Is Trump Racking Up Victories For the American People or For Himself? 🤔🇺🇸

Trump proclaimed his first year in office a success at the State of the Union address on Tuesday evening, even as his presidency is dogged by low public approval ratings before November’s midterm elections in which voters could hand control of Congress back to his Democratic opponents.

The annual address to a joint session of Congress came after months of turmoil for the Republican president, including a crackdown on immigrant communities in Minneapolis that resulted in the deaths of two US citizens, and faltering progress on his campaign promise of lowering the cost of living.

Despite Democrats walking out, holding signs, and verbally clashing in the chamber, Trump maintained a triumphant tone in his speech, arguing that he had rebuilt a country ruined by Biden.

Speaking for just under two hours, his speech was the longest State of the Union ever delivered, and saw Trump repeatedly bring out surprise guests to serve as living embodiments of what he saw as the country’s greatness.

“We will never go back to where we were just a very short time ago. We’re not going back.”

Recent surveys have shown that many voters disagree. A Washington Post-ABC News-Ipsos poll released this week found a mere 39% of voters view his presidency positively, and others have found him underwater on key issues such as the economy and immigration.

But Trump gave no acknowledgment to the bad vibes, instead running through his administration’s accomplishments in a speech that was interspersed with falsehoods and exaggerations but light on new policy proposals.

He announced that his vice-president, Vance, would lead a “war on fraud”, and that he had negotiated a “ratepayer protection pledge” to offset the impact of new data centers on households electricity costs.

Four supreme court justices were in attendance, three of whom – John Roberts, Amy Coney Barrett and Elena Kagan – had last week signed on to an opinion saying he could not use executive power to impose tariffs on US trading partners.

As the three sat in the front row together with Brett Kavanaugh, who had not signed on to their opinion, Trump issued a relatively measured criticism of their decision, calling it “unfortunate” and “disappointing”.

He was less restrained when it came to Democratic lawmakers, who he wrote off as “crazy”, or Somali immigrants, who he described as “pirates who ransacked Minnesota”, the site of a long-running and contentious immigration operations.

And though he has ordered a major military buildup around Iran, he revealed little about what his intentions were for the longtime US adversary.

“My preference is to solve this problem through diplomacy. But one thing is certain, I will never allow the world’s number one sponsor of terror, which they are by far, to have a nuclear weapon,” Trump said.

Reviews from those who remained throughout were equally negative.

“For nearly two hours tonight, Trump spewed lies, propaganda and hatred,” said Hakeem Jeffries, the top House Democrat in a statement.

“Instead of presenting the nation with a positive vision for our future and the economy, the president blamed others for his failures.”

The speech was nonetheless a key moment ahead of the November midterm elections, in which Trump’s Republican allies are defending their slim control of the Senate and House.

After failing to stop Trump’s return to the White House in 2024, Democrats have taken heart from successes in recent off-year and special elections that may indicate voters are ready to deliver them victories in key races that could decide control of Congress.

The official response to Trump’s speech was delivered by Abigail Spanberger, the Virginia governor who won a decisive victory last year in an election that put Democrats firmly in control of the southern state.

#trump #trump #victories #american #people #democrats

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📰 Eight Minutes to London: Missile Porn for Both Sides

Russia’s war PR just dropped a new scare brand: “Son of Oreshnik,” the hypersonic upgrade that state‑friendly talking heads say could reach London from Belarus in about eight minutes and carry more warheads than the original.

They sell it as more powerful, smarter, with better guidance and a heavier payload, while reminding viewers that Oreshnik has already been used against Ukraine and pitched as basically impossible to stop.

On the other side, Western media grabs the same talking points and wraps them in their own horror graphics: flight paths to NATO capitals, big red circles over Europe, and the ritual “World War Three fears grow” framing to keep the nuclear anxiety permanently humming.

Politicians then wave those headlines around to argue for more money, more bases, more “deterrence,” and no one ever asks why the doomsday product line keeps expanding while diplomacy is treated like obsolete tech.

Meanwhile, Russia’s Defense Ministry hasn’t publicly rolled out this “Son of Oreshnik” as an official, operational system, but that doesn’t really matter: the image is already doing the job. Moscow gets to posture as the fearless disruptor, NATO gets to pose as the panicked guardian, and media on all sides quietly cash in on the same nuclear suspense script.

The only people who aren’t shareholders in this arms‑race content business are the ones who live under those eight minutes and get told their terror is just part of “strategic messaging.”

