PUTIN 4

ESTB 11 24

MERRI OK

SEE RUSSIA TRUMP 3

see BANNON

SEE FasCism CRUELTY, VIOLENCE. NATIONALISM, MILITARISM, MALE

SEE HUMAN RIGHTS VIOLATIONS WAR CRIMES RUBIO HID ICC?

BAK

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DISRUPTER TRANSACTION MAFIA DON TOSS POST-WAR ORDER,

HCR SAYS BIG DOG GRAB OK: CHINA TAIWAN, PUTIN UKRAINE ~ UN

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30K KIA WOUNDED MISSING / MO UKRAINE WAR

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AN 11 26

A Ukrainian researcher has said Melania Trump may have walked straight into the Kremlin’s trap.

Petro Andrushchenko, head of the Center for the Study of the Occupation, was livid following a Russian drone strike at a train station in Dnipro, about 160 miles from Oleshky, on October 29. The attack killed 14 civilians and injured at least 14 more as they were waiting on the platform

“While screaming to the world how much he wants Melania Trump to mediate saving 1,500 people in Oleshky, Putin continues to kill civilians 10 minutes away from my house, continues to bomb Kyiv and Zaporizhzhia,” he told the Daily Beast.

“Now Putin will be a ‘humanitarian’ for moving people from Oleshky to Russia," he said. "The Oleshky operation is truly the greatest victory of Russian propaganda.”

The first lady hosted an event at the White House on Thursday with delegations from both Russia and Ukraine in attendance, where both sides praised her efforts to achieve peace.

She said she had “acted immediately” to secure a ceasefire in Oleshky and described herself as the “exclusive intermediary” between the hostile nations. The event lasted about 15 minutes, and the first lady did not take questions from the press.

Nearly 800 people were evacuated from Oleshky, according to the first lady. The frontline Russian-occupied city in the Kherson region has been trapped in a horrific war zone since 2022, with residents facing months of severe food shortages.

Andrushchenko was even more blunt about the propaganda surrounding the operation.

“Using Donald Trump and Melania as their façade, Russian propaganda is building a campaign in order to blame Ukraine, put the ‘genocide,’ hunger in Oleshky on our shoulders,” he said.

“They are allowing American journalists in; they have brought a bunch of dubious reporters from Moscow. Not sure how Ukraine is supposed to react.”

President Volodymyr Zelensky has awarded the first lady the Order of Princess Olha, 1st Class, for her humanitarian work supporting Ukraine, including efforts to bring Ukrainian children home.

The Daily Beast reports that Ukrainians have mixed feelings about Melania’s involvement in the Oleshky evacuation. It helped people escape Oleshky while Russian strikes continued elsewhere, including Dnipro. It may have set a precedent for more truces on the frontline, but critics said it also handed Russia a propaganda coup. The report also raised concerns that moving Ukrainians out of occupied territory contributed to ethnic cleansing.

“Melania Trump brokered a ceasefire without a single independent monitor in the room, and Russia used that gap to stage exactly the picture it wanted the world to see,” Lyudmyla Yankina of the Ukrainian human rights group Civil Fortis told the Daily Beast.

Special envoy Steve Witkoff came under fire from U.S. lawmakers and Ukraine for describing Russian President Vladimir Putin as a “humanitarian” following Russia’s release of U.S. citizen Stephen Hubbard on October 21.

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AN 10 26

'Morally bankrupt': McConnell rips Trump for 'coddling' Russia deals

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10 22 26 STARLINK FAIL

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Trump's own spy chief just secretly delivered a warning to Putin :report

AN 10 26

Trump's CIA director traveled to Moscow to assess the Russia-Ukraine war, and his verdict came with a warning to Vladimir Putin.

Trump sent the CIA director, John Ratcliffe, in August to meet Russian security officials, The Atlantic reported Friday, citing sources familiar with the talks.

Ratcliffe presented his conclusion that neither side is winning the war, noting that Russian forces had failed to make any meaningful gains, but Ukraine had also failed at pushing them out of occupied territory.

American and Russian spies communicated through an intelligence back channel, called "the channel," to speak privately.

While Ratcliffe did not meet Putin personally, his intelligence chiefs documented his message for the Russian president.

U.S. officials believe that Putin is being misled by his advisers, and they hope the information would get him to negotiate with Ukraine to end the war.

Ratcliffe later spoke with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky about the Moscow visit while they refueled their planes in Ireland in September, according to the report.

This comes as Trump’s public statements seem to contradict his own spy chief's conclusion about the conflict.

Trump, who has never had a good relationship with the Ukrainian president, recently became a more vocal critic, accusing him of refusing to make a peace deal and saying he is "more difficult to deal with than Putin."

Trump also attacked Ukraine's renewed strikes on Russian oil refineries, calling them "a disgrace" and blaming them for the rising cost of fuel globally, while most experts believe the Iran war is mostly responsible for the price hike.

Trump also insisted that Ukraine could choose other targets in direct contradiction to Zelensky’s repeated warnings that Russia is using their fuel to attack Ukraine.

The International Energy Agency report suggests Ukraine has been successful in its campaign. Per the report, Russian refinery throughput fell to its lowest level in more than 20 years in June, roughly 30% below the previous year.

Its analysis also found that Ukrainian strikes hit a Russian refinery about once every three days during the first eight months of 2026. Russian gasoline production fell by 20% and diesel production had fallen by about 30%, which led to export restrictions to preserve supply.

Meanwhile, The Atlantic reported that the CIA gives Ukraine intelligence to help them identify and hit russian energy targets. A Baltic intelligence officer said the operations are "much more aggressive" than under Biden.

After Trump criticized Zelensky, Ukraine's defenses faced restrictions on Starlink satellite services, which disrupted its ability to operate defensive drones.

Zelensky has repeatedly said Ukraine is willing to end the war, but Russia has no plans to stop.

Ratcliffe's Moscow mission seemingly contradicts Trump’s statements about Ukraine and Russia, as his relationship with Putin sparks anger across both sides of the political aisle.

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WITKOFF CALLS HUMANITARIAN, ACCUsE WAR CRIMES

Fox News chief political analyst Brit Hume put President Donald Trump's special envoy Steve Witkoff on blast after he praised Russian President Vladimir Putin as a "humanitarian" during peace talks in St. Petersburg.

When asked about how he felt about the interaction, Hume did not hold back, calling Witkoff’s comment extravagant before adding: "The guy's a war criminal, for God's sake, and he's rained down bombs on civilians without regard to human life."

Hume, speaking with host John Roberts on Wednesday's edition of America Reports, called the Putin praise "absurd," pointing to Russia's war with Ukraine and the high civilian casualty count, with millions more displaced.

Witkoff gave the compliment after Putin announced the release of Stephen Hubbard, a 74-year-old American who had spent more than four years in Russian custody.

"You are a humanitarian also, sir, and I salute that, I commend you, and I thank you again," Witkoff told Putin during their meeting.

Hubbard, a retired teacher from Michigan, was detained by Russian forces in Ukraine in 2022. Russian authorities accused the then-70-year-old of being a mercenary for Ukraine. He denied the allegations, and the United States determined that he was illegally detained.

Roberts excused Witkoff’s comments as diplomatic flattery, and Hume acknowledged that possibility, while seemingly taking a dig at Trump’s diesel deal with Russia

Hume then discussed Donald Trump’s reason for putting a pause on the Russia sanctions in Sen. Lindsey Graham’s bill.

The Fox News star said the president told reporters on the South Lawn that you don’t punish people you’re trying to strike a deal with.

“When you’re trying to get a guy out of what has been locked up for four years illegally, you don’t insult the guy,” Hume said. “Maybe you flatter him.”

North Carolina Sen. Thom Tillis called the praise "embarrassing and outrageous," mentioning how the comment is insulting to the families of Ukrainian children killed or made homeless by the war.

Texas Sen. John Cornyn offered a rebuke, calling Putin a "stone-cold killer."

The criticism comes as Trump faces criticism for what many believe is capitulating to Putin’s demands and turning his back on Ukraine.

During the Fox News discussion, Hume also addressed Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky's willingness to freeze current battle lines as a potential starting point for peace talks.

Hume said the proposal now requires a response from Putin, who has rejected previous proposals to put the brakes on the fighting. He also noted that it challenges Trump, who has repeatedly blamed Zelensky for the lack of progress toward ending the war that Russia started.

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10 20 26 trms

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pro putin buy diesel, cut starlink...

Trump’s Greenland threats spark arctic power grab as Russia looms

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THOM GOOD RUSSIA SUMMARY

AN 10 26

Clandestine Kremlin meetings just sent tremors through CIA headquarters

THOM

Clandestine Kremlin meetings just sent tremors through CIA headquarters

Thom Hartmann October 13, 2026

Is Putin running America through Trump, is Trump just a “useful idiot” for the Russians, or is he the worst traitor America’s seen since the days of Benedict Arnold?

Yesterday morning, Trump took to his Nazi-infested social media site to announce to the world (and a bit earlier to people who give him $100,000 a month for market-moving information) that Russia and Ukraine had agreed to an “energy ceasefire,” telling the world “Both parties have agreed. Do not break it!”

Ukrainian President Zelenskyy responded that the deal was “news for me,” and the Kremlin spokesman said three days earlier that Russia wasn’t interested in any sort of a limited truce like Trump announced. But Trump made an identical announcement back in September, which was also a lie, and the night of his announcement both countries continued to bomb each other’s refineries and power plants.

I’m guessing that Trump’s announcement was designed to shift the news cycle away from reporting on the most nakedly pro-Russia act by any American president in our nation’s history that happened on Friday.

After one of his regular roughly-every-two-weeks-since-he-was-inaugurated phone calls with Putin, Trump announced that he’d just suspended our worldwide sanctions against any country that buys oil or refined products from Russia so that country could put millions of tons of diesel on the world market.

Every past sanction suspension — there have been a few — have lasted just 30 days, but Trump extended this one for six months, giving Russia billions they’re desperate for to keep up their violent, illegal war against our democratic ally, Ukraine.

As if to give Ukraine, Europe, the free world, and every American who believes in democracy instead of naked autocracy, Trump stood in front of the White House and told reporters:

“I want to thank President Putin.”

This won’t do a thing for American diesel prices, although Trump is hoping that angry truckers and farmers believe it will. Even if every drop of that diesel ended up here — and most of it won’t — it would only cover about nine days of what we burn here.

But in reality this is simply Trump bailing out his mentor, owner, blackmailer, or whatever Putin is. Russia’s diesel output right now is down 30 percent and Putin’s hold on the country is getting shaky, as Terrence Goggin (The West Point History Professor) argues so cogently. With prices this high, this deal will give Putin billions.

Following Trump’s announcement, Putin showed America and the world exactly how seriously he took Trump’s Friday statement: Saturday morning, Russian guided bombs killed at least 20 people, three of them children, in a residential neighborhood in Zaporizhzhia.

Trump’s response that afternoon, instead of calling Putin out, was to blame our diesel prices on Zelenskyy for hitting Russian refineries and to declare:

“I think it’s time for Ukraine to get a new president.”

In fact, diesel is high because refinery capacity in the Gulf states has crashed due to being hit over and over again by both Iranian and Houthi missiles. While Ukraine’s strikes are hurting Russian diesel supplies, as Putin noted two weeks ago at his annual Valdai forum in Moscow, that has nothing to do with America; we refine virtually all of our diesel right here at home.

Prices are high here because of scarcity-driven pricing around tight international supplies, and our oil companies are using those international rates to price-gouge American drivers on both diesel and gasoline. The industry that Trump said he’d do anything for if they gave him a billion dollars is now making tens of billions in windfall profits every week.

But this is just the beginning of Trump’s most recent anti-American crime spree.

Remember the Lindsey O. Graham Sanctioning Russia and Iran Act? It passed and was signed into law a mere three weeks ago and gives the Trump administration until Sunday of this week to begin punishing countries that still buy Putin’s oil.

He’s breaking that law right in front of us all.

And that’s on top of the Ending Importation of Russian Oil Act that flat-out banned all imports of any Russian energy products to the United States. If Trump wanted to issue waivers in a way that would comply with that law — which has been on the books for four years now, dating back to the Biden years — he’d first have to give Congress 45 days advance notice, certify in writing that Russia has withdrawn all of its troops from Ukraine and stopped all bombing, and then wait a full 90 days for Congress to give him a thumbs-up or a thumbs-down.

As Democratic Senator Jeanne Shaheen noted, Trump and his lickspittles have totally bypassed every one of those requirements; Republican Senator Thom Tillis said yesterday that the deal is both illegal and will put more American lives at risk.

Which provoked former Illinois Republican Congressman Joe Walsh — a frequent guest on my radio/TV program — to say:

“Trump is a traitor to the free world.”

Walsh used to be a lonely voice in his old party, but now he’s rapidly getting company. Mike Pence called the deal a “betrayal” of Graham’s legacy. Senator Lisa Murkowski and Congressmen Don Bacon and Michael McCaul have all condemned it.

Pennsylvania Republican Congressman Brian Fitzpatrick has warned Mike Johnson that he’ll use a discharge petition to force a vote on a bill he’s calling the Ronald Reagan Peace Through Strength Act that would block any purchase of Russian oil (even though two other laws already make it illegal).

Which caused Democratic Senator Mark Kelly to ask out loud the question a lot of Americans are wondering:

“Whose side is Trump on?”

I can think of two possible answers, and both are insane.

The first is that Putin is actually steering Trump’s presidency. First, weaken America and gut our military, and then give Putin whatever he wants:

Put an alcoholic B-list weekend TV guy in charge of the Pentagon, a plumber in charge of DHS, a fracking guy in charge of Energy, a wrestling billionaire in charge of Education, a brain-worm-disabled former heroin- and sex-addicted lawyer in charge of our nation’s health, let a ketamine-addled trillionaire rip apart our federal government and destroy our soft power around the world by taking down USAID, shut down our pro-democracy propaganda operations (VOA, etc.), put a weight-loss “miracle pill” hawker in charge of Medicare and Medicaid, a C-list former reality TV star in charge of our airlines, his own criminal defense lawyer to run the coverup of Epstein at the Department of Justice, etc. The list is virtually endless.

The Republican-led Senate Intelligence Committee documented that Trump’s 2016 campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, was also passing internal campaign data to a Russian intelligence officer while running the campaign and the two of them worked on a plan to hand eastern Ukraine to Moscow. Then there was Helsinki where Trump humiliated our intelligence service while all but shining Putin’s shoes on live TV.

In his first months in office, Trump outed an Israeli spy to the Russian Ambassador in what he thought was going to be a “secret Oval Office meeting” (the Russians released the photo to the press), resulting in MOSAD having to “burn” (relocate, change identity of) that spy.

The undercover agent was apparently working in Syria that year against the Russians, who were embroiled in the midst of Assad’s Civil War and indiscriminately bombing Aleppo into rubble.

That, in turn, prompted the CIA to worry that a longtime American spy buried deep in the Kremlin was similarly vulnerable to Trump handing him over to Putin.

As CNN noted (when the story leaked two years later):

“According to CNN’s sources, the spy had access to Putin and could even provide images of documents on the Russian leader’s desk.”

The CIA concluded that the risk Trump had burned or was about to burn our spy inside the Kremlin was so great that — at massive loss to US intelligence abilities that may even have otherwise helped forestall the invasion of Ukraine — they pulled our spy out of Russia in the first year of Trump’s first presidency, 2017.

Similarly, when they met in Helsinki on July 16, 2018, Trump and Putin talked in private for several hours and Trump ordered his translators’ notes destroyed; there is also concern that much of their conversation was done out of the hearing of the US’s translator (Putin is fluent in English) who may have been relegated to a distant part of the rather large empty ballroom in which they met.

The Washington Post reported, after a leak six months later, that when Trump met privately for those two hours with Putin the CIA went into “panic mode.” A US intelligence official told the Post:

“There was this gasp’ at the CIA’s Langley, Virginia headquarters. You literally had people in panic mode watching it at Langley. On all floors. Just shock.”

Things were picking up in 2019, as Putin was planning his invasion of Ukraine while Trump was preparing for the 2020 election.

In July 2019, Trump had conversations with five foreign leaders during and just before a presidential visit that month to Mar-a-Lago; they included Putin and the Emir of Qatar.

In one of those conversations, according to a high-level US Intelligence source, Trump “made promises” to a “world leader” that were so alarming it provoked a national security scramble across multiple agencies.

As The Washington Post noted in an article titled “Trump’s communications with foreign leader are part of whistleblower complaint that spurred standoff between spy chief and Congress”:

“Intelligence Community Inspector General Michael Atkinson determined that the complaint [against Trump] was credible and troubling enough to be considered a matter of ‘urgent concern,’ a legal threshold that requires notification of congressional oversight committees.”

On the last day of that month, July 31, Trump had another private conversation with Putin.

The White House spokespeople told Congress and the press that Trump said that he and Putin discussed “wildfires” and “trade between the nations.” No droids in this car…

But the following week, on August 2nd, The Daily Beast’s Betsy Swan reported that Trump had that week asked the Office of the Director of National Intelligence for a list of all its employees (including all our “spies”) who had worked there more than 90 days, and the request had intelligence officials experiencing “disquiet.”

Perhaps just by coincidence, months after Trump left office with cases of classified documents, The New York Times ran a story with the headline Captured, Killed or Compromised: C.I.A. Admits to Losing Dozens of Informants:

Then there was the red carpet in Alaska last year, where Russia’s foreign minister showed up in a sweatshirt reading “CCCP,” as if to announce who’d won the Cold War after all. There’s the invitation to Putin, a man under indictment for war crimes and stealing children from Ukraine, to come to Mar-a-Lago for the G20 in December. Historian Heather Cox Richardson walked through that whole history Saturday night and closed by asking “how much more evidence is necessary” before we conclude that this president is working for Russia.

The second possibility is that nobody’s blackmailing or threatening Trump and he’s doing all of this of his own free will because he thinks it’ll make him richer.

The midterms were 25 days off when he made that call, diesel prices are killing Republican candidates, and Trump desperately needed a positive-sounding headline.

Meanwhile, the New York Times reported that Putin personally pitched Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner at the Kremlin on the sale of Lukoil’s $20 billion in overseas assets to a group led by a Trump megadonor and including business partners of both the Kushner and Witkoff families.

Selling out your country for money and advantage has a name in American history, Benedict Arnold, who offered to hand West Point to the British for 20,000 pounds because — like with Trump and the Nobel Prize — he felt underappreciated.

But Arnold, at least, had been a real patriot before he turned. He’d been shot in the left leg storming Quebec and then had that same leg shattered leading the charge that won the Battle of Saratoga. There’s a monument on that battlefield today, a single carved boot honoring the leg while pointedly leaving off the name of the man it was attached to.

Unlike Arnold, Donald Trump used a diagnosis of bone spurs to stay out of Vietnam that the podiatrist’s own daughters say was a favor to Fred Trump, who just happened to be the doctor’s landlord and patron.

My dad was a Republican activist in Michigan. The Republican Party he loved defined itself by standing up to the Kremlin.

I can’t imagine what he’d make of a Republican president publicly thanking the man in the Kremlin for suggesting that America bankroll his bloody, unprovoked war, or of the Senate’s number two Republican going on Sunday television to defend this insanity.

US intelligence agencies have determined — and told Trump — that Putin has provided Iran with the satellite data and intelligence that country’s IRGC used to attack our bases and troops in the Gulf, killing at least 21 and sending hundreds of others to the hospital. And now Trump’s handing him billions while cutting off our ally Ukraine from American-made Patriot missile interceptors?

I’ll leave it to the lawyers and the impeachment committees to determine if that fits the definition of treason in the Constitution, which says:

“Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort.”

But whatever it is, when a president knowingly breaks his own country’s laws to send billions to a hostile nation’s dictator who’s slaughtering the people of a nation we promised — in writing in 1994 — to protect, most Americans know in their gut what to call it.

Whether Putin is giving the orders or Trump is freelancing to hustle more money into his kids Uday and Qusay’s investments, Ukraine’s children end up just as dead and America’s word and reputation ends up just as worthless.

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2022?LAW ~ BUY RUSS OIL; 4 SEN ~? SUSAN MAINE, MURKOWSKI AK, TILLIS? BACON?

Murkowski, 5 other senators urge Trump administration to reverse ...

1 day agoThe Republican senators who signed onto the statement are Sens. Susan Collins of Maine, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Thom Tillis of North Carolina and John Curtis of Utah.

MMA

Fox host Brian Kilmeade: "No doubt" that Trump's money for Russian oil is "going to be used to help kill innocent Ukrainians"

October 12, 2026, edition of Fox News' Fox & Friends

BRIAN KILMEADE (HOST): So, the other big news that happened over the last few days is the President of the United States in a personal call with Vladimir Putin has gotten a deal that would bring hundreds of tons of diesel oil to our shores. But that money is no doubt gonna be used to help kill innocent Ukrainians and those in the battlefield. Are you okay with that tradeoff?

K.T. MCFARLAND (GUEST): Look, Russia gets its money to pay for this war through oil sales. It still sells more oil in Europe than Europe is paying Ukraine to fight the war. So am I okay with the United States kind of bailing Russia out for the immediate term with diesel? Let's just see where it goes. If this is the beginning of a ceasefire, if this is an energy ceasefire — Ukraine doesn't attack Russia's energy infrastructure, Russia doesn't attack Ukraine's infrastructure, we get a little oil — that's fine. If Russia, however, is going to use that money and then escalate the war and not go to the negotiating table and then think that somehow it's got President Trump over a barrel, bad joke, barrel of oil. Look, it's not gonna happen. President Trump is not gonna be done in and fooled by Russia or China, or Zelenskyy or Iran.

KILMEADE: Well, Vladimir Putin is making him look terrible. Because he said there is a ceasefire on energy. And this post was backed up by fact. Zelenskyy put it up. A power plant in Kharkiv was attacked this evening. Overall, the past weeks alone, the Russians have carried out more than 200 strikes on electricity generation and transmission facilities in Ukraine. And another 17 strikes this week targeting gas and oil facilities. Ukraine wants peace. The question is whether Russia does. Look, Russia is having one of the biggest catastrophic wars in their history: four and a half years, 1.4 million casualties, hundreds of thousands of dead, 30,000 a month, and now they're losing ground in the Donbas, which some predicted would be won by Russia flat-out. So they have no choice. I'm concerned about them using that money to help kill our guys in the Middle East.

