Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) had a bemused response on Friday to Donald Trump’s decision to back out of a suggested debate between the two. “Well, Mr. Trump, what are you afraid of?” the Democratic candidate said. Sanders said reporters were the first to inform him that Trump pulled out of the prospective debate, shortly after a tech firm offered to put up the $10 million donation the presumptive Republican presidential nominee had named as a condition. “Mr. Trump comes across as a big tough guy,” Sanders said. “If you’re so tough, let’s sit down and have that debate.”
He’s a punk and a wimp, and Sanders called him out as such.
Donald Trump was on Jimmy Kimmel, and in response a question from the late night host, Trump said that he would be willing to debate Bernie Sanders, and Sanders promptly picked up the gauntlet:
On ABC’s “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” Trump was asked if he would consider holding a debate with Sanders. Trump agreed to the idea.
“If he paid a sum toward charity I would love to do that,” said the business mogul, noting that a Sanders vs. Trump debate “would have such high ratings.”
In a campaign stop in North Dakota, Trump said Sanderrs would need to raise $10 million for charity in order for the debate to happen.
Sanders quickly responded with a tweet reading, “Game On. I look forward to debating Donald Trump in California before the June 7th primary.”
I don’t expect Trump to follow through, but there is no way that this is a losing proposition for Sanders.
If Trump backs out, he looks weak.
If Sanders does poorly in the debate, Clinton is not harmed, and her campaign gets a preview of Trump’s debate performance.
Sanders gets another chance to sell his movement and his campaign.
If Bernie trounces Trump, he gives a big boost to his chances in California.
There are no downsides for Sanders, and only one downside for Clinton, here, and all likely outcomes are bad for the “Short Fingered Vulgarian.”
For more the 20 years, we have had a problem with out negotiations with the DPRK (North Korea).
We haven’t even been able to end the Korean War.*
The problem is that one of the parties is not negotiations is not acting in good faith, and engages in meaningless posturing, threats of dire consequences, and a general lack of seriousness.
The other, of course, is the DPRK.
Since the Clinton administration stiffed the DPRK on formal diplomatic relations in 2004, the US has refused face to face negotiations, because ……… Hell, I don’t know why, but it appears that Donald Trump finds this similarly absurd:
Presumptive US Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump says he is willing to meet North Korea’s leader to discuss its nuclear programme. “I would speak to him, I would have no problem speaking to him,” the businessman said of Kim Jong-un. Such a meeting would mark a significant change of US policy towards the politically isolated regime. Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton decried Mr Trump’s “bizarre fascination with foreign strongmen”. The statement, delivered by one of her aides, added that Mr Trump’s foreign policy “made no sense”.
Because talking with people instead of threatening them works so well?
As Democrats portray Donald Trump as a dangerous leader for his party, most of them barely acknowledge he could be president. But some centrist Democrats say they’re ready and willing to work with the business mogul should he defeat their party’s nominee. “The people will have a chance to vote. If Donald Trump is elected president there will be a great opportunity to sit down and have a conversation about what that agenda looks like,” explained Sen. Heidi Heitkamp (D-N.D.), who has long backed Hillary Clinton. “If he’s president, we’re going to have disagreement. But we’d better all figure out how to come up with an agenda for the American people.” Getting ready for a potential Trump presidency in their home states may just be good politics for moderate senators such as Heitkamp, Jon Tester of Montana and West Virginia’s Joe Manchin. They’ll be top targets for Republicans in 2018, a midterm year that could favor the GOP if recent trends of lower turnouts in nonpresidential elections continue. And it’s a good bet that they’ll need Trump voters to keep their jobs.
Seriously?
These cheese eating surrender monkeys are panicking over the midterms, and so they are engaging in activities calculated to demoralize the base.
It’s stupid on a policy level, it’s stupid, on a political level, it’s even worse.
This is blind unreasoning panic.
I’ve seen zebras chased by cheetahs that carry themselves with more grace and dignity.
