crime wave to justify sending troops into blue cities and states against the will of governors and mayors.
Trump insiders say he plans to invoke the Insurrection Act to have the military crush civilian protests. We saw a glimpse of that in 2020, when Trump deployed the National Guard against peaceful protesters outside the White House.
And with promises to pardon January 6 criminals and stop prosecutions of right-wing domestic terrorists, Trump would empower groups like the Proud Boys to act as MAGA enforcers.
Step 4: Jail the opposition
In classic dictatorial fashion, Trump is now openly threatening to prosecute his opponents.
And he’s looking to remake the Justice Department into a tool for his personal vendettas.
In the model of Hitler and Mussolini, Trump describes his opponents as subhuman.
TRUMP: …the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country…
Step 5: Undermine the free press
As Hitler well understood, a fascist needs to control the flow of information. Trump has been attacking the press for years.
And he’s threatening to punish news outlets whose coverage he dislikes.
He has helped to reduce trust in the media to such a historic low that his supporters now view him as their most trusted source of information.
Within a democracy, we may often have leaders we don’t like. But we have the power to change them — at the ballot box and through public pressure. Once fascism takes hold, those freedoms are gone and can’t easily be won back.
We must recognize the threat of fascism when it appears, and do everything in our power to stop it.
Murdoch’s monster Trump all trussed up and in for a wild ride
A hog-tied Joe Biden is depicted in a life-size decal on the tailgate of a pickup truck in an image Donald Trump posts on Truth Social, Good Friday. Cue howls of outrage. Clearly, The Donald wants to make himself centre of attention again, via a “dead cat on the tailgate” decoy, in case we dwell…
The post Murdoch’s monster Trump all trussed up and in for a wild ride appeared first on The AIM Network.
Step Right Up And Get Your Low-Priced ‘Pro-God Content’! Donald Trump Enters the Bible Business
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‘The Joe Biden Impeachment Hearing Says Everything About Republicans and Nothing About the President’
When former US President Donald Trump was impeached, for the first time, the cry from the (far) right was that this was all an act of political theatre. This, of course, was not true, but it may be that Republicans in Congress have come to believe their own lies and see impeachment as simply a political tool to tarnish an opponent. What they have overlooked is that like any other kind of trial against an accused person, getting to conviction requires evidence. The testimony of Lev Parnas at the impeachment hearing related to President Joe Biden on Wednesday brutally exposed the fact that the Republicans leading this charge have absolutely no evidence of any wrongdoing by either Biden or his son Hunter.
That the bombshell testimony from Parnas has exposed the GOP scam is all the more ironic for the fact that he, a former associate of disgraced former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, had been on the side of those who were responsible for fabricating the whole story in the first place.
The concocted tale revolves around an energy company in Ukraine called Burisma. In short, Hunter Biden had served on its Board while his father was the Vice President and point man for the Obama White House. Ukraine was already at war at that time after Russia created the hot war in the Donbas as well as illegally seizing Crimea in 2014. Biden’s remit related to those hostilities.
The allegations against the Bidens were that they had each received a $5 million bribe from Burisma, and got the then Prosecutor General of Ukraine, Viktor Shokin, fired for sniffing around Burisma too closely. The big problem here is that not a single part of that story is true. The bigger problem is that, according to Parnas, Fox News host Sean Hannity and several members of Congress were engaged in “knowingly” pushing disinformation from Russia.
It is with alarming regularity that the acts of the Republican Party and the Russian state align. The Russians have several motivations behind their troublemaking. Most glaringly, it would be thrilled by a Trump presidency because another tenure in the White House will certainly lead to chaos in the United States at a time when Russia is involved in a full-scale war against Ukraine. A war that saw 31 missiles fired at the capital city of Kyiv just the night before last. Another reason is that this story deepens the belief that Ukraine is a thoroughly corrupt country, one of the chief issues put forward by those who argue against the provision of further military aid.
The story of Burisma first entered the American body politic in 2020, as I wrote for Byline Times back then it was an attempt to distract from the facts of what Trump was then being impeached for. This is a disinformation tactic called ‘whataboutism’, there’s an allegation from one side, and so the other side screams “what about….?” Whataboutism is one of the standard tools of Russian dis- and misinformation operations, frequently employed by their armies of online trolls and useful idiots, and now the GOP.
