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An Ugly American Berates the UN and Embarrasses America

The Felon addressed the United Nations earlier this week and put on a display that was both cringe worthy and an embarrassment to America. Much of his hour long address was rambling and semi-coherent and filled with insults to allies and batshit craziness involving the Felon's strange obsessions, including babbling about windmills and cows.  Sadly, the deranged Felon is the face of this nation and  one can only image that China and Russia were snickering as they watched the supposed leader of the west look like he escaped a mental institution.  Needless to say, much of MAGA world liked the farcical performance as they view "toughness", no matter how deranged as a positive. Meanwhile, America's economy is tanking and the federal government is likely shutting down in three days as Republicans who control the White House, Senate and House of Representatives cannot get their act together on anything save for blocking a full release of the Epstein files. The Founding Fathers must be spinning in their graves given that the Felon is the embodiment of what they most feared. Rather than saving the nation, the Electoral College - which needs to be abolished - largely was responsible for the Felon's election and the growing threat that the nation is sliding towards a dictatorship. A piece at Salon looks at the deranged address and the manner in which America was humiliated.  Here are highlights:

[T]he [Felon’s] president’s performance is that of raw and corrupt power, and being freed from nearly all constraints on his behavior. For his MAGA supporters, such a role model and leader is exciting and cathartic.

Ultimately, the world is his stage, and he is going to command it for as long as he can. But Trump’s stage isn’t just symbolic — it has extreme real-world consequences. What begins as performance ends as policy. On Tuesday, Trump addressed the United Nations General Assembly in New York City.

Like a wrestling promo crossed with insult comedy, Trump mocked the UN building (“a bad escalator and a bad teleprompter”), bragged (“I’m really good at this stuff. Your countries are going to hell”) and feigned toughness on Russia (a “paper tiger”). He said that America’s NATO allies need to do more to help Ukraine, defended fossil fuel energy and declared climate change to be “the greatest con job ever.” He castigated European countries for being too “nice” to immigrants and migrants because Europe’s (white) “heritage” is being poisoned by supposed hordes of strange (brown) “foreigners.”

Talking for nearly an hour, Trump held little back. The UN, he declared, is useless: “What is the purpose of the United Nations? . . . . Trump also returned to his obsessive hatred of windmills, and he is now apparently very concerned about cows: “We don’t want cows anymore. I guess they want to kill all the cows.” 

Last year, the delegates laughed at the [Felon] president. This year, they sat in stunned silence.

Trump’s surreal speech was “coarse absurdist theater,” communications scholar Marcel Danesi said. But, he warned, “it would be naïve to think that Trump does not know what he is doing. He does. As Orwell feared, the absurd does not manifest itself only by making language meaningless, but also by the cruelty of unrestrained power, and the ultimate failure of resistance against devastating political oppression.”

Unrestrained power, of course, is the president’s raison d’être. And his UN address was particularly unhinged, even for Trump. Instead of believing that conflicts can be resolved collectively, the key tenet of President Franklin Roosevelt’s vision for the UN, Trump is resolute that global problems can only be repaired by strongmen like him who, he claimed again, “ended seven wars.”

“There’s never been anything like that,” he said. “Very honoured to have done it. It’s too bad that I had to do these things instead of the United Nations doing them. And sadly, in all cases, the United Nations did not even try to help in any of them…All I got from the United Nations was an escalator that, on the way up, stopped right in the middle.”

Former U.S. Ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul said that Trump’s address was unequivocal in its embrace “of his foreign policy philosophy — unilateralism.” 

“President Trump does not believe that the United Nations or most other multilateral organizations serve U.S. national interests,” McFaul observed. “He prefers to go it alone. And he has backed up these words with actions in both his first and second terms, pulling out of many international treaties and multilateral institutions.”

McFaul raised the specter of Trump withdrawing American participation in the UN. “Through participation in the UN, we can more closely align this organization with American interests. If we exit, we will allow China to take over completely.”

Trump made it clear that his MAGA agenda isn’t just domestic — it’s global. Since he returned to office in January, his attempts to pull the U.S. away from its democratic allies and into the orbit of authoritarian countries has accelerated. 

The speech was rooted in “an American First foreign policy,” . . . . “This most notably included his repeating that America is for Americans, and not a place where immigrants will be widely welcomed.” 

In short, Poast said, the president characterized the world as filled with “chaos and disorder” before his return to office, and “peaceful and prosperous” since his inauguration in January.

This claim is, of course, laughable. From Gaza to Ukraine, from Syria to Congo, the world is full of wars and hot spots. In such an era, the fact that the American president decided to blather and bluster instead of attempting to offer workable proposals is nothing short of an embarrassment. 

In his speech, Trump pitched his return to office as opening a new era of American greatness. “On the world stage, America is respected again like it has never been respected before,” he said. “You think about two years ago, three years ago, four years ago or one year ago, we were a laughing stock all over the world.”