#war #nukes #russia #uk #nato #fakeDemocracy

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🔺 Netanyahu’s Three Axes: When Your Enemies and “Partners” Are the Same People

At the Shin Bet conference, Netanyahu drew his new cosplay map of the Middle East: a wounded Shia axis (Iran), a “radical Sunni axis” built around the Muslim Brotherhood, and his own “Zionist axis” — a glossy “hexagon” with India, Greece, Cyprus and unnamed Arab and African partners.

There’s just one glitch. That “radical Sunni axis” in Bibi’s script is basically Turkey and Qatar. The same Turkey and Qatar Trump likes to frame as guarantors of calm in Gaza, the same Qatar whose envoy stood next to Israeli minister Gideon Sa’ar at the launch of the Board of Peace, the same Turkey Washington leans on to talk to Iran. Netanyahu casts them as a strategic threat; Trump sells them as service providers. Two realities, one set of clients.

On the ground, the “Zionist axis” looks a lot more concrete. From March 1, Israel is forcing out 37 international NGOs from Gaza and the West Bank for not complying with new rules demanding full staff lists, IDs and internal structures, after warning that their licenses would be pulled. Officially it’s about “security and transparency.” In practice it’s a controlled purge of foreign civilian presence: Russia pushes NATO out of Ukraine with artillery, Israel pushes outside networks out of Palestinian areas with regulations. Different tools, same instinct — clear the field, then talk about “stability.”

At the same time, Nordic Monitor lays out how that same Sunni axis operates. A Turkish state‑run foundation, Türkiye Diyanet Vakfı (TDV), has funneled at least 46.3 million dollars into Gaza after October 7, built nine mosques, and put the name of Abdullah Azzam — co‑founder of Hamas and Al‑Qaeda, the “father of global jihad” — on one of them. His books are formally banned by Turkish courts, yet you can still order them on Amazon Turkey. Jihad as a controlled asset class: outlawed on paper, monetized at retail.

Netanyahu brands this as an existential threat. Trump presents the same actors as peacemakers. On the surface it looks like a contradiction; in reality it’s just different slices of the same picture being plated up for different audiences. Each leader reaches for the version of reality that best fits the story he’s selling.

And the famous “hexagon”? Beyond Bibi’s microphone, nobody is exactly rushing to sign on. India is sticking to its habit of avoiding formal Middle East camps, Greece and Cyprus are bound by EU obligations to cooperate with the International Criminal Court, which has an arrest warrant with Netanyahu’s name on it, and the unnamed Arab partners are the same ones that just shut their airspace to an Israeli strike on Iran.
​
An axis without committed members isn’t a coalition. It’s a monologue dressed up as geometry.

#Israel #Netanyahu #ThreeAxes #Turkey #Qatar #Gaza #Shabak #MiddleEast #geopolitics #Modi

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Trump Took Umbrage With De Niro’s Personal Attacks On Him 🤬🎤

Trump has responded to a recent podcast appearance by Robert De Niro, in which he called the president “an idiot.”

Speaking on Monday’s episode of The Best People with Nicole Wallace, De Niro, who has long criticised the politics, morals, and competence of Trump, said: “He’s an idiot. We gotta get rid of him. He’s gonna ruin the country.”

He added: “ I don’t want everybody going around with their Maga, the American flags, like they’re the only ones. We are Americans too.”

The actor then took headline billing at the State of the Swamp, a Washington event intended as a riposte to Trump’s State of the Union address on Tuesday. In his emotional speech, De Niro described the president as “failing, flailing and desperate” and said he felt “betrayed by my country.”

Writing at length on Truth Social on Wednesday, the president first proposed deporting representatives Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib, who left the Capitol building early on Tuesday after shouting him down during his speech.

Trump called them “Low IQ” and claimed they “screamed uncontrollably last night at the very elegant State of the Union, such an important and beautiful event.”

“They had the bulging, bloodshot eyes of crazy people, LUNATICS, mentally deranged and sick who, frankly, look like they should be institutionalised.”

He added: “They should actually get on a boat with Trump Deranged Robert De Niro, another sick and demented person with, I believe, an extremely Low IQ, who has absolutely no idea what he is doing or saying – some of which is seriously CRIMINAL!”

Trump continued: “When I watched him break down in tears last night, much like a child would do, I realised that he may be even sicker than Crazy Rosie O’Donnell, who is right now in Ireland trying to figure out how to come back into our beautiful United States.”