Donald Trump derided Hillary Clinton’s hawkish foreign policy record over the weekend, a glimpse into a potential general election strategy of casting Clinton as the more likely of the two to take the nation to war. Just moments after maligning Syrian refugees at a rally in Lynden, Washington, Trump pivoted into a tirade against Clinton as a warmonger. “On foreign policy, Hillary is trigger happy,” Trump told the crowd. “She is, she’s trigger happy. She’s got a bad temperament,” he said. “Her decisions in Iraq, Syria, Egypt, Libya have cost trillions of dollars, thousands of lives and have totally unleashed ISIS.” And he expressed a rarely heard appreciation for the “other side to this story,” noting: “Thousands of lives yes, for us, but probably millions of lives in all fairness, folks” for the people of the Middle East. Trump implied that casualties inflicted by the U.S. military were far higher than reported. “They bomb a city” and “it’s obliterated, obliterated,” he said. “They’ll say nobody was killed. I’ll bet you thousands and thousands of people were killed every time you see that television set.”
I think that Trump is an isolationist, and that is not necessarily a bad thing.
When you look at the history of US military and diplomatic interventions over the past 60 years, overthrowing a democratically elected government in Iran as well as any number of Latin American nations (Chile, Argentina, Honduras, Guatemala, Nicaragua, etc), and interventions in Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq (1963, 1990, 2003), Lebanon, East Pakistan (now Bangladesh), Cambodia, Angola, Grenada, Kuwait, Somalia, Libya, the Ukraine, and Syria, you have a poor record.
At best (Kuwait) you have us propping up a corrupt, reactionary, and totalitarian state.
At worst, you have the effective destruction of a country and its society, particularly in Afghanistan, Libya, Iraq, and Cambodia, and the death toll is in the tens of millions.
The only post Korea success that I can think of is in the former Yugoslavia.
The world would be better off if we were more isolationist.
Here is a suggestion for Hillary: If you are making Donald Trump sound sane about anything, you are on the wrong side of history.
Seriously? If there is anyone in the Washington commentariat who is less well qualified to talk about misogyny and profanity, I haven’t read them yet:
Here’s a serious question for Republican officeholders: WTF?
Now that Trump has a lock on the presidential nomination, many top Republicans — too many — are moving to embrace this vulgar man for the sake of party unity. It is a real [expletive] show.
The man who would be the Grand Old Party’s standard-bearer has said the following things (among many others) in front of thousands of men, women and children (and millions more via the media):
The National Interest, which is a (Possibly THE) seriously Neocon organization, is trying to explain why it hosted a Trump foreign policy speech, and is not endorsing Trump’s analysis:
……… As the hosts, we are ill suited to evaluate Mr. Trump’s speech; some may find criticism ungracious or, conversely, see praise as unpersuasive. That said, we heard enough from Mr. Trump to feel that while his approach to foreign and security policy is not yet fully developed and remains a work in progress, it is quite different from the existing semi-consensus among America’s foreign-policy elites. His remarks outlined a fundamental break with post-Cold War U.S. foreign policy and offered an alternative vision with considerable appeal to a frustrated public, if less to the elites who have defined, articulated and implemented policy through three administrations run by both major political parties.