A new poll from YouGov shows that a majority of Americans (51%) disagree with the president’s assessment. Twenty-nine percent agree, while 21% are not sure. 

Thom Hartmann, the progressive radio talk show host, reported that, after Trump’s speech, callers to his show were “embarrassed, horrified and even feeling humiliated by how he is making the country and the American people look.”

His behavior was that of the infamous Ugly American. Ethnocentric, rude to others while traveling abroad in their own countries, ignorant of the world, self-absorbed, arrogant, rude — these are the very characteristics of America’s president.

And in many ways, Donald Trump is America. That is an uncomfortable truth many Americans still have yet to face. But if it were not true at some deep level, Trump would not have been elected president twice, and he would not be threatening now to remain in power forever — an outcome that many Americans would welcome.

Based on his reception at the UN, it’s also one that many more around the world would regard with horror.

Be very afraid.

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America Steps Closer to Banana Republic Status

In Putin's Russia or in the past Stalin's Russia, or China or North Korea one can be indicted for crimes that one never committed.  Ditto in the stereotypical banana republics of the 20th century.  All that's needed is that one have somehow crossed the glorious leader, something which can include doing something to upset the delicate and overweening ego of the despot, being a political opponent, or simply arguing for upholding the rule of law.  With the indictment of James Comey yesterday at the Felon's bidding and in the view of experienced U.S. attorney who was forced to resign without facts or evidence to support charges, America has entered a dangerous phase where criminal charges based on the Felon's hatred may become the norm.  Sadly, the Department of Justice under the Felon and his morally challenged henchwoman, Pam Bondi, long standing ethical and procedural standards have been discarded.  All of this is happening for two reasons: (i) the Felon's ego demands retribution against perceived enemies, and (ii) the Felon hopes to intimidate political opponents in an effort to aid the GOP in maintaining its slim control of both houses of Congress.   The Felon is cunning enough to know that should Democrats gain control of either the House or the Senate,  investigations into his corruption and self-enrichment schemes will ensue. Sadly, Republicans care nothing about the rule of law or morality and decency. All that matters to them is appeasing the Felon.  A piece in The Atlantic looks at the dangerous realm we have entered:

President Donald Trump [The Felon] recently ordered his attorney general to prosecute former FBI Director James Comey, and tonight, the Department of Justice delivered an indictment of Comey for lying to Congress. Comey, for his part, insists on his innocence. But the charges against Comey are not just about the president’s abuse of his power for personal retribution. They represent a test of the president’s plans for the future.

Since the assassination of Charlie Kirk, Trump and his top aides have spoken of their plans to bring cases against people who give money to anti-Trump causes.  . . . In real life, there is no known evidence that any organization funded Kirk’s assassin. But there are donors to left-wing causes that Trump wants to defund. In the White House today, the president signed an order to investigate those donors. He cited the liberal donors Reid Hoffman and George Soros as potential targets. In April, Trump ordered an investigation of ActBlue, the Democratic fundraising platform.

Trump faces a very immediate problem. He and his family have already amassed an enormous fortune in the first nine months of his second term, in great part from gifts and deals with foreign powers. That behavior is likely to be investigated if Trump’s party loses control of either house of Congress in November 2026. Trump’s bad economic management has put that control at extreme risk. His overall approval numbers have dropped to the very low 40s; his economic management, to the mid-30s. Grocery prices are up, and electricity prices are rising even faster. If honest congressional elections were held today, the Republicans’ two-seat margin in the House of Representatives would vanish. The protective screens for Trump’s self-enrichment would vanish with it.

The president is driven by intense ego needs. He hates Comey for his role investigating Russian interference in the 2016 election—as he hates his own former national security adviser John Bolton for refusing to comply with his scheme to extort Ukraine in 2019.

But Trump is also a gifted survivor, with a keen instinct for the weaknesses of individuals and nations. The American justice system is only as good as the people who staff it. Led by Kash Patel and Pam Bondi, the system can be an abundant resource for a president who wants to use the law to frighten opponents away from the political process. Troops in the streets of Washington, D.C., have deterred residents from going to bars and restaurants in 2025. Those troops could be used to dissuade residents of blue cities in red states from standing in voting lines in 2026. Selective prosecution can be used to cut the flow of money to Democratic candidates.

Yes, Trump’s politicization of the Department of Justice is a backward-looking expression of hurt feelings. It’s also another step in a forward-looking plot to shred the rule of law in order to pervert the next election and protect his corruption from accountability.

James Comey’s rights and liberties are not the only ones at risk today. So is your own right to participate in free and fair elections in order to render a verdict on Trump’s invasion of those rights and liberties. Trump understands the stakes—and has been astoundingly transparent about his intentions. Will you listen and understand as clearly as he speaks and threatens?

