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The Felon Has Failed As Commander-in-Chief

When not scheming about ways to rip off American taxpayers, using insider information for thousands of unprecedented stock trades to garner ever more money, and insulting the majority of one time loyal American citizens and foreign allies, and operating much like a Mafia boss, the Felon has been obsessed with his "legacy" - think the ballroom, the arch, his name and/or face on U.S. currency, the list goes on and on.  Nowhere does the good of America and Americans factor in and true strategic national security factor in.  Indeed, if the Felon has a legacy, it will be that he will be remembered as the most corrupt, unthinking, venal and narcissistic occupant of the White House in America's history. America's once crucial alliances are in tatters and former allies have zero trust in America and are taking steps to lessen their reliance on the United States - e.g., Canada making deals with Chinese automakers, Mexico, Canada and others making joint economic alliances, and European nations moving away from reliance on American weaponry.  Again, the list of the Felon's failures goes on and on and none of them make the United States safer or stronger.  A column in the New York Times looks at the Felon's many failures and ethical bankruptcy.  Here are highlights:

With each passing month of his presidency, [the Felon] Donald Trump behaves more like America’s commander in thief than its commander in chief.

How so? Let me count the ways. We are a nation at war today, with tens of thousands of troops deployed near Iran. Generally, when our nation has been at war, the commander in chief’s top domestic priority is to keep the country united. Because there is nothing more demoralizing for U.S. troops fighting abroad than to look back and see our country ripping itself apart at home. And there is nothing that encourages an enemy to hold out for better terms for ending a war with America than seeing America at war with itself.

And how has Trump risen to that commander-in-chief unifying duty? He has not lifted a finger to bring Democrats behind the war. Instead, he’s prioritized acting like a commander in thief. At the same moment Trump was asking our men and women in uniform to make the ultimate sacrifice, he engaged in a brazen, in-your-face attempted heist of the U.S. Treasury to benefit himself, his family and his political allies, which could include those who attacked the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

Trump conspired with his own Justice Department, headed by his former personal lawyer, to use taxpayer money to create a $1.776 billion political slush fund, supposedly to compensate those Trump supporters who “suffered weaponization and lawfare” at the hands of his predecessor. In fact, as this paper’s editorial board noted, it would “reward loyalists willing to defy the law and commit violence on behalf of the president.”

Fortunately, a federal judge put a temporary hold on the scheme that no one described better than the Republican former Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell: “So the nation’s top law enforcement official is asking for a slush fund to pay people who assault cops? Utterly stupid, morally wrong — take your pick.” In the face of all that opposition, Trump’s acting attorney general, Todd Blanche, said on Tuesday he was withdrawing this terrible plan.

If Trump had an ounce of integrity, instead of scheming to set aside $1.776 billion to potentially pay off these phony defenders of freedom’s frontier — loyalists who ransacked the halls of Congress — he would direct Congress to spend that exact amount to support today’s real defenders of freedom’s frontier: the Ukrainian Army. It is both resisting Vladimir Putin’s attempt to crush Ukraine’s democracy and sapping Russia’s ability to threaten the other free countries of Europe. God bless Ukraine’s fighters.

Alas, though, Trump apparently wants money only for people who tried to overthrow our Constitution at home, not for those who want to emulate our constitutional democracy abroad.

In addition, the Trump-directed Justice Department quietly inserted, as a supplement to that slush fund deal, a one-page document signed by Blanche stating that the government would be “FOREVER BARRED and PRECLUDED from prosecuting or pursuing” pending tax claims against Trump, his family members or his businesses. That measure remains in force, Blanche said on Tuesday.

[The Felon] President Trump has another moniker suggesting his ethical challenges: “trader in chief,” as The Associated Press recently proposed. Why? Because “recent presidents have stayed away from trading stocks in companies whose fortunes they could lift or scuttle with the stroke of a pen, but Donald Trump smashed that precedent in the first quarter of this year with more than 3,600 buy and sell orders,” The A.P. wrote, “many of them involving companies whose profits have been directly impacted by his decisions as head of the government.”

Not only has Trump choked off virtually all U.S. financial aid to Ukraine, but he is also reducing U.S. troops on the ground in NATO countries right when Putin, sensing he is losing the war, is increasingly threatening them.

Just as Americans are starting to realize that Trump is becoming a predator on our system — trying to manipulate the justice system to generate cash available to his Jan. 6 pirates and immunity from ongoing inquiries into taxes for himself and his family — our allies are concluding that Trump’s America is becoming a dangerous predator on them.

Indeed, something is happening with America’s traditional allies that I never thought I would see in this lifetime or the next. In the post-World War II era, we and our allies together embraced the doctrine of “deterrence” against the Soviet Union, and later Russia, to prevent any attempt by the Kremlin to forcibly expand its influence into the free world or put neighbors under its thumb.

