Biden’s fitness for a second term

Sorry this is long but an interesting historical perspective on Trumps unprecedented interference in foreign policy as a candidate.

April 2, 2024
HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

Almost six months have passed since President Joe Biden asked Congress to appropriate money for Ukraine in a national security supplemental bill. At first, House Republicans said they would not pass such a bill without border security. Then, when a bipartisan group of senators actually produced a border security provision for the national security bill, they killed it, under orders from former president Trump.

In February the Senate passed the national security supplemental bill with aid for Ukraine without the border measures by a strong bipartisan vote of 70 to 29. Senator Susan Collins (R-ME) cheered its passage, saying: “The national security bill passed by the Senate is of profound importance to America’s security.”

The measure would pass in the House by a bipartisan vote, but House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) has refused to take it up, acting in concert with Trump.

On March 24, on Washington Week, foreign affairs journalist Anne Applebaum said: “Trump has decided that he doesn’t want money to go to Ukraine… It's really an extraordinary moment; we have an out-of-power ex-president who is in effect dictating American foreign policy on behalf of a foreign dictator or with the interests of a foreign dictator in mind.”

On Thursday, March 28, Beth Reinhard, Jon Swaine, and Aaron Schaffer of the Washington Post reported that Richard Grenell, an extremist who served as Trump’s acting director of national intelligence, has been traveling around the world to meet with far-right foreign leaders, “acting as a kind of shadow secretary of state, meeting with far-right leaders and movements, pledging Trump’s support and, at times, working against the current administration’s policies.”

Grenell, the authors say, is openly laying the groundwork for a president who will make common cause with authoritarian leaders and destroy partnerships with democratic allies. Trump has referred to Grenell as “my envoy,” and the Trump camp has suggested he is a frontrunner to become secretary of state if Trump is reelected in 2024.

Applebaum was right: it is extraordinary that we have a former president who is now out of power running his own foreign policy.

For most of U.S. history, there was an understanding that factionalism stopped at the water’s edge. Partisans might fight tooth and nail within the U.S., but they presented a united front to the rest of the world. That understanding was strong enough that it was not for nearly a half century that we had definitive proof that in 1968 Republican presidential candidate Richard Nixon had launched a secret effort to thwart incumbent president Lyndon Baines Johnson’s peace initiative to end the Vietnam War; Nixon had tried very hard to hide it.

But the era of hiding attempts to undermine foreign policy ended in 2015, when 47 Republican senators openly warned Iranian officials that they would destroy any agreement Iran made with then-president Barack Obama, a Democrat, over nuclear weapons as soon as a Republican regained the White House. At the time it sparked a firestorm, although the senators involved could argue that they, too, should be considered the voice of the government.

It was apparently a short step from the idea that it was acceptable to undermine foreign policy decisions made by a Democratic president to the idea that it was acceptable to work with foreign operatives to change foreign policy. In late 2016, Trump’s then national security advisor Michael Flynn talked to Russian foreign minister Sergey Kislyak about relieving Russia of U.S. sanctions. Now, eight years later, Trump is conducting his own foreign policy, and it runs dead against what the administration, the Pentagon, and a majority of senators and representatives think is best for the nation.

Likely expecting help from foreign countries, Trump is weakening the nation internationally to gain power at home. In that, he is retracing the steps of George Logan, who in 1798 as a private citizen set off for France to urge French officials to court popular American opinion in order to help throw George Washington’s party out of power and put Thomas Jefferson’s party in.

Congress recognized that inviting foreign countries to interfere on behalf of one candidate or another would turn the United States into a vassal state, and when Logan arrived back on U.S. shores, he discovered that Congress had passed a 1799 law we now know as the Logan Act, making his actions a crime.

The law reads: “Any citizen of the United States, wherever he may be, who, without authority of the United States, directly or indirectly commences or carries on any correspondence or intercourse with any foreign government or any officer or agent thereof, with intent to influence the measures or conduct of any foreign government or of any officer or agent thereof, in relation to any disputes or controversies with the United States, or to defeat the measures of the United States, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than three years, or both.”

Trump’s interference in our foreign policy is weakening Ukraine, which desperately needs equipment to fight off Russia’s invasion. It is also warning partners and allies that they cannot rely on the United States, thus serving Russian president Vladimir Putin’s goal of fracturing the alliance standing against Russian aggression.

Today, Lara Seligman, Stuart Lau, and Paul McLeary of Politico reported that officials at the meeting of North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) foreign ministers in Brussels on Thursday are expected to discuss moving the Ukraine Defense Contact Group from U.S. to NATO control. The Ukraine Defense Contact Group is an organization of 56 nations brought together in the early days of the conflict by U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and then–Joint Chiefs chair General Mark Milley to coordinate supplying Ukraine.

Members are concerned about maintaining aid to Ukraine in case of a second Trump presidency.

Jim Townsend, a former Pentagon and NATO official, told the Politico reporters: “There’s a feeling among, not the whole group but a part of the NATO group, that thinks it is better to institutionalize the process just in case of a Trump re-election. And that’s something that the U.S. is going to have to get used to hearing, because that is a fear, and a legitimate one.”