 

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I Look at This Country and I See a Stranger

While Jimmy Kimmel has received a reprieve from Disney/ABC - at least for now even though the Felon continues to rant about silencing critics - the talk of the Felon's Department of Justice (Department of Retribution might be more apt) indicting James Comey underscores the reality that America is under a dark cloud of authoritarianism with far too many Republicans willing to go along and far, far too many average citizens seemingly not paying attention. Much of what is happening is in full accord with Project 2025, especially the aggressive demonizing of racial minorities, members of the LGBT community, particularly the "T" component, and non-Christians.  And then there is the exalting of right wing Christianity as personified in the message conveyed by the late Charlie Kirk.  When a stray bible passage can be cited, bigotry is whitewashed into mere conformity with religious belief. For many, myself included, it is a very scary time and there is certainly talk among LGBT activist of the potential need to leave the USA if one is able. I and other LGBT activists and journalist have no desire to leave, yet at some point one's physical safety and desire to not lose civil rights could dictate that leaving is the only choice.  A column by an LGBT activist in the New York Times looks at the fear and foreboding many are feeling as they wonder what has happened to their country.  Here are column excerpts:

When your country strips you of rights and protections, it tells you that it no longer recognizes you. Other times, you realize that you no longer recognize your country. People leave; families rupture along political lines; friendships shatter; people and institutions that used to be widely admired are vilified, and yesterday’s villains are sainted; familiar faces disappear from the public sphere; an aggressive conformity takes hold; the material conditions of life change.

What unites the many actions of the Trump administration, from the sledgehammer it has taken to government programs to the demonstrative cruelty it has built into immigration raids, is that they transform the daily physical, economic and psychic experience of life. The [Felon] President Trump is remaking the country in his image: crude, harsh, gratuitously mean. The ongoing attack on civil society, which his administration plans to intensify in the name of Charlie Kirk, is a part of this program. Civil society makes life more livable. The administration’s message is that the work of civil society no longer belongs in this country.

And neither do trans people. The government’s official policy is that we do not exist — and yet, somehow, we constitute a danger to the country. The fact that Kirk was killed while he was answering a question about the purported prevalence of trans mass shooters (a fiction he had helped promulgate) and the news that the suspect in Kirk’s killing apparently has a romantic partner who is trans have hypercharged this process of disowning.

The feeling that I am on borrowed time in my own home is a familiar one. Twelve years ago, I was forced to leave Russia to protect my family from a campaign to take children away from L.G.B.T. parents. In the years since, Russia has been adding L.G.B.T. people to a list of “terrorists and extremists.” Other lists — of “foreign agents,” “undesirable organizations” — are for journalists, academics, media outlets and universities. For a while after Russia issued the arrest warrant that resulted in my being sentenced in absentia to prison, I had a recurrent nightmare: I am on a plane to Moscow, which is exciting, until I remember that I will be arrested as soon as I land.

Ece Temelkuran, the prominent Turkish political columnist, who now lives in exile, described a moment of realization: “I was standing at a gate in Tunis airport after talking to my lawyer, who had said: ‘They’re arresting journalists by the dozen today. Take a vacation or something. I don’t know, go away somewhere.’ I looked at the passengers boarding the plane to Istanbul, then down at my boarding pass. While trying to change my ticket from home to somewhere else, it was the first time I felt that Turkey was hardly my country.” This quote is from a book called “How to Lose a Country.”

The price of admission to Trump’s America is aggressive compliance, the sort demonstrated by more and more universities. Columbia and Williams College, for example, have been voluntarily flying flags at half-staff in honor of Kirk. Meanwhile, the University of California, Berkeley, has notified about 160 students, faculty members and staff that it has given their names to the federal government in connection with “alleged antisemitic incidents.”

These people have good reasons to be frightened. Over the last eight months, we have all learned how such lists are used: to exile students and professors from the university or from the country — and to put others on notice that they are living or working on borrowed time. That they are, to borrow a term from a previous era of lists, un-American.

Something is dying: the sense that we know our country. Butler told me that when they got the email notification from U.C. Berkeley, they had trouble believing the university would so badly violate its own procedure and fail in its obligation to protect academic freedom. They had trouble believing it even though they have studied autocracies. Even though they are currently writing a book on Franz Kafka and the law. In Kafka’s novel “The Trial,” the protagonist is arrested but never learns what his crime was. The letter Butler received from the university counsel did not specify for what offense, if any, they might be investigated.

I have been thinking of historical, rather than fictional, antecedents, in particular the assassination in 1938 of a Nazi diplomat in Paris by a Polish-German Jewish teenager named Herschel Grynszpan. I’ve been thinking about it because it’s an assassination; because, like most public violence, it was committed by a young man; and because it was an act of despair. Grynszpan’s family, rejected by both Germany and Poland, was stuck in borderland hell between those two countries, along with some 12,000 other people. Staying with an uncle in Paris, Grynszpan was unable to help them. He decided to kill someone he saw as a representative of the force that was immiserating his loved ones.