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AN 10 26

Trump puts US in rare company with Russia and Belarus before midterms

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BULGARIA EXPLOSION?

AN 10 26

Clandestine Kremlin meetings just sent tremors through CIA headquarters

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By Thomson ReutersSep 21, 2026 |

By Olivia Le Poidevin

GENEVA, Sept 21 (Reuters) – Russia has intensified surveillance, intimidation and reprisals against critics overseas since its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, a UN expert said on Monday.

The Special Rapporteur on human rights in Russia told the Human Rights Council in Geneva ‌that Russia had become one of the most prolific perpetrators of “transnational repression”, through attempted assassinations, assaults and poisonings.

“It is the continuation, beyond Russia’s borders, of the same structural, state-sponsored system of repression I have documented at home,” Mariana Katzarova said in a statement, citing her new ‌report based on 400 documented cases.

“Leaving Russia does not mean ⁠leaving Russian repression behind,” she ⁠added. Some 650,000-900,000 people have left Russia since 2022, her report said.

Russia’s diplomatic mission in Geneva did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment, though Moscow has in the past denied allegations of hostile actions on foreign soil and alleged a Western smear campaign.

Incidents of “transnational repression” tripled from 29 during 2014-2021 to 89 between 2022-2024, the report found, citing civil ⁠society data.

While Russia has a long history ⁠of assassinations and intimidation beyond borders – including the murder of former KGB agent Alexander Litvinenko in London in 2006 – the method and scale of targeting has changed from overt violence towards covert, administrative and digital ‌tools, Katzarova found.

“Repression now travels through arrest warrants, databases, banks, digital systems and proxies – cheaper, scalable, and built to evade attribution,” Katzarova said.

BLOCKED BANK ACCOUNTS

The report explained how Russia places individuals on the Federal Financial Monitoring Service (Rosfinmonitoring) list of “terrorists ⁠and extremists”, sparking red flags and blocked accounts in European and American banking institutions.

Russian authorities have also restricted services and travel documents to citizens abroad, the report said. ⁠It cited the case ‌of Elena Pushkareva whom the Russian Embassy in Canada refused ⁠consular services to, citing a “security threat”, after she protested for the release ‌of Alexei Navalny and other political prisoners.

Russia is the most frequent user ⁠of Interpol arrest requests, though roughly half of Russia-related cases reviewed by Interpol’s oversight body in 2024 were non-compliant, Katzarova said.

Targets include anti-war emigrants, journalists and non-governmental organizations. While targeting occurs mainly in South Caucasus and Central Asian States, documented incidents have dramatically increased in Europe and beyond, the report said.

(Reporting by Olivia Le Poidevin; Editing by Andrew Cawthorne)

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AN 9 26

On May 24, Donald Trump Jr. was celebrating in the Bahamas, as scantily clad dancers in stilettos and sailor caps performed for him and his guests. It was the last night of his wedding, a lavish, three-day party held across a pair of ultra-exclusive private islands. A five-tier funfetti cake had been airlifted in from Florida, and helicopters and seaplanes descended on the islands before guests settled into their oceanfront villas. That night on the beach, Trump Jr. lifted his bride into the air while fireworks launched from a barge over the sea.

“It was everything we dreamed of and more,” his wife later wrote on Instagram.

That dream was heavily funded by a secret benefactor: Umar Kremlev, a Russian oligarch close to President Vladimir Putin.

Kremlev footed the bill for hundreds of thousands of dollars of wedding expenses, according to records reviewed by ProPublica and interviews with three people familiar with the event. The oligarch paid to rent out one of the private islands, where a reception was held and where guests slept.

He also covered other big-ticket items, like the fireworks show, and his team helped plan the event. Kremlev is the head of the International Boxing Association, a scandal-plagued sports group that has been financed by the Russian state-owned energy giant Gazprom. The wedding payments came from an IBA-affiliated entity in Dubai that the boxing association uses for financial transactions.

The guest list numbered around 50. It included Trump Jr.’s brother-in-law Jared Kushner, Eric Trump — and Kremlev, an imposing man with a shaved head who speaks limited English. The oligarch was part of a large group whose presence puzzled other attendees. They sometimes stood off by themselves, speaking Russian.

“It was really small, like, just really close friends,” Trump Jr. later said on his podcast. “Tried to keep it really tight. And it was just awesome.”

Kremlev’s previously unreported relationship with Trump Jr. represents an extraordinary development: a member of Putin’s circle financially supporting the president’s son and gaining intimate access to the Trump family. For a decade, Putin’s government, regarded as a chief adversary of the U.S., has been accused of efforts to influence American elections. Attempts by Russia to make inroads with the Trumps before the 2016 election exploded into controversy that dogged much of the president’s first term.

National security experts expressed alarm at Trump Jr. accepting the oligarch’s largesse, saying it raised an urgent question: What motivated Kremlev to spend a fortune cultivating the connection?

“If I’m paying for your wedding, at some point, you’re going to owe me something,” said Frank Montoya Jr., a retired career FBI official who held senior counterintelligence roles. Oligarchs like Kremlev often act in coordination with the Russian government. While it’s unclear if that happened here, Trump Jr. put himself in a precarious position, Montoya said. “This should be unthinkable for the son of the president. End of story.”

Holden Triplett, who served as Trump’s counterintelligence director on the National Security Council during his first term, said Russian intelligence frequently seeks to build ties with U.S. government officials and their family members. “Money is a tried-and-true method to gain access,” said Triplett, who also worked for the FBI in Moscow.

In the days leading up to Trump Jr.’s wedding, Kremlev was in China as part of the delegation accompanying Putin, according to Chinese state media. The month before, Putin had bestowed him with a state honor, the Order of Friendship. The Ukrainian government has imposed sanctions on Kremlev personally, citing his closeness to Putin and Russian security services.

It’s not clear why Kremlev helped pay for Trump Jr.’s wedding. The men appear to have met only recently. Public reporting suggests Trump Jr. could have afforded it himself, with Forbes recently estimating his net worth at roughly $300 million.

In response to detailed questions, a spokesperson for Trump Jr. did not dispute the wedding payments from Kremlev. “Umar is a personal friend of Don,” he said. The spokesman said that Kremlev is “not someone he has a business relationship with” and that the men met through a mutual friend in the hunting world and bonded over their love of boxing and the outdoors.

A spokesperson for Trump Jr.’s brother Eric said of Kremlev: “Eric has absolutely no clue who this person is, nor has never heard his name.”

In a statement, Kremlev’s press office said, “Mr. Kremlev and Mr. Trump Jr have a friendly relationship” and they first met “a couple of years ago.”

The press office described Kremlev as a businessman and philanthropist, adding, “Mr. Kremlev has never discussed political matters with any of his American friends and acquaintances,” including Trump Jr. They said the boxing organization itself did not incur expenses for the wedding but did not comment on the payments from the Dubai entity. The press office also said that when Putin and Kremlev were in China recently, Kremlev was not part of Putin’s “official delegation.”

Kushner, who has been helping lead the U.S. government’s negotiations with Russia over Ukraine, did not respond to requests for comment. The White House and the Russian government did not respond either.

The revelations come as Trump Jr. has emerged as a political power center in his own right. Beloved by the MAGA base, he reportedly played an active role in vetting White House cabinet picks for Trump’s second term and was dubbed his father’s “most essential political adviser” by The Wall Street Journal. “I certainly don’t think I’d be sitting here as the VP nominee without Don’s help,” Vice President JD Vance told the outlet in late 2024.

This account is based on records and interviews with dozens of current and former IBA officials and contractors, wedding attendees and other people in Trump Jr.’s and Kremlev’s circles.

Trump Jr. exchanged vows with socialite Bettina Anderson on a private island that was featured in “Pirates of the Caribbean” and the 2006 James Bond movie “Casino Royale.” They had their first dance on a second private island nearby that can rent for around $100,000 a night, paid for by Kremlev. The company that put on the fireworks display charges around $70,000 for such shows. (Kremlev did not attend the ceremony itself, which was held on the first day and had just 18 guests, Trump Jr.’s spokesperson said.)

The atmosphere was Monte Carlo meets frat party — helicopters in and out, a beachside DJ set, beer pong tournaments. One day, the men went spearfishing. Artisans at the London fashion house Safiyaa spent 150 hours embroidering Anderson’s bespoke silk reception outfit. The president’s son had undergone treatment to better define his jawline for the occasion.

Some longtime friends of Trump Jr. told associates they were disappointed not to be invited, though a few of his closest business partners — executives at the Trump family crypto company, World Liberty Financial, and the venture capital firm 1789 Capital — did make the cut. President Trump himself skipped it. (“He’d like me to go, but it’s going to be just a small, little private affair,” the president told reporters beforehand. “I said, you know, this is not good timing for me.”) But many of the guests were immediate family of the bride and groom.

That made the large contingent of Russians all the more conspicuous. “What are they doing here?” one person recalled thinking. At least one of the Russian guests had been with Kremlev on his China trip: Alexander Lagutin, a businessperson who has served in senior roles at a Russian defense contractor and a state-backed energy company. Kremlev’s right hand at the IBA, Elena Sobol, attended the wedding too.

Since the wedding, the Trumps have released scores of photos and videos of the festivities. While they show many of the guests, the Russians have been absent from all of them. (The top of Kremlev’s head is visible in the back of one group photo posted on Instagram by a friend of the bride.) After the party was over, on his “Triggered” podcast, Trump Jr. emphasized the event’s privacy: “The people that were there — if you’re on that list, you weren’t talking.”

In 2009, Umar Kremlev did not yet exist.

He was in his late 20s, with a criminal record for extortion and battery, still going by his birth name, Umar Lutfulloyev, according to the Russian independent news outlet Proekt. But he was about to rapidly ascend in Russia to a position of wealth and influence, with the help of a powerful friend. (“Mr. Kremlev has a completely clean legal record,” his press office said.)

In 2010, he changed his name to Kremlev. He soon joined a Russian government-backed biker gang called the Night Wolves, eventually taking a leadership role, according to news reports. That is what first brought him close to Alexei Rubezhnoi, who now leads Putin’s presidential security service, Proekt reported. In 2017, Kremlev took over the Russian Boxing Federation, after Rubezhnoi personally intervened to put him at the helm.

In 2020, Kremlev became president of the IBA. The association was something akin to FIFA but for boxing and had long overseen the sport in the Olympics. But it had been beset by corruption allegations and was on the brink of insolvency. Kremlev brought money to the table from Gazprom, the state-owned company that operates as an arm of Putin’s government. Gazprom publicly became the IBA’s financial backer, filling its coffers with tens of millions of dollars.

Former high-level IBA officials said that Kremlev had a clear political agenda. “Umar is guided by Putin. It was using the sport for soft political power,” a former IBA board member told ProPublica. “It’s geopolitics. That it’s boxing is just happenstance.” Kremlev, 43, is also heavily involved in an organization called Healthy Fatherland, run by his 23-year-old wife’s twin sister. The group — which promotes healthy eating and youth sports — is under Ukrainian sanctions for its alleged role in a program of abducting Ukrainian children from occupied territories and relocating them under the guise of “rehabilitation.” (Healthy Fatherland did not respond to a request for comment.)

Kremlev’s cozy relationship with the government has made him rich. Putin used the levers of the state to make Kremlev a dominant player in the Russian sports betting industry, according to Proekt, and one of his companies was chosen to operate the national lottery. After Putin nationalized Russia’s largest car dealership company in 2023, Kremlev became the owner of that too.

He now flaunts that wealth through his boisterous public persona. In one video Kremlev posted on social media, he surprises a young mother by giving her a free car. In another, he criticizes his young female aide’s outfit as not feminine enough and makes her change. He shadowboxes with ostriches and brings in celebrities like Rick Ross and Naomi Campbell for IBA events; he praises Stalin and rides private jets.

Following the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the U.S. began to indict Russian oligarchs and seize yachts and other assets. Kremlev repeatedly told associates he was worried about being targeted by a U.S. government probe, according to a person close to IBA leadership. “He was very afraid of American sanctions,” the person added. (Kremlev does not appear on public U.S. sanction lists.)

With the business environment in Europe growing more hostile to Russia, Kremlev moved much of the IBA’s operations from Switzerland to the United Arab Emirates. A new Dubai entity, IB Challenger, would later pay wedding expenses for Trump Jr. The current sources of the IBA’s funds are murky, and, in recent years, top executives have given conflicting accounts of the status of its relationship with Gazprom. (Kremlev’s press office told ProPublica the IBA’s sponsorship contract with Gazprom “expired long ago.”) People close to the organization said they understood that its money still comes from Russia.

In 2023, the International Olympic Committee stripped Kremlev’s IBA of its role organizing Olympic boxing. It has cited a host of governance issues and the group’s refusal to “transparently explain the sources of its financing or to explain its full financial dependency, at the time, on a single state-owned company.”

It was a major setback that deprived the IBA of a key source of its international influence. Kremlev has raged against the Olympic committee ever since and has said that his IBA predecessor, who he blames for the problems, “must be shot.”

Kremlev saw a potential ally in President Trump. After Trump’s second inauguration, in January 2025, Kremlev sent an open letter to the president asking him to look into the Olympic committee’s actions in advance of the 2028 Los Angeles Games. “We look forward with great optimism to the possibility of working together to make the Olympic movement great again,” he wrote.

In September 2025, the IBA brought in Trump Jr. for a panel discussion in Istanbul about boxing. With his then-girlfriend, Anderson, sitting offstage, he criticized transgender women competing in women’s sports and reminisced about watching Saturday night fights as a child. Trump Jr. shared the stage with Kremlev, the boxer Manny Pacquiao and Muhammad Ali’s daughter Rasheda. (Trump Jr.’s spokesperson said he was not paid for the appearance and was already in Turkey for an unrelated event.)

The president’s son had reason to be attuned to the sensitivity of cozying up with a Putin associate, especially while his father navigates the Russia-Ukraine war. Trump Jr.’s June 2016 meeting with a Russian attorney in Trump Tower became a major focus of the Robert Mueller investigation.

The Trump Tower meeting was arranged after an email offering Trump Jr. damaging information about Hillary Clinton as “part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump.” Trump Jr. famously responded, “If it’s what you say I love it especially later in the summer.” Trump Jr. later dismissed the matter as a “witch hunt,” and the Mueller report concluded that there was not enough evidence to convict him of a crime.

Recently, Kremlev has been working to expand into the U.S. market. In July, his group hosted a bare-knuckle boxing event in Miami, a chance to showcase a particularly bloody form of the sport in which contenders fight without gloves. But the debut was overshadowed when manosphere influencer Andrew Tate, who the IBA had brought in to host, was arrested by U.S. Marshals outside the arena. (Tate is facing rape and sex trafficking charges in the United Kingdom, which he has denied.)

Much about Kremlev’s relationship with Trump Jr., and where it is headed, remains unknown. In a press release after the Istanbul panel, the IBA hinted there was more to come.

“President Kremlev and Donald Trump Jr made it clear – this alliance will not remain symbolic,” the press release read. “More joint initiatives will follow.”

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an 9 26

putin cont helps iran econ and military, target info?!

invite g20 designed to punish iran? Trump's favorite dictator made him a 'fool' and might cost him the midterms

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AHA DOH SANCTIONS // TARIFFS TOLL FOR EXTORTION

AN 8 26

President Donald Trump announced that his new strategy for the Iran war returns to his old strategy of deploying sanctions on the country and attempting to isolate it economically. But Trump is giving his friends a pass when it comes to following his new sanctions rules.

MS NOW Rachel Maddow producer Steve Benen argued in a Friday column that Trump has weakened his own policy with sweeping threats against countries that assist Tehran, but then signaled that he may not enforce those threats against Russia or China. The contradiction ultimately undermines the credibility of Trump’s strength at a time when the United States is already struggling to bring its six-month war with Iran to an end.

"It quickly became obvious that the president’s threat was largely meaningless, and the administration’s new policy amounted to little more than another underwhelming threat," wrote Benen.

During an Oval Office signing on Thursday, Trump was asked whether he intends to enforce the sanctions for all countries, including Russia and China. Given that the two countries have been aiding Iran, there was a question about whether Trump would be willing to enforce his rules for his favorite world leaders.

"Well, it depends, it depends,” Trump replied. “So far, I think Russia’s behaved quite well having to do with the Strait of Hormuz. And you have to understand, for everything they do, we do also, you know. Somebody was saying about China, ‘What about China? We hear they’re spying.’ We spy on them too; that’s the way it goes.”

Trump added that it's not as if the U.S. doesn't do the same kind of things, breaking sanctions.

Benen called it "pitiful."

Russia has been shipping drone components to Iran, NBC News reported last week. Another report revealed that Russia has also been sending cash to Iran.

"Instead of acting on this, Trump has largely *defended* Russia, accepted Putin’s denials at face value, and as recently as Thursday, praised Russia for having “behaved quite well,'" Benen said.

Essentially, Benen wrote, the president drew a red line and then gave his pals a pass once they stepped over it.

Meanwhile, he cited the report The Washington Post, indicating “fresh U.S. intelligence indicating that the Kremlin sees the United States as weakened by the Iran war.”

"Trump’s willingness to signal abject weakness isn’t likely to help," he closed.

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AN 8 26

While President Donald Trump has repeatedly upended U.S. foreign policy over the course of his second term, a whistleblower from his first administration warns that over the past few days, the commander-in-chief may have “sold us out to our enemies” once and for all. This is according to Miles Taylor, who during Trump’s first term served as Deputy Chief of Staff in the Department of Homeland Security and famously revealed the existence of a resistance group within the administration. “The president,” wrote Taylor on Monday, “is abandoning our friends in all the places where we are needed most, and he is leaving behind vacuums to be filled by his dictator buddies.”

“Start with Korea,” said Taylor. “On Sunday, Trump ordered the Pentagon to ‘substantially reduce’ our joint military exercises with South Korea, complaining that our ally wouldn’t join his war with Iran and insisting the drills send a signal that is ‘inappropriate and hostile’ to our friends in North Korea, which he called ‘unthreatening and respectful.’ Ah yes, Mr. President, they are so ‘unthreatening’ that during your first term we had to urgently plan for the possibility that the hermit kingdom might launch a nuclear attack on the continental United States because Kim Jong Un was so ‘respectful.’ By the way, Trump announced America’s pull-back from its longtime ally days after North Korea launched a ballistic missile in a show of force against the South.”

“Then look at what else is happening in the Pacific,” wrote Taylor. “This weekend, the Navy pulled the USS George Washington out of Asia to relieve the exhausted USS Abraham Lincoln in the Middle East, leaving the western Pacific without a single American aircraft carrier, while China grows more aggressive toward Taiwan by the month. In fact, Taiwan has been holding emergency drills practicing what to do if Beijing orders an invasion. So why is America pulling back vital resources? Because Trump has no real interest in deterring China, where he has marveled enviously at Xi Jinping’s power and toyed with the idea of a ‘grand bargain.'"

Instead of opposing China, warns Taylor, “his ego has America mired in an open-ended war with Iran that is grinding down our ships, draining our missile stockpiles, and running our sailors ragged. So he’s sending more ships into that quagmire.”

“Finally,” says Taylor, “take a look at what’s happening in Europe. Satellite imagery revealed this weekend that Russia is building a network of secret drone bases within striking distance of NATO, with storage for a thousand attack drones at a single site. German authorities just found a suspected Russian drone rigged with explosives at the Leipzig airport. And Western planners are quietly admitting they have no real plan for NATO’s nightmare scenario, a coordinated Russian and Chinese strike on two fronts, at the very moment Trump has hollowed out the alliance that exists to prevent such a surprise attack.”

“Our enemies are gobsmacked by what’s happening,” Taylor predicts. “Under Donald Trump, we’ve walked out onto thin ice and handed our foes a sledgehammer. They must be fist-pumping in foreign briefing rooms.”

With all this in mind, Taylor arrives at a grim conclusion, writing, “Strategically, I believe we are in the most perilous hour of the modern era, and it is peril of our own president’s making. Donald Trump’s real National Security Strategy has been to get revenge against countries that criticize him, to advance his own self interests, and to build bridges to dictators with whom he can work once he leaves office. The great dealmaker has sold us out to the most dangerous nations on earth.”

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AN 5 267

Furious Republican shreds 'weak' Trump over 'embarrassing' gift to Russia - Alternet.org

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AN 4 26

In March, Scottish journalist Andrew Neil — known for being a staunch conservative — expressed his frustration with U.S. President Donald Trump's foreign policy when he lamented, "I think, in some ways, he regards (Russian President Vladimir) Putin as more of an ally than he regards the United Kingdom or any of his European NATO allies."

Neil complained, "He slapped tariffs on all of his allies. He didn't put tariffs on Russia. And he's helped to bail out Russia now with what he's done on the price of oil."

Neil isn't the only one who views Trump as more favorable to Putin than to longtime North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) allies of the United States. MS NOW host Joe Scarborough, a former GOP congressman, lamented, during an April 7 rant, that "the Republicans I grew up with" who "believed in a strong west" have "vanished" and been replaced by admirers of Putin and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán.

In an essay/opinion column published on April 7, the New York Times' Thomas B. Edsall laments that Trump's fondness for Putin hasn't gone away.

"Events over two days last month — Friday, March 6, and Saturday, March 7 — demonstrated President Trump's willingness to sacrifice American interests in subservience to President Vladimir Putin of Russia," Edsall argues. "On that Friday, the Washington Post reporters Noah Robertson, Ellen Nakashima and Warren P. Strobel revealed that 'Russia is providing Iran with targeting information to attack American forces in the Middle East.' The next day, Trump attended the transfer at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware of the flag-draped coffins of six U.S. members of the Army Reserve killed by a kamikaze drone strike at the Shuaiba port in Kuwait. An inevitable, but unanswerable, question: Was the drone strike guided by information Russia provided to Iran?"

Edsall notes that the Trump White House staff "followed orders to tow Trump's line" on Putin and Iran.

"His press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, told reporters that the Russia-Iran intelligence sharing 'is not making any difference with respect to the military operations in Iran,'" Edsall explains. "She declined to say whether Trump has discussed the issue with Putin or whether the administration would pursue repercussions…. Trump's deference not just to Putin' but to other authoritarian leaders' has repeatedly and profoundly corrupted American foreign policy."