I, however, do agree with Trump’s assessment regarding the general uselessness of our foreign establishment, even while eschewing his nonsensical solutions
……… For much of the post–Cold War era, experts both inside and outside the government have faced informal but powerful pressure to share in existing interventionist orthodoxies if they seek top positions requiring Senate confirmation or even regular appearances in mainstream media. From this perspective, it is predictable that an avowedly antiestablishment candidate should provoke ferocious rhetoric from not only the political establishment, but also the foreign-policy establishment (perhaps even more bitterly). Pledging that he would not surround himself “with those who have perfect resumes but very little to brag about except responsibility for a long history of failed policies and continued losses at war” has surely fueled establishment fear of Mr. Trump. This statement—the functional equivalent of his signature line “you’re fired” directed at a number of former senior and mid-level officials—ensured that not only many Democrats, but also a number of Republicans in Washington’s foreign-policy community would race to the barricades. Some self-serving Trump-haters may well see this as the greatest danger he poses; ending the dominance of today’s foreign policy nomenklatura could directly threaten their careers. He provokes similar reactions among the transnational Davos elites by insisting “the nation-state remains the true foundation for happiness and harmony.” In America, this Soviet-style foreign-policy nomenklatura system has helped the post–Cold War foreign-policy elites in the Republican and Democratic parties to develop a sense of entitlement wholly disproportionate to their accomplishments. How difficult was it to run America’s foreign policy during an era of virtually unquestioned dominance? Why—with so many advantages—have our elites produced so many failed policies? And why do they feel no shame? No matter how many individual positions he changes, Mr. Trump will never satisfy the architects of these massive mistakes or, for that matter, their ardent supporters on editorial boards and television screens. To be clear, it is entirely appropriate to criticize Mr. Trump’s views or, for that matter, his temper. Both have long been important components in our electoral politics. What is not appropriate is to attempt to shut down public discussion of critical national issues.
Our current foreign policy establishment, what I refer to as the Council on Foreign Relations crowd, has squandered blood and treasure, all while making us less secure and insuring that our influence will be diminished in the future.
Presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump on Thursday positioned himself on the far left of the political spectrum on fiscal issues, coming out for low interest rates, against a strong dollar and a more aggressive managing of U.S. debt. ……… “She [Fed Chair Yellen] is a low interest rate person, she’s always been a low-interest-rate person, and let’s be honest, I’m a low-interest-rate person,” Trump added. Trump shifted to a discussion of the impact that higher rates has on the dollar, and on the impact a rising dollar has on U.S. business. “If we raise interest rates and if the dollar starts getting too strong, we’ll have some very major problems.” “I love the concept of a strong dollar, but when you look at the havoc that a strong dollar causes … it sounds better to have a strong dollar than it actually is.” ……… One thing Trump advocated that the U.S. Treasury has resisted is a more active management of the debt. The U.S. Treasury hasn’t taken advantage of current low interest rates to issue more longer-term debt. “I think there are times for us to refinance debt with longer term, we owe so much money,” Trump said. While at times Trump seemed to link a conversation of refinancing with a situation where “the bubble popped” — at one point even suggesting a buyback of U.S. debt — he also made clear that he wanted to refinance now, to rebuild infrastructure.
This is a coherent and thoughtful, if someone iconoclastic, view of the economy, budget, and monetary policy.
It is also a refreshing departure from the conventional fetish about deficits that tends to promulgate austerity.
The economy remains depressed, interest rates are at historical lows, and it’s time borrow cheap and long term and spend on decaying infrastructure and create jobs.
I’ve said before that Donald Trump was the best Republican in the race,* and this reinforces my initial impression.