Grynszpan’s action served as a pretext for Kristallnacht, “the Night of Broken Glass,” a two-day state-sponsored pogrom in Nazi Germany. During the course of it, authorities rounded up nearly 30,000 Jews, marking the first time the regime conducted mass arrests and put people in concentration camps because of who they were and not what they had ostensibly done.

But what makes this parallel feel most apt is how nervous I am about drawing it. The comparison seems straightforward: The person who was murdered was a representative of a hateful ideology, the person thought to have killed him was a deluded young man who may have tried to oppose that hatred in the most destructive manner imaginable. And yet something in the transformed landscape of this country tells me I’m not supposed to say so.

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Three Rural Virginia Health Clinics Close Due To Mega Bill

By design the worse impacts of the "big beautiful bill" pushed by the Felon and passed by congressional Republicans will not fully hit home until after the 2026 mid-term elections, the hope being that Republican and MAGA voters will not realize how badly they have been betrayed so that billionaires and the super wealth can enjoy huge tax cuts.  Yet some of the betrayal of average Americans and rural areas is beginning to become visible as health insurance premiums are soaring and already, some rural health clinics, including three in Southwest Virginia, are already closing in anticipation of the coming large cuts to Medicaid funding.  Rural hospitals and rural health clinics tend to be far more reliant on Medicaid to remain open and studies have shown that over 300 rural hospitals may be threatened with closure. Here in Virginia, the gubernatorial candidates have very different views of the "big beautiful bill" and what needs to be done, Republican Winsome Sears has praised the bill and has no workable solution to avoid thousands of Virginians losing health care coverage.  Her Democrat opponent, Abigail Spanberger has both condemned the GOP mega bill and is seeking solutions and is vowing to fight the harm the Felon and GOP are inflicting on Virginia.  Once again, voters in Southwest Virginia have overwhelmingly voted against their own economic best interests - something that has been happening for decades. A piece at CNN looks at the impact of the Trump/GOP's "big beautiful bill" here in Virginia and elsewhere:

Exactly two months after President Donald Trump signed his policy megabill in a July 4 celebration at the White House, a Virginia health care company blamed the law for the closure of three rural clinics serving communities along the Blue Ridge Mountains.

The closures, Augusta Medical Group said in its statement, were part of the company’s “ongoing response to the One Big Beautiful Bill Act and the resulting realities for healthcare delivery.”

Rural health providers that rely on Medicaid funding were already under strain before the bill cut federal health spending by hundreds of billions of dollars over the next decade. Now, Democrats are linking that crisis to Trump and Republicans in elections this year and next.

Democratic gubernatorial nominee Abigail Spanberger recently campaigned in Buena Vista, a 6,600-person town that is losing its clinic, as she tries to improve her party’s standing with rural voters ahead of this fall’s election. Candidates for governor, potentially faced with the job of navigating the cuts, have been among the most vocal about the threats to rural health care, including Keisha Lance Bottoms in Georgia, Rob Sand in Iowa, Gov. Kathy Hochul of New York and former Biden administration Interior Secretary Deb Haaland in New Mexico.

“Rural hospitals are closing, at the end of the day. We’re seeing the tip of the iceberg here in Virginia, and it’s a sign of what’s to come,” said Marshall Cohen, a veteran Democratic strategist at the political firm KMM Strategies.

Under the legislation, Medicaid spending is set to fall by more than $900 billion over the next 10 years, according to projections from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office. About 7.5 million more people would be uninsured in 2034 due to the policy changes, with 5.3 million of them being affected by the addition of work requirements for many low-income adult enrollees, according to the CBO’s most recent analysis.

The work requirements are likely to affect rural communities more, said Tim Layton, an associate professor of public policy and economics at the University of Virginia, because it’s harder for residents in those communities to find employment.

“You can expect those places to be impacted by now having people who don’t even have Medicaid,” Layton said. “With fewer people to spread fixed costs across, it becomes harder and harder to stay open.”

Rural health care providers disproportionately rely on Medicaid enrollees. They were already struggling with limited patient pools and long-term population loss.

Researchers at the University of North Carolina, cited in a letter by Democratic senators opposing the GOP legislation, identified 338 rural health facilities nationwide endangered by the policy changes, including six total in Virginia.

Candice Crow, a mother of four children who have autism, heavily relies on the Bon Secours - Southampton Medical Center in Franklin, Virginia, one of the facilities on the researchers’ list. She’s been raising concerns with local media and spoke to CNN. . . . . “Every minute counts when it comes to emergencies. This could cost someone their life, so you’re taking away their lifeline.”