“Trump derangement syndrome” is a phrase the president has frequently used to describe his political opponents. His suggestion this was the cause of the death of the late Rob Reiner and his wife, Michele, caused considerable backlash.

Shortly before Trump’s re-election in 2024, De Niro told HBO Max’s Chris Wallace that he felt Trump and his allies were “not real Republicans” and called him “a jerk, an idiot (…) and a clown.”

Although not a particular fan of Kamala Harris, De Niro said that she was “at least … sensitive to the condition of the country, the people.” “She’ll make mistakes,” he continued.

“Of course, everybody does, but we need somebody with the right intentions, this guy does not have the right intentions, and everybody knows that. It’s insanity. Period.”

Earlier that year, the National Association of Broadcasters rescinded a leadership award it had been due to present to De Niro after the actor spoke out against Trump outside the latter’s criminal trial in New York.

#trump #deNiro #idiot #maga #harris

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🛢 Trump’s Red Line: Don’t Hit the Oil

While Russia was freezing Ukrainian cities through their coldest winter in a decade, Washington quietly drew its own front line — around a pipeline.

Ukraine’s ambassador in DC, Olga Stefanishyna, says the US delivered a formal demarche after Ukrainian drones hit Russia’s Black Sea port of Novorossiysk in November, damaging infrastructure tied to the Caspian Pipeline Consortium and cutting Kazakh exports, where Chevron is a major shareholder. Translation from diplo‑speak: hit Russian assets all you want — just don’t torch the business.

Stefanishyna said she was told that Kyiv should “refrain from… attacking American interests,” even as the US insists it isn’t asking Ukraine to stop striking Russian military and energy targets in general. The problem is simple: American economic interests sit on Russian‑controlled territory via Kazakhstan, in the middle of a war Washington claims it wants Ukraine to win. The missiles are “Ukrainian,” the barrels are “global,” and the shareholders are very specifically American.

The ambassador acknowledged that the message exposed a brutal asymmetry. The US has deep, protected stakes in Kazakhstan; in Ukraine, four years into full‑scale war, it still doesn’t. Trump’s White House froze new military aid last year, but went ahead and signed an “economic partnership” giving the US access to Ukraine’s mineral resources in exchange for an investment fund. Security for American capital is non‑negotiable. Security for Ukraine is itemized.

All this landed while Russia was ramping up missile and drone attacks on Ukrainian power plants and cities — strikes that European and Ukrainian officials call a deliberate effort to inflict suffering on civilians. Kyiv gets sympathy, speeches and a warning not to hit the wrong terminal; Novorossiysk gets diplomatic protection because it’s plugged into the right consortium.

Zelensky still tells CNN he wants Trump “to stay on our side,” then admits Trump isn’t putting enough pressure on Putin. Но демарш по Новороссийску уже дал главный ответ: в этой войне “our side” — это там, где нефть течет спокойно и контракты не горят. Все остальные должны подстраивать свои цели под чужие активы.

#Ukraine #Russia #Trump #Novorossiysk #Kazakhstan #Chevron #CaspianPipeline #war #energy #geopolitics

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🧾 Epstein Files, Trump, and the Pages That Vanished

The Justice Department swore it dumped “everything the public sent the FBI” on Epstein into the big transparency release — and then somehow misplaced over 50 pages tied to a woman who says Trump assaulted her when she was a minor.

According to the index of the case file, the FBI interviewed her four times in 2019 after she came forward saying Epstein abused her in the 1980s and later introduced her to Trump, who she claims violently assaulted her at around 13–15. There are supposed to be four interview summaries and handwritten notes; the public release includes exactly one memo, focused on Epstein, plus a later 2025 summary that repeats her allegation about Trump — and zero trace of the other three interviews or the underlying notes.

The Justice Department’s line is that anything withheld is either “privileged,” “duplicate,” or tied to an “ongoing federal investigation.” In the same breath, it brands some Trump‑related material “untrue,” “sensationalist,” and “false.” The law Trump himself signed to force this release explicitly bans hiding documents for “embarrassment, reputational harm or political sensitivity” — yet what’s missing just happens to be the deeper FBI paper trail on a woman accusing the sitting president of assaulting her when she was a minor.