Over at FT, Edward Luce makes the obvious observation, that the foreign policy establishment who is having the vapors of Trump’s foreign policy, Luce ironically calls them the. “best and brightest, have been wrong about everything all the time for decades:
Intellectuals crave doctrines. The tidier the formula, the easier it is to make sense of that messy world out there. In the view of the US’s strategic elites, Donald Trump’s mind is recklessly untidy. Last week they poured scorn on his much-awaited foreign policy speech. Not only was it self-negating — Mr Trump vowed both to be predictable and unpredictable — but he has yet to hire an intellectually respected adviser. It is doubtful he has read a book on foreign policy. Is further proof needed? Mr Trump is not only a loose cannon. He is also ignorant of the canon. The man could not even pronounce Tanzania (his version rhymed with Romania). All of which is true. But the critique suffers from two weaknesses. First, the people making it, which includes almost everyone, are throwing stones from glass houses. These include former Republican presidential candidates Mitt Romney, John McCain and Lindsey Graham and their galaxy of advisers — 121 of whom signed a letter condemning Mr Trump’s platform. It also includes the Democratic elites led by Hillary Clinton. They may differ in degree but they share a basic worldview. The US must uphold universal values with force if necessary. That is how things are done. In the words of Madeleine Albright, the former secretary of state, the US sees further than other nations because “it stands taller”. All of which adds up. Yet, with one or two exceptions, these were the same people who brought you the US-led invasion of Iraq. Mr Trump plays loose with detail when he claims to have opposed the 2003 war (he said very little until the scale of the disaster had become obvious). But few outside Washington bother with such timelines. What they grasp is that Mr Trump has united the same elites against him who were so collectively wrong on Iraq. This is no minor detail. Washington’s biggest brains have a record of miscuing in unison on the biggest questions. Think of the Vietnam war, which competes with Iraq as the largest foreign policy disaster in US history. That was famously orchestrated by “the best and the brightest”. Their doctrine was the domino theory — if one state fell to communism, its neighbours would follow. It was simple, logical and disastrous. George W Bush’s doctrine was that pre-emptive war would stave off bigger threats down the line. It was also easy to grasp and catastrophic. The Iraq war spawned the monster child of Isis. On a smaller scale, the same could be said of the 2011 US-backed overthrow of Libya’s Muammer Gaddafi. Libya is now a second base for Isis. Given the chance, might these same elites drag the US into a Syrian quagmire, or a military clash with Russian president Vladimir Putin over Ukraine? Could we rule out a conflict with China in the South China Sea?
I think that it is highly likely that Trump’s foreign policy will batsh%$ insane.
It will be completely nuts.
That being said, there is a substantial possibility that this foreign policy will be saner and less destructive than the Council on Foreign Relations/Washington foreign policy consensus.
After last night’s sweeping wins by Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, it appears even more likely that the two will become their respective party’s nominees. But according to multiple different polls and recent data, these are the sh%$tiest candidates in recorded history and this election will be a total mess. A recent CBS poll has Clinton at 52% unfavorable rating, with Trump at 57% unfavorable. These are the lowest favorability ratings of presumptive nominees since CBS began polling, and other polls show similar findings. Clinton’s sh%$tiness has been seen as a major problem for the Democratic party, while the only consolation to the Democrats is that Donald Trump is statistically sh%$tier, to the point that he is potentially starting a civil war within the Republican party. If either of these two are elected, they will be the least favored nominee to become president in the history of polling. ……… If Clinton and Trump win their party nominations, we’re in for six months of peak sh$%tiness. Trump saving $2 Billion on ad revenue means he can outspend a cash-strapped Clinton after the primaries, and his sh$%ty rhetoric and fistfuls of money will force a hawkish Clinton to at turns go tough on him and differentiate herself with a market-tested party unification approach. ……… One thing is certain, if Clinton and Trump become their party’s nominees, it will be a race to the bottom. With Trump’s schoolyard rhetoric and Clinton’s distrustfulness, a heated general election fight will turn off an already election-fatigued American populace. According to the data, no matter who wins, a majority of Americans will lose.
I think that the assessment is fundamentally accurate.
It’s a f%$#ing mess, but Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton are two different phenomena.
Donald Trump is the proverbial black swan. The Republican party could not have predicted him, or what he would be, or his ascendance. No one could have predicted this.
Hillary Clinton, on the other hand, has been a known quantity for decades, and she record of failure that would make Dick Cheney or Donald Rumsfeld blush, whether it is Iraq, NAFTA, Hillary Care, crime bill, Libya, Syria, the Ukraine, or any other signature of her issues.
But the Democratic Party establishment, following the script to Blazing Saddles, has decided that, “”We’ve gotta protect our phoney baloney jobs, gentlemen!”
It is the Iron Law of Organizations Institutions, where power WITHIN an organization is pursued at the expense of the power OF that organization.
The Democratic Party establishment has consciously chosen its course for the most venal of reasons, and the rest of us will pay for this.