To alleviate the impact of the cuts, Republicans in Washington created a $50 billion fund for rural health providers, inviting “all 50 states to apply for funding to address each state’s specific rural health challenges.”

Layton said the rural health care fund was a “short-term patch,” noting that “$50 billion will go pretty quick.”

The Kaiser Family Foundation, a national nonprofit focused on health policy, wrote in a July study that “federal Medicaid spending in rural areas is estimated to decline by $137 billion, more than the $50 billion appropriated for the rural health fund.”

Pete Barlow is a Democrat running to unseat Cline and lives in Augusta County, where two of the affected clinics are. “This administration has really taken a bloody ax to rural health care. It’s incredible, and it’s going to have downstream effects for years to come,” Barlow told CNN.

He says that as he speaks to people in the community, they don’t always immediately “connect the dots” about why they are losing services, but it’s a recipe for eventually breeding deep frustration. “How is it making America great again for us to be cutting our rural health care? It blows me away,” he said.

Lynlee Thorne, political director of Rural GroundGame, a group supporting Democratic candidates in Virginia, said Democrats are “willing to listen” as they engage with rural voters on the policy changes. According to CNN exit polls, Trump won two-thirds of rural voters in the 2024 election.

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The Felon's Art of the Decline

The Felon's signature slogan is "make America great again" yet in practice this seemingly equates to enriching himself, his family and preferred cronies, seeking vengeance against perceived opponents, and making America a white, right wing nation under the design of Project 2025.  Currently, inflation and prices are up, many farmers are on the verge of bankruptcy thanks to the Felon's tariffs, manufacturing jobs are still in decline, foreign investment in America is in question after the stupid raid on Hyundai's plant in Georgia, and old international alliances and trade patterns have been threatened, if not discarded.  In short, little has been  accomplished to make America great and, instead, America's economy and leadership position on the world are both in decline.  Seemingly, the Felon doesn't care so long as he is posturing and making threats to assuage his fragile ego, bringing corruption and self-enrichment in his regime levels seen before, and pursuing grievances, both real and imagined. The Jimmy Kimmel censorship effort is but one example of the latter.  Meanwhile, as much of the MAGA base revels in the permission granted by the Felon to be racist and bigoted, the Felon's promises go unfulfilled.  A piece in The Atlantic looks at America's decline on the world stage thanks in large part to the Felon:

The sight of the Indian, Russian, and Chinese heads of state holding hands in late August led even Donald Trump to concede that the U.S. had “lost” India and Russia to China. But the president suggested that he wasn’t bothered: “May they have a long and prosperous future together!” he wrote on Truth Social.

Behind the display of bravado, Trump must surely have sensed that his approach to foreign policy was catching up with him. His signature style, which involves breaking trust with America’s friends while alternately cozying up to and lashing out at its competitors, rests on a notion central to his self-conception: the deal.

As dealmaker in chief, Trump has turned U.S. trade negotiations into a series of deals, haggled with Nvidia and AMD on China exports so America could get in on the deal, and called an Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement the “ultimate deal.” He covets the Nobel Peace Prize, ostensibly as a tribute to his dealmaking prowess.

Yet Trump has little to show for his methods: no end to the war in Ukraine, no new modus vivendi with Russia or China, no progress on Middle East peace, no breakthroughs on trade, and certainly no Nobel Peace Prize. The recent rupture in relations with India follows breaches with Europe and Canada. Mexico may be next.

Why is Trump’s dealmaking backfiring so spectacularly? The answer may lie in his dismissal of an important bit of American dealmaking folklore: namely, that a deal is a deal.

Several aspects of Trump’s posture, although ill-suited to the current moment, are not new. He hesitates to make long-term commitments and has a penchant for acting alone—traits he shares with a unilateralist strain in U.S. foreign-policy making that persisted well into the 20th century. He takes pride in driving a hard bargain, as have other tough American negotiators

But a crucial difference separates these statesmen from Trump’s team: They were credible. They knew that American power and influence depended on the conviction, among both friends and enemies, that if the U.S. reached an agreement, it would keep its word. And they knew that America would cease to be able to reach agreements if it could not be counted on to deliver on its commitments.

At times the concern with credibility was excessive. It kept the country from cutting its losses as quickly as it needed to, for instance in Vietnam and more recently in Afghanistan. But the underlying idea was that a reputation for keeping commitments would deter enemies and attract friends. Allies who felt confident that America would keep its promises were willing to accede even to disadvantageous requests—such as equipping their militaries with hardware that only the U.S. made, or forswearing nuclear weapons despite living in a nuclear-armed neighborhood, or endorsing Washington’s sanctions or export controls on powers that might otherwise have been friendly to them.