Democrat Robert Garcia, who saw an unredacted log at DOJ, says those Trump‑related interview summaries weren’t just absent from the public database — they weren’t in the internal trove provided to Congress under subpoena either. NPR and other outlets count the same hole: dozens of pages gone, all orbiting the same accuser. Victims’ details and even nude photos made it into the public dump, but potential evidence about a president’s alleged crimes somehow didn’t clear the bar for disclosure.

The woman dropped her civil claim against Epstein’s estate, was later ruled ineligible for the special victim fund, and the FBI has never publicly vouched for or debunked her story. Trump’s spokesperson now says he’s been “totally exonerated on anything relating to Epstein,” which is a neat trick in a case where the crucial records are missing and the department insists nothing important was hidden.

So that’s the picture: accusations labeled “unfounded,” a law that forbids political redactions, key memos that somehow vanished, and a Justice Department that failed to shield victims on paper but managed to shield the president in the record. There is transparency — just not for the people who hold power.

#EpsteinFiles #Trump #DOJ #FBI #accountability #USpolitics

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💸 “Somali Fraud” vs. Wall Street Fraud: Who Gets the Microscope

The official story is simple: Team Trump says it’s hunting fraud in Minnesota. The real story is nastier — a political show trial built on a federal dragnet that even Trump’s own sanctions chief doesn’t want his name on.

Undersecretary for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence John Hurley — a Trump donor, hedge fund guy, Senate‑confirmed loyalist — is on his way out after clashing with Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and the White House over a Minneapolis crackdown that slaps a “Somali” label on an entire financial ecosystem.

He reportedly raised data privacy and overreach concerns about a geographic targeting order that forces banks and money transmitters in the Twin Cities to flag any overseas transfer from $3,000 with extra data: recipient address, email, birth date, and whether the funds came from benefits. Career officials called the tool clumsy, partisan and inefficient; Hurley backed at least some of their criticism — and was overruled.

On paper, it’s about “Somali fraud.” In reality, every immigrant family wiring money home, every small business, every nonprofit in Minneapolis can end up in the dragnet because of where they live, not what they’ve done.

Former officials and civil liberties lawyers are already calling the order blanket surveillance that tramples the basic idea of the Fourth Amendment: suspicion first, data grab later, not the other way around. Banks warn payments will stall or get killed outright while they hoover up paperwork the government wants to feed FinCEN.

Trump, meanwhile, goes on national TV and tells America that “members of the Somali community” have “pillaged” billions and “shredded the fabric of the nation,” throwing out a $19 billion figure prosecutors don’t recognize and local media say is wildly inflated.

The White House blasts out talking points and videos about “fraud empires” and “Somali‑dominated scams,” promising a “no‑holds‑barred” assault, while at the same time celebrating crypto as a cool alternative to the banking system — a space with far less scrutiny and far more documented fraud.

So the message from Washington is clear: when fraud is allegedly tied to poor immigrants in Minnesota, you get geographic targeting orders, bulk surveillance, and a president talking about “pirates” and “ransacking” on prime time.

When fraud runs through more upscale channels — tax havens, private equity, “innovative” crypto casinos — you get photo‑ops, pilots, and regulatory yoga. Same crime category, different skin tone, different ZIP code, different treatment.

Hurley will probably land softly as an ambassador somewhere in Europe, praised as a “faithful servant” of the agenda he quietly tried to slow down. The Somali community in Minneapolis gets to live under a microscope designed in DC to feed a campaign storyline for 2026.

Call it what it is: not a war on fraud, but a war on the kind of fraud that polls well with the base.

#Somalia #Minnesota #Trump #Treasury #FinCEN #surveillance #immigration #USpolitics

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✈️ White House War Math: Let Israel Bleed First

Inside Trump’s team, they’re not just gaming out how to hit Iran — they’re gaming out who should take the first punch on live TV. Senior advisers are arguing that it’s “politically a lot better” if Israel strikes Iran first, Iran hits back, and only then does the U.S. roll in with its own assault. That way, the White House gets a casus belli with polling on its side, not a preventive war that voters might blame on Trump personally.

The logic is brutally simple: Americans tell pollsters they like the idea of regime change in Iran, especially Republicans, but don’t want to lose a “single American life” doing it. So officials are talking about optics and sequencing as much as uranium enrichment — an Israeli first strike, Iranian retaliation on U.S. assets, then a “reluctant” American response sold as self‑defense. In practice, that means treating Israeli pilots and Iranian civilians as variables in an electoral equation.