In all the commotion about the Panama Papers, we tend to ignore the fact that most of the dodgy finance that is used to hide wealth from the tax man occurs right here in the good old US of A, most notably in Wyoming and Delaware.
There aren’t many things upon which Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump agree, especially as they court very different Delaware voters ahead of a primary on Tuesday. But the candidates for president share an affinity for the same nondescript two-storey office building in Wilmington. A building that has become famous for helping tens of thousands of companies avoid hundreds of millions of dollars in tax through the so-called “Delaware loophole”.
The receptionist at 1209 North Orange Street isn’t surprised that a journalist has turned up unannounced on a sunny weekday afternoon.
“You know I can’t speak to you,” she says. A yellow post-it note on her computer screen reads “MEDIA: Chuck Miller” with the phone number of the company’s director of corporate communications. Miller can’t answer many questions either, except to say that the company does not advise clients on their tax affairs.
The Guardian is not the first media organisation to turn up at the offices of Corporation Trust Centre, and it’s unlikely to be the last.
The term tax haven may evoke images of exotic locales, but Panama actually ranks as the 13th most attractive spot for hiding assets, while the US lies third.
This squat, yellow brick office building just north of Wilmington’s rundown downtown is the registered address of more than 285,000 companies. That’s more than any other known address in the world, and 15 times more than the 18,000 registered in Ugland House, a five-storey building in the Cayman Islands that Barack Obama called “either the biggest building in the world, or the biggest tax scam on record”.
Officially, 1209 North Orange is home to Apple, American Airlines, Coca-Cola, Walmart and dozens of other companies in the Fortune 500 list of America’s biggest companies. Being registered in Delaware lets companies take advantage of strict corporate secrecy rules, business-friendly courts and the “Delaware loophole”, which can allow companies to legally shift earnings from other states to Delaware, where they are not taxed on non-physical incomes generated outside of the state.
………
Both the leading candidates for president – Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump – have companies registered at 1209 North Orange, and have refused to explain why.
Clinton, who has repeatedly promised that as president she will crack down on “outrageous tax havens and loopholes that super-rich people across the world are exploiting in Panama and elsewhere”, collected more than $16m in public speaking fees and book royalties in 2014 through the doors of 1209, according to the Clintons’ tax return.
The routine corruption in the United States is mind buggering.
Paterno was fired a because he covered up the activities of a serial child rapist.
Jo Paterno is dead.
Oops:
Speaking at a rally in Pittsburgh, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump mentioned late Penn State football coach Joe Paterno, who died in 2012. Paterno was fired from the school and his statue removed after Jerry Sandusky’s sexual abuse of children came to light. (Reuters) Pandering to local crowds is a staple of political campaigns everywhere, and Donald Trump’s is no different. But the key to successful pandering is knowing to whom you’re speaking and, of course, what you’re saying. Trump was way off base on both those counts Wednesday, when he spoke before a crowd of supporters at a rally in Pittsburgh. “I know a lot about Pennsylvania, and it’s great,” Trump said. Which is standard-issue stuff, but then things got awkward. “How’s Joe Paterno?” Trump asked. “We’re gonna bring that back? Right? How about that whole deal?” Paterno, for those who may have forgotten (including, possibly, a certain presidential candidate) died in 2012. (Wait, is bringing him back from the grave an essential part of making America great again?)
His campaign is now claiming that he was asking if the coach’s statue was returning to the State College campus.
No. Trump had a brain fart that makes John Kasich look like Stephen f%$#ing Hawking, only, of course, Stephen Hawking is a far more inspiring speaker.
Democratic presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders this week joked about a topless woman who showed up at one of his rallies recently to protest Republican rival Donald Trump.