In an interview, Daniel Fried, a former U.S. ambassador to Poland, told Edsall, "Trump does seem attracted to Putin as a strongman ruler. He seems more comfortable with — and gives more credence to — Putin than with leaders of America's democratic allies or with President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine."

Former National Security Council (NSC) official Fiona Hill is also frustrated by Trump's affinity for Putin.

Hill recently told the BBC, "Well, I think the first thing to disavow everybody of is the idea that there is a relationship between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin. I think that's part of the problem, because Trump would like a relationship with Putin, and that's exactly why he doesn't criticize him. It's a kind of unrequited love of some description. You know, everyone keeps talking about bromance. He hasn't even got there. And you know, Putin is very good at playing hard to get, incredibly hard to get. And this drives Trump mad, because he never gets what he wants off Putin, which is really adulation, respect."

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bikers

putin night wolves

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OFFICIAL 3 26

Doomsday Clock Today | Current Time & Complete Timeline (2026)

The Doomsday Clock is currently at 85 seconds to midnight — the closest it has ever been to global catastrophe since its creation in 1947.

clock moved to 85 seconds in February 2026 due to increased nuclear risks, the ongoing Russia-Ukraine war, the Middle East conflict, climate change, and AI-related threats. It had previously been at 89 seconds.

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AN 3 26

President Donald Trump reportedly spoke with Russia about whether they are helping Iran and told other officials that he holds them at their word that they aren't involved. Now, it turns out, there is evidence to the contrary.

Speaking to CNBC about the matter on Tuesday, Trump's special envoy, Steve Witkoff, claimed that Russia was being honest with the U.S.

"That's what they said. So, you know, we can take them at their word. But they did say that," Witkoff claimed. "Let’s hope they’re not sharing."

It prompted a question at the White House press briefing on Tuesday when one reporter asked, "The Kremlin put out a statement, a statement where Putin said, 'I would like to reaffirm our unwavering support for Tehran and our solidarity with Iranian friends.' How does the president think that Russia could be helpful if not helping Iran? And did the president push Putin on Russia sharing intelligence with Iran in this war?"

Press secretary Karoline Leavitt softened that emphatic claim by Trump and Witkoff, telling the press, "Both said that they've sent a message to Russia that if that was taking place, it's not something they would be happy with and they hope that it is not taking place."

CNN reported Wednesday morning that Russia has specifically been working with Iran on "advanced drone tactics," a problem that the Defense Department confessed was causing them headaches.

“There are not great defenses available to the U.S. military to defend against the Shahed,” a congressional official told The Atlantic last week after a Capitol Hill briefing with senior Trump administration members.

“So they have to use the defensives they have, which are costly,” the congressional official said. “We have known this for a long time. We don’t have, at scale, good defenses against drones.”

CNN confirmed that Russia is helping Iran with those drone tactics, after facing off against the assault themselves from Ukraine, Western intelligence said.

"Shahed drones, designed by Iran but mass-produced by Moscow for use in Ukraine, have been unexpectedly successful in penetrating the air defenses of Gulf nations," the report explained. "Russian intelligence sharing with Iran has until now been reported as general assistance with targeting, but specific tactical advice is a new level of support."

“What was more general support is now getting more concerning, including UAS [drone] targeting strategies that Russia employed in Ukraine,” the official told CNN.

The individual wouldn't provide specifics about the tactical help.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky wrote on X, “Russia has started supporting the Iranian regime with drones. It will definitely help with missiles, and it is also helping them with air defense."

He has his own drone interception experts and has agreed to send them to aid the U.S. They have a small, easily-produced $5,000 device that can stop the cheap Russian drones.

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NO LNX

Thom Hartmann February 04, 2026

The British newspaper Daily Mail is out with a deeply researched investigative report, the result of a long collaboration between columnists Glen Owen and Dan Hodges, along with Mark Hookham (Assistant Editor Investigations), and Daisy Graham-Brown (Investigative Reporter).

It’s shocking in its detail and its implication that Vladimir Putin has basically owned Donald Trump for years, even before Trump ran for president in 2016.

They note of last week’s partial (about 50 percent) Epstein document release:

“The files include 1,056 documents naming Russian President Vladimir Putin and 9,629 referring to Moscow. [Jeffrey] Epstein even seems to have secured audiences with Putin after his 2008 conviction for procuring a child for prostitution.”

Essentially, they’re arguing that Epstein was running an operation on behalf of the KGB/Putin that lured wealthy and powerful men to Epstein’s New York and Palm Beach mansions and his island where they were surreptitiously filmed having sex with underage girls.

That material was then presumably passed along to Putin, who used it for leverage when he needed it:

“Intelligence sources believe Epstein was running ‘the world’s largest honeytrap operation’ on behalf of the KGB when he procured women for his network of associates.”

In return for giving Putin videos of wealthy, famous men in criminally compromising positions, Putin reportedly arranged for massive amounts of corrupt Russian money to be handed to Epstein to launder in the US.

Such money typically comes from illicit drug and oil deals, outright theft, sanctions evasions, and Russian organized crime oligarchs (including Putin and his associates) and is frequently laundered in this country using real estate. It’s the Mafia’s favorite, too.

America has the most lax and largely useless real estate transaction laws in the developed world, so a main way to launder such dirty cash is through cash-based real estate transactions (which are illegal in almost every other developed country).

And we know that Trump and his sons, when US and European banks refused to loan him any more money after his multiple bankruptcies, started taking in enough money to ensure the survival of his little real estate empire and it was all coming from Russia.

As Don Jr. told wealthy attendees to a 2008 real-estate conference:

“In terms of high-end product influx into the U.S., Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets.”

Similarly, Eric Trump told a friend, who later testified about it:

“‘Well, we don’t rely on American banks. We have all the funding we need out of Russia.’ I said, ‘Really?’ And he said, ‘Oh, yeah. We’ve got some guys that really, really love golf, and they’re really invested in our programs. We just go there all the time.’”

This is one of the reasons Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR), the Ranking Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee (that oversees US banking) has been demanding access to Epstein’s finances and even introduced legislation (the Produce Epstein Treasury Records Act) to require that disclosure, which Republicans are currently blocking.

That alone is worth a call to your two US senators.

The documents released last week included a series of email conversations between Epstein and senior European officials close to Putin. This is way beyond Gary Hart and Monkey Business; this is the President of the United States being in the pocket of a foreign power and profiting from it. They pretty much openly suggest Epstein knew about ways to “handle” Trump:

“Other messages revealed Epstein claimed he could give the Kremlin valuable insight into Mr Trump ahead of a summit with Putin in Helsinki. …“In a June 2018 exchange, Epstein indicated that Vitaly Churkin, Russia’s ambassador to the UN, ‘understood Trump after our conversations.’ …

“Earlier that month Epstein had also messaged Steve Bannon, a Trump ally, to tell him Mr Jagland was due to meet Putin and Lavrov and was then staying overnight with him at his mansion in Paris.” [Emphasis added]

Epstein, of course, died under deeply suspicious circumstances in jail while Trump was president (and now Epstein’s partner in crime, Ghislaine Maxwell, has been moved to a country club type of facility where she reportedly spends the days training puppies). As Republican consultant Harlan Hill noted on Twitter at the time of Epstein’s supposed suicide:

“Dead men tell no tales. Just as Jeffrey Epstein starts to name names, he decides to kill himself? Mkay. Totally believable.”

So, if Epstein had given Putin video of Trump having sex with underage girls, and Trump knows it and has for decades, how might that have changed Trump’s behavior?

Might it provoke him to hang a photo of Putin in the White House?

Or go along with Putin’s daily slaughter of Ukrainian children?

Give Putin’s top diplomat information that burned a spy and an anti-Russia operation?

Tell the world that he trusts Putin over the US intelligence services?

Put a Putin-friendly conspiracy fan in charge of all US intelligence?

Severely damage NATO, a perpetual thorn in Putin’s side?

Shatter our alliances with the EU and other democratic nations in ways that may well last for generations?

Refuse to make America’s dues payments to the UN, causing that body to have to shut down, perhaps permanently, this summer?

Steal US intelligence secrets, including top-secret nuclear information, and put it in a place where Russian spies or their associates can easily access and photocopy it?

Unleash ICE in a way that turns Americans against each other leading to the “Second US Civil War” that Russian media and Putin’s #2 man (Medvedev) have been gleefully predicting?

Gut America’s soft power around the world by shutting down USAID, leading to the deaths of hundreds of thousands mostly children, in the Third World while opening opportunities for Putin and Xi to pick them up as new alliances?

In 2019 The Washington Post revealed that, throughout his first presidency, Donald Trump was having secret phone conversations with Putin (over 20 have been identified so far, including one just days before the 2020 election).

The Moscow Project from the American Progress Action Fund documents more than 270 known contacts between Russia-linked operatives and members of the Trump campaign and transition team, as well as at least 38 known meetings, all just leading up to the 2016 election.

The manager of his 2016 campaign, Paul Manafort — who was previously paid tens of millions by Vladimir Putin’s people to install a pro-Putin puppet as Ukraine’s president in 2010 — has admitted that he was regularly feeding secret inside-campaign strategy and polling information to Russian intelligence via the oligarch who typically paid him on their behalf.

Throughout the campaign, he regularly let Russia know where Trump needed specific types of help, and how, and when.

With that help, an army of bots, shills, and trolls were unleashed on social media to successfully swing the young white male vote toward Trump.

Trump pardoned Manafort, which got him out of prison. He’s still fabulously rich from his work for Russia and his unpaid efforts to elect Trump.

As The New York Times noted in 2020:

“[I]nvestigators found enough there to declare that Mr. Manafort created ‘a grave counterintelligence threat’ by sharing inside information about the presidential race with Mr. Kilimnik and the Russian and [pro-Russian] Ukrainian oligarchs whom he served.”

There is no known parallel to this behavior by any president in American history — one could argue it easily exceeds Benedict Arnold’s audacity — and criminally bringing stolen top secret documents to Mar-a-Lago is just the tip of the iceberg.

The Washington Post reported that Trump had a habit of carrying top-secret information that could severely damage our national security, leaving it in hotel rooms in hostile nations.

Was he bringing these documents with him to sell? Or just to show to leaders or oligarchs in those countries to impress them? Or because Putin told him to?

Trump doesn’t put all that effort into hauling things around unless he’s terrified.

“Boxes of documents even came with Trump on foreign travel,” The Post noted, “following him to hotel rooms around the world — including countries considered foreign adversaries of the United States.”

When Robert Mueller’s team tried to investigate Trump’s ties to Russia and his possibly sharing sensitive military information with Putin, they were stonewalled.

The Mueller Report identified ten specific instances of Trump trying to obstruct the investigation, including offering the bribe of a pardon to Paul Manafort, asking FBI Director Comey to “go easy” on General Flynn after Flynn’s dinner with Putin, and directing Attorney General Jeff Sessions to limit Mueller’s ability to investigate Trump’s connections to Russia.

As the Mueller Report noted:

“The President launched public attacks on the investigation and individuals involved in it who could possess evidence adverse to the President, while in private the President engaged in a series of targeted efforts to control the investigation.“For instance, the President attempted to remove the Attorney General; he sought to have Attorney General Sessions un-recuse himself and limit the investigation; he sought to prevent public disclosure of information about the June 9, 2016 meeting between Russians and campaign officials; and he used public forums to attack potential witnesses who might offer adverse information and to praise witnesses who declined to cooperate with the government.”

It adds, detailing Trump’s specific Obstruction of Justice crimes:

“These actions ranged from efforts to remove the Special Counsel and to reverse the effect of the Attorney General’s recusal; to the attempted use of official power to limit the scope of the investigation; to direct and indirect contacts with witnesses with the potential to influence their testimony.”

There are, after all, credible assertions from American intelligence that when Trump was elected, members of Russian intelligence and Putin’s inner circle were literally partying in Moscow, celebrating a victory they believed they made happen.

And apparently Putin and his intelligence operatives had good reason to be popping the champagne in November, 2016. They were quickly paid off in a big way.

In his first months in office, Trump outed an Israeli spy to the Russian Ambassador in what he thought was going to be a “secret Oval Office meeting” (the Russians released the photo to the press), resulting in MOSAD having to “burn” that spy.

The undercover agent was apparently working in Syria that year against the Russians, who were embroiled in the midst of Assad’s Civil War and indiscriminately bombing Aleppo into rubble (creating a brown-skinned refugee crisis in Europe, which both Putin and Orbán exploited).

That, in turn, prompted the CIA to worry that a longtime American spy buried deep in the Kremlin was similarly vulnerable to Trump handing him over to Putin.

As CNN noted (when the story leaked two years later):

“The source was considered the highest level source for the US inside the Kremlin, high up in the national security infrastructure, according to the source familiar with the matter and a former senior intelligence official.“According to CNN’s sources, the spy had access to Putin and could even provide images of documents on the Russian leader’s desk.”

The Washington Post reported, after a leak six months later, that when Trump met privately for those two hours with Putin the CIA went into “panic mode.” A US intelligence official told the Post:

“There was this gasp’ at the CIA’s Langley, Virginia headquarters. You literally had people in panic mode watching it at Langley. On all floors. Just shock.”

Three weeks after Trump’s July 16, 2018 meeting with Putin in Helsinki, Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) made a solo trip to Moscow to personally hand-deliver a document or package of documents from Trump to Putin. Its contents are still unknown, although Paul told the press it was a “personal” letter of some sort.

Paul has also consistently taken Trump’s and Putin’s side with regard to the Ukraine war: he single-handedly blocked a $40 billion military aid package in the Senate. When the FBI searched Mar-a-Lago, he responded with a call for the repeal of the Espionage Act, which Jack Smith was prepared to charge Trump under. Paul further suggested the FBI may have “planted” Secret documents at Mar-a-Lago.

Ten days after Paul’s trip to Moscow, The New York Times reported that the CIA was worried because their sources inside Moscow had suddenly “gone silent”:

“The full reasons the sources have gone silent are not known,” the Times reported, but Trump having intentionally burned a man working for the FBI — whose job at that time was to find and reveal Russian agents involved in or close to the Trump campaign — may also have had something to do with it:

“[C]urrent and former officials said the exposure of sources inside the United States has also complicated matters,” noted the Times. “This year, the identity of an F.B.I. informant, Stefan Halper, became public after [Trump-loyal MAGA Republican] House lawmakers sought information on him and the White House allowed the information to be shared. Mr. Halper, an American academic based in Britain, had been sent to talk to Trump campaign advisers who were under F.B.I. scrutiny for their ties to Russia.”

Things were picking up the following year, in 2019, as Putin was planning his invasion of Ukraine while Trump was preparing for the 2020 election.

In July 2019, Trump had conversations with five foreign leaders during and just before a presidential visit that month to Mar-a-Lago; they included Putin and the Emir of Qatar.

As The Washington Post noted in an article titled “Trump’s communications with foreign leader are part of whistleblower complaint that spurred standoff between spy chief and Congress”:

On the last day of that month, July 31, Trump had another private conversation with Putin.

The White House spokespeople told Congress and the press that Trump said that he and Putin discussed “wildfires” and “trade between the nations.” No droids in this car…

“Top American counterintelligence officials warned every C.I.A. station and base around the world last week,” the Times’ story’s lede began, “about troubling numbers of informants recruited from other countries to spy for the United States being captured or killed, people familiar with the matter said.“The message, in an unusual top secret cable, said that the C.I.A.’s counterintelligence mission center had looked at dozens of cases in the last several years involving foreign informants who had been killed, arrested or most likely compromised. Although brief, the cable laid out the specific number of agents executed by rival intelligence agencies — a closely held detail that counterintelligence officials typically do not share in such cables.”

In the years since, Trump continues to maintain a close relationship with Putin; most recently he revealed that he’d asked “a favor” of the Russian dictator to “pause” his murderous, war-crime bombing of civilian infrastructure in Ukraine “for one week.” Putin, being in the power position, chose to laugh at Trump and continued his assault on the nation, although he did throw Trump a bone by pausing his hits on Kiev for a few days.

These aren’t just “a few bad judgment calls” or a president with “strange foreign policy instincts.” These stories (and literally hundreds of others) point to a man who’s behaved, consistently and predictably, like someone under leverage, someone whose personal fear of exposure of some sort of major crime — like the ones we know Epstein was holding over other billionaires — outweighs his loyalty to the nation he swore to serve.

If Americans don’t demand real investigations, genuine accountability, and impeachment and jail time for what sure looks like the greatest counterintelligence failure in our history, we may lose what’s left of our democracy before the 2028 elections can fix things.

If Democrats can take control of either branch of Congress and if Schumer and Jeffries get spine transplants and begin a serious investigation into Trump’s destruction of the United States and our historic role in the world, they’ll have enough to keep them busy for years.

This is not about politics or personality. It’s about whether a country can survive being led by someone who looks captured and compromised by a foreign power. If even half of this is true, then staying quiet is the same as going along with it.

We must demand real investigations and real consequences, or accept that the presidency can be bought, blackmailed, and used against the country itself.

Let your elected officials know your thoughts on this, and don’t forget to demand your elected Republicans step up and defend America, too. You can reach your member of Congress and both your Senators via the congressional switchboard at: (202) 224-3121.

See you in the streets on March 28th!

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kos 11 25

### Ukraine Invasion Day 1,365: RU uses cluster munitions against civilians

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AN 10 25

CONTEXT

A weekend call between President Donald Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy devolved into a "shouting match," and Russian state media pundits are now declaring it the result of Russian President Vladimir Putin's influence over Trump.

Mediaite reported Monday on a recent segment by CNN's Erin Burnett, in which she highlighted comments by Russian media bragging about Trump being captive to Putin. Burnett said Trump's "complete 180" on supporting Ukraine in its war with Russia prompted Russian propagandists to refer to the U.S. president as "Putin's puppet."

Burnett then played a clip captured by Daily Beast columnist Julia Davis, who runs the Russian Media Monitor account. Davis reported that on the show "Sunday Evening with Vladimir Solovyov," Trump is simply playing Putin's game when it comes to Ukraine.

"Putin understands Trump all too well. Trump doesn’t understand Putin," the guest said. "Putin can manipulate him very well and lead Trump by his nose."

During the call with Zelenskyy, Trump didn't commit to sending Ukraine long-range Tomahawk cruise missiles despite earlier suggestions that he may do so. Davis wrote Monday that one Russian media host said that Trump was simply teasing Zelenskyy with the potential for Tomahawks "like dangling a carrot in front of a donkey." He further opined that in the coming summit in Budapest, Hungary between Trump and Putin, if Zelenskyy ends up attending it will be "solely to sign his capitulation."

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As CNBC reported, the source of the tension on the call between Trump and Zelenskyy came from Trump insisting that the Ukrainian leader accept Putin's conquest of Ukraine's Donbas territory in the east for the sake of ceasing hostilities. The initial 2022 invasion was over the Donbas territory, and came eight years after Russia illegally annexed Ukraine's Crimean peninsula.

“It’s cut up right now, I think 78 percent of the land is already taken by Russia," Trump said on Sunday. "They should stop right now at the battle lines. ... Go home, stop killing people and be done."

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an 10 25

ABC News Chief Washington Correspondent Jonathan Karl said MAGA firebrand Steve Bannon was communicating with President Donald Trump even as he sat in jail for contempt of Congress.

In his new book "Retribution," Karl reports Bannon managed to discreetly keep in touch with Trump and his camp during his 2024 prison stay through a "coded" system that allowed his daughter and top aide to pass along messages to Trump through the monitored email system he was allowed in prison.

"Bannon claims that an investigative officer at Danbury — an official he described as 'pure MAGA' — had warned him that his communications were being reviewed by 'Main Justice,' otherwise known as the Biden administration,” Karl wrote, according to ABC News.

"So he developed a coded system to let 'the girls' know which messages were to be passed on to Trump or to those around him, in particular the aide Boris Epshteyn: 'I had just a system to get to Boris, kind of in quasi-code, through [daughter Maureen] into [aide Grace Chong],' he said. Was there literally a code word? 'Well, we had — ' he began, before catching himself. 'I don’t — the Bureau of Prisons could go back through it. We had a way that they could get to him,'" Karl writes.

Karl reports Bannon remained an influence on Trump’s presidency after he was released from prison, and he was likely a source of Trump’s hostility toward Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy at a controversial meeting earlier this year.

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“In his book, Karl reported on a meeting of Trump's national security team shortly before Zelenskyy's visit to Washington in February where Trump stopped the meeting and asked then-national security adviser Michael Waltz to ‘get Steve Bannon’ on the phone,” ABC reports.

"Hey, Steve, I’ve got the boys here," Trump said. "I’m going to put you on speaker."

“Trump, keeping Bannon on speakerphone for half an hour, had the MAGA firebrand make his case to the national security team against the deal, and Zelenskyy, who he referred to as ‘that punk,’" according to ABC News.

“I f—— hate it," Bannon said, arguing that the deal "ties us to Ukraine."

"If that punk comes here, he’s going to want a security guarantee,” Bannon said of Zelenskyy to Trump and his top advisers. He told the group they "can’t trust Zelenskyy" or "any of the Europeans."

Karl claims in his book that the previously unreported conversation set the tone for Trump’s combative meeting in the Oval Office with Zelenskyy, which crumbled into a shouting match in front of reporters and international viewers.

“You’re not acting at all thankful,” Trump said to the Ukrainian leader, in contradiction of Zelenskyy thanking the U.S. profusely for weaponry and aid to defend itself against its Russian aggressor. Trump also accused Zelenskyy of “gambling with World War III,” despite Russia invading Ukraine in 2022.

Read the ABC News report at this link.

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AN 9 25

U.S. President Donald Trump's administration earned condemnation from Amnesty International on Thursday over its leaked plans to downplay human rights violations in countries favored by the American government.

News of the plan was originally reported on Wednesday by The Washington Post, which documented how the administration has been revising State Department reports on human rights in El Salvador, Israel, and Russia to "strike all references to LGBTQ+ individuals or crimes against them." The Post also added that "the descriptions of government abuses that do remain have been softened."

In the case of El Salvador, where the administration earlier this year began lawlessly shipping immigrants deported from the United States, the administration's report stated that were "no credible reports of significant human rights abuses" there, even though a State Department report under former President Joe Biden's administration issued last year documented "significant human rights issues" in the country.

Human rights violations against LGBTQ+ people were deleted from the State Department's report on Russia, while the report on Israel deleted references to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's corruption trial and to his government's threats to the country's independent judiciary.