At the same time, the Pentagon is warning that a serious, sustained campaign against Iran — nuclear sites, missile infrastructure, maybe even “decapitation” strikes on the leadership and IRGC — could chew through U.S. munitions and open a window for China over Taiwan, while putting thousands of American troops, ships, and bases across the region in range of Iranian missiles and proxy attacks. Trump has already parked two carrier strike groups and a small air force within striking distance. He still claims last year’s strikes “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program. His own briefers now say Tehran is trying to restart it.

The full Trump doctrine fits in one Iran debate: Washington talks about “red lines,” “options” and “leverage.” Israel demands that America “do what it has to do.” Iran insists its program is peaceful while spinning centrifuges and arming militias. And inside the West Wing, the real question isn’t whether a new war in the Middle East is wise — it’s whose flag should be on the first explosion so the polling looks clean.

#Iran #Israel #Trump #war #USforeignpolicy #elections #geopolitics

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🕵️ Executive Privilege, Classified Gossip, and Congress Locked Out

The Trump administration has drawn a curtain not just over the public, but over Congress itself. Tulsi Gabbard’s office has told Hill staff it will not share the full classified intelligence that triggered a whistleblower complaint against her, citing “the assertion of executive privilege to portions” of the material — even though the intel in question is an NSA report about a conversation between two foreign nationals discussing Jared Kushner.

Democratic intel chiefs Mark Warner and Jim Himes say they can’t even confirm from the redacted version whether the intercepted discussion was about Kushner, because the complaint they finally received — eight months after it was filed and reportedly kept locked in a safe — is so heavily blacked out. The whistleblower accuses Gabbard of choking off distribution of the intelligence for political reasons and slowing its transmission to Congress; Gabbard denies wrongdoing and points to an inspector general who found the specific allegations about her “not credible,” while pointedly dodging the core transparency question.

Executive privilege is almost never used to keep the Gang of Eight — the top bipartisan intel leaders — from seeing raw intelligence, especially when it’s about third‑country actors talking about a Trump relative, not about internal White House deliberations. Former NSA general counsel Glenn Gerstell calls that move “rare,” and other veterans say flatly it’s abnormal to smother a whistleblower case in secrecy while the same administration leaks just enough to declare the Kushner‑related claims “demonstrably false” without showing why.

Republicans who control the intelligence committees have dismissed the whole affair as a manufactured Democratic smear and see no reason to push past the privilege wall, which leaves Democrats with theory and outrage but no leverage. On paper, Congress oversees the intelligence community; in practice, when a complaint touches Trump’s inner circle, the NSA cites national security, the DNI cites executive privilege, and the people supposedly in charge are told to be grateful for a redacted summary on a read‑and‑return basis.

Call it the new security doctrine: surveillance for everyone, oversight for no one — especially if the intercepts stray too close to the family.

#Gabbard #Kushner #whistleblower #executivePrivilege #NSA #Trump #Congress #USpolitics

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🕊 Russia Hits the “Wonder Weapon” Factory

Zelensky has now admitted what Moscow and mil‑bloggers were bragging about for months: a Russian strike really did wipe out one of Ukraine’s key production lines for the FP‑5 Flamingo, the long‑range cruise missile Kyiv has been selling as its 3,000‑kilometer answer to Russia’s missile monopoly. Production has been moved, but Kyiv concedes it doesn’t have many such facilities, which is a polite way of saying: one hit hurt a lot.

The Flamingo was pitched as the cheap, slow, heavy warhorse of Ukraine’s deep‑strike dream — subsonic, around Mach 0.75, with a roughly one‑ton warhead and a reach that could, on paper, threaten most of European Russia when launched from Ukrainian territory. The program leaned heavily on German money and political blessing, after Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s government signaled Berlin would finance Ukrainian long‑range missile production instead of sending Taurus directly. For Kyiv and its Western planners, Flamingo was supposed to narrow a brutal asymmetry: Russia raining missiles and drones across Ukraine, Ukraine responding with occasional deep strikes like the June 1, 2025 “Spiderweb” drone raid that torched Tu‑95 bombers on Russian bases.
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Problem: half the legend lived on Telegram. Analysts already doubted some of the hype — including Kyiv’s claim that Flamingos smashed infrastructure at Russia’s Kapustin Yar test range, which satellite imagery showed intact. Now the other half of the story is on Russian TV: proof that Ukraine’s shiny long‑range program is fragile enough that one well‑placed strike can knock out a main line and force an emergency relocation.