The impeachment of Trump and the attempt to find grounds for the impeachment of President Biden could not be more different. The former was based on the “prefect phone call” between the Presidents of the US and Ukraine, in which Trump threatened to withhold a military aid package unless President Volodymyr Zelensky did him “a favour” by announcing an investigation into his political rival. The latter was based on Russian lies readily taken up and believed to be fact by large numbers of people in the US, both in and out of political circles.
As an outsider, and as a person directly affected by Russia’s war against Ukraine, it is astonishing that there are so many American minds polluted by Russian propaganda. Some are genuinely duped, others are engaging in and embracing it for reasons of political expediency. Whatever the reason behind it, toeing the Russian line is something that would have horrified the old school of the Republican Party, who realised full well the danger that Russia, and the Soviet Union before it, represented.
Trump was impeached because he attempted to use a package of weapons destined for an ally at war with an adversary as a tool of leverage for his personal political benefit. As Parnas testified, he was instructed by the personal lawyer to Trump, Giuliani, to deliver a message that “unless Zelensky announced an investigation into the Bidens by Monday, that there would be no cooperation, no aid to Ukraine from the United States.” This was a President who not only believed that manipulating the assets of the nation for his personal benefit was perfectly fine, but who also, being unable to deny the charge because there were witnesses to this crime, insisted instead that the call was “perfect”.
Had the Republicans followed the evidence at that first impeachment (or for that matter at the second one) the inescapable conclusion would have been that Trump was guilty as charged and ruling such, the world would not be facing the theoretical possibility of this man, a convicted fraudster and rapist, reassuming the role of the most powerful man in the world.
The evidence in the hearings trying to establish grounds to impeach President Biden is just not there on the other hand. Again, according to Parnas, “I found precisely zero evidence of the Bidens corruption in Ukraine. No credible source has ever provided proof of criminal activity, not the FBI, the CIA, or the NSA. No respected Ukrainian official has ever said that the Bidens did anything criminal in Ukraine.” And “the only information ever pushed on the Bidens on Ukraine has come from one source and one source only, Russia and Russian agents.”
There was no $5 million bribe. Shokin, the Prosecutor General, was not fired because he was getting too close to finding wrongdoing in his investigation of Burisma, because he was not in fact investigating Burisma. Shokin was fired because he was acorrupt man who would look the other way for the right price. His belated dismissal was greeted with applause by Ambassadors to Ukraine from a great number of countries when it happened.
As for the underlying (Russian/GOP) message that Ukraine is a fundamentally corrupt country and therefore undeserving of US aid, the clear Russian goal is to leave Ukraine defenceless so that they can prosecute their war even more ruthlessly. But the fact is that a decade ago millions of brave Ukrainians across the country decided to stand up to the corrupt rule of the Yanukovych regime, and much has changed since then in terms of anti-corruption developments in the country.
At the insistence of civil society, under the watchful eye of allies such as the United States and the European Union, a great number of anti-corruption programs have been successfully implemented. Ukraine, as a nation that fights corruption, has created a new national police force from scratch and developed an award-winning app through which pretty much all government services are delivered, efficiently and transparently. In fact, just one month before the beginning of the big war, as it is called here, I wrote for Byline Times that it is precisely because Ukraine is a model for fighting corruption (and a democracy) that war was inevitably coming.
Channel 9 Locks In Donald Trump To Host The Roast Of Kevin Rudd
Fresh of the success of their ”roast” of John Cleese which featured a who’s that of Australian comedy, Channel 9 has announced that their next roast victim will be former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd.
Not only that but the roast will be hosted by former President turned multiple time defendant, Donald Trump.
”The Cleese roast was such a success we almost got 20 viewers, that’s unheard of these days for commercial TV,” said a Channel 9 executive. ”The Kevin Rudd one though will be off the hook, we’ll have 100’s of people watching.”
”And that’ll just be the Nation’s defamation lawyers.”
When asked how they managed to secure former President Trump to host, the Channel 9 executive said:”He really needs the cash at the moment, so it wasn’t that hard.”
”Heck, offer him a bundle of cash and a microphone and you can pretty much get him to do anything.”
”Don’t believe us? Wait till you see our new winter show, Don’s Backyard.”
Mark Williamson
@MWChatShow
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