Amanda Klasing, Amnesty International USA's national director of government relations and advocacy, ripped the administration for selectively whitewashing human rights records of nations favored by the president.

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"The leaked chapters of the latest Annual Human Rights Report reveal a disturbing effort by the Trump administration to purposefully fail to fully capture the alarming and growing attacks on human rights in certain countries around the globe," she said. "Alarmingly, we understand that the mandate from Secretary Rubio was... to go back and wipe out portions of the reports that had already been written—to delete stories from survivors of human rights violations."

Klasing went on to accuse the administration of turning the human rights report "into yet another tool to obscure facts to push forward anti-rights policy choices."

She also emphasized that "it would be a travesty and subversion of congressional intent to downplay or ignore human rights violations faced by marginalized populations including refugees and asylum seekers, women and girls, Indigenous people, ethnic and religious minorities, and LGBTQI+ people throughout the world."

An unnamed State Department official this week told the Post that the administration was merely simplifying the human rights reports to make them more "readable."

"The 2024 Human Rights report has been restructured in a way that removes redundancies, increases report readability, and is more responsive to the legislative mandate that underpins the report," the official said. "The human rights report focuses on core issues."

NOW READ:DOJ memo reveals Trump’s dark plan for a new Red Scare — and it may be perfectly legal

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RED CARPET ALASKA, BEAST RIDE; SHOWS OFF PUTIN PIX AT wh 8 25 25

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AN 8 25

Vice President JD Vance is facing criticism for reshaping the historical record of the past century of wars in a way seen as aiding Vladimir Putin, and for appearing to defend Russia by refusing to denounce the Russian President over the bombing of a U.S. factory in Ukraine.

Speaking to NBC News’ Kristen Welker on Sunday, the Vice President was asked if he was “enraged” when he learned that Russia had “targeted an American company based in Ukraine?”

“I don’t — I’m — I don’t like it, Kristen, but this is a war, and this is why we want to stop the killing,” was Vance’s response, “The Russians have done a lot of things that we don’t like, a lot of civilians have died. We’ve condemned that stuff from the get-go, and frankly, President Trump has done more to apply pressure and to apply economic leverage to the Russians.”

Some were stunned by Vance’s “this is a war” remark.

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Vance then went on to attack former President Joe Biden’s handling of Putin’s illegal war against Ukraine, while praising President Trump for allegedly ending a half-dozen wars.

Russia is now refusing to meet with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, despite President Trump’s claim to the contrary, the Vice President also said, “I think the Russians have made significant concessions to President Trump for the first time in three and a half years of this conflict.”

“They’ve actually been willing to be flexible on some of their core demands,” Vance added. “They’ve talked about what would be necessary to end the war.”

Critics disputed Vance’s “significant concessions” claim.

Political science Professor Maria Popova, wrote: “For the umpteenth time: asking for a piece of Ukraine they cannot conquer in return for (maybe) pinky promising not to take another piece they cannot conquer is NOT a concession. Ru[ssia] has not made a single concession. Vance is lying through his teeth. He cannot be this obtuse.”

French civil servant Nicolas Tenzer, a senior expert in international and security issues, responded to Vance’s “concessions” claim: “We knew it from the outset. Full ideological alignment. Vance is cozying up to Putin. Period.”

Later, the Vice President was asked, “If Russia is allowed to keep any of the territory that it illegally seized, what message does that send to China? Does it give China a green light to invade Taiwan?”

Vance insisted (video below) that it’s up to Ukraine if it cedes territory to Russia after being illegally invaded, in an effort to end the war, but then added, “this is how wars ultimately get settled.”

“If you go back to World War II, if you go back to World War I, if you go back to every major conflict in human history, they all end with some kind of negotiation,” he claimed.

Critics, including experts on war, corrected the Vice President.

“This…is not at all how World War II ended,” wrote The Atlantic’s Tom Nichols, a retired U.S. Naval War College

professor and an expert on Russia.

“Fact check,” wrote James Robert Carroll, Washington Bureau Chief of the Capital News Service, “World War II ended with the unconditional surrenders of Germany and Japan.”

“And since Vance also mentioned WWI,” Nichols added, “the Treaty of Versailles was drafted by the victors and handed to the already-defeated Germans as an ultimatim.”

“Everybody remembers that seminal moment in WW2,” snarked The Bulwark’s Tim Miller, “with FDR in his wheelchair rolling out the red carpet for Hitler discussing which portions of France he will get in exchange for peace.”

Professor Larry Sabato, Director of the University of Virginia Center for Politics, wrote: “In both Europe and the Pacific, Germany and Japan surrendered unconditionally—no negotiation whatsoever—just as the Allies insisted in 1945.”

“People need to stop thinking that Vance didn’t know he’s wrong. He knows. He’s just assuming that Trump voters are too stupid to know better, and judging from the replies around here, he’s making a good bet,” Nichols observed.

Watch the video below or at this link.

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no lnx

Trump just crossed a line no other president ever dared to

:{:{Thom Hartmann August 21, 2025}:

With the echo of Vladimir Putin’s whisper in his ear, in front of President Volodymyr Zelensky and seven other European leaders, Trump announced he’s preparing an executive order to ban mail-in ballots and even outlaw voting machines across America ahead of the 2026 midterm elections.

Sitting in front of the Chancellor of Germany and the Prime Minister of Great Britain — both nations that allow and even encourage mail-in voting — Trump said:

“Mail-in ballots are corrupt mail-in ballots. You can never have a real democracy with mail-in ballots, and we as a Republican Party are gonna do everything possible that we get rid of mail-in ballots. We're gonna start with an executive order that’s being written right now by the best lawyers in the country to end mail-in ballots because they’re corrupt. And, you know that we’re the only country in the world, I believe, I may be wrong, but just about the only country in the world that uses it because of what’s happened.”

This is not just a partisan maneuver. It’s an open assault on the Constitution, a grotesque power grab, and a direct threat to the foundation of democracy itself. And it’s happening in real time, in broad daylight, with a criminally compliant Republican Party cheering him on.

Republicans hate mail-in voting for multiple reasons.

First, for people who’re paid by the hour, mail-in voting increases participation because they can fill out their ballots at the kitchen table after work. Republicans don’t want people to vote, and have introduced more than 400 pieces of legislation in the past three years nationwide to make voting more difficult.

Second, mail-in voting makes voters better informed and less vulnerable to sound-byte TV ads because, while perusing that ballot at the kitchen table, they can look up candidates on their laptops and get more detail and information. Republicans hate informed voters and rely heavily on often-dishonest advertisements to swing voters.

Third, mail-in ballots — because they arrive in the mail weeks before the election — give voters an early chance to discover if they’ve been the victim of Republican voter-roll purges, one of their favorite tactics to pre-rig elections.

Fourth, mail-in ballots end the GOP trick of understaffing and under-resourcing polling places in minority neighborhoods, leading to hours-long lines. Hispanic voters generally wait 150 percent longer than white voters, and Black voters must endure a 200 percent longer wait; mail-in ballots put an end to this favorite of the GOP’s voter suppression efforts.

Trump, knowing all this, couldn’t help himself yesterday, finally blurting out his real reason for wanting to end mail-in voting in America:

“We got to stop mail-in voting, and the Republicans have to lead the charge. The Democrats want it because they have horrible policy. If you [don’t] have mail-in voting, you’re not gonna have many Democrats get elected. That’s bigger than anything having to do with redistricting, believe me.”

Once again, Trump is ignoring the law and the Constitution, which explicitly delegates the administration of elections to the states and Congress, not presidential executive orders.

That’s not some vague norm or debatable tradition: it’s written into the very DNA of our system of government. States set the rules, unless Congress — not the president — overrides them. States decide how their citizens vote, as the Constitution’s Article I, Section 4, Clause 1 dictates:

“The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations, except as to the Places of chusing Senators.”

Yet here we have a president declaring that he alone will dictate the terms of elections nationwide, in direct violation of two centuries of law and precedent. This is not only unconstitutional, it’s tyrannical.

When a president asserts powers he does not have, with the full knowledge that they aren’t his to wield, he’s announcing to the country that the rule of law no longer constrains him. That’s the definition of dictatorship.

And what makes this even more obscene is the source of Trump’s inspiration. According to multiple reports, Trump’s sudden rant on mail-in ballots followed a private conversation with Putin, who reportedly told Trump that mail-in voting was the reason he lost in 2020.

The man occupying the Oval Office is now taking advice about how to rig American elections from the very dictator who has spent his career poisoning journalists, jailing opponents, and staging sham referendums to annex entire countries.

It’s bad enough that Trump has always been Putin’s toady, but now we see the Kremlin effectively writing U.S. election law. If Jefferson, Madison, or Lincoln were alive to hear this, they would spit.

Mail-in voting is not a scam. It’s not a trick. It’s how tens of millions of Americans — Republicans, Democrats, independents — exercise their right to vote.

Seniors rely on it. People with disabilities rely on it. Military service members overseas rely on it. Hourly workers who can’t take a day off rely on it. Parents with young children rely on it. Rural voters, who often live miles from polling places, rely on it.

And every study, every audit, every bipartisan commission has found mail-in voting to be secure, safe, and reliable. Five states do it exclusively; we’ve had it more than two decades here in Oregon with nary a single scandal or problem. To call it fraudulent is a lie. To ban it is voter suppression on a scale this country has never seen.

And voting machines? Trump is openly declaring that he’ll return us to mind-numbingly slow hand-counting of ballots, a tactic straight from the authoritarian playbook designed to create chaos, delays, and endless opportunities to dispute the results in 2026 and 2028.

I’ve had concerns about voting machines and Windows-based tabulators for decades, but my solution isn’t to end them. Instead, we should use machines owned by the government itself, generating paper ballots and operating transparently on open-source software with every election subject to sample audits.

Instead of trying to make elections more secure, Trump’s laying the groundwork for election theft in plain sight. This isn’t subtle: it’s the loud declaration of a man preparing to overturn the will of the voters, with the blessing of a foreign adversary, and with a Republican Party too craven to object.

If Trump succeeds in outlawing mail-in ballots and voting machines, millions of Americans will simply not be able to vote. Seniors in nursing homes, service members abroad, people with disabilities, single parents, rural citizens: they will all be disenfranchised overnight. And make no mistake: that’s the point.

This is not about integrity. This is not about security. This is about shrinking the electorate to a size that Republicans believe will guarantee them victory forever.

Republicans know they can’t win free and fair elections in much of America. They know their policies are unpopular. They know their agenda is toxic.

So they cheat. They gerrymander districts into grotesque shapes that make a mockery of representative government. They purge voters from the rolls. They criminalize voter registration drives. They intimidate voters at the polls.

And now, at Trump’s command and Putin’s urging, they want to ban the very methods by which millions of Americans vote. This is not politics as usual. This is the slow-motion strangulation of democracy.

Every American who believes in self-government must rise up against this. Governors must prepare to defy such an executive order in court and in practice. State legislatures must assert their constitutional authority.

Attorneys general must be ready to sue. And ordinary citizens must take to the streets, the phones, the ballot box, and every civic space available to declare that this will not stand. Because if it does, we’ll have surrendered the very essence of the American experiment.

We’ve been here before in spirit if not in form.

Ronald Reagan’s campaign cut a deal with the Iranian Ayatollahs to hang onto the hostages until after the election. Richard Nixon tried to sabotage our democracy by killing Lyndon Johnson's peace negotiations with Vietnam and followed-up with burglaries and cover-ups when he thought Democrats were onto him. He was forced to resign. George W. Bush and the GOP stopped the counting of votes in Florida and handed the presidency to themselves. That assault has scarred our politics for decades.

But never — not once in 250 years — has a president openly declared that he will strip states of their constitutional right to run elections, end mail-in voting, and ban voting machines altogether. This is unprecedented, authoritarian, and it must be stopped.

It’s also just one in a broad spectrum of attacks Republicans have launched against your right to vote, with the SAVE Act — which will prevent women from voting if their birth certificate and drivers’ license have different names on them and they’ve never had an official change-of-name in the courts — teed up in the US Senate. All while millions are being purged from the voting rolls as you read these words.

This is the moment when the American people must decide whether they still believe in democracy. If we shrug, if we accept this as just more noise from a corrupt and broken con man, we will lose it. If we wait for someone else to act, we will lose it. If we tell ourselves the courts will save us, we may be bitterly disappointed.

The survival of democracy has never been guaranteed. It has always required vigilance, courage, and action. Now it requires all three from each of us.

Trump’s promised executive order is not just a legal maneuver. It’s a declaration of war against the American people. It’s the dream of every tyrant: to control who votes and who does not, to dictate the rules of elections so that the outcome is predetermined.

What Putin and Trump are proposing is not democracy. It’s not freedom. It’s not America.

And the Republicans who are enabling this treachery are as guilty as Trump himself. They’re betraying their oaths, their constituents, and our country. History will remember them not as conservatives or patriots, but as the gravediggers of our Republic.

This is the line. This is the moment. We cannot let Trump and his cronies bulldoze democracy into the ground at Putin’s command. Every patriot, every progressive, every independent, every honest conservative who still believes in the Constitution must join together and say no.

No to dictatorship. No to disenfranchisement. No to treason.

If we fail now, there may not be another chance.

NOW READ: Trump's new 'emergency' could be his downfall — if Democrats exploit it

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AN 8 25

The Atlantic reports courts will not likely let President Donald Trump destroy mail-in voting, but that won’t stop him from gumming up elections.

The president appears to have taken his most recent idea for ending mail-in voting from Russian authoritarian Vladimir Putin, who told him “you can’t have an honest election with mail-in voting,” according to a Fox News interview with host Sean Hannity.

Days later, Trump posted on Truth Social that he would ban “MAIL-IN BALLOTS” in an “EXECUTIVE ORDER to help bring HONESTY to the 2026 Midterm Elections.” He later said in an Oval Office press conference that: “We’re going to end mail-in voting. It’s a fraud.”

Such an order would have little legal power, writes Atlantic reporter Quinta Jurecic. “The American system for administering elections is highly decentralized: The work of deciding how people should vote and of helping them do so is largely carried out at the state and local levels, with the federal government playing only a minor role.”

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Banning mail-in ballots is a presidential power that doesn’t exist, but Jurecic said Trump can still make an “enormous mess” by “MacGyvering” a clumsy workaround. The Justice Department could threaten state and local election officials with “baseless investigations” in an effort at intimidation.

“Prosecutors would encounter the small problem that no criminal statutes obviously apply to an election official legally handing out mail-in ballots. But the risk of a criminal investigation, even a meritless one, could still frighten election administrators,” Jurecic said.

Trump’s “hatred of mail-in ballots dates back to 2016,” said Jurecic, when he complained of Colorado’s shift to all-mail voting. He also tried to claim that “fraudulent” mail-in votes stole his presidency — an idea that become a key claim of the Big Lie that Trump won the 2020 election.

But his animosity is knocking up against Republican voters’ increasing use of mail-in voting in their own elections, and Jurecic, adding that Trump’s advisors “may have to struggle to contain him.”

“The risk created by Trump’s attacks on mail-in ballots is less that Trump will actually succeed in limiting access to the franchise and that such limitations will actually tilt the playing field toward Republicans, and more that the president will … kick up enough doubt and confusion that a significant number of Americans no longer trust an election’s results,” Jurecic said.

Read the full Atlantic report at this link.

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note kim jung un, bibi and putin all disobey trump; ordered no strike iran

an 6 25

'Kremlin-owned puppet': Critics slam Trump for jetting off to Canada to defend Putin at G7

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1/3 BOMBERS GONE? 1 MILLION KIA?! VS 40 AFGHANISTAN?

AN 6 25

The Hill reports MAGA podcaster and former Trump White House chief strategist Steve Bannoncalled for U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), to be “arrested” if he doesn’t stop traveling overseas and encouraging Ukraine to defend itself against the ongoing Russian invasion.

Bannon, who has praised Russian leader Vladimir Putin’s anti-LGBTQ policies and his “anti-woke” agenda in Russia, was also furious at Ukraine’s weekend drone attack on Russia’s bombing fleet. The strategic attack destroyed 40 aircraft deep inside Russian territory. Bannon said the White House should condemn Ukraine’s military response to the invasion and put a collar on Graham’s diplomacy of encouragement.

“The White House has to condemn this immediately and pull all support and tell Lindsey Graham to come home or we are going to put you under arrest when you come home. You’re stirring it up,” Bannon said Monday on his ‘War Room’ podcast.

He added that Graham’s cheering of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky last week amounted to undermining President Donald Trump. He also slammed Graham’s legislation sanctioning Russia and other countries that buy Russian products.

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“Lindsey Graham’s over there saying, ‘Hey, forget Trump. I got the House and the Senate. We’re going to pass [the legislation]. You’re going to see something in a couple of days,’” Bannon said.

“He’s stirring it up over there,” he repeated.

Bannon’s demand comes just as CNN anchors speculated on Russia requesting a limited ceasefire on Monday in response to the attack. Up until this year, Ukraine had kept most of its drone attacks close to the Ukraine/Russia boundary, or it reserved drone strikes for Russian positions inside Ukraine.

Monday, on CNN, Former U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense Evelyn Farkas, called the barrage “a turning point” in the war, but she was not ready to say it would deter more Russian attacks.

Read the full report from the Hill at this link.

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RWI 7 25 -->

NO LNX

How US Christian nationalists are exporting their agenda to Europe

(RNS) — A new report follows the money as it moves from reactionary advocacy groups and think tanks to groups waging war on women’s equality and related causes.

Katherine Stewart

July 7, 2025

(RNS) — A report on the state of reproductive rights presented to journalists, policy wonks and activists in Brussels on June 26 begins with a quote from the 15th-century general and military theorist Raimondo Montecuccoli: “To wage war, you need first of all money; second, you need money; and third, you also need money.”

The 158-page report, “The Next Wave: How Religious Extremism Is Reclaiming Power,” follows in meticulous detail the flow of money as it moves from reactionary advocacy groups, think tanks and strategic litigators masquerading as philanthropies — the modern equivalents of the wealthy royal houses and their priestly hierarchies of Montecuccoli’s day — into groups waging war on women’s equality and related causes.

RELATED: At Turning Point USA’s AmFest, Charlie Kirk takes a victory lap for Trump election

Compiled by the researcher Neil Datta and his team of experts at the European Parliamentary Forum on Sexual and Reproductive Rights, a network of European lawmakers committed to advancing gender equality and sexual and reproductive health, the study follows similar reports published in 2018 and 2021. It shows substantial growth over a relatively short span of time in a broad-based movement opposing not only sexual and reproductive rights, but access to comprehensive health education and LGBTQ+ rights.

Between 2019 and 2023, the report finds, the equivalent of $1.18 billion flowed into 275 frontline groups on the attack. The EU countries contributing the largest amounts were Hungary ($172.7 million), France ($165.7 million), the United Kingdom ($156 million), Poland ($90.7 million) and Spain ($66.4 million). In addition, funding from Russia effectively doubled from $42.9 million in 2019 to $86.7 million in 2022; spending in Europe by U.S. Christian right groups averaged $22 million per year.

“The Next Wave: How Religious Extremism Is Reclaiming Power” report cover. (Courtesy image)

Much of the money flowing into the movement came from private sources, but some represents a transfer of public funding into sectarian groups. About half of the money went into advocacy and messaging organizations. The rest went into what the report labels “anti-gender” services — work done by grant-making groups, think tanks, legal advocacy and miscellaneous other campaigns.

As the EPF report notes, Russia’s principal strategic goal in supporting these causes is to infiltrate right-wing political parties and movements in Europe and then to steer their activism in ways favorable to Russian state interests. The Russian regime also helps right-wing European actors reinforce its own brand of Christian nationalism in their countries.

Its report cites a document, identified as a Mandate, that emerged from an influential March 2024 gathering of the XXV World Russian People’s Council (WRPC) titled “The Present and Future of the Russian World.” Overseen by Moscow’s Patriarch Kirill, the leader of the Russian Orthodox Church’s leader, the gathering aims to guide Russia’s political class as well as the Russian Orthodox Church on policy issues. The new Mandate “referred to Russia’s international role as ‘the ‘Restrainer,’ protecting the world from evil and from the ‘onslaught of globalism and the victory of the West, which has fallen into Satanism,’” the EPF report said.

The Mandate also “refers to the Russian aggression against Ukraine as a ‘Holy War,’’ and states that the borders of the ‘Russian world’ are ‘much wider than the state borders of both the present-day Russian federation,’” according to the report.

According to the EPF report, the Mandate also declared that “the fight against abortion should be placed at the center of all state policy” along with the “cleans(ing) of the destructive ideological concepts and attitudes, primarily Western ones.”

By 2024, according to the EPF report, nearly all Orthodox churches, particularly those with ties to the ROC, had become active in anti-rights mobilization.

The American groups that turned up in the report due to their involvement in Europe are some of the same ones that have aggressively pushed Christian nationalist ideology on the home front. The Alliance Defending Freedom, which played a key role in overturning Roe v. Wade and defended discrimination against a gay couple in the Masterpiece Cake Shop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission case, has become a major player in European litigation, crafting “freedom of speech” cases, for instance, out of the harassment of women outside reproductive health clinics in the U.K.

Other U.S. groups active in Europe include 40 Days of Life, which stages anti-abortion harassment activities; the Heritage Foundation, which forges partnerships with conservative European think tanks; and Heartbeat International, whose “crisis pregnancy centers” offer some forms of support for pregnant women while dissuading them from seeking abortions.

RELATED: Ukraine strips Orthodox leader of citizenship, alleging links to Moscow

The funding for most U.S. activism in Europe, according to the report, can be traced to a handful of hyper-wealthy individuals and families, such as members of the DeVos and Prince families, the Walters family, the Uihlein family, the Green family, the Eldred family and the Koch brothers.

However, as Datta noted in Brussels, “We can’t just blame Americans. A lot of money is coming from European sources.”

Much of this support, the report notes, is from a cadre built from old European money and titles. “Dozens of archdukes, countesses, princes, and princesses appear as avid supporters of religious extremist causes which may at first appear exotic until one understands that this involvement demonstrates a continuity going back to a past almost forgotten in 21st century Europe,” Datta writes.

These aristocrats bring “a generalized distain for democracy and liberal values, a worldview based on religious legitimation for inherited social, political, and economic inequality; and being part of a vast, transnational and endogamous network,” which Datta describes as an “Aristo-clerical network.”