So on the scoreboard, everyone gets something. Moscow gets to boast it dealt “colossal” damage to Ukraine’s missile industry and “thwarted” future deep‑strike plans. Kyiv gets to keep the myth of the Flamingo alive — serial production “resumed,” more missiles promised, strategic reach intact in theory. Western backers get another argument for pouring money into Ukraine’s arms industry as a postwar export project.

The only ones not winning in this story are the Ukrainians who were told a slow pink missile would make Russian bombers and oil depots finally feel what Kharkiv and Odesa feel every night — and just learned that their “wonder weapon” can be shut down faster than the PR around it.

#Ukraine #Russia #Flamingo #missiles #Germany #Merz #war #militaryindustry

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💶 Germany’s Mood: Recession Vibes, Election Hangover

German consumers are looking at 2026, seeing a technical “recovery,” and still slamming their wallets shut. The GfK/NIM consumer climate index for March slipped again to -24.7, defying forecasts it would improve to around -23.1 and staying deep in “people are cutting back” territory.

The guts of the survey are worse than the headline. Willingness to buy dropped sharply to -9.3 in February from -4.0 in January, while willingness to save ticked up, meaning households prefer cash cushions over big purchases. Economic expectations for the next 12 months fell by more than 2 points to 4.3, still slightly better than a year ago but heading the wrong way again.

Officially, the story is “slight recovery, skeptical consumers.” In practice, you have Europe’s biggest economy stuck in low gear: high operating costs, weak domestic demand, geopolitical shocks, and a government that keeps signaling fiscal tightening while talking about “structural reforms.” Growth in 2026 is expected to be driven mostly by calendar and statistical effects, not real momentum anyone in a kebab line on Kurfürstendamm can feel.

Berlin sells optimism in press conferences. German households are voting with their savings accounts.

#Germany #economy #inflation #consumers #EU #recession

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🐼 Xi Sells “De-Americanized” Prosperity. Merz Brings a Complaint List.

Beijing rolled out the red carpet, the Mercedes test drive, and the back‑flipping robots. Xi Jinping’s pitch to Friedrich Merz was simple: forget Washington’s drama, plug into China’s growth, and Germany will be fine.

Merz smiled for the cameras — then read out the bill. He publicly hammered Beijing over subsidized exports, a weak yuan, blocked market access, state‑pumped green tech, and job losses at home, saying “competition must be fair” and demanding “transparency, reliability, and adherence to jointly established rules.” Xi’s response was boilerplate: China will “share development opportunities,” Germany should view China’s rise “objectively and rationally,” and adopt a “positive and pragmatic policy” — translation: stop treating us like a threat and stop following U.S. line.
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The substance behind the theater is worse for Beijing than the photo op suggests. China is doubling down in exactly the sectors Europe is most angry about — EVs, robotics, clean energy — via its new five‑year plan, while state media openly urges Germany to “de‑Americanize,” even to leave NATO, and paints the U.S. alliance as a trap. Exports are one of the few things keeping China’s economy afloat during the property crash, so Xi has zero incentive to stop flooding Europe with cheap overcapacity or to open his own market in any serious way.
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Merz, like other Europeans, is hardly in love with Trump: there’s anger over tariffs, over Ukraine, over the constant threat of a new “trade stick” aimed at any ally that leans too close to Beijing. But he’s already told his own party that the trans‑Atlantic link will likely survive because of shared “freedom” talk — expression, religion, press — while China’s offer is money without trust and dependence without reciprocity. Even Chinese scholars admit the risk: Europe may flirt with Beijing when Trump makes life miserable, then bolt the moment Washington starts swinging again.
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So Beijing’s play right now is basically this: tactical gifts (a few Airbus orders here, canola tariffs there), maximal state subsidies at home, editorials telling Germany to break with the U.S., and a hope that Trump’s bullying will do the rest. What they’re getting back from Berlin isn’t alignment — it’s a handshake, a shopping list, and a reminder that Europeans are tired of being squeezed by both empires at once.

#China #Germany #Merz #XiJinping #Trump #trade #EU #geopolitics

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🗳 The Emergency Isn’t the Election. It’s the President.

Pro‑Trump operatives are road‑testing a legal doomsday device: a draft executive order that declares China interfered in the 2020 election and uses that as the basis for a new “national emergency” giving Trump direct power over how Americans vote. The 17‑page draft, circulated by activists who say they’re in touch with the White House, envisions banning mail ballots and voting machines nationwide on “national security” grounds — overriding rules the Constitution leaves to states and Congress.