Awesome. Love Trae so much.

newrepublic.com/article/180404/trumps-ugly-hateful-rants-michigan-covered-scandal



Hmmmm, I feel like somebody here made this point before.

Somehow I missed this, but on Monday, a Trump cultist - apparently spurred on by QAnon radicalization - rammed his truck into an FBI building in Atlanta.

Much peaceful. Very sane.

www.wired.com/story/navy-veteran-fbi-headquarters-qanon-conspiracies-online/

there will still be jails

.
@repmoskowitz on Trump’s claim that the country will “cease to exist” if he loses: “We’re still gonna have elections. The sun is still gonna rise. And to Trump’s chagrin, we’ll probably still have jails.”

prison



Jo @jojofromjerz
He’s didn’t win in 2020.
We still exist.
We’ve had all sorts of elections since.
That’s not what he’s worried about.
He knows if he doesn’t win, he’s going to prison.

reply to
Trump: If we don’t win on November 5th, I think our country is going to cease to exist. It could be the last election we ever have. I actually mean that. If we don’t win, I think this could be the last election we ever have

That's what happens when conservative media prioritizes what readers want to hear over the truth.

And it makes more sense that Reuters wrote the article.  I'm not sure anyone at Newsmax is capable of truthful journalism.

This is not at all surprising




crooked and criminal behavior





insider trading


Two investors plead guilty in insider trading scheme linked to the Trump Media deal that brought the former president's social media business public

www.cnn.com/2024/04/03/business/trump-truth-social-insider-trading/index.html


New York
CNN
—
Florida venture capitalist Michael Shvartsman and his brother Gerald Shvartsman pleaded guilty on Wednesday to participating in an insider trading scheme linked to the blockbuster deal that brought former President Donald Trump’s social media business public.

Each of the brothers pleaded guilty in New York to one count of securities fraud, which carries a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison, according to federal prosecutors.

The two brothers were arrested in June and charged with illegally trading on nonpublic knowledge of a shell company’s secret plan to buy Trump Media & Technology Group, the parent company of struggling social network Truth Social.

“Michael and Gerald Shvartsman admitted in court that they received confidential, inside information about an upcoming merger between DWAC and Trump Media and used that information to make profitable, but illegal, open-market trades,” Damian Williams, the US Attorney for the Southern District of New York, said in a statement.

Trump won't renounce political violence because he depends on it to intimidate judges, prosecutors, witnesses and potential jurors.




political violence

This doesn't make sense to me either. I'm not sure why Hannity or any other Republican would try to make the case that we were better off 4 years ago. All you need to look at are clips from Trump's press conferences to remember how terrible things were.



4 years ago

Alyssa Farah Griffin @alyssafarah
I’m perplexed from a strategy standpoint why Republicans are doubling down on the claim “we were better off 4 years ago.” We were literally facing down a global pandemic, under lockdown, facing a supply chain crisis, & the economy was in free fall.

Were u better off 4 years ago than today? 4 yrs ago I was at the Pentagon pushing back on Chinese disinfo abt the origins of COVID, we were countering fake reports daily that the US military was going to be delayed on us streets to enforce lockdowns, we deployed the USNS Comfort

And at this point 4 years ago only thousands of Americans had died. Over 1 million souls would ultimately perish to COVID. Millions would lose livelihoods, tens of thousands would lose businesses, many more homes. Kids would fall behind in schools. 2020 was hell.

Now Trump boosters seem to be reflecting on pre-COVID times when the economy was objectively strong pre-pandemic. But why use the specific metric of 4 years ago? A very specific period in time that no American wants to repeat? Bizarre. Strategic fail.

So what did you think about this?l  I’m not going to track down your response ,if you actually made one.

www.nytimes.com/2024/04/03/business/trump-media-short-selling.html

Traders Are Betting Millions That Trump Media Will Tumble
The parent company of Truth Social is a popular target for short-sellers, even after they lost $100 million last month betting on a decline in the stock that didn’t come.

Before former President Donald J. Trump’s social media company made its stock market debut, many investors were lining up to bet on its collapse. After the company’s share price plunged following an initial surge, the appetite to bet against the stock has grown even more ravenous.

Trump Media & Technology Group, which trades under the ticker DJT, slipped on Wednesday to below $50 per share, extending a steep decline this week that pulled the stock down from its high near $80 and erased more than $2 billion of market value.

Trump Media is the most “shorted” special purpose acquisition vehicle in the country, according to the financial data company S3 Partners. Short-sellers bet that the price of a stock will fall. They do that by borrowing shares of a company and selling them into the market, hoping to buy them back later at a lower price, before returning the shares to the lender and pocketing the difference as profit.

The demand to short Trump Media, the parent company of the social media platform Truth Social, is so great that stock lenders can charge enormous fees, making it hard for short-sellers to turn a profit unless the shares fall significantly. Still, there is a lot of interest in taking the bet.