In France, private foundations controlled by Catholic families with generational wealth invest heavily in anti-abortion and other conservative political causes. Similar patterns are evident in Germany, Spain, Hungary, Austria and the U.K. Though lacking a native aristocracy, the U.S. has the next best thing in Leonard Leo and Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, both of whom have connections with far-right European aristocrats such as Princess Gloria von Thurn und Taxis, the widow of one of the largest landowners in Germany who has close connections with former Trump adviser Steve Bannon.

Stacks of currency. (Photo by Mufid Majnun/Unsplash/Creative Commons)

But in recent years, a nouveau riche elite has emerged in the technology sector. “Tech bros” such as Elon Musk and Peter Thiel, along with Fredrik Wester in Sweden and Marek Spanel in the Czech Republic, have become significant funders of conservative activism, along with other oligarchic business leaders such as Lőrinc Mészáros, who owns Hungary’s MHB bank and is a longtime associate of Viktor Orbán, and Guillaume de Thieulloy, whose organization, Fonds de dotation GT Editions, finances digital infrastructure for ultra-conservative Catholic media in France, along with far-right political parties.

Some reactionary groups have learned to siphon money from public sources as well, typically from sympathetic illiberal national and regional governments. This state money goes to favored think tanks, advocacy groups and service providers that in turn bolster their own political legitimacy. Hungary and Poland were leaders in this sector, but regional governments in Spain and elsewhere have developed the same patronage model.

Facilitating this fusion of reactionary political parties with reactionary religion has been the rise of what Datta calls “ChONGOs,”—church-based non-governmental organizations. These groups typically pretend that they are offering scientific or fact-based information and services, though in reality their aims are to promote a certain theological vision of the proper order of society.

OMB’s Russell Vought, the Christian ‘nation-ist’ driving Project 2025 and DOGE

Honed to a sharp edge in the U.S. and Russia, the illiberal ideas and methods deployed across Europe are also being exported to Africa and beyond. What is most disturbing, perhaps, is the use of massive propagandistic operations of the sort pioneered by America’s authoritarian movement.

“This isn’t a backlash or a culture war,” Datta states in the report. “It’s a strategy.”

(Katherine Stewart writes about the intersection of faith and politics. Her latest book is “Money, Lies and God.” The views expressed in this commentary do not necessarily reflect those of Religion News Service.)

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an 6 25

In late May — four months into Donald Trump's second presidency — The Guardian reported that record numbers of Americans are applying for residency or citizenship in the U.K. Plenty of Americans are looking at countries in Continental Europe as well, and liberal American actress Rosie O'Donnell — a major critic of Trump — is now living in the Republic of Ireland and has no plans to return to the United States anytime soon.

But many observers of international politics are warning Americans who have hopes of becoming expatriates that Europe has its far-right populists as well, from Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán to National Rally leader Marine Le Pen in France to Germany's Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party.

In an article published on June 1, Axios' Tal Axelrod examines the alliances between far-right MAGA Republicans in the U.S. and far-right movements in Europe.

"MAGA media heavyweights are intervening in elections around the world, increasingly obsessed with exporting President Trump's brand of right-wing populism beyond America's borders," Axelrod reports. "Why it matters: What began as a nationalist reaction to America's perceived decline has evolved into a global ideological crusade. Now at the apex of its domestic power, MAGA is rallying behind candidates who share its views on immigration, globalism and the fight for 'western civilization.'"

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The Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) has held events in Hungary and Poland, and Axelrod cites examples of Trump allies promoting far-right movements in Romania and Germany.

"MAGA leaders — including Vice President Vance — excoriated Romanian authorities for annulling the results of December's election and banning the leading far-right candidate over allegations of Russian interference," Axelrod reports. "In last week's rerun, MAGA podcasters like Jack Posobiec and Steve Bannon rallied behind pro-Trump candidate George Simion, who even described himself as running 'on the MAGA ticket. Simion ultimately fell short to centrist Bucharest Mayor Nicusor Dan, a result that MAGA blamed on globalist meddling…. Vance, Elon Musk and scores of pro-Trump influencers have championed the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, which had its best-ever showing in elections earlier this year."

Axelrod adds, "Secretary of State Marco Rubio condemned German intelligence's since-retracted decision to classify AfD as a right-wing extremist organization, calling it 'tyranny in disguise.'"

Axelrod points out, however, that "MAGA's influence abroad has yielded mixed results."

According to the Axios reporter, "The AfD has been shut out of government in Germany, Simion lost in Romania, the liberal candidate is favored to win in South Korea.… A win in Poland would be a major symbolic victory — and a sign MAGA's global playbook might finally be working."

*Read Tal Axelrod's full Axios article at this link.

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MMA Steve Bannon and his guest agree: Trump should suspend habeas corpus if the Supreme Court doesn't end nationwide injunctions

Rogan O'Handley: "President Trump will have no choice but to suspend the writ of habeas corpus”

Written by John Knefel

Published 05/28/25

A guest on former Trump adviser Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast argued that if the Supreme Court doesn’t limit the federal judiciary’s power to issue nationwide injunctions, then President Donald Trump must suspend the writ of habeas corpus to accelerate his mass deportation plans. Bannon later fully agreed with the assessment.

Rogan O’Handley — a conservative commentator who goes by the moniker DC Draino — made the comments on the May 27 edition of War Room, escalating a campaign that he, Bannon, and others in right-wing media have been waging since at least April 22.

Habeas corpus refers to the constitutional right of an incarcerated person to challenge their confinement before a judge. Legal experts have said it is “absurd” to think that the Trump administration can suspend habeas without an act of Congress. Bannon and O’Handley’s conversation comes as the Trump administration has sought to use a 1798 wartime law to circumvent habeas claims, while also railing against federal judges who have issued various injunctions limiting the practice.

Previously, Bannon and War Room guest Mike Davis, founder of the Article III Project, had called for the Trump administration to force the Supreme Court to rule on whether the executive branch could unilaterally suspend habeas corpus rights before its summer recess. O’Handley’s push to tie habeas to the issue of nationwide injunctions offers a more concrete and explicit timeline.

“Right now, the Supreme Court is debating internally about the extent and the power of these federal district court judges to issue these national injunctions,” O’Handley said. “If they make a ruling that they are able to continue completely stalling the presidency, executive II powers to deport illegal aliens, then President Trump will have no choice but to suspend the writ of habeas corpus and save this country.”

“If the Supreme Court does not limit these injunctions to just the parties before the district courts, then that solidifies that we are in a constitutional crisis and Trump will have to take drastic measures to repel this historic invasion,” O’Handley added.

“I 100% agree with you,” Bannon responded.

Video

Citation

From the May 27, 2025, edition of Real America's Voice's War Room

There are at least two distinct legal issues underlying Bannon and O’Handley’s commentary. One is whether unauthorized immigration constitutes an “invasion,” as the Trump administration has argued, and therefore authorizes use of the Alien Enemies Act, an 18th century law that gives the president sweeping powers to detain and deport people during wartime. Legal blog Just Security characterized the administration’s position as “extremely dangerous, and at odds with the text and original meaning of the Constitution.”

On May 16, the Supreme Court prevented the Trump administration from using the Alien Enemies Act to quickly deport Venezuelans without “constitutionally adequate notice.” Prior to the Supreme Court’s decision, at least three federal judges had ruled against the Trump administration’s use of the Alien Enemies Act, although a judge in Pennsylvania OK’d its use.

The other issue is the power of federal district courts to issue rulings that apply to the entire country, known as nationwide injunctions. The topic came before the Supreme Court on May 15, during a hearing on the constitutionality of Trump’s executive order purporting to ban birthright citizenship in a case that also had direct implications for nationwide injunctions. The Washington Post reported that the Supreme Court appeared “divided” on how to rule on that issue.

White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, and Trump himself all appear to be willing to take the extraordinary step of suspending habeas corpus.

According to Georgetown law professor Steve Vladeck, the “near-universal consensus is that only Congress can suspend habeas corpus—and that unilateral suspensions by the President are per se unconstitutional.”

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MMA

Contrary to right-wing media claims, the GOP's Medicaid cuts are for far more than “able-bodied men”

While right-wing media yell about “able-bodied men,” in truth Medicaid work requirements would hit caregivers the most — and they are disproportionately women

Written by John Knefel

Research contributions from Sophie Lawton

Published 05/22/25

Right-wing media figures are telling their audiences that proposed work requirements for Medicaid will be targeted at men who are unwilling to look for a job, when the actual population most likely to be affected is poor, rural women who are taking care of elderly parents or adult children.

The discussion comes as congressional Republicans negotiate a budget bill that is widely predicted to deliver massive tax cuts to the wealthy and corporations while gutting social safety net programs like Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, formerly known as food stamps. The House passed its version of the bill on May 22, which included what Axios described as “the biggest Medicaid rewrite in the history of the safety-net program, which will likely result in millions of Americans losing their health insurance coverage.”

One of the ways the House's legislation reduces Medicaid costs is by introducing arduous and unnecessary work requirements for beneficiaries that would begin at the end of 2026. The Congressional Budget Office, which provides nonpartisan economic analysis to lawmakers, estimated that 10.3 million people would lose their Medicaid by 2034 if the bill was passed in its May 14 form. The New York Times cited the same figure in its coverage of the House bill’s passage. (The bill also adds work requirements to SNAP, which could put almost 11 million people at risk of losing some of their food assistance.)

Much of the right-wing commentary supporting the bill mischaracterizes Medicaid beneficiaries by claiming there is a large pool of “able-bodied” people who refuse to seek employment. In fact, 92% of people on Medicaid are working, have a disability, or are performing duties — such as going to school or caregiving — that could qualify for an exemption from meeting work requirements.

It’s true that there is a group of people who qualify as able-bodied, nonworking Medicaid recipients without a young child who also aren’t enrolled in school. But contrary to conservative punditry, that population is overwhelmingly made up of women (79%), mostly living in rural areas, who are caring for elderly parents or adult children and have low levels of formal education and have recently left the workforce, according to new research from the University of Massachusetts Boston.

“Work requirements would primarily target this population,” the researchers write.

Fox News’ Jesse Watters says Medicaid work requirements target men in their 20s who “sell ecstasy on the side"

Fox News, Fox Business, and the Wall Street Journal’s editorial page — three gilded properties in Rupert Murdoch’s media empire — have pushed for cuts to Medicaid, either by adding work requirements or through an outright rollback of the program’s expansion under the Affordable Care Act. Slashing Medicaid is incredibly unpopular, including among supporters of President Donald Trump, so on some occasions Fox has misled its viewers into thinking the Republican budget doesn’t pose a threat to the program.

But as Trump has thrown his weight behind the bill, so too has Fox modified its austerity-heavy rhetoric.

Following the House’s passage of the bill, Fox national correspondent Aishah Hasnie said some Republicans from states that have “a lot of constituents on Medicaid” were “worried there were going to be massive cuts.”

“Really, Republicans wanted to go after illegal immigrants that were using Medicaid and able-bodied men that were on Medicaid,” she continued. “They wanted to add work requirements, and those work requirements now will start in 2026. It’s a huge win for fiscal conservatives.”

Video

Citation

From the May 22, 2025, edition of Fox News' Fox & Friends

On May 19, host Jesse Watters said, “If you're a young, able-bodied, healthy American man — 26 years old, you don't even want to go to work — you can get on Medicaid.”

“You can live at your parents’ house, play softball on the weekend, sell ecstasy on the side, not even look for a job — and you can get free health care,” Watters added. “That’s what they’re doing. They’re just closing that lazy loophole."

Video

Citation

From the May 19, 2025, edition of Fox News' The Five

The same day on Fox & Friends, on at least two occasions co-host Charlie Hurt falsely argued that work requirements strengthened Medicaid.

“A major Democrat attack on the bill is they claim it cuts Medicaid,” Hurt said. “What it actually does is it saves Medicaid by not paying, first of all, people who are ineligible for it, but also because it doesn’t — it puts in work requirements for, you know, 30-year-old, able-bodied males without dependents, and it says, you know, if you are going to get welfare from the government, you're going to need to work, and that seems like a really low standard to a regular person."

Video e

Citation

From the May 19, 2025, edition of Fox News' Fox & Friends

Elsewhere in the program, Hurt argued the bill strengthens Medicaid and “protects it by getting people off that — able-bodied, 30-year-old men … without dependents ought to be working."

Steve Bannon says Medicaid work requirements for able-bodied men should be “40 to 60 hours” at a “minimum”

Former Trump adviser Steve Bannon has attempted to present himself as both a defender of Medicaid and an advocate for large cuts to the program. One of the ways he tries to reconcile that contradiction is by dividing Medicaid users into the deserving and undeserving poor, using rhetoric strikingly similar to Fox’s.

Contrary to right-wing media claims, the GOP's Medicaid cuts are for far more than "able-bodied men" | Media Matters for America

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User Clip: Steve Bannon Nazi Salute

C-SPAN

https://www.c-span.org › video › user-clip-steve-banno...](https://www.c-span.org/video/?c5154286/user-clip-steve-bannon-nazi-salute)

Feb 20, 2025 — Steve Bannon throws a Nazi salute on stage at CPAC 2025. The crowd loves it.

[### Steve Bannon gives fascist-style salute after speech at CPAC

YouTube · The Independent

17.7K+ views · 2 months ago](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3WbMFW3zxMA)

Steve Bannon flashed a 'Nazi-style' salute at the end of his speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference.

[### Steve Bannon is accused of doing a straight-arm Nazi ...

AP News

https://apnews.com › article › steve-bannon-cpac-nazi-s...](https://apnews.com/article/steve-bannon-cpac-nazi-salute-gesture-wave-43a06de6184fe58940c8ae3d743bc6ba)

Feb 21, 2025 — Steve Bannon has been accused of making a Nazi salute at a conservative gathering where President Donald Trump is slated to speak this ...

[### French far-right leader cancels speech, accusing Bannon ...

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AN 5 25

When Boris Yeltsin was serving as Russia's first post-Soviet Union, post-communist president during the 1990s, optimists were hoping that Russia would become a full-fledged liberal democracy. But it didn't work out that way, and Russia moved in an increasingly authoritarian direction under his successor, Vladimir Putin.

In an opinion column published on May 28, the New York Times' M. Gessen makes a comparison between Putin's presidency in Russia and Donald Trump's second presidency in the United States — and explains why Russia's post-communist history serves as a warning for Americans.

"Living in and reporting on Russia when Vladimir Putin took and consolidated power," Gessen explains, "I was shocked many times. I couldn't sleep in September 2004, after tanks shelled a school in which terrorists were holding hundreds of children hostage, and I was shocked when Putin used this terrorist attack as a pretext to eliminate elected governorships. I was shaken when Russia invaded Georgia in 2008. My world changed when three very young women were sentenced to jail time for a protest performance in a church in 2012 — the first time Russian citizens were imprisoned for peaceful action."

Gessen continues, "I couldn't breathe when Russia annexed Crimea in 2014. And when the opposition leader Aleksei Navalny was poisoned in 2020, arrested in 2021 and almost certainly killed in prison in 2024. And when Russia again invaded Ukraine in 2022."

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The Times columnist goes on to compare Trump's first four months back in the White House to events he saw in Russia.

"The United States in the last four months has felt like an unremitting series of shocks: executive orders gutting civil rights and constitutional protections; a man with a chainsaw trying to gut the federal government; deliberately brutal deportations; people snatched off the streets and disappeared in unmarked cars; legal attacks on universities and law firms," Gessen observes. "Unlike the Russian autocratic breakthrough — or, for that matter, the Hungarian one, which has apparently provided some of Donald Trump’s playbook — the transformation of American government and society hasn’t been spread out over decades or even years. It’s been everything everywhere all at once."

Gessen warns that extremism in the U.S. is becoming normalized.

"In this country, too, fewer and fewer things can surprise us," the columnist laments. "Once you've absorbed the shock of deportations to El Salvador, plans to deport people to South Sudan aren't that remarkable. Once you've wrapped your mind around the Trump Administration's revoking the legal status of individual international students, a blanket ban on international enrollment at Harvard isn't entirely unexpected." normalization chris ahyes ANCHOR SET #

Gessen continues, "Once you've realized that the (Trump) Administration is intent on driving thousands of trans people out of the U.S. military, a ban on Medicaid coverage for gender-affirming care, which could have devastating effects for hundreds of thousands, just becomes more of the same. As in a country at war, reports of human tragedy and extreme cruelty have become routine — not news."

*M. Gessen's full New York Times column is available at this link (subscription required).

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NO LNX

Only one thing is going to stand in Trump's way — and he knows it

Thom Hartmann April 28, 2025

It didn’t happen in some shadowy back alley or under the cover of night.

It happened in broad daylight — in the heart of an American courthouse.

Federal agents, acting without even the decency of a signed warrant, stormed into Judge Hannah Dugan’s courtroom on Friday morning and dragged her away like a common criminal. No warning. No legal process. No respect for the law she had spent a lifetime upholding.

But they made sure the cameras were there, so America could see what they were doing. Because this was not about justice. This was about terror.

This was a warning shot aimed directly at the beating heart of America’s judiciary:

“Fall in line — or you’re next.”

In that moment, the world’s oldest democracy lurched closer to the edge of authoritarian rule. In that moment, America became a little less free — and a lot more like the nightmare Vladimir Putin always hoped we’d become.

The FBI arrested Judge Hannah Dugan last Friday without even having a legal arrest warrant; this is as outrageous and police-state illegal as an administration can get.

And Pam Bondi’s performance Friday — after her federal agents swarm-raided this county judge — wasn’t staged for the general public.

The real audience was a very small, select group: America’s judges.

Their message is very simple: “P--- us off, judges, and you could end up in prison, too.”

Trump has already pacified the Article I branch of government — Congress — and now he’s in the process of pacifying the Article III branch, the Judiciary.

There are only 3 branches to our government: cowing both Congress and the nation’s Judiciary will leave only the president in charge of the entire country under all circumstances in all ways.

Nothing and nobody else will be able to stop him, short of a military coup (and he’s already decapitated the senior leadership of the military) or unending demonstrations in the streets (demonstrators who may soon face live ammunition).

That is called dictatorship. Real dictatorship. Vladimir Putin-style dictatorship where you are punished for the smallest deviation from orthodoxy and can find yourself in prison or sued into bankruptcy if you dare speak out in public.

It appears more and more every day that Putin is Trump’s mentor, if not his handler. Trump is doing everything he can, with help from a South African billionaire, to destroy the historic American infrastructure (which has been an example for the world for 250 years) and turn us into the newest member of the dictators club, joining Russia, China, Saudi Arabia, Belarus, Hungary, North Korea, and the rest of the fascist and authoritarian world.

To get there, now that they’ve pacified every single Republican member of Congress (most recently, Don Bacon criticized Trump’s schizophrenic tariffs; a day later he started talking about retiring), they only have to seize control of the Judiciary, and then nothing except We The People will stand in their way.

Nothing. Will. Stand. In. Trump’s. Way. Except We The People. And he knows it.

Look at the striking parallels between Putin’s strategies and Trump’s actions:

From installing Trump’s loyalists in the military and the federal police agencies of the Department of Justice and FBI, to his open threats against freedom of the press, to the GOP’s efforts to rig elections and purge voters, Trump’s subversion of US democracy looks eerily familiar.

He’s taking pages directly from the autocrat’s handbook.

Trump has openly quoted and praised autocrats like Putin and Hungarian strongman Viktor Orbán, who has presented his leadership in speeches to the GOP and CPAC as a model of an “illiberal” state.

Trump’s not hiding his admiration for dictators; he’s flaunting it. And now he’s putting the final stages of their script into action.

Trump’s movement toward authoritarianism follows “a known playbook. It’s unfolded in many other countries,” as journalist Anne Applebaum notes. “These are democratically elected leaders who characterize themselves or describe themselves as deserving of no opposition. So I am the true Hungarian, or I am the only real American.”

In a mere matter of weeks into his presidency, Applebaum says, Trump and his allies “have managed to push America into that space somewhere between (no longer) democracy and full-scale autocracy.”

The speed is shocking, but it shouldn’t be surprising. It only took Hitler 53 days to completely end democracy in Germany. Others, like Lukashenko, Orbán, Putin, Mussolini, Duterte, El-Sisi, and Erdoğan took longer (none longer than two years), but you could argue that Trump has been working at this project for 9 years now.

Harvard professor Steven Levitsky, who studies how democracies slip into authoritarianism, warns that we’re heading toward what experts call “competitive authoritarianism”: regimes that “constitutionally continue to be democracies” with regular elections and legal opposition, but where “systematic abuse of power tilts the playing field against the opposition.”

Make no mistake about what’s happening: Trump and his allies are methodically working through a four-step process to establish complete autocratic control, which will turn America into a one-man dictatorship.

Terrorize Congress: Trump’s already largely succeeded here. Republican lawmakers now march in lockstep with his agenda, afraid to oppose him even when their consciences scream otherwise. The V-Dem Institute already warns that Trump’s actions are “extremely worrying” for American democracy.

Terrorize the Media: Trump has, as The Washington Post writes, “relentlessly attacked the free press, another pillar that allows democracies to stand above authoritarian regimes,” as political scientists have noted. “He has echoed the worst dictators in history, calling journalists the ‘enemy of the people.’” With help from Elon Musk and other billionaires, he’s creating a media and social media environment where truth itself is under assault. And last week his administration threatened to arrest journalists and charge them with treason, an offense for which they could be executed.

Terrorize Judges and Lawyers: What we witnessed Friday with the raid on a county judge and the arrest of a retired judge earlier in the week is just the beginning. The final step in this process will be intimidating the Supreme Court, and if Trump’s minions can first terrorize the entire federal judiciary, it will be much easier to terrorize members of the Court itself, just like Putin and Orbán have done. This follows dangerous cracks in democracy’s pillars that experts have been warning about.

Terrorize Citizens: Once the above institutions are captured and there’s no more Constitutional opposition to Trump, the final phase begins: crushing individual dissent through fear, persecution, and potentially violence. This is the playbook Malcolm Nance detailed in his work analyzing Putin’s strategies to undermine American democracy and has already started against immigrants and student visa holders. If history tells us anything, American citizens will be next.

Most of this is already in place; time is running out fast.