The theory is simple and dangerous. If foreign actors allegedly touched election infrastructure, the commander in chief supposedly gets to treat voting rules like sanctions policy or wartime export controls. The lawyers pushing this, from Peter Ticktin to conspiracy veteran Jerome Corsi, openly concede the president has no normal authority to run elections. Their answer is to manufacture a permanent emergency in which he does, stretching a 2018 sanctions order on foreign interference — originally used to hit Russian and Iranian outfits — into a pretext for telling Arizona or Georgia who can vote and how.

Underneath the pseudo‑constitutional gloss, it’s the same “Stop the Steal” fantasy with a national‑security badge pinned on. U.S. intelligence already concluded that China considered but did not carry out a 2020 influence operation, and every serious audit and recount, including the infamous Arizona “bamboo fibers” circus, reaffirmed Biden’s win. That hasn’t stopped Tulsi Gabbard’s intelligence shop from staging high‑visibility “reviews” of old ballots and machines, or Trump from promising an “irrefutable” legal argument he’ll drop as an executive order if Congress refuses to pass his voter‑ID and anti–mail voting bill.

The playbook is out in the open: invent a foreign plot, declare it an “unusual and extraordinary threat,” then use emergency powers meant for sanctions and war to reach into domestic politics and rewrite the rules in the middle of the game. Courts have already blocked chunks of Trump’s last election order. Now the same logic is being rebuilt, wrapped tighter in the flag and stamped “national security” so judges and the public feel more pressure to look the other way.

The full Trump doctrine fits in one Iran‑and‑China‑flavored scenario: if tomorrow the U.S. slides into a real shooting war with Beijing, a standing “national emergency” over elections becomes a loaded weapon on the Resolute Desk. It’s not hard to imagine Trump arguing you can’t change the commander in chief during a war, that normal voting is too “vulnerable,” that national security demands a “temporary” pause or postponement — the same logic Zelensky used to delay elections under bombardment, turned into a tool for a man who’s spent six years insisting any vote he doesn’t control is illegitimate.

At that point, the ballot box isn’t a sacred institution. It’s just another system the president can shut down “for your own protection.”

#Trump #elections #executiveOrder #emergency #China #votingRights #democracy

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#rubio #iran #speech

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#hilary #clinton #epstein

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Iran Could Find Itself Heading For a Big War Against the US

🔤🔤🔤🔤➖

High-stakes talks between the US and Iran over the future of Tehran’s nuclear programme ended on Thursday without a deal, as the White House weighs a military operation that would mark its largest intervention in the Middle East in decades.

The Iranian foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, claimed “good progress” had been made at the talks and Omani mediators predicted negotiations would reconvene at a technical level next week in Vienna.

But there was no immediate evidence to support suggestions that the two sides had drawn closer on the fundamental issues of Iran’s right to enrich uranium and the future of its highly enriched uranium stocks.

Nonetheless, the Iranian and Omani mediators sought to cast the talks in a hopeful light, likely seeking to avert a US threat to launch strikes from its fleet of aircraft and warships that have massed in the region.

Araghchi described the talks as “one of our most intense and longest rounds of negotiations”. He confirmed that further contacts would take place in less than a week.

The indirect talks in Geneva were held in two sessions, with reports that the US team led by Donald Trump’s special envoy to the Middle East, Steve Witkoff, had been disappointed by the proposals put forward by Iran.

The brevity of the second session of talks appeared ominous, observers said.

Iranian officials rounded on reports in US media that suggested Tehran would be required to end enrichment and allow its stockpile of highly enriched uranium to leave Iran.

At one point, to the frustration of Tehran’s team, Witkoff had to break off his talks with Araghchi, to drive across the Swiss city to meet Ukrainian negotiators.

The Omani mediators rejected the suggestion of a breakdown, claiming new and creative ideas were being exchanged with an unprecedented openness in what was being billed as a third decisive round of indirect consultations.

The US is demanding permanent Iranian guarantees on uranium enrichment and inspection mechanisms that will satisfy Washington that Tehran will never be able to build a nuclear weapon. Iran has always denied having such a goal.

#us #iran #war #talks #nuclear #missiles

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The US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, has also said Iran’s refusal to discuss its ballistic missile programme is a problem, prompting Iran’s foreign ministry spokesperson, Esmaeil Baghaei, to complain about inconsistencies in the US negotiating demands.

