Trump, Alabama and the ghost of George Wallace

Donald Trump continues to play to the racism that has become one of the strongest undercurrents of today's Republican Party.   Not surprisingly, he found a sizable audience in Mobile, Alabama last night, albeit only about half the numbers Trump had boasted about prior to the event.  I lived in Mobile for four years over three decades ago and in many ways the state is more extreme now than it was back then.  I continue to wonder what is being added to the drinking water.  Perhaps the only good news is that Trumps cavalcade of racism drew a smaller crowd than expected.  Perhaps there is still hope for Alabama.  Here are highlights on the spectacle from Politico:

MOBILE, Ala. — It was immigration, not segregation, that brought some 20,000 southerners — far fewer than predicted — out for Donald Trump on Friday night, but the ghost of George Wallace loomed large.

Wallace, an avowed segregationist, was the last presidential candidate to win electoral votes as a third-party candidate. The threat of Trump doing so, propelled by a hardline immigration stance that many have condemned as racist, looms over the Republican Party now as it did over the Democratic Party then, even as the enthusiasm of his following, for once, fell far short of expectations.

Trump also panned birthright citizenship as a bad deal for the U.S., saying, “We’re the only place just about that’s stupid enough to do it.” Trump’s recently released immigration plan calls for ending birthright citizenship for the children of undocumented immigrants, which is guaranteed by the 14th Amendment, according to the legal consensus, though Trump disputes that point.

Trump invited Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions, one of Congress’s most ardent immigration hardliners who helped the businessman craft his immigration plan, to the podium, where the two embraced.

He also attacked his favorite punching bag, former Florida governor Jeb Bush, on the issue. “ Jeb Bush, ugh,” said Trump, pausing for dramatic effect, before calling the former governor “totally in favor of Common Core, weak on immigration.”

There were also vestiges of Wallace’s Alabama, including on the sample editions of “The First Freedom” newspaper one man handed out to drivers as they entered the parking lot. The paper’s front page included a story about “black-on-white crime in South Carolina” and an editor’s note about German media’s silence about “the actual programs these peaceful ‘neo-nazis’ stand for.”

The vast majority of supporters where white: of over 1,000 people waiting to enter on the east of the Ladd Peebles Stadium at 5 p.m., eight were black.

Marty Hughes, 47, wore a camouflage hat with Confederate flag detailing and said he liked Trump’s stances on immigration and taxes. He called the removal this year of Confederate flags from government property across much of the South “stupidity” and said he didn’t think a President Trump would stand for it.

[T]he city said it expected 40,000 supporters at the rally, but various media outlets estimated that the total was in the ballpark of 15-20,000, leaving the stadium looking less than half full.

Russian Bank is Financing French Neo-Nazi Party

It seems that Vladimir Putin is once again employing techniques of Hitler and the Nazi regime not to mention those of the former Soviet Union: funding political parties in foreign countries to cause unrest and fan support for Putin's own Neo-Nazi policies.  As Time magazine reports, a Russian bank is providing loans to France's National Front, a Neo-Nazi and virulently anti-gay political party in France.  Here are article highlights:

Is Russian President Vladimir Putin meddling in the internal politics of countries in the European Union? That seemed a strong possibility to some Europeans this week, after French political leader Marine Le Pen confirmed she had secured a €9-million ($11.1 million) loan from a Moscow-based bank, in order to run her right-wing National Front party.

“At this stage, Russia is trying to influence French domestic policy,” says Jean-Yves Camus, a political researcher at France’s Institute of International and Strategic Relations (IRIS). If so, Putin’s strategy resembles the Soviet Union before its collapse in 1991, when Moscow funded trade unions and political groups in western Europe in an attempt to buy influence and destabilize foes. “In this respect Putin is pretty much in line with the former USSR. It is the same policy all over again,” says Camus.

The French investigative news site Mediapart first broke the news that the National Front had taken the loan, with a 6% interest rate, from First Czech Russian Bank, a small Moscow-based institution, the chairman of which is Roman Popov. Mediapart said the deal emerged partly as a result of Le Pen’s visit to Moscow last February, where she met Alexander Babakov, a Russian lawmaker with connections to Putin. 

Le Pen has been a staunch supporter of Russia. For months she has lambasted the E.U. for its sanctions against it, and she told Naryshkin in Moscow last year that Europe’s “Cold War on Russia” was “not in line with traditional, friendly relations nor with the economic interests of our country.”

Le Pen — whose party is similar to populist movements like the United Kingdom Independent Party (UKIP) and the Alternative for Germany — aims to pull her country out of the Union and reclaim its sovereignty over border control and fiscal budgets. As Putin fights to keep Ukraine and other countries allied to Russia, anything that weakens the 28-country E.U. could help further that cause. The far-right parties in Europe share certain ideological opinions with Putin including opposition to gay marriage and open immigration.

[S]ome believe Putin might be misjudging the potential for right-wing leaders in Europe to take control of their governments. “In practical terms the far-right parties are of little help to him as they hold no power,” says Cas Mudde, associate professor in the School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Georgia. Similarly, Camus believes that Putin could be further isolated if Le Pen fails to become French president. “This strategy can backfire,” he says. “Putin is pretty much isolated in the international community. So I think he doesn’t have anything to gain by supporting or helping the extreme right.”

Putin continues to demonstrate that he is a very dangerous individual who is driven by one thing alone: a quest for power to satisfy his megalomania.  I may just have to nickname him "Adolph Junior."