Trump and his fellow fascists know their time is running out because elections are coming in a handful of months and their popularity is already crashing. They are at maximum power right now, and it is already beginning to decline.

This is another reason why they are pushing so hard to frighten judges, so they can implement the final destruction of any Constitutionally-based opposition to Trump’s one-man rule.

If Trump can consolidate authoritarian rule as quickly as some other historical dictators did, the complete (albeit hopefully temporary) end of American democracy could happen very rapidly, possibly even in the next few weeks or months. The window for action is closing fast.

But there’s still hope, because we’re still We The People. As long as our protest movement continues to grow and demand a stop to the damage Trump and Musk are doing to our democratic republic, we may be able to slow or even stop this anti-American cabal and reclaim our republic.

Our protesting in the streets and reaching out to legislators may encourage resistance within the media and courts, and might even inspire a handful of Republicans to stand against this wannabe dictator.

When democratic institutions fail, the last line of defense has always been citizens willing to take to the streets. Ukraine provides the most powerful recent example of how a determined populace can rescue democracy from Russian-inspired authoritarianism.

During Ukraine’s Euromaidan protests in 2014, over half a million people joined demonstrations in Kyiv to defend democracy against creeping authoritarianism. Those protests ultimately ended Viktor Yanukovych’s Russia-backed puppet regime (and kicked out its Russian-funded American advisor, Paul Manafort, who later became Trump’s 2016 campaign manager) and became known as the Revolution of Dignity.

Ukrainians stood firm in the streets despite violence and intimidation, and their courage changed history.

Ukraine’s later Orange Revolution similarly empowered ordinary citizens to engage in mass protests, with some lasting continously more than two weeks. This peaceful revolution successfully defended Ukraine’s democratic aspirations against Russian influence and showed the world that people power can overcome autocratic manipulation.

Putin fears democracy, particularly at his doorstep like in Ukraine and the Baltic states. He knows that democracy is contagious, and any spread near Russia, he believes, poses an existential threat to his autocratic rule. That’s why he invaded Ukraine, and that’s why he spent millions on social media trolls to support Trump’s election and his assault on our democratic institutions.

As Ukrainian historian Hanna Perekhoda warns, “If we let Russian authoritarians win, it will mean that the authoritarian forces also in our countries, in the U.S., for example, will grow stronger.”

If this assault on the Courts (and the implied intimidation of all judges including those on the Supreme Court) succeeds, and the media continues to bow down, the only thing left will be us in the streets.

The time for half-measures, “very strong letters,” and polite political disagreement has passed. We are watching in real-time as our 250-year experiment in democracy is being dismantled by a would-be dictator taking his cues from — or, at least, modeling his presidency on — Vladimir Putin.

This is not hyperbole. This is not partisan exaggeration. This is the stark reality facing our nation today. Fascism and dictatorship are at our doorstep.

Just last week, it was reported that Trump has now deported three American citizens, including a child taking cancer therapy.

Not content to just pull student visas and ask them to leave the country, Trump’s goons have been imprisoning students for writing OpEd articles for weeks. And now they’re show-arresting judges.

The arrest of Judge Dugan is not an isolated incident; it’s part a broader strategy to intimidate the judiciary and consolidate power.

When judges are arrested for upholding the principles of due process, the very foundation of democracy is at risk. This moment demands vigilance and action from all who value the rule of law.

The preservation of our democratic institutions depends on our collective response to such unprecedented challenges.

Buckle up, America. Democracy itself is on the line, and if the courts fall, we’ll be its last defenders.

NOW READ: Behind the 60-year Republican plot to destroy American democracy

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omfg us switch sides in cold war

mma

The right’s decade-long lurch toward Vladimir Putin’s Russia

Written by Matt Gertz

:{:{Published 03/06/25}:

President Donald Trump’s actions over the past few weeks have drawn cheers from Russian President Vladimir Putin’s government — and with good reason.

Trump falsely blamed Ukraine for the war that began with Russia’s 2022 invasion and described Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky as a “dictator,” then threw him out of the White House following a public confrontation. His administration over the same period began working with Russia on terms for a ceasefire with Ukraine, attempted to extort Ukraine for partial U.S. control of its rare mineral rights, voted with Russia against a United Nations resolution condemning its “aggression” in Ukraine, floated U.S. sanctions relief for Russia, and on Monday cut off military aid to Ukraine.

The remnants of the right-wing media still somewhat in step with the values of Ronald Reagan have spoken out against Trump’s Putinist turn. But its more popular and influential members are lining up behind the president and praising his actions.

The right-wing commentariat’s decade-long shift from near-universal antagonism to Russia to eager amplification of Kremlin propaganda has helped create the environment for Trump’s recent moves selling out Ukraine in favor of an effective alliance with Putin.

As late as 2012, the GOP and its propagandists were still uniformly anti-Russia. When former President Barack Obama told then-Russian President Dmitry Medvedev that he would have “more flexibility” to negotiate on the issue of missile defense after the November election, his words were seized upon by right-wing commentators across the spectrum, from far-right outlets like Breitbart.com and The Gateway Pundit to the staid conservatives of The Wall Street Journal's editorial board to the pseudopopulists of Fox News, where hosts repeated the attack for years.

But following Obama’s reelection, a faction of the right changed course. Initially they were a fringe group seeking to rehabilitate Putin — a dictator who assassinated political opponents and defiant journalists — as a contrast with the purportedly elite Democratic president and what they deemed his excessively pro-LGBTQ policies. But the faction grew over time, drawing support from pundits like Sean Hannity, who sought counternarratives to excuse Trump’s Russia ties and attack Joe Biden’s Ukraine ones, and Tucker Carlson, who seemed to simply favor Russia’s success in its invasion of its neighbor.

The shift toward Russia became so prominent that in recent years, GOP lawmakers have sounded the alarm about pro-Kremlin propaganda infesting their party’s communications apparatus. And now, we are seeing the devastating consequences.

2013-2014: The right launches love affair with “macho man” Putin, calls him “one of us”

The right’s Putinist turn began as a revolt against a potential future of equal rights and dignity for LGBTQ people and escalated as the movement came to champion the brutish Russian dictator as an anti-Obama.

Putin signed sweeping laws during the summer of 2013 which banned the dissemination of “gay propaganda” and prohibited same-sex couples in Russia and foreigners from nations with marriage equality from adopting Russian children. This triggered widespread condemnation and even calls to boycott the impending Winter Olympic Games in Sochi, Russia.

When Obama added his voice, saying in an August appearance that he had “no patience” for countries that impose laws “violating the basic morality that I think should transcend every country,” a faction of right-wing media responded by siding with Putin.

“Our moral and cultural elites have put Putin on notice: Get in step with us on homosexual rights — or we may just boycott your Sochi games,” wrote the paleoconservative Pat Buchanan. “What this reveals is the distance America has traveled, morally and culturally, in a few short years, and our amnesia about who we Americans once were, and what it is we once believed.”

Buchanan added that Putin was trying to restore the “moral compass” of the Orthodox Church. After quoting a Putin remark praising Christianity’s influence on Russia, he wrote: “Anyone ever heard anything like that from the Post, the Times or Barack Hussein Obama?”

(Putin’s opposition to marriage equality made him “one of us” in “the culture war for mankind’s future,” Buchanan suggested later that year.)

Right-wing commentators over the following years began praising Putin as the polar opposite of the caricature they had created of Obama as an effete, indecisive intellectual. In disputes between Putin and Obama — between Russia and the United States — they started hewing to the Kremlin line.

Amid U.S.-Russian altercations over the Syrian civil war, Matt Drudge deemed Putin “the leader of the free world,” while Tucker Carlson argued that he was “riding to President Obama's rescue.”

As Russia invaded Ukraine the following month, right-wing pundits like Fox’s Bill O’Reilly dissected photos of shirtless “macho man” Putin on a horse and a helmeted Obama on a bicycle. While Russian troops were occupying the Crimean Peninsula, Rudy Giuliani was telling Fox’s audience that Putin is “what you call a leader” because “he makes a decision and he executes it quickly,” while Obama has “got to think about it” before taking action.

At times, the right’s Kremlinist corps would make explicit its desire to have the Russian running the U.S. instead of Obama.

“Can we get like Netanyahu or like Putin in for 48 hours, you know, head of the United States?” former Fox host Kimberley Guilfoyle commented in August 2014. “I just want somebody to get in here and get it done right, so that Americans don't have to worry and wake up in the morning fearful of a group that's murderous and horrific like ISIS.”

### 2015-2016: Trump’s Russia ties trigger right-wing excuses

While the right-wing media’s pro-Putin faction was not yet dominant, it included one particularly influential figure: Donald Trump, the reality TV star and real estate mogul who had become the GOP front-runner for the 2016 presidential nomination.

Trump touted Putin on the campaign trail as a “powerful leader” who “represented his country” better than Obama did the U.S. That praise, along with Trump’s known past (and secret contemporaneous) business interests in Russia; his hiring of campaign advisers notorious for their ties to the country; his waffling on NATO’s security guarantees; his open call for the Kremlin to intercede on his behalf; and the clear (and ultimately successful) effort by Russia's government to help him win the 2016 election triggered widespread concern about his ties to the country as he ascended to the Republican nomination and then the presidency.

Trump’s pro-Russia stance was unacceptable for some in the right-wing media — but not the stars of Fox, who made excuses for his actions.

In July 2016, for example, Trump called on Russian intelligence services to follow up their successful hack of the Democratic National Committee by finding Hillary Clinton’s emails.

“Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing," Trump said during a press conference. “You will probably be rewarded mightily.”

National security experts were horrified. But on Fox, the comment was played off as either a joke, a misunderstanding, or a media lie.

“The media has got the whole thing wrong,” Hannity claimed. “They’re purposefully distorting this whole thing, which is what they do.”

“I think what he was saying was they already stole them. They have them. Can you please return them to us,” offered Carlson.

Both Greg Gutfeld and Bret Baier told viewers that Trump had been making a joke.

However, the Kremlin seemed to take Trump both seriously and literally.

“Russian officials began to target email addresses associated with Hillary Clinton’s personal and campaign offices ‘on or around’ the same day Donald Trump called on Russia to find emails that were missing from her personal server,” PBS reported of an indictment brought by special counsel Robert Mueller two years later.

As the extent of Russia’s pro-Trump campaign came into focus, the most devoted Trumpists waved it away.

Carlson posited that claims that Russia had been behind the leaked Democratic emails published by WikiLeaks were “a lie” and repeatedly argued that the U.S. intelligence community was pushing an “unsubstantiated claim” that cyberattacks on American political institutions were “a Russian propaganda effort.”

Hannity put forward a similar thesis about the allegation of a Russian hack-and-leak effort to benefit Trump. “I'm just assuming this is another liberal media fake news story that they're all falling for, and it's politically motivated,” he claimed.

It was not.

### 2017-2020: Trump defenses lead to a tightening embrace of Russian propaganda

The Trumpist right’s fervent need to defend him at all cost led to its inexorable adoption of pro-Russian narratives over the course of his presidency. During Trump’s four years in office, three main threads braided together into a rope yoking pro-Trump media figures to Putin.

First, Trump continued to habitually praise Putin and take inexplicably pro-Russian actions over the course of his presidency. In response, pro-Trump media figures defended him by explaining away or ignoring what other press outlets and even members of Trump’s own party considered abhorrent.

Trumpist commentators became practiced in responding to the president’s public statements about Russia, arguing that in contrast to his rhetoric, his “actions” against Russia had been “tough.” When Trump shocked the international community by standing next to Putin at a 2018 press conference in Helsinki and validating the Russian dictator’s false claim that he had not interfered in the 2016 presidential election, Trump’s media allies touted his “very strong” performance and criticized the “mass hysteria” to the contrary. And damning reports about Trump sharing classified information with the Russian ambassador at the White House and meeting with Putin without a note taker or translator were downplayed or avoided altogether.

Second, Mueller’s investigation created a steady stream of damaging stories for Trump as the special counsel successfully indicted and prosecuted some of the president’s closest aides, revealing both the breadth of the Kremlin’s effort to bolster Trump’s campaign and the eagerness of Trump’s allies to participate. In response, Trump’s media supporters, led by Fox’s Hannity, developed a sprawling counternarrative in which Mueller’s Russia probe was the result of a “soft coup” by a shadowy cabal of journalists, Democrats, and “deep state” operatives.

Night after night, Hannity and his anti-Mueller crew put forward a series of bogus premises: “The media has been corrupt and lying to you”; “so-called Trump Russia collusion” is a “tinfoil hat conspiracy theory,” while Democrats had committed the “real collusion” with Russia; Trump was the victim of “the biggest abuse of power corruption case in American history”; and a second special counsel was needed to “expose” all of the above and ensure that the perpetrators “go to jail.”

With Trump amplifying such claims and rewarding Republicans who promoted them, these talking points became the heart of the GOP’s Mueller rebuttal. The counternarrative even led to the appointment of a special counsel for an “investigation of the investigators,” albeit one who turned up remarkably little of note.

Third, Russia’s campaign to sway U.S. elections on Trump’s behalf continued as the president sought reelection in 2020. Right-wing media figures like Hannity and John Solomon responded by participating: They teamed up with Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani, the minions of a pro-Russian Ukrainian oligarch, and a sanctioned Ukrainian lawmaker described by the U.S. government as “an active Russian agent” to concoct and disseminate purported evidence that former-Vice President Joe Biden acted corruptly by pushing Ukraine to fire its top prosecutor, who was supposedly investigating Biden’s son’s business interests.

This disinformation campaign was flagrantly false — U.S. policy called for firing the prosecutor, who was viewed as unwilling to prosecute corruption by U.S. diplomats, foreign governments, international bodies, and Ukrainian anti-corruption groups.

But the right-wing narrative caught Trump’s eye. He subsequently tried to condition vital military aid to Ukraine and a state visit by Zelensky on the Ukrainian president announcing an investigation into the Bidens. The revelation of Trump’s conduct ultimately triggered his first impeachment — during which his media allies settled on the conclusion that the president had done nothing impeachable.

As Trump’s Fox propagandists scrambled to defend his conduct, one host broke new ground by suggesting that the U.S. shouldn’t have been supporting Ukraine in the first place.

“Why do I care? Why do I care what's going on in the conflict between Ukraine and Russia?” Carlson asked on his prime-time show. “Like, why do I care? And why shouldn't I root for Russia? Which I am.”

Carlson quickly claimed he had been joking — but the mask had slipped.

### 2021-2024: MAGA pundits swallow Kremlin line on Ukraine, Biden

On March 3, 2022, just days after Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine, a Russian government agency issued new instructions to state-sponsored propaganda outlets: Promote Tucker Carlson.

“It is essential to use as much as possible fragments of broadcasts of the popular Fox News host Tucker Carlson, who sharply criticizes the actions of the United States [and] NATO, their negative role in unleashing the conflict in Ukraine, [and] the defiantly provocative behavior from the leadership of the Western countries and NATO towards the Russian Federation and towards President Putin, personally,” the memo, which was leaked to Mother Jones, stated.

The Kremlin’s assessment of Carlson’s broadcast was accurate. The Fox star, in the days before and following the Russian incursion, had passionately defended Putin, criticized Zelensky as Biden’s “puppet” and his country as a “growing dictatorship,” denied that a war was imminent and then blamed the U.S. for its start, and mocked the bipartisan supporters of U.S. aid to Ukraine. And over the following months, a Carlson-Kremlin feedback loop developed in which Carlson picked up disinformation campaigns originating with Russian state media, then Russian outlets promoted his reports.

Carlson was the loudest and most influential MAGA media figure to adopt pro-Russian talking points about the country’s brutal bombing and occupation of portions of Ukraine — but he and his guests were far from alone.

Commentary that toed the Putin line became increasingly commonplace on the right among Carlson’s Fox colleagues as well as from online fever swamps like The Gateway Pundit and far-right influencers like Jack Posobiec. Within months, the right-wing propaganda machine was in full-scale revolt over the U.S. sending aid to support Ukraine’s fight against the Russian invasion.

The MAGA movement’s information ecosystem became increasingly honeycombed with pro-Putin propaganda over the course of the war.

Hannity, his House Republican allies, and his Fox colleagues spent 2023 attempting to manufacture an impeachment case against Biden which largely rehashed the disinformation debunked four years earlier about the fired Ukrainian prosecutor. The story did feature one new wrinkle — a report from an FBI informant that a Ukrainian oligarch had paid Biden a $5 million bribe to get the prosecutor removed.

Hannity promoted that account in dozens of segments, arguing that the FBI informant’s “bombshell” was “smoking-gun evidence” of “the very definition of a high crime,” and “might end up being the biggest story of the year.” But the tale disintegrated in February 2024 when federal prosecutors arrested the informant — who reportedly had deep ties to Russian intelligence — and charged him with fabricating his allegations (he later pleaded guilty). The GOP’s impeachment push dissolved soon after.

Meanwhile, Carlson was not just excusing Putin’s invasion, but doing an interview with the Russian dictator that was heavily touted by Kremlin propagandists and producing glowing videos that extolled the Russian system.

The situation became so bleak that in April 2024, Rep. Michael McCaul (R-TX) — the former GOP chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee — told a reporter that because of right-wing media, Russian propaganda had “infected a good chunk of my party’s base.”

McCaul was not exaggerating — later that year, federal prosecutors alleged several prominent right-wing influencers had unwittingly received millions of dollars that originated from a Russian government operation aimed at promoting Donald Trump.

They didn’t push Russian talking points for the money — the Kremlin gave them the money because, like so many of their MAGA colleagues, they were already pushing Russian talking points.

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What explains the Trump administration’s radical reversal toward Moscow?

By Jonathan Mahler

April 12, 2025

In 1989, shortly before the fall of communism, Boris Yeltsin — the reformer who would soon become the first freely elected president of post-Soviet Russia — visited a supermarket in Houston, Texas, and was overwhelmed by the dizzying array of meats and vegetables on offer. “What have we done to our poor people?” he later asked an associate traveling with him. The story became instant fodder for the crusade to convert Russia to capitalism.

Now jump ahead to last year, when the right-wing commentator Tucker Carlson provided a mirror image of Yeltsin’s supermarket visit, only this time the supermarket was in Moscow. Carlson was in Russia to conduct a sympathetic interview with President Vladimir Putin. While he was there, he went grocery shopping and professed to be similarly overwhelmed by the range of options and affordable prices. The superpowers had traded places. It was America that now apparently needed to be converted — to Putinism. “Coming to a Russian grocery store — ‘the heart of evil’ — and seeing what things cost and how people live, it will radicalize you against our leaders,” Carlson said after passing through the checkout line. “That’s how I feel anyway — radicalized.”

President Trump, it seems, has also been radicalized. During his first term, he made no shortage of startlingly pro-Putin comments, and even sided with Russia’s president against his own intelligence agencies. But in the first few months of his second term, Trump has gone much further, overturning decades of American policy toward an adversary virtually overnight. He has claimed that Ukraine was responsible for its own invasion by Russia and berated Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, during a televised meeting in the Oval Office. His administration also joined North Korea and several other autocratic governments in refusing to endorse a United Nations resolution condemning Russia for the attack. And he has filled his cabinet with like-minded officials, including his director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, who has been described as a “comrade” by Russian state TV.

It’s almost impossible to overstate the magnitude of this pivot, as Sasha Havlicek, the chief executive of the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a nonpartisan think tank that analyzes global extremism and disinformation, points out. “If, in fact, we are witnessing a total ideological shift of America away from its post-World War II role as guarantor of the international order and an alignment with Putin and other authoritarian nationalists against the old allies that constituted the liberal world order,” she says, “there couldn’t be anything more dramatic than that.”

Russia has long served as much more than a geopolitical rival for America. It has been an ideological other, a foil that enabled the United States to affirm its own, diametrically different values. In the words of the historian David S. Foglesong, Russia is America’s “imaginary twin” or “dark double,” the sister superpower that the United States is forever either demonizing or trying to remake in its own image. Or at least it was. Trump’s policies and rhetoric seem aimed at nothing less than turning America’s dark double into its kindred soul.

Some administration officials and their allies have characterized this as a strategy — a “reverse Kissinger.” Rather than trying to undermine Russia by making peace with China, the argument goes, Trump is trying to isolate China — an even more daunting rival — by building closer ties to Russia. It’s the America First version of realpolitik. As Vice President JD Vance has said, it would be “ridiculous” for the United States “to push Russia into the hands of the Chinese.”

Others see it as primarily personal. Trump has never made a secret of his affinity for Putin, and the Justice Department’s investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election only brought the two leaders closer together. “Let me tell you, Putin went through a hell of a lot with me,” Trump said during his meeting in the Oval Office with Zelensky. Putin has worked the personal angle. Last month, he told Trump’s special envoy, Steve Witkoff, that he went to his local church to pray for Trump when he was shot last summer and gave Witkoff a portrait of the American president that he had commissioned. Witkoff, in turn, eagerly shared these stories in an interview with Tucker Carlson.

Seen through a different lens, though, the reorienting of America’s relationship with its imaginary twin is not about geopolitical maneuvering or the president’s personal proclivities. It’s about the improbable triumph of a set of ideas — political and cultural — that have been bubbling up on the American right for years.

‘The Focus of Evil in the Modern World’

Before Trump’s recent reset, the dark-double framework defined the Russia-U.S. relationship going back to the last decades of the 19th century, when the United States first took up the cause of trying to redeem Russia. In the summer of 1882, an American journalist named James Buel traveled across the country and returned with an account of a “barbarous” nation that desperately needed to be freed from tsarist oppression — “whether with bayonet or psalm-book,” he wrote.

In the decades after the 1917 Bolshevik revolution, when Russia became the Soviet Union, it morphed into a different, more menacing other — “not just despotic but diabolical,” as Foglesong writes in his book “The American Mission and ‘The Evil Empire’” (2007). The Bolshevik ideology of global revolution represented the ultimate threat to the United States, spurring the paranoia that fueled Senator Joseph McCarthy’s infamous witch hunts. The specter of nuclear warfare only intensified the panic over the Red Menace — or, as President Ronald Reagan called the Soviet Union in 1983, “the focus of evil in the modern world.”

The collapse of the Soviet state over the next decade brought a fresh campaign to Americanize Russia by cajoling it to build its post-Communist future around the beacons of democracy and capitalism. Things didn’t work out as either Russia or the United States hoped. By the end of the 20th century, Russia’s G.D.P. had collapsed, its new stock market had crashed, it had defaulted on its foreign loans and a former K.G.B. spy — Putin — had become president.