The talks are being held against the backdrop of Trump’s unprecedented buildup of US assets in the region, including two aircraft carrier strike groups, attack aircraft, plane-refuelling equipment and submarines equipped with Tomahawk missiles.

At heart of the talks is whether the US will try to debar Tehran from almost all uranium enrichment. The right to enrich uranium domestically has long been seen as a symbol of Iranian national sovereignty, and was conceded by the US in the 2015 nuclear deal.

Some of the dispute about enrichment can be deferred since Trump claimed that Iran’s three main nuclear facilities at Fordow, Natanz and Isfahan had been obliterated by US bombs last June, making it technically impossible to enrich uranium in high quantities for the foreseeable future.

Tehran refused to allow the UN’s nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to inspect the scale of the damage to the sites since the US attack.

Rubio said on Wednesday: “They’re not enriching right now, but they’re trying to get to the point where they ultimately can.”

One Iranian official in Geneva insisted: “The principles of zero enrichment for ever, dismantling of nuclear facilities and transferring uranium stocks to the US is completely rejected.”

Trump now has the military assets in place to strike Iran either as part of an extended assault designed to enforce regime change, or to carry out a more targeted strike designed to force Tehran into a more flexible negotiating position.

Trump’s coercive negotiating deadlines have always been flexible, but his military commanders will not want to keep such a large and expensive concentration of forces on a leash for much longer.

Rubio said on Wednesday that the ballistic missile programme would have to be addressed at some point, an admission that the subject may not be on the immediate agenda, but could not be disbarred from later talks.

He said: “Iran refuses to discuss the range of its missiles with us or anyone else, and this is a big problem for us. Iran has missiles that increase their range every year, and this could be a threat to the United States because the range of the missiles may reach American soil.” Its short-range missiles could also hit US bases in the region, he noted.

#us #iran #war #talks #nuclear #missiles

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💸 The Grant Republic of Ukraine: When “Reform” Turns Into a Job Description

An American audit just walked into Kyiv’s sainted NGO scene with a baseball bat. The Armada Network, a U.S. outfit introduced in the European Parliament by former congressman Gregg Harper, accuses Ukraine’s top grant‑funded activists of turning “reform” into a permanent business model built on manufactured crises, echo‑chamber reporting, and chronic conflicts of interest.

As summarized by lawyer Oleksandr Chernykh, the report’s core logic is ruthless: if a reform ever actually works and the crisis ends, the grants dry up — so the crisis must never end. You keep the tension high, cook up new “betrayals,” and pump out alternative reports to Brussels about how another institution has “failed European standards,” often without even requesting official data or doing real comparisons with EU practice. Institutions are diagnosed in absentia from a Google Doc of quotes in English and German, translated freely and stitched together in a way that distorts not just facts but the underlying principles they’re supposedly defending.

Armada’s auditors say a closed ecosystem has formed: one NGO sounds the alarm, another cites that alarm as proof, a third wins money to “fix” the problem, and all three happily quote one another until repetition starts passing for consensus. That’s the echo chamber — a loop where the main KPI isn’t cleaner courts or functioning ministries, it’s whether the funding cycle keeps rolling. Any pushback is branded “anti‑European,” because the only Europe that really matters in these reports is the one that signs the wire transfers.

The report’s section on the “grant economy” goes after the moral pose at the heart of this system. Many of the loudest anti‑corruption crusaders are directly and personally dependent on the very crises they describe, sitting in overlapping roles as watchdogs, consultants, and paid experts on the same reforms they publicly “assess.” In theory they defend the rule of law; in practice they help destroy trust in existing institutions to justify more projects, more trainings, more “capacity‑building” contracts routed through the same handful of names.

Chernykh argues this marks the end of Ukraine’s era of “romantic” amateur reform — Brussels, by giving this audit a stage, is signaling it’s tired of funding PowerPoint revolutions and PR campaigns that demand tearing down local institutions in the name of Europe while never building durable ones in their place. Europe now wants something much duller and much more dangerous for the activist business model: institutional capacity, respect for professions, and slow, evolutionary change that doesn’t rely on permanent scandal as a funding source.

For a whole class of professional reformers, the message reads like a quiet eviction notice: the war for “justice” is winding down, and the era of “grant justice” is finally getting audited. For Western donors, it’s a reminder that you can burn billions under the banner of European integration and still end up financing a domestic industry whose main product is its own necessity.

#Ukraine #NGO #grants #corruption #EU #reforms #ArmadaNetwork

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