“Well, I was trying very hard to get every detail,” the Vermont senator joked during an interview with Phoenix-area radio station KTAR when asked if he could read the text on the woman’s chest. “No, just kidding,” Sanders chuckled as the male radio hosts erupted into laughter. “No, actually I was trying to focus on a couple of other things,” Sanders continued, trying to stifle another laugh as he pivoted to discuss campaign issues of income inequality. A woman who tried unsuccessfully to get into one of Trump’s rallies in Arizona over the weekend opted to show up at Sanders’s rally in Phoenix on Saturday instead. The words “stop fascism” were revealed on her back and “hate speech is not free speech” were marked on her chest, as she stood on someone’s back, interrupting Sanders’s rally.
She was also wearing “Free the Nipple” pasties.
Photos (she is quite fetching) available at the links.
Donald Trump is now strongly implying that any attempt to stop his nomination by the Republican establishment at the convention will be met by rioters:
……… But let’s say a miracle happens and one of the many Republican candidates who is fantasizing about rushing in to save the party manages to unify the party. What then? Would Trump — who by then will have little-to-zero hope of launching a third-party run — just sit back an absorb a massive humiliation? Well, you won’t like Trump supporters when they are angry and legally indemnified against violence. This threat isn’t just some fantasy I’ve conjured. Trump has all but said he and his “people” would resist being usurped with everything he’s got:
“I don’t know that that’s going to happen. But I’ll tell you, there are going to be a lot of people that will be very upset if that doesn’t happen. I think that would be pretty unfair.”
With his daily war against protesters as training and his followers seeing him as their savior, maybe the Republican establishment will decide they’re better off just letting Trump take the nomination. Sure it could be the end of the GOP and the dawn of American fascism. But at least he’ll try to cut their taxes by $1.3 million a year.
I am so glad that the Donald is their problem, and not ours.
Over the past 50 years, there has been a trajectory towards greater trade liberalization, along with a massive expansion in property rights and rents.
Ordinary Americans note that this has made their lives, and the lives of their children, measurably worse.
The Very Serious People (VSPs) among our elites argue that in the long run we will benefit, but it’s been over 2 generations with poor results, and as John Maynard Keynes said, “In the long run, we are all dead.”
The VSPs maintain that it is all racism. It’s something more significant than that:
……… Or so we’re told. Last week, I decided to watch several hours of Trump speeches for myself. I saw the man ramble and boast and threaten and even seem to gloat when protesters were ejected from the arenas in which he spoke. I was disgusted by these things, as I have been disgusted by Trump for 20 years. But I also noticed something surprising. In each of the speeches I watched, Trump spent a good part of his time talking about an entirely legitimate issue, one that could even be called leftwing. Yes, Donald Trump talked about trade. In fact, to judge by how much time he spent talking about it, trade may be his single biggest concern – not white supremacy. Not even his plan to build a wall along the Mexican border, the issue that first won him political fame. He did it again during the debate on 3 March: asked about his political excommunication by Mitt Romney, he chose to pivot and talk about … trade. It seems to obsess him: the destructive free-trade deals our leaders have made, the many companies that have moved their production facilities to other lands, the phone calls he will make to those companies’ CEOs in order to threaten them with steep tariffs unless they move back to the US. Trump embellished this vision with another favorite leftwing idea: under his leadership, the government would “start competitive bidding in the drug industry”. (“We don’t competitively bid!” he marveled – another true fact, a legendary boondoggle brought to you by the George W Bush administration.) Trump extended the critique to the military-industrial complex, describing how the government is forced to buy lousy but expensive airplanes thanks to the power of industry lobbyists. Or so we’re told. Last week, I decided to watch several hours of Trump speeches for myself. I saw the man ramble and boast and threaten and even seem to gloat when protesters were ejected from the arenas in which he spoke. I was disgusted by these things, as I have been disgusted by Trump for 20 years. But I also noticed something surprising. In each of the speeches I watched, Trump spent a good part of his time talking about an entirely legitimate issue, one that could even be called leftwing. Yes, Donald Trump talked about trade. In fact, to judge by how much time he spent talking about it, trade may be his single biggest concern – not white supremacy. Not even his plan to build a wall along the Mexican border, the issue that first won him political fame. He did it again during the debate on 3 March: asked about his political excommunication by Mitt Romney, he chose to pivot and talk about … trade. It seems to obsess him: the destructive free-trade deals our leaders have made, the many companies that have moved their production facilities to other lands, the phone calls he will make to those companies’ CEOs in order to threaten them with steep tariffs unless they move back to the US. Trump embellished this vision with another favorite leftwing idea: under his leadership, the government would “start competitive bidding in the drug industry”. (“We don’t competitively bid!” he marveled – another true fact, a legendary boondoggle brought to you by the George W Bush administration.) Trump extended the critique to the military-industrial complex, describing how the government is forced to buy lousy but expensive airplanes thanks to the power of industry lobbyists.