After his re-election as president in 2012, Putin took Russia in a new direction. He adopted a crusade of his own against Western “decadence” and “the destruction of traditional values,” beginning with a ban on L.G.B.T.Q. “propaganda,” part of an effort to win over conservative Russians who had been disillusioned by their country’s post-Soviet turn toward the West. The familiar pattern seemed destined to repeat itself, and for a while it did. The United States had a new foil, and it was an old foil. Asserting America’s moral superiority in response to Putin’s crackdown on gay rights, President Obama included three retired gay athletes in the official American delegation to the Olympic Games in Sochi in 2013.

Putin has since done just about everything in his power to reinforce Russia’s identity as America’s spiritual adversary, even describing the West as “satanic.” Harking back to the Cold War, he embarked on a global campaign to upend the United States-led international order, creating troll farms that flooded the internet with social media posts designed to spread misinformation and sow discord. At the same time, he reasserted Russia’s imperial ambitions, first annexing Crimea in 2014 and then invading the rest of Ukraine.

And yet with Trump now back in the White House, the cycle of history may finally have been broken.

An Alliance Against Liberalism

Whether he knew it or not when he began his campaign to defend traditional values in 2012, Putin was aligning himself with a small cadre of conservatives inside the United States who shared his disdain for modern liberalism. That common cause would become a genuine alliance.

Its roots can be traced back to 1995 — before Putin was even president — when two Russian sociologists, Anatoly Antonov and Viktor Medkov, summoned Allan C. Carlson, an academic and the president of a conservative think tank in Illinois, to Moscow. Carlson had published a book in defense of traditional families, “Family Questions: Reflections on the American Social Crisis.” Antonov and Medkov were worried about the population decline in Russia, and were convinced that the solution was contained between the book’s covers.

Out of this meeting sprang a new organization, the World Congress of Families, whose aim was to foster a global network of like-minded conservatives to fight feminism, homosexuality and abortion.

In America, this fight had a prominent spokesman: Patrick J. Buchanan, a veteran of the Nixon and Reagan White Houses and a Republican presidential candidate in 1992, 1996 and 2000. Buchanan represented the paleoconservative wing of the party, which was articulating a very different vision of the post-Cold War world from that of its neoconservative rivals.

As Buchanan saw it, the great struggle of the 21st century wasn’t a geopolitical battle between East and West, or freedom and oppression. It was a cultural battle between traditionalists and the secular, multicultural, global elite. In this context, America’s crusade to spread democracy was bound to lead it astray. “If communism was the god that failed the Lost Generation,” he wrote in the early ’90s, “democracy, as ideal form of government, panacea for mankind’s ills, hope of the world, may prove the Golden Calf of this generation.”

Buchanan had a following, but he was very much on the margins of a party dominated by neocons, who saw America’s victory in the Cold War as the decisive triumph of liberal democracy. The post-Cold War world order appeared to be set; history had ended. The attacks of Sept. 11, and the overwhelming bipartisan support for America’s military response to them, only reaffirmed the urgency and righteousness of the cause.

In 2013, Buchanan turned his gaze toward Russia. He had recently published his best-selling book “Suicide of a Superpower,” bemoaning what he saw as America’s ongoing social, moral and cultural disintegration. It was an apocalyptic warning about the country’s declining birthrates, the diminishing influence of Christianity, the vanishing nuclear family and what Buchanan called “third world” immigration. Chapter titles included “The End of White America” and “The Death of Christian America.”

Against this backdrop, Buchanan saw Putin as an inspiration. While Obama condemned the Russian president as an enemy of American values, Buchanan embraced him as one of his own. “Is Vladimir Putin a paleoconservative?” he wrote in 2013 in The American Conservative. “In the culture war for mankind’s future, is he one of us?” When Russia annexed Crimea the following year, Buchanan characterized the invasion as part of Putin’s divine plan to establish Moscow as “the Godly City of today and command post of the counterreformation against the new paganism.”

Mainstream conservatives distanced themselves from Buchanan — and Putin — but the ground was shifting beneath them. A backlash was brewing on the right against immigration and progressive social change, as well as America’s misadventures in Iraq and Afghanistan and the American project to export liberal democracy. A new generation of nativist, reactionary thinkers gravitated toward Putin’s Russia as an ally in their culture war to turn America instead toward an antiglobalist nationalism. Putin’s critiques of Europe’s liberal immigration policies and his talk of rebuilding a Russia with citizens who felt “a spiritual connection to our Motherland” resonated. “In 20 years, Russia will be the only country that is recognizably European,” the right-wing commentator and author Ann Coulter said in 2017.

During Trump’s first term, many of the ideas that Coulter and her fellow reactionaries were expressing began migrating toward the Republican Party’s power center. This new, more favorable vision of Russia was developing its own intellectual architecture, one that married isolationism, nationalism and traditionalism with a growing appreciation for autocratic strongmen who were bending their countries to their will.

Viktor Orban, the Hungarian prime minister who has cracked down on immigration and put in place policies to raise birthrates, has been the most widely and openly admired of these European strongmen. But Putin, too, has his admirers, and they are no longer just fringe characters.

In 2017, Christopher Caldwell, now a senior fellow at the Claremont Institute, a think tank closely aligned with the Trump movement, paved the way with an address at the conservative Christian Hillsdale College titled “How to Think About Vladimir Putin.” He praised Putin’s refusal to accept a “subservient role in an American-run world system drawn up by foreign politicians and business leaders,” and described him as “the pre-eminent statesman of our time.”

Soft Power Pays Hard Dividends

Putin originally embraced the conservative side of the culture war for domestic reasons. It was a way to reassure Russians that he was attuned to their concerns about a rapidly changing world, and to provide a new binding ideology for generations weaned on communism. But this morphed into what Mikhail Zygar, an exiled Russian journalist, has called “a form of statecraft” — a means by which to build support on America’s far right and, in so doing, undermine its politics from within.

Putin’s rhetoric and policies are designed, in part, for American consumption. “He is, in essence, forming a kind of Far-Right International, similar to the Communist International, which promoted the Soviet revolution in the first half of the 20th century,” Zygar wrote last year in Foreign Affairs.

The strategy seems to have worked out better than even Putin could have imagined. In the many years since Buchanan first praised the Russian president, his fans have moved from the margins of conservative media to the center of White House decision-making. The soft power is paying hard dividends as American foreign policy bends in Russia’s direction.

As ambitious as it is, though, the Trump administration’s Russia reset may have its limits. According to a Quinnipiac poll released in mid-March, only 7 percent of American voters have a favorable opinion of Putin, while 81 percent have an unfavorable opinion of him. Similarly, 55 percent of American voters disapprove of Trump’s handling of the war in Ukraine, and only 38 percent approve of it. Trump and his cabinet may look at today’s Russia and see a kindred soul. But most of America still sees a dark double.

The right-wing politicians and pundits who view Russia as an ally appear to be a disproportionately powerful minority driving an agenda that is out of step with most of the public they represent. As radical as this particular agenda may seem, the broader phenomenon is one that the United States has seen before. “America’s foreign policy is conducted by elites,” says Jacob Heilbrunn, the author of the 2024 book “America Last,” a history of America’s modern romance with foreign dictators. “You’ve just got a new one that has come into power now.”

The reorientation of America’s Russia policy, then, may say less about the persuasiveness of a set of beliefs than it does about the takeover of the Republican Party by a group of ideologues who have been welcomed in from the fringe. In this sense, they are no different from the neoconservatives and globalists who drew Buchanan’s wrath 20 years ago by committing the United States to unpopular wars in the name of ideology.

Jonathan Mahler, a staff writer for The New York Times Magazine, has been writing for the magazine since 2001.

See more on: Vladimir Putin, Russia-Ukraine War, Republican Party, Patrick J Buchanan, Tucker Carlson, Donald Trump

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04/14/2025

Kyle Mantyla RWW

Steve Benen @ The Maddow Blog: Trump leans into the idea of sending American criminals to a Salvadoran prison

Trump has spent months talking about deporting American criminals. The White House has said it’s a real idea. Maybe we should take the threat seriously.

Hannah Allam @ ProPublica: American Rendition: Rümeysa Öztürk’s Journey From Ph.D. Scholar to Trump Target Languishing in Louisiana Cell

Rümeysa Öztürk’s arrest and detention reveal what President Donald Trump’s deportation campaign looks like on the street level.

Jonathan Mahler @ The New York Times Magazine: How the G.O.P. Fell in Love With Putin’s Russia

What explains the Trump administration’s radical reversal toward Moscow?

David Gilmour @ Mediaite: Trump Demands FCC Punish ‘CBS Fake News’ for ‘Out Of Control’ 60 Minutes: ‘They Should Pay a Big Price’

President Donald Trump launched a new attack on 60 Minutes, this time demanding regulatory retribution over recent segments on Ukraine and Greenland — calling on “highly respected” FCC chair Brendan Carr to “impose the maximum fines and punishment” possible on “out of control” network CBS.

Alex Galbraith @ Salon: "He's going to have a third term": Bannon tells Maher Trump is sticking around in 2028

Bannon's comments come after Trump shared he's "not joking" about an unconstitutional third-term.

Will Neal @ The Daily Beast: DOJ Wants to Give Capitol Rioters a Refund for Damage They Caused

Court documents filed this week suggest some insurrectionists could receive a check for their troubles.

Warren Throckmorton @ Telling Jefferson Lies: Mike Johnson's False Jefferson Prayer: The Rest of the Stor

On January 3, 2025, Louisiana Representative Mike Johnson was re-elected to be Speaker of the House. In his acceptance speech, he quoted a prayer that he said Thomas Jefferson said every day during his presidency and every day of his life thereafter. There is a problem with this story. The prayer was written 56 years after Jefferson died. Jefferson never said the prayer even one day of his life.

John Fea @ The Way of Improvement Leads Home: Expect to see more David Barton in the coming year

This past week David and Tim were invited to the White House as part of a team planning special faith focused events for the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence.

Melody Schreiber @ The New Republic: Measles Is Spreading, and RFK Jr. Is Praising Quacks

Last week, an 8-year-old girl became the second child and the third person to die of measles in the current outbreak. But it was Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the secretary of health and human services, who dominated the news cycle.

Phil Williams @ News Channel 5: Men behind Tennessee's Christian nationalist settlement: 'This country belongs to Jesus,' not the Jews

Andrew Isker compares Jews to "foster children," who cannot be trusted with the family credit card. C.Jay Engel argues Jews "have largely operated at odds with the Old American way of life."

Christine Fernando @ The Associated Press: An emboldened anti-abortion faction wants women who have abortions to face criminal charges

As Kristan Hawkins, president of the national anti-abortion group Students for Life, tours college campuses, she has grown accustomed to counterprotests from abortion rights activists. But more recently, fellow abortion opponents, who call themselves abortion abolitionists, are showing up to her booths with signs, often screaming “baby killer” at her while she speaks with students. Hawkins has had to send alerts to donors asking them to help pay for increased security.

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an 4 25

Arlie Russell Hochschild’s Strangers in their own Land, which explored the motivations and resentments of working-class conservatives in Louisiana, was named one of six books to help understand Donald Trump’s win by the New York Times when he was first elected president, in 2016. (Another was Hillbilly Elegy, by now vice president JD Vance, published just a few months earlier.)

Since then, Californian progressive sociologist Hochschild has been struggling to understand the appeal of Donald Trump: particularly to white, working-class men, once a strong Democratic constituency. No writer has worked harder to grasp the gut-level appeal that saw Trump win two elections – and in the process, convert the Republican Party into his personal fiefdom.

*Review: Stolen Pride: Loss, Shame and the Rise of the Right – Arlie Russell Hochschild (The New Press)

The puzzle is greatest when one contrasts the current billionaire cabinet with the fact much of Trump’s support comes from people who are objectively worse off under his policies – including tariffs. Last week, Oxfam America called them “an attack on the global working class” that will harm working-class families in the United States and “inflame inequality”.

In Strangers in their own Land, Hochschild called this “the Great Paradox”. Stolen Pride returns to many of that book’s questions, but in a different era – and a US that seems more fragmented, and far angrier than it was in 2016.

Hochschild explores the world of Pikeville, Kentucky, a poor, overwhelmingly white, Trump-supporting city in the heart of Appalachia: in the “whitest and second-poorest congressional district in the country, a region that had rapidly shifted from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party”.

The American dream’s broken promise

One of Hochschild’s subjects is James Browning, a recovering drug user whose hands are tattooed and covered in rings. “There you have it” he says, “I have a shame hand and a pride hand.” This sums up the basic argument of Stolen Pride.

“Pride and shame,” she writes, “signal the juncture between the identity we hold out to the world, and how the world responds to our identity.” The men she speaks to desperately need a sense of pride, but too often find their failures are the cause of deep shame. The American Dream, after all, teaches them every individual can make it, inherently implying failure is due to individual weakness.

Many of the men she speaks to have experienced unemployment, domestic breakups, jail, alcoholism and drug abuse. (She even manages to speak to one current jail inmate.) Kentucky has one of the highest rates of opioid addiction in the United States – and despite Trump’s attacks on Mexico and Canada, the doctor-prescribed drugs some were addicted to appear to be domestically manufactured.

So many of the men Hochschild interviewed talk of the balance between shame and pride, I began to wonder if they were prompted. On reflection, I suspect this represents Hochschild’s careful selection from a series of very extensive interviews, conducted over roughly six years.

Her emphasis is almost entirely on the men in Pikeville, though a majority of white women also voted for Trump. I would love to see Hochschild explore this further. That so many women can support a convicted sexual predator in a country obsessed with sexual behaviour is one of the mysteries of contemporary American politics.

By 2021, many Americans – and most Republicans – believed Trump’s claims that he had really won the 2020 election. They saw the rioters at the Capitol on January 6 as heroes defending American democracy. In Trump’s claim the election was stolen, many of those Hochschild interviews saw parallels to what they believed had been stolen from them, by economic and cultural upheavals.

Importantly, many of her respondents saw Trump as a bully — but a bully who stood up for them, against what they perceived as urban liberal elites. When Hillary Clinton spoke of his supporters as “a basket of deplorables”, she reinforced the grievances of people consistently looked down on as “hillbillies” and “rednecks” by people they identified as Democratic elites.

How ‘deep stories’ inform politics

For Hochschild, there are underlying emotional narratives, which she calls “deep stories”, that inform our political positions.

In Strangers in their Own Land, these were identified as a sense of being overtaken by groups, usually educated women and Black people, who benefited from programs of affirmative action. The second Trump administration’s crusade against “DEI” is playing directly to these grievances. In Stolen Pride, this feeling is strengthened by the sense liberal elites are undermining both traditional values and the ability for individuals to succeed.

Eastern Kentucky is coal country, and Clinton’s ill-worded election-trail claim she would “put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business” was a major factor in swinging voters towards Trump. For men who took pride in their work, the collapse of the coal industry produced a sense of shame: strengthened by a strong belief individuals are to blame for their own misfortunes.

Pikeville was also the site of a neo-Nazi march in April 2017, the forerunner of the tragic Unite the Right march in Charlottesville later that year, which resulted in one death and multiple injuries.

Much of the book skilfully explores the preparations for and reactions to the Pikeville march, which seemingly passed without incident. Some 100 white nationalists turned up and were outnumbered by counter protesters, As Hochschild writes, “Very few Pikeville locals were involved on either side”.

Perhaps the most fascinating figure in Hochschild’s book, and evidence of her skill in persuading the most unlikely people to open up in interviews, is Matthew Heimbach, who led the 2017 Pikesville march, identified as a proud Nazi and co-founded the now-defunct neo-Nazi party, Traditionalist Worker Party.

He also co-planned the Charlottesville march, where he railed against “white genocide” and was sued (with other members of the TWP) for his role in it on behalf of Charlottesville victims. He was found guilty on charges of civil conspiracy in 2021.

“Some years later”, he reveals some of his core beliefs are shaken, especially his attitude toward Black Americans, whom he recognises as often sharing the same sense of dispossession that had fuelled his own anger. “I love Russia and I love Putin,” he told Hochschild, “so I looked into moving there.” As Hochschild remarks: “It seemed that Adolf Hitler was to be replaced in his pantheon by Vladimir Putin.”

Transcending the gulf?

Pikesville is also the home of America’s most famous family feud, between the Hatfields and the McCoys. The feud, which lasted many decades from the late 19th century, “began as a dispute over a stolen pig” and “ended as the longest and fiercest clan fight in the nation”. It has been the basis for a dozen movies, virtually all unmemorable. In 2017, a member of the reconciled clans said if they could settle their differences, “there has to be a way for Americans to get back together as one”.

In the last section of the book, Hochschild looks for ways to transcend the apparent gulf that separates blue and red America. Reading the book after Trump’s return to power, this felt sadly inadequate. Yes, as she points out, most voters are more moderate than the politicians on either side. Sadly, this is not sufficient protection against the rise of the authoritarian plutocracy that now seems to have a firm grip on Washington.

Hochschild wrote this book during the Biden administration and the lead-up to the 2024 elections. I assume she finished it before Trump named Vance as his vice president: a man who first came to prominence with his own account of Appalachian pride and shame. Hochschild doesn’t discuss his Hillbilly Elegy, though it is listed in her references.

Hochschild brilliantly captures the pain of men who feel left behind and conveys something of life in rural Kentucky that goes beyond easy stereotypes. I could feel empathy for many of the people she comes across. But I was unpersuaded there is much room for optimism that the appeal of Trump, and those who follow him, will easily be defeated.

Dennis Altman, Vice Chancellor's Fellow and Professorial Fellow, Institute for Human Security and Social Change, La Trobe University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

---

OMFG // BONDI LIFT SANCTIONS USSR DAY ONE?!

A prominent Republican congressman, the former House Intelligence Committee chair, appeared shocked on national television when he learned that U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has ordered a top Pentagon agency, U.S. Cyber Command, to suspend operations and planning against Russia’s cyber offensives.

Secretary Hegseth’s “stand down” order, while allegedly temporary, is expected to “last for the foreseeable future,” according to The Record (https://therecord.media/hegseth-orders-cyber-command-stand-down-russia-planning), a cybersecurity news site which first reported the news.

CNN (https://www.cnn.com/2025/03/02/politics/us-cyber-operations-russia-suspend/index.html) reported that a senior U.S. official called Hegseth’s order “a major blow.”

According to the network, “planning for such operations takes time and research to carry out. The concern, the official said, is that the pause on offensive cyber operations against Russia will make the U.S. more vulnerable to potential cyberattacks from Moscow, which has a formidable cadre of hackers capable of disrupting U.S. critical infrastructure and collecting sensitive intelligence.”

READ MORE: World Leaders Rush to Support Zelenskyy as Americans Debate Trump’s Allegiance (https://www.thenewcivilrightsmovement.com/2025/02/world-leaders-rush-to-support-zelenskyy-as-americans-debate-trumps-allegiance/https://www.thenewcivilrightsmovement.com/2025/02/world-leaders-rush-to-support-zelenskyy-as-americans-debate-trumps-allegiance/)

The development has received widespread coverage over the weekend.

“Russia is not a significant cyber threat to the U.S. anymore, Trump’s new Defense Secretary says,” the science and technology website Gizmodo (https://gizmodo.com/trumps-defense-secretary-hegseth-orders-cyber-command-to-stand-down-on-all-russia-operations-2000570343) reported. “The policy shift represents a complete 180-degree turn from America’s posture over the past decade, which has consistently considered Russia one of the top cybersecurity threats. Credible reporting and government investigations have shown that Russia has hacked into U.S. systems countless times.”

Experts were also stunned.

Veteran cyber expert James Lewis, formerly of the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) said “it’s delusional to think” the stand down order “will turn Russia and the FSB \the Russian security agency] into our friends,” [The Guardian (https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/feb/28/trump-russia-hacking-cyber-security) reported. “They hate the U.S. and are still mad about losing the cold war. Pretending otherwise won’t change this.”

The order appears to extend past the Department of Defense, suggesting it may have originated at the highest levels of the executive branch.

Analysts at the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) received a new priorities directive that included China, but not Russia, The Guardian also reported. One source “said analysts at the agency were verbally informed that they were not to follow or report on Russian threats, even though this had previously been a main focus for the agency.”

“Russia and China are our biggest adversaries,” that source said. “With all the cuts being made to different agencies, a lot of cybersecurity personnel have been fired. Our systems are not going to be protected and our adversaries know this.”

READ MORE: ‘What the Hell Is This?’: GOP Group’s Andrew Tate Invitation Draws Bipartisan Outrage (https://www.thenewcivilrightsmovement.com/2025/02/what-the-hell-is-this-gop-groups-andrew-tate-invitation-draws-bipartisan-outrage/)

“People are saying Russia is winning,” they added. “Putin is on the inside now.”

U.S. Rep. Mike Turner (R-OH) has decades of defense experience in Congress, having served on several committees on the armed forces and veterans affairs, and as Chair of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence until January—when Speaker Mike Johnson unexpectedly removed him from that critical position. He is a strong supporter of Ukraine and opposes Russia.

At the time of his removal, The Bulwark’s Bill Kristol remarked (https://x.com/BillKristol/status/1879693874408652891), “If you’re going to sell out Ukraine to Putin, makes sense to get Turner out of the way first.”

Last year, Turner was also one of a few House Republicans who “were warning about how elements of their party had been infected by Russian propaganda,” The Washington Post’s Aaron Blake noted (https://x.com/AaronBlake/status/1896546415675076857) on Monday. (Video of Turner from last year here (https://x.com/CNNSOTU/status/1776984100592636247).) Turner, he added, “was removed 7 months later as chair of the House intel committee.”

In February 2024, Turner issued a “national security threat” warning on Russia’s activities in space so dire that President Biden’s National Security Communications Advisor John Kirby was forced to deliver a statement (https://x.com/therecount/status/1758210523156373615) from the White House press briefing room.

On Sunday’s “Face the Nation,” CBS News’ Margaret Brennan told Congressman Turner (video below), that “CBS has confirmed these reports that Defense Secretary Hegseth has ordered U.S. Cyber Command to temporarily halt cyber operations and planning against Russia. The Washington Post reports that that’s as long as the negotiations continue. There are no negotiations under way. Does this concern you? Have you been briefed on this?”