Not any longer.  Our allies have watched Trump threaten to make Canada the 51st state and to seize Greenland from Denmark. They have watched him start a war with Iran without consulting NATO and then demand that NATO help rescue us from what has turned into a mess. They have watched him slash U.S. financial assistance to Ukraine, put the Russian aggressor on the same moral footing as that country and then top it all off with reckless, ill-conceived tariffs on all our allies.

As a result of all that, something unprecedented is happening: “Deterring Trump’s America is now becoming a strategic priority of our allies as much as deterring Russia was,” Nader Mousavizadeh, the chief executive of Macro Advisory Partners, a geopolitical consulting firm, and a former senior adviser to U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan, told me.

And how could it not? When you look at how Trump has hammered Canada with tariffs, it is hard not to conclude that the worst position for a country to be in during the second Trump administration “is to be America’s closest ally and have integrated your economy, energy systems and military with that of the United States,” Mousavizadeh said.

Let’s not forget that early on Trump forced Ukraine to give the United States access to critical minerals in return for U.S. help against a Russian Army trying to overrun it. This is the real “Trump Doctrine”: Oppose America, and I will tariff you; depend on America, and I will extort you.

I have been in Portugal this week and I have been shocked by the degree to which European business executives speak of having lost faith in American institutions and in America as the guarantor of global legal norms — something they have always taken for granted. It is literally disorienting for them, like hikers who have lost their compass.

In short, having a president who behaves like a commander in thief — not a commander in chief — is costing us dearly at home and abroad. This perversion of the American presidency is undermining the very alliance structure that won two world wars and the Cold War and generated one of history’s longest ages of peace and prosperity. Every day we tolerate such behavior we endanger our children’s future.

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The Felon Dreads an Iran Deal Worse Than Obama’s

The Felon's Iran war was supposed to be quick and over in a few days - similar to Vladimir Putin's illegal invasion of Ukraine.  Like Putin's misadventure that has dragged on for going on four years, the Felon's misadventure shows no sign of an ending quickly and the Felon now finds himself in a mess of his own hubris filled creation.  In addition, the Felon has an added difficulty in that whatever exit strategy he may ultimately be able to cobble together, it may not be enough to satisfy Israel's Benjamin Netanyahu (the Felon reportedly read Benjamin Netanyahu the riot act earlier this week for wanting to launch strikes on Beirut, which could collapse the Felon's negotiations with Iran). Perhaps more disturbing to the egomaniac Felon, any deal he is able to put together could well make the deal Barack Obama structured look like a far better deal than the Felon's, perhaps the ultimate humiliation for narcissistic Felon.  A piece in The Atlantic looks at the tensions with Israel:

A U.S. official told Axios that on Monday that Donald Trump read Benjamin Netanyahu the riot act for wanting to launch strikes on Beirut, which could collapse American negotiations with Iran. The message, the official said, was “You’re fucking crazy. You’d be in prison if it weren’t for me. I’m saving your ass. Everybody hates you now. Everybody hates Israel because of this.”

The spectacular bust-up, which Trump confirmed today, reveals a deeper problem. With a nuclear deal with Iran out of reach, Trump seems content to defer the problems he faces instead of squaring up to them. There may be an end to violence, but any peace will be temporary and inherently unstable. The war will likely resume at intervals over the next few years, with grave consequences for all concerned.

The U.S. and Iran are too far apart for the distance to be bridged with a lasting settlement. Instead, they are moving toward a narrow deal: the U.S. lifting its blockade of the Strait of Hormuz and Iran allowing ships to transit in exchange for economic compensation. The nuclear issue—including what to do with Iran’s highly enriched uranium—would be deferred to later negotiations, which few expect to succeed.

Having placed himself - and the nation - in an impossible position which previous American presidents were smart enough to avoid, the specter of any deal the Felon does achieve looking like a loss compared to Obama's agreement that the Felon canceled is only increasing.  Another piece in The Atlantic looks at the Felon's growing dread of looking like a loser compared to Obama.  Here are article excerpts:

[The Felon] President Trump was on a conference call late last month from the Situation Room with leaders from across the Middle East and South Asia to pitch a deal that he believed was within reach to end the conflict in Iran. Trump asked for their support in a roll call, going one by one through Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Turkey, Egypt, Jordan, Bahrain, and Pakistan. All answered in the affirmative. Trump’s tone, according to officials briefed on the conversation, suggested that he believed each country should be in his debt for taking on Iran.

But then Trump reached for something bigger: He proposed linking the Iran negotiations to a major expansion of the Abraham Accords, the U.S.-brokered agreements normalizing relations between Israel and some of its neighbors that Trump regards as a signature foreign-policy achievement. He suggested that those countries that hadn’t yet joined the Abraham Accords get on board—but received a less than lukewarm response. . . . Several times during the 90-minute call, Trump had to interject: “Hello? Hello? Anyone there?”

The awkwardness of the conversation, the details of which have not been previously reported, encapsulates what has gone awry in the roughly eight weeks since the United States and Iran entered a tentative cease-fire designed to allow negotiations for a longer-term deal. That agreement has remained out of reach . . .

