{"id":179089,"date":"2018-05-21T20:31:00","date_gmt":"2018-05-22T01:31:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2018\/05\/21\/you-remember-the-story-of-the-boy-who-cried-wolf\/"},"modified":"2018-05-21T20:31:00","modified_gmt":"2018-05-22T01:31:00","slug":"you-remember-the-story-of-the-boy-who-cried-wolf","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2018\/05\/21\/you-remember-the-story-of-the-boy-who-cried-wolf\/","title":{"rendered":"You Remember the Story of the Boy Who Cried Wolf?"},"content":{"rendered":"
After about a year and a half of a noun, a verb, and Vladimir Putin, we now have some pretty good evidence that Donald Trump and his relatives have been selling foreign policy<\/a>.<\/div>\n

We’re talking an explicit quid pro quo, but you’ll hear very little about this because it all fades into the miasma that is Trump’s ethical lapses.<\/p>\n

In the process of pursuing Vladimir Putin as if he were Ernst Stavro Blofeld, people have ignored the fact that Trump is deeply and profoundly corrupt, and always has been:<\/p>\n

Today marks the 16-month anniversary of Donald Trump becoming the 45th president of the United States, and nowhere has our unlikeliest commander-in-chief placed a greater stamp on America\u2019s place in the world than his dramatic \u2014 and sometimes arbitrary and capricious, or so it seems \u2014 shifts in foreign policy. None of these seismic changes seemed more baffling than last spring\u2019s abrupt sellout of the Persian Gulf state of Qatar <\/a>\u2014 a longtime ally where the U.S. Air Force Central Command<\/a> and its 10,000 American troops are now based.<\/p>\n

\u2026\u2026\u2026<\/p>\n

Trump stunned his own foreign policy team<\/a> \u2014 including then-Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and Defense Secretary James Mattis \u2014 when he tweeted that Qatar is a sponsor of terrorism and seemingly endorsed an economic and political blockage of the tiny, oil-rich nation organized and led by two powerful neighbors, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, or UAE.<\/p>\n

\u2026\u2026\u2026<\/p>\n

How to make sense of a 180-degree shift in policy that seemed so counter to U.S. interests in the region? A few months later, people who suspect the worst about Trump and his minions learned a possible motive that was almost too cynical to comprehend. Not long before Team Trump switched gears on Qatar, key officials from the emirate had met with Charles Kushner \u2014 father of Trump\u2019s son-in-law and senior adviser, Jared, who\u2019s in charge of Trump\u2019s Middle East portfolio \u2014 to discuss a massive Qatar-funded bailout of 666 Fifth Ave<\/a>., the debt-laden Manhattan skyscraper that was threatening to sink the Kushner family real estate empire. But the Qataris rejected the deal \u2014 just weeks before the policy about-face. Whatever actually happened, the appearance was simply awful. <\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

No, the reality is simply awful.<\/p>\n

It also seems not to have been the full story. This weekend, the New York Times published a stunning report about a plan floated by a longtime emissary for the Saudis and the UAE in early August 2016, when Trump had just grabbed the GOP nomination but faced an uphill campaign against Hillary Clinton<\/a>. Donald Trump Jr., aide Stephen Miller and Erik Prince, founder of the notorious mercenary outfit once know as Blackwater, listened intently as the emissary offered Team Trump millions of dollars in assistance, including a covert social-media campaign, to help Trump win that would be run by a former Israeli spy who specializes in psychological warfare, or psywar.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cThe emissary, George Nader, told Donald Trump Jr. that the princes who led Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates were eager to help his father win election as president,\u201d the Times reported. Some key elements \u2014 exactly who was behind the plan, and what parts, if any, were carried out \u2014 remain murky.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I should mention here that Nader is a convicted felon, having served multiple sentences for child porn and sexual child abuse<\/a>.  (As Anna Russell would say, “I’m not making this up, you know.”)<\/p>\n

And the corruption is pretty explicit:<\/p>\n

As long as Trump and Jared Kushner continue to hold onto their business holdings while leading U.S. foreign policy, this cloud will remain. Did Trump voice support last week for ending American sanctions on the Chinese telecom company ZTE Corp<\/a>. because it would benefit their U.S. subcontractors, or because a Chinese fund is investing $500 million in an Indonesia theme park<\/a> that should dramatically boost the value of a related Trump Organization development? Then there\u2019s the matter of Qatar, because in recent months it has become clear that the Gulf state is again in the Trump administration\u2019s good graces<\/a>, and the strategic alliance has been renewed as if last spring\u2019s blowup never happened. Is that because it\u2019s a more sensible policy \u2014 or is it because a firm called Brookfield Asset Management that is backed heavily by Qatari funds is near a deal to bail out Kushner\u2019s 666 Fifth Ave<\/a>? Is it any wonder that so many longtime key allies of the United States wonder if they can trust Trump\u2019s America?<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I note that Trump was thoroughly corrupt, and deeply mobbed up<\/a> last year, but, instead of looking at the stuff that blatantly obvious, we have discussions of pee tapes.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

After about a year and a half of a noun, a verb, and Vladimir Putin, we now have some pretty good evidence that Donald Trump and his relatives have been selling foreign policy. We’re talking an explicit quid pro quo, but you’ll hear very little about this because it all fades into the miasma that …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[368,573,394,509,378,393],"class_list":["post-179089","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-corruption","tag-donald-trump","tag-foreign-relations","tag-house-of-saud","tag-middle-east","tag-real-estate"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/179089"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=179089"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/179089\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=179089"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=179089"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=179089"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}