When America goes back on its word, leaving allies exposed, such countries learn their lesson and start hedging. Having paid a price for relying on America, they draw closer to others they may need to depend on in the future. They are less receptive when America asks them to take costly action to serve American interests, because the payoff of America reciprocating the goodwill is no longer there. America may then try to extract concessions with threats in place of promises, but even this may be ineffective, because a country that can’t be trusted to fulfill a promise also can’t be trusted to rescind a threat.

James Baker, who came to his posts atop the Treasury and State Departments with next to no diplomatic chops but ample experience cutting deals as a Texas lawyer, echoed that point when asked about the secret to his success. “The worst thing you can do, in my opinion, in a negotiation is to get caught in a lie,” . . . “Then it’s almost all over, because the other guy thinks to himself, Boy, I can’t trust anything this fellow says.”

That about sums up U.S. foreign policy today: No one trusts what we say.

Trump, like any president, has the right to develop his own foreign policy, and no one should pursue a policy just because a predecessor did so. Yet just as judges appeal to precedent to create stability and predictability in the law, policy makers must be attentive to the risks of casually discarding their nation’s commitments.

But Trump is not only disrupting his predecessors’ deals—whether NATO or AUKUS or the World Health Organization or the Paris Agreement. He’s undermining his own diplomacy.

He imposed tariffs on Canada and Mexico because he had complaints about the 2020 agreement between America and those two countries—a treaty that he negotiated and championed in his first term. He promised European allies that he would levy sanctions on Russia if Vladimir Putin didn’t agree to a cease-fire in Ukraine—then concluded his summit with Putin in Alaska without any such agreement. He slapped a 50 percent tariff on India months after he’d welcomed Narendra Modi to the Oval Office, toasted him as his “great friend,” and committed to doubling trade between the two nations by 2030. South Korea promised to ramp up investment in U.S. manufacturing, only for Trump to follow up a recent meeting with the country’s new president by arresting hundreds of Korean workers in an immigration raid at a Hyundai construction site in Georgia. Even countries that have not experienced Trump’s betrayal directly can read the signs, which aren’t subtle.

China and Russia have long sought to rewire the world for their own purposes and recruit others to their cause. They now have a target-rich environment.

China has held firm in the face of Trump’s tariffs and been rewarded with the option to purchase U.S.-designed chips that are foundational to global leadership in artificial intelligence. Russia has pocketed the gain in stature from Trump’s diplomatic overtures and conceded nothing in return. Trump inverts the motto popularized by his onetime secretary of defense Jim Mattis: Instead of “no better friend, no worse enemy,” Trump’s America is a fickle friend that leaves the field to its opponents.

In the short term, Trump has scored some legitimate wins: NATO allies have promised to pay more for their own defense, Asian allies have offered more favorable terms of trade, and Ukraine has granted the U.S. expanded access to crucial minerals. But as his relentless pressure on allies becomes the new normal, those allies have every reason to adapt to protect themselves rather than accede to his demands.

And so a number of countries are seeking to “de-risk” from America—to diversify supply chains, reduce dependency on American technology, and strengthen partnerships with other countries—in the same way America once pushed them to “de-risk” from China. What was conspicuous at the summit last month was not only the links between Russia and China, who professed a “no limits” partnership several years ago, but also the eagerness of countries such as India, Egypt, Turkey, and Vietnam—all of which the U.S. has courted over the better part of several decades—to join this ascendant club.

America continues to have a stronger hand than any other single country in the world, but its power is not unlimited. The rest of the world produces more than two-thirds of all goods and services, and the U.S. lags behind China in both manufacturing capacity and leadership in several important technologies.

Marco Rubio, Trump’s national security adviser and secretary of state, once suggested that his predecessors in the Biden administration would be “polite and orderly caretakers of America’s decline.” The irony is that while Trump has taken pride in being neither polite nor orderly, the decline in America’s position has been swifter than nearly anyone imagined. There is no easy way to reverse it—but a president who knows how to strike a deal could make a worthy start.

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With Luck, Trump Will Lose His Race Against Time

Besides vowing retribution against his political opponents during the 2024 campaign the Felon promised to improve the economy and to lower consumer prices - something that supposedly attracted younger voters in particular rather than the permission slip for open racism and homophobia the Felon was waiving.  Eight months in, none of the economic promises have materialized other than tariff wars that have increased rather than decreased prices and have not lead to new industrial jobs. At some point those who whined about higher prices under Biden will that a war on diversity and efforts to increase white supremacy will not pay grocery bills and rent or mortgage payments. If the economy continues to decline, GOP prospects for 2026 may be dim, hence the Felon's accelerating efforts to push of mid decade redistricting and voter suppression to stave off the GOP's loss of control of Congress.  For those around the Felon who continue their self-prostitution save for true believers, at some point the calculation  must enter their minds as to what happens to them if the Felon fails at his desire to be a dictator.  Is potential future prison time worth possible short term gain and power?  A piece in The Atlantic by a former conservative Republican looks at the race against time the Felon faces - a race I hope he loses:

President Donald Trump [The Felon] is worried that Attorney General Pam Bondi is moving too slowly to prosecute his political adversaries on fake charges. Trump has good reason to be concerned. He is carrying out his project to consolidate authoritarian power against the trend of declining public support for his administration and himself. He is like a man trying to race upward on a downward-moving escalator. If he loses the race, he will be pulled ever deeper below—and the escalator keeps moving faster against him.