The most frightening thing about Donald Trump is that he is the best Republican on the issues, not his demagoguery.
In their Super Tuesday speeches, Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio tried to use an Israel hammer to bash Donald Trump. Cruz sneeringly lambasted him for saying he would remain “neutral” while Rubio trounced Trump for trying to stay “impartial”, as his audience booed accordingly. And Trump? Trump was racking up victories, amassing delegates and laughing all the way to the top of the Republican presidential field.
In this way, the New York billionaire is decimating the conventional wisdom, one of many, that in 2016, total and unconditional support for Israel is a prerequisite for any aspiring GOP candidate wishing to run for president; that such a pledge of allegiance to Israel, in general, and to Benjamin Netanyahu, in particular, is a threshold requirement for gaining the support of Evangelicals, who set the tone during primary season; and that the flow of sympathy for Israel from liberal Democrats to conservative Republicans is inevitable, perhaps even desirable, and in any case unstoppable.
But exactly a year after Netanyahu took this logic to its extreme and stood on the podium of Congress as Leader of the Republican opposition to President Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran, the conception is falling apart. The notion that the Republican Party is a monolithic bastion of support that will withstand the test of time is evaporating. The belief that any Republican president who will follow Obama will be better for Israel is eroding with each passing day. Faced with the Trump phenomenon, Netanyahu’s Fortress GOP strategy is collapsing like a house of cards.
………
Trump not only diverts the Republican leadership from uniform automatic support for Netanyahu, he is destroying the internal coalition that was the lynchpin of the party’s strong pro-Israel stance. Evangelical support for Trump has already sparked an internal rupture, which has some experts declaring the death of America’s Religious Right. Evangelical leaders and many of their supporters in the media are heartbroken that so many Believers are flocking after the thrice married, dirty-talking reality star. They are less perturbed by his deviation from the strict pro-Israel party line, however, and more by the sinful ways for which he has not asked forgiveness.
If Trump becomes their candidate, the GOP will lose its most hawkish, most neoconservative and most pro-Israel secular elements as well. They are repelled not only by his indecipherable positions on Israel but also by his harsh criticism of George Bush and the Iraq War, his undisguised adulation of dictators for Vladimir Putin to Bashar Assad, his all round belligerence and his neo-isolationist vision of making America great again within its hermetically sealed walls. “As president, he would use the authority of his office to act in ways that make America less safe, and which would diminish our standing in the world” according to public letter signed by 50 GOP national security stalwarts, many of them known for their pro-Israel positions. “We commit ourselves to working energetically to prevent the election of someone so utterly unfitted to the office.”
Sometimes, I worry about the future of Israel.
The two things that worry me the most is Netanyahu, who sees no further than the next election, and the Necons whose every action for at least the past two decades has served to diminish the safety and security of Israel, notwithstanding their declared support for the Jewish state.
Iraq, and Yemen, and Libya, and Syria, etc. have all been foreign policy disasters that have been created or worsened by Neocons, and all of these have been disasters for Israel.
But Washington is freaking out about Trump in a way they never did about Bush. Why? Because Bush was their moron, while Trump is his own moron. That’s really what it comes down to.