Critics of Trump’s decision to go to war contend that his impulse to go big masks the weakness of his negotiating position despite the U.S. military’s dominance. . . . Tehran has succeeded simply by surviving the onslaught and has gained leverage by taking control of the Strait of Hormuz. As a result, Trump has been unable to convert tactical success on the battlefield into any lasting diplomatic or political achievement. None of his original war goals has been met, and the pressure to get a deal done is arguably now greater for Trump than it is for Iran, given the war’s broad unpopularity in the United States and the approaching midterm elections.

Every attempt to seal a deal has expanded the list of issues or created new wrinkles that prevent progress. What began as a narrow negotiation to end the conflict has become a grab bag of objectives: constrain Iran’s nuclear program and destroy its highly enriched uranium, reopen shipping through the strait, achieve a durable cease-fire in Lebanon, reassure Persian Gulf monarchies that they can count on U.S. protection, and, if possible, reshape the political map of the Middle East through new alliances with Israel.

The likely result is not another “forever war” of the sort that Trump has repeatedly condemned, but a “forever limbo,” where all sides involved have sufficient incentive to stay at the table but not enough to make binding commitments.

Inside the White House, Trump oscillated between impatience and theatrical self-confidence. He told advisers repeatedly that he wanted a deal bigger than President Obama’s 2015 nuclear agreement and broader than the initial round of Abraham Accords. He also made clear that he did not want to own the failure of negotiations. The longer the process dragged on, the more the competing impulses pulled him in different directions.

He wanted the conflict over. But he had become irritated by comparisons between the emerging framework and the Obama-era agreement, which set restrictions and time limits on Iran’s nuclear-development program. Administration officials said Trump repeatedly complained that critics were calling his team’s draft agreement a weaker version of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, which he had spent years attacking and tore up in his first term.

At the same time, Trump grew wary of Iran’s calls for relief from international sanctions that could generate a financial windfall for Tehran. Trump has long complained about the “pallets of cash,” according to advisers, a reference to the $1.7 billion that flowed to Iran after the 2015 pact. Rubio told the Senate committee yesterday that Iran had to get rid of the enriched uranium and that the move would not lead to sanctions relief for Iran or any other financial incentives.

But the bottom line, Rubio said, was the need to reopen the Strait of Hormuz. That, like everything else involved in the talks, is harder than it might sound. To restore sufficient security and trust for shipping to return to prewar levels—about 135 ships a day—would require a major effort by the U.S. Navy, perhaps along with other nations, to clear mines laid by Iran. Shippers also need to feel confident that Iranian drones, missiles, and fast boats won’t threaten them. Only if those things happen, and the U.S. Navy lifts its blockade, would insurance companies reduce their rates for transit.

Yet Trump remains determined to secure a settlement he can portray as a legacy-making win. . . . As Trump heads into the summer, with events planned for America’s 250th birthday and the World Cup, it is hard to see him dedicating more time than he is now to extricating the United States from the war he started at the end of February. He may be content to simply wait rather than do a deal that invites unflattering comparisons to one that already existed—and which didn’t come at the cost of 13 U.S. service members and at least 1,700 Iranian civilians, tens of billions of dollars, the depletion of U.S. munitions stockpiles, and a global energy crisis.

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European Travels - Thoughts From Paris

A number of readers have asked how American tourists are being received in Europe or more particularly at the moment by Parisians.   Our experience - namely me, the husband and two friends - is that the French definitely distinguish between the U.S. government under the Felon and everyday American tourists.  The former is viewed with contempt (a few Parisians have made specific remarks about the government under the Felon) while individual tourists are greeted with friendliness and courtesy.  Of course, if one behaves as an entitled "ugly American" then all bets are off for obnoxious tourists.  We make a point of setting the tone by being friendly and polite and that goes a long way.  My perception is that the French are well aware that less than a third of all registered voters casts their votes for the Felon and his evil policies and that two thirds of registered voters either did not vote or cast their votes for Kamala Harris.  One could argue that they see the Felon as quasi-legitimate and see him for the nasty, boorish, and demented individual that he is.   We will see if this reaction to Americans continues when we enter the United Kingdom before embarking for New York City aboard the Queen Mary 2 which typically as many aboard who are not Americans.   

Our scheduled activities tomorrow should allow me to get to some of my more normal political posts tomorrow.

Wednesday Morning Male Beauty

 

Reduced Posting - Europe Bound

Posting frequency will likely be reduced over the next two weeks. Today the husband and I we head out for a new travel adventure: We fly to Paris with two friends where we have an apartment in the Marais area for a week. On June 8th we will travel to Le Havre and board the Queen Mary 2 for 9 nights, visiting Cherbourg and Southampton before heading transatlantic and arriving in New York City on the 17th. A shout out to our friend Jenny who will be staying at our home while we are gone.