Autocracies are headed by one man but require the cooperation of many others. Some collaborators may sincerely share the autocrat’s goals, but opportunists provide a crucial margin of support. In the United States, such people now have to make a difficult calculation: Do the present benefits of submitting to Trump’s will outweigh the future hazards?

As Bondi makes her daily decisions about whether to abuse her powers to please Trump, she has to begin with one big political assessment: Will Trump ultimately retain the power to reward and punish her? It’s not just about keeping her present job. On the one hand, people in Trump’s favor can make a lot of money from their proximity to power. On the other, Richard Nixon’s attorney general, John Mitchell, served 19 months in prison for his crimes during Watergate. If Trump’s hold on power loosens, Bondi could share Mitchell’s fate.

Trump’s hold on power is indeed loosening. His standing with the voting public is quickly deteriorating. Grocery prices jumped in August 2025 at the fastest speed since the peak of the post-pandemic inflation in 2022. Job growth has stalled to practically zero.

Almost two-thirds of Americans disapprove of higher tariffs, Trump’s signature economic move. His administration’s attack on vaccines for young children is even more unpopular. . . . . Parents may be rightly shocked and angry.

Shortly after MSNBC reported that Tom Homan, Trump’s border czar, had accepted $50,000 in cash from FBI agents posing as businessmen last year, allegedly in exchange for a promise to help secure government contracts, the pro-Trump podcaster Megyn Kelly posted, “We DO NOT CARE.” This kind of acquiescence to corruption has been one of Trump’s most important resources. But the American people become a lot less tolerant of corruption in their leaders when they feel themselves under economic pressure. As of early August, nearly two-thirds of Americans regarded Trump as corrupt, 45 percent as “very corrupt.” More than 60 percent think the Trump administration is covering up the Jeffrey Epstein case. Almost 60 percent regard Bondi personally responsible for the cover-up.

The MAGA project in many ways resembles one of former businessman Donald Trump’s dangerously leveraged real-estate deals. A comparatively small number of fanatics are heart-and-soul committed. Through them, Trump controls the Republican apparatus and the right-wing media world, which allows him to do things like gerrymander states where he is in trouble (50 percent of Texans now disapprove of Trump, while only 43 percent approve) or wield the enforcement powers of the Federal Communications Commission to silence on-air critics. But overleveraged structures are susceptible to external shocks and internal mistakes.

Trump in his first term mostly avoided screwing up the economy. His trade wars with China triggered a nearly 20 percent stock-market slump in the fall and early winter of 2018. Trump retreated, and no recession followed the slump until the COVID shock of 2020. But in his second term, Trump has jettisoned his former economic caution. The stock market is doing fine in 2025 on hopes of interest-rate cuts. The real economy is worsening. The percentage of Americans who think the country is on the “wrong track” rose sharply over the summer. Even self-identified Republicans are now more negative than positive.

The souring is especially bitter among younger people. More than 60 percent of Republicans younger than 45 say things are on the wrong track, a 30-point deterioration over the three summer months.

Trump has a shrewd instinct for survival. He must sense that if he does not act now to prevent free and fair elections in 2026, he will lose much of his power—and all of his impunity. That’s why he is squeezing Bondi. But for her, the thought process must be very different. Trump is hoping to offload culpability for his misconduct onto her. She’s the one most directly at risk if she gives orders later shown to be unethical or illegal.

The survival of American rights and liberties may now turn less on the question of whether Pam Bondi is a person of integrity—which we already know the dismal answer to—than whether she is willing to risk her career and maybe even her personal freedom for a president on his way to repudiation unless he can fully pervert the U.S. legal system and the 2026 elections.

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Right-Wing Violence Accounts for 75%+ of U.S. Domestic Terrorism Deaths

In the wake of the murder of Charlie Kirk, the Felon and others are blaming Kirk's murder on "radical leftist groups" even though to date no definitive motive as been found for alleged shooter Tyler Robinson's actions.  Stated another way, without any evidence, the Felon and his minions - think Stephen Miller, Trump's equivalent to Nazi propaganda minister Josef Goebbels - are blaming liberals and those on the political left for being responsible.  Anything that challenges these disingenuous claims is labeled as "fake news."  However, if anything qualifies as so-called fake news, it is the false claim that those on the political left are most responsible for political violence.  In reality, right-wing activist/supporters and right wing violence are responsible for up to 80% of domestic terrorism deaths over the last quarter of a century. Indeed, just this weekend Phoenix’s CBS affiliate reports: A Phoenix man has been arrested after police say he threatened to shoot up a gay bar near his apartment reportedly because he was angry about the murder of Charlie Kirk and and his belief that the “radical left violence required a far-right response.” Sadly, those who get their news solely from the right wing echo chamber or who blindly belief what pathological liars like the Felon are clueless of the source of the vast majority of political violence.  A piece at Salon looks at the real data on who is responsible:

After the Sept. 10, 2025, assassination of conservative political activist Charlie Kirk, President Donald Trump [the Felon] claimed that radical leftist groups foment political violence in the U.S., and “they should be put in jail.”  . . . . “The radical left causes tremendous violence,” he said, asserting that “they seem to do it in a bigger way” than groups on the right.

Top presidential adviser Stephen Miller also weighed in after Kirk’s killing, saying that left-wing political organizations constitute “a vast domestic terror movement.”

But policymakers and the public need reliable evidence and actual data to understand the reality of politically motivated violence. From our research on extremism, it’s clear that the [Felon's] president’s and Miller’s assertions about political violence from the left are not based on actual facts.

Based on our own research and a review of related work, we can confidently say that most domestic terrorists in the U.S. are politically on the right, and right-wing attacks account for the vast majority of fatalities from domestic terrorism. The understanding of political violence is complicated by differences in definitions and the recent Department of Justice removal of an important government-sponsored study of domestic terrorists.

Political violence in the U.S. has risen in recent months and takes forms that go unrecognized. During the 2024 election cycle, nearly half of all states reported threats against election workers, including social media death threats, intimidation and doxing.

Kirk’s assassination illustrates the growing threat. The man charged with the murder, Tyler Robinson, allegedly planned the attack in writing and online. This follows other politically motivated killings, including the June assassination of Democratic Minnesota state Rep. and former House Speaker Melissa Hortman and her husband.

This article relies on some of our research on extremism, other academic research, federal reports, academic datasets and other monitoring to assess what is known about political violence. But different agencies and researchers use different definitions of political violence, making comparisons difficult.

The FBI and Department of Homeland Security define domestic violent extremism as threats involving actual violence. They do not investigate people in the U.S. for constitutionally protected speech, activism or ideological beliefs.

Domestic violent extremism is defined by the FBI and Department of Homeland Security as violence or credible threats of violence intended to influence government policy or intimidate civilians for political or ideological purposes. This general framing, which includes diverse activities under a single category, guides investigations and prosecutions.

Datasets compiled by academic researchers use narrower and more operational definitions. The Global Terrorism Database counts incidents that involve intentional violence with political, social or religious motivation. . . . The FBI and Department of Homeland Security emphasize that these distinctions are not merely academic. Labeling an event “terrorism” rather than a “hate crime” can change who is responsible for investigating an incident and how many resources they have to investigate it.

Despite differences in definitions, several consistent patterns emerge from available evidence.

Politically motivated violence is a small fraction of total violent crime, but its impact is magnified by symbolic targets, timing and media coverage.  In the first half of 2025, 35% of violent events tracked by University of Maryland researchers targeted U.S. government personnel or facilities – more than twice the rate in 2024.

Right-wing extremist violence has been deadlier than left-wing violence in recent years. Based on government and independent analyses, right-wing extremist violence has been responsible for the overwhelming majority of fatalities, amounting to approximately 75% to 80% of U.S. domestic terrorism deaths since 2001.

Illustrative cases include the 2015 Charleston church shooting, when white supremacist Dylann Roof killed nine Black parishioners; the 2018 Tree of Life synagogue attack in Pittsburgh, where 11 worshippers were murdered; the 2019 El Paso Walmart massacre, in which an anti-immigrant gunman killed 23 people. The 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, an earlier but still notable example, killed 168 in the deadliest domestic terrorist attack in U.S. history.

By contrast, left-wing extremist incidents, including those tied to anarchist or environmental movements, have made up about 10& to 15% of incidents and less than 5% of fatalities.

Unlike foreign terrorism, the federal government does not have a mechanism to formally charge an individual with domestic terrorism. That makes it difficult to characterize someone as a domestic terrorist.

The State Department’s Foreign Terrorist Organization list applies only to groups outside of the United States. By contrast, U.S. law bars the government from labeling domestic political organizations as terrorist entities because of First Amendment free speech protections.

Right-wing extremist violence has been more frequent and more lethal than left-wing violence. The number of extremist groups is substantial and skewed toward the right, although a count of organizations does not necessarily reflect incidents of violence.

Trump and members of his administration are threatening to target whole organizations and movements and the people who work in them with aggressive legal measures – to jail them or scrutinize their favorable tax status. But research shows that the majority of political violence comes from people following right-wing ideologies.