A stunned and stammering Rep. Turner delivered his response.

“I can’t – I don’t – no, I’m not – unaware of that. And I don’t believe that that would be – there are too many, I’m certain, considerations there for that to be an accurate statement, so blanket,” he said, according to the official CBS transcript (https://www.cbsnews.com/news/face-the-nation-full-transcript-03-02-2025/).

“But they have ordered Cyber Command to halt cyber operations,” Brennan reiterated.

“Considering what I know that – that – considering what I know what – what Russia is currently doing against the United States, that would, I’m certain, not be an accurate statement of the current status of the United States’ operations,” Turner insisted, despite multiple news reports confirming the stand down order.

“I’m confident, considering what Russia is currently doing against the United States, that the United States, the status against Russia would not be that, considering what we are facing from Russia operations,” Turner added.

Watch the video below or at this link (https://www.thenewcivilrightsmovement.com/2025/03/considering-what-we-are-facing-us-cyber-defense-halt-against-russia-stuns-republican/).

---ly:Merriweather"):

factchecked by macron and starm UK --> ambush? omfg feelings?!

an 2 25

President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance ganged up on and attacked Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, in an Oval Office meeting that aired on national television in near-real-time. Experts decried the event, with some declaring Russia would be celebrating.

Politico described the meeting as an "ambush," and an "attack" by Trump and Vance on Zelenskyy.

In one exceptionally heated exchange, Trump attacked Zelenskyy and accused him of playing with "millions of lives."

"You’re in no position to dictate what we’re gonna feel," Trump told Zelenskyy. "You’re right now, not in a very good position."

"You're gambling with World War III," Trump alleged.

"Have you ever said thank you once?" Vance asked Zelenskyy, attacking him for "campaigning for the opposition" last year.

"You’re not acting at all thankful,” Trump later added.

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"So, so depressing to watch this s----show in the Oval," remarked Michael McFaul, former U.S. Ambassador to Russia.

The New Yorker's Susan Glasser, whom has written books on Trump and Putin, called it, "the most shocking behavior by Trump and Vance I’ve ever seen in the Oval Office. An ambush."

Former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine, Steven Pifer, responded: "VP Vance, who once said he did not care about #Ukraine, despicably provoked this fight in Oval Office. Vance is not #Russia’s agent. But he could not have done more damage and caused greater joy in Moscow were he a Russian agent."

Russian intelligence operations expert Olga Lautman of the Center for European Policy Analysis remarked, "At least Zelenskyy tried but as I said Ukraine and the rest of Europe are on their own and need to tell the Kremlin owned Trump regime to go to hell."

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The Financial Times' chief correspondent in Kyiv, Christopher Miller, described the event as "really, really bad," and wrote: "Look at Ukraine ambassador @OMarkarova grab the bridge of her nose. She knows this is a disaster."

Tom Nichols, a former Naval War College professor, and expert on Russia and nuclear weapons, wrote: "This is the video that the Kremlin needed and will celebrate."

In a series of social media posts in recent days President Zelenskyy has praised the "bipartisan" support he has received from the U.S., declaring his gratitude as recently as late Friday morning.

When it was all over, Trump angrily declared, "That’s going to be great television, I will say that.”

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Watch the videos above or at this link.

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AN 2 25

Fox News host Mark Levin offered a rebuttal of President Donald Trump’s misleading claims about the war between Russia and Ukraine on his radio show Wednesday, voicing his support for Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

“While Levin did not present his argument as being a rebuke of Trump, most of his points seemed to be aimed at debunking Trump’s claims over the last few days,” writes Mediaite’s Isaac Schorr.

“Now look, I don’t have a problem if it’s the position of our administration to cut back on support for Ukraine — which I oppose, by the way — then so be it,” Levin said. “Elections have consequences, so be it. But I want to make sure the facts are on the table and you, the American people, draw your own conclusion.”

“MAGA doesn’t support Putin,” he said.

Trump recently claimed that Zelenskyy’s approval rating was at 4 percent and suggested that Ukraine started the war.

“Zelenskyy’s latest poll, he’s at 57 percent,” Levin said.

“The parliament — with all parties in the parliament — support what he’s doing,” he added. “They’re trying to survive. Ukraine did not invade Russia. Russia invaded Ukraine.”

"He refuses to have Elections, is very low in Ukrainian Polls, and the only thing he was good at was playing Biden 'like a fiddle,'" Trump posted on Truth Social Wednesday. "A Dictator without Elections, Zelenskyy better move fast or he is not going to have a Country left. In the meantime, we are successfully negotiating an end to the War with Russia, something all admit only 'TRUMP,' and the Trump Administration, can do. Biden never tried, Europe has failed to bring Peace, and Zelenskyy probably wants to keep the 'gravy train' going. I love Ukraine, but Zelenskyy has done a terrible job, his Country is shattered, and MILLIONS have unnecessarily died – And so it continues….."

Levin defended Zelenskyy’s actions. “Zelenskyy ordered martial law — that’s what the constitution there compelled,” he said. “Zelenskyy hasn’t called for an election — that’s what the constitution there compels. Now, I’m waiting for the first free election for Vladimir Putin. I mean, this is almost comical in a sick way that Putin is demanding an election. Why is he demanding an election in Ukraine when he doesn’t have free and real elections in his own country? And why does he — why does he get to call the shots when in fact, he murders people who dare to challenge him?”

“This is what we’re dealing with. Again, old KBG, and not just KBG, [Putin] was in like Flynn with the Stasi in East Germany. So, I don’t know why there are people that not only oppose Zelenskyy, but seem to support Putin,” said Levin.

People with this position are pushing “policies that in many ways are un-American in my view, and policies that if they had espoused these policies not that long ago, people would have wondered if they were on the take, or who they’re working for, something like that," he added. "Not that they are, but they would wonder.”

“Ukraine doesn’t have the industrial might that a Russia has — or a China. A relatively small population of around 40 million people, mostly an agricultural country. They didn’t start this war. What were they supposed to do? Roll over and play dead?” he asked.

“If Ukraine is making preposterous demands that cannot be met, that’s another problem, that’s another problem. But the idea that Ukraine must hold elections in violation of its own constitution as a condition for peace, or that Ukraine must give up more territory as a condition for peace… you have to understand the Ukrainian people don’t want to do that. That’s why Zelenskyy at 57%, higher than most politicians in our own country!” he said.

===

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MMA

February 19, 2025, edition of Fox Business' Mornings with Maria

MARIA BARTIROMO (ANCHOR): Trump says he could meet with Vladimir Putin before the February. Joining me now is the head of the global Magnitsky Justice Campaign, the CEO of Hermitage Capital Management, Sir Bill Browder. Bill, it's good to see you this morning. Thanks so much for being here. You've had plenty of run-ins with Vladimir Putin. Give us your reaction to all of this.

BILL BROWDER (GUEST): Well, Vladimir Putin — so my run-ins with Vladimir Putin was he murdered my lawyer, Sergei Magnitsky, and a bunch of other people. And, he's been chasing me around the world ever since with death threats and so on. And so I know Vladimir Putin very well, and he's a very bad guy, a man who shouldn't be trusted. And so when I'm watching this whole thing playing itself out, I'm thinking to myself that we need to be more supportive of Ukraine who are the victims and and a little bit less chummy with Putin who is the aggressor in this whole situation. I find — that, you know, at the end of the day, Putin could end this war in right this minute by just stopping. That that's the thing. If Ukraine is defending, Putin's attacking, and he could stop. And so that's what we should be pushing for.

BARTIROMO: Yeah. It's a great point that you make. And and, you know, it certainly felt in those comments from President Trump that he was more critical of Zelensky, certainly name noting, his, lack of popularity with that 4% number in terms of the potential for elections.

BROWDER: That number comes out of thin air. There's no 4% number. Zelensky's got a 52% approval rating, not a 4% approval rating. And they're under attack. The reason they have martial law is because this country has been invaded. They have air strikes every day from from Russia. I think it's highly unfair for for him to be critical of the victim. He should be critical of the person who's launching the air strikes.

BARTIROMO: And and certainly, when you think about, you know, approval for Vladimir Putin, I mean, what are you gonna say when you get the phone call? What do you think of Vladimir Putin? You better say you love him. So I don't believe anything on the Russia side either in terms of approval of Vladimir Putin. But what's your take on Ukraine not even being part, of that peace talk yesterday? I mean, President Trump has made the point. Look. He's been part of the talks for three years, but Zelensky makes the point that he wasn't at the table, in Saudi Arabia, and he says he's not gonna accept any outcome without being part of the talks.

...

BARTIROMO: What do you think, Bill? Zelensky later canceled his own scheduled visit to Saudi Arabia following the talks.

BROWDER: Well, it's the whole thing, again, is Putin invaded Ukraine. Putin thought he was gonna win in three days, and he didn't. And why didn't he win in three days? Because the Ukrainians bravely fought back and they said we don't want you to invade our country. We don't want you to kill our men, rape our women, and kidnap our children.

There wasn't — this was not a time for negotiation. This was a time for them to defend themselves. And so it's there there was no chance for for any negotiation to happen. It's — this was a brutal dictatorship of invading a peaceful neighbor who didn't wanna be invaded. And so I think, President Trump is being very unfair to, Volodymyr Zelensky.

It pains me to see him saying these things. I think that he should be supporting the the victim in this thing, the the democratically elected victim. Vladimir Putin has been a dictator for twenty five years. He's taken over Georgia. He's carpet bombed Syria. He's done all sorts of terrible things. I think we need to understand who the good guys are and who the bad guys here. Ukraine is the good guys and Putin is the bad guy.

---

TRUMP BOASTS LIES WORLD NOW RESPECTS US AGAIN, BUT OPPOSITE; HEGSETH JDV UNDO POSTWAR SYSTEM; NEGOIT UKR 3 DICTATOR PETRO-STATES SAUDI

2 25

Last week in Europe, the United States sent some very strong messages it is prepared to upend the established global order.

US Vice President JD Vance warned a stunned Munich Security Conference that Europe has an “enemy within”, referring to leaders who ignore their citizens’ concerns and values. He also advocated for right-wing political groups to be brought into the mainstream.

Meanwhile, at a meeting of NATO defence ministers, US Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth talked about hard power, the warrior ethos and the need for NATO members to spend up to 5% of their GDPs on defence. Most have only just climbed to about 2%, the longstanding NATO guideline.

In Poland, he reaffirmed the US commitment to the defence of Poland (and NATO) and committed to bolstering the US military presence there. So, despite the mixed messaging, the United States is not leaving Europe anytime soon. YOU SURE?

Meanwhile, President Donald Trump is reportedly demanding a significant levy from Ukraine as payback for US protection and support.

The combination of remarks has left pundits and policymakers wondering – is the US-led international order, with its multilateral institutions, nearing its end?

The demise of the rules-based order?

The United States played a leading role in establishing the rules-based international order from the ashes of the second world war.

Critics have decried the UN-related institutions that arose at this time. But the rules-based order is perhaps best viewed as Voltaire saw the Holy Roman Empire: “no way holy, nor Roman, nor an empire”. Those proclaiming the demise of the rules-based order should be careful what they wish for.

Such a system of trusted international exchanges barely existed prior to 1945. And while superpowers have carved out many exceptions for themselves, the rules-based order has nonetheless resulted in a time of remarkable stability and prosperity for the world.

So, why would the United States now appear to be retreating from this arrangement? The declining centrality of US influence goes some way to explain this.

China’s rise and the rise of Trump

To place the current events in proper context, we need to go back 25 years, when China joined the World Trade Organisation (WTO).

This move was supported by and facilitated by then US President Bill Clinton in a belief that market liberalisation would eventually lead to political liberalisation.

Since then, China’s growth has skyrocketed thanks to its ready access to global markets. But it’s retained a strong mercantilist approach, counter to the spirit of the WTO. This has generated much resentment and nervousness among Western powers about the changing global power balance.

Since Xi Jinping’s rise to power in 2012, in particular, China has taken on an adversarial position to the rules-based order, following its own set of rules.

In effect, the world got neither the political nor the trade liberalisation that it once sought from China. Rather, the rules as they applied in China (and to an extent in Russia) allowed state-owned enterprises to co-opt – if not outright steal – technology shared by their international industry partners.

Foreign companies were squeezed out of China and had difficulty competing with lower-priced Chinese products at home.

Trump’s rise is, in part, a reaction to these developments. During his first term from 2017–20, Trump fitfully attempted to take a retaliatory, transactional approach to international relations. Now, as he begins his second term, he has a much more clear-eyed plan of action.

What Trump expects now

What became startlingly clear at the Munich Security Conference was Trump’s new vision of transactional alliances with America’s traditional partners.

In his view, the United States is not so much retreating into isolationism as much as it’s acting as a great power with its own economic interests at heart. Trump is eager for the US to assert its place in a world where spheres of influence matter as much – if not more – than any particular set of rules.

Evidently, the US is no longer advocating for multilateralism, in which states cooperate as equals. Now, it’s focused more on multi-polarity – a world with several great powers, in which the US puts its own interests first. As Trump frequently reminds us, “America First”.

According to this world view, allies and adversaries have equally been taking unfair advantage of:

America’s famous openness (notably its borders)
its liberal trade policies (which, according to Trump, has led to the de-industrialisation of the American heartland).

Its allies have also taken advantage of the generosity of its security umbrella, leading to their cavalier approach to security.

The Trump administration’s remedy to all of this involves doling out sanctimonious advice. An example of this: Vance telling European allies they should.JD Vance’s speech to the Munich Security Conference.

It’s also doling out some tough medicine, apparently trying to provoke a reaction in European capitals so they significantly increase their defence spending. This would enable the US to step back from being Europe’s security guarantor and finally undertake its long-talked-about pivot to Asia and focus on its main adversary: China.

Russia evidently features as part of this plan. Trump appears intent to try to cleave Russia from its Chinese embrace in order to either isolate or weaken China. A hard-nosed deal with Russia over Ukraine may well be the price he’s willing to pay to make that happen. JUST HAD ANOTHER GREAT CALL W XI

For America’s close security and economic partners, this presents an unprecedented challenge. The old preconceptions and expectations no longer seem to apply. What’s important now is not so much America’s shared values with Europe, it’s their overlapping interests.

For America’s allies, as well as its adversaries, this is going to require some hard thinking and new strategies, both economically and militarily.

John Blaxland, Professor, Strategic and Defence Studies Centre, Australian National University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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NO LNK AN

Why is Trump bending the knee?

U.S. President-elect Donald Trump attends the America First Policy Institute (AFPI) gala at Mar-A-Lago in Palm Beach, Florida, U.S., November 14, 2024. REUTERS/Carlos Barria

Thom Hartmann February 19, 2025

What if Putin owns Trump?

I mean, seriously, what the hell is up with this? The BBC reported yesterday that Trump gave Russia everything they want with regard to Ukraine, rewarding Putin’s invasion of a sovereign European nation, and even took steps to help rebuild Russia’s economy that sanctions and the war damaged:

“The Americans said they agreed to four principles with the Russians, maintaining talks between the delegations, restoring broader diplomatic ties, enabling teams to work on a path to end the war in Ukraine, and then what the US called historic economic and investment opportunities with Russia.

“But what of any concessions being demanded of Moscow? Mr. Rubio wouldn't set any out to reporters after the meeting, saying only that it would be a matter for future talks. Mr. Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, made clear European peacekeeping forces were out of the question. …

“Pressed on why the US wasn’t laying down conditions for Moscow in order to agree to a durable peace, Mr Rubio said the two sides would only agree to ending the war on terms they were each happy with.” (emphasis mine)

Trump, in other words, has ordered Lil’ Marco to give Russia whatever they want and to hell with Ukraine. It’s a complete betrayal of Ukraine, America, democracy, and our European allies.

He even incoherently blamed Ukraine for Russia invading them, killing their people, stealing their children, and destroying their cities:

“Well, you've been there for three years. You should have ended it three years. You should have never started it.

“You could have made a deal. I could have made a deal for Ukraine that would have given them almost all of the land, everything, almost all of the land, and no people would have been killed and no city would have been demolished and not one dome would have been knocked down.”

This morning, Trump went even farther, lying with Russian talking points about how much money America has spent in Ukraine and calling President Zelenskyy a “dictator.”

Why?

ALSO READ: 'Outrageous lies': Trump floats kicking millions off of Social Security

What if Trump is working for Putin? What if Putin somehow owns him? And has been running him as an asset since at least 2017?

That would be more important than Russian agents Robert Hanssen (life without parole), Aldrich Ames (life without parole), or Ethel and Julius Rosenberg (death penalty).

Jack Smith’s case in Florida was limited to Trump stealing sensitive documents and sharing them on two publicly known occasions (and didn’t even reference other known acts like Kid Rock’s allegation that Trump showed him Top Secret maps in the White House: this was apparently a regular thing for Trump).

That said, you can bet your bottom dollar that the FBI and other agencies worked as hard as they could to contain the damage done by Trump’s leaving documents that could cause “grave damage” to America in public places where spies could simply waltz in and take cell-phone pictures of them by attending a wedding or paying $200,000 for essentially unlimited access Club membership.

But what if it goes beyond that? What if Putin has owned him for years?

From Russian oligarchs laundering money through his operations — real estate is the most common device used worldwide for money laundering — to keeping him alive in his most difficult times, like those multiple bankruptcies in the 1990s when he almost lost everything?

Or perhaps blackmailing him?

What if Putin got him the presidency, and he knows that if America found out for sure, it would destroy him?

Which begs the question: exactly how much damage might Trump have already done to our nation, and what does he have planned for this second term?

And is he getting ongoing day-to-day instructions from Putin, which explains why he’s so reluctant to discuss their conversations, as Rachel Maddow documented last night?

In 2019 The Washington Post revealed that, throughout his last presidency, Donald Trump was having secret phone conversations with Russia’s President Putin (over 20 have been identified so far, including one just days before the 2020 election).

Throughout the campaign, Manafort let Russian intelligence know where Trump needed help, and when.

Trump pardoned Manafort, which got him out of prison. He’s still fabulously rich from his work for Russia.

As The New York Times noted in 2020:

There is no known parallel to this behavior by any president in American history — one could argue it easily exceeds Benedict Arnold’s audacity — and bringing documents to Mar-a-Lago was just the tip of the iceberg.

The Washington Post reported in 2022 that Trump had a habit of carrying top-secret information that could severely damage our national security, leaving it in hotel rooms in hostile nations.

Was he bringing these documents with him to sell? Or just to show to leaders or oligarchs in those countries to impress them? Or because Putin, who has agents in those countries, told him to?

Trump doesn’t put all that effort into hauling things around unless it’s extraordinarily important to his ego or he thinks he can makes money off them. Or he’s scared.

When Robert Mueller’s FBI team tried to investigate Trump’s ties to Russia and his possibly sharing sensitive military information with them, they were stonewalled.

The Mueller Report identified ten specific instances of Trump trying to obstruct the investigation, including offering the bribe of a pardon to Paul Manafort, asking FBI Director Comey to “go easy” on General Flynn after his dinner with Putin, and directing Attorney General Jeff Sessions to limit Mueller’s ability to investigate Trump’s connections to Russia.

As the Mueller Report noted:

“For instance, the President attempted to remove the Attorney General; he sought to have Attorney General Sessions un-recuse himself and limit the investigation; he sought to prevent public disclosure of information about the June 9, 2016 meeting between Russians and campaign officials; and he used public forums to attack potential witnesses who might offer adverse information and to praise witnesses who declined to cooperate with the government.”

It adds, detailing Trump’s specific Obstruction of Justice crimes:

And apparently Putin and his intelligence operatives had good reason to be popping the champagne in November, 2016. They were quickly paid off in a big way.

The undercover agent was apparently working in Syria that year against the Russians, who were embroiled in the midst of Assad’s Civil War and indiscriminately bombing Aleppo into rubble.

That, in turn, prompted the CIA to worry that a longtime American spy buried deep in the Kremlin was similarly vulnerable to Trump handing him over to Putin.

As CNN noted (when the story leaked two years later):

“According to CNN’s sources, the spy had access to Putin and could even provide images of documents on the Russian leader’s desk.”

The Washington Postreported, after a leak six months later, that when Trump met privately for those two hours with Putin the CIA went into “panic mode.” A US intelligence official told the Post:

“There was this gasp’ at the CIA’s Langley, Virginia headquarters. You literally had people in panic mode watching it at Langley. On all floors. Just shock.”

Three weeks after Trump’s July 16, 2018 meeting with Putin in Helsinki, Senator Rand Paul made a solo trip to Moscow to personally hand-deliver a document or package of documents from Trump to Putin. Its contents are still unknown, although Paul told the press it was a “personal” letter of some sort.

Senator Paul has also consistently taken Trump’s and Putin’s side with regard to the Ukraine war: he single-handedly blocked a $40 billion military aid package in the Senate. When the FBI searched Mar-a-Lago, he responded with a call for the repeal of the Espionage Act. He further suggested the FBI may have “planted” Secret documents at Mar-a-Lago.

Ten days after Paul’s trip to Moscow, The New York Times reported that the CIA was freaked out because their sources inside Moscow had suddenly “gone silent”:

“The full reasons the sources have gone silent are not known,” the Times reported, but Trump having intentionally given a man working for the FBI to Putin — a man whose job at that time was to find and reveal Russian agents involved in or close to the Trump campaign — may also have had something to do with it.

Things were picking up the following year, in 2019, as Putin was planning his invasion of Ukraine while Trump was preparing for the 2020 election.

In July 2019, Trump had conversations with five foreign leaders during and just before a presidential visit that month to Mar-a-Lago; they included Putin and the Emir of Qatar.

As The Washington Post noted in an article titled, “Trump’s communications with foreign leader are part of whistleblower complaint that spurred standoff between spy chief and Congress”:

On the last day of that month, July 31, Trump had another private conversation with Putin.

The White House spokespeople told Congress and the press that Trump said that he and Putin discussed “wildfires” and “trade between the nations.” No droids in this car…

“The message, in an unusual top secret cable, said that the C.I.A.’s counterintelligence mission center had looked at dozens of cases in the last several years involving foreign informants who had been killed, arrested or most likely compromised. Although brief, the cable laid out the specific number of agents executed by rival intelligence agencies — a closely held detail that counterintelligence officials typically do not share in such cables.”

And now, to complicate matters, Elon Musk has access to the payroll records of all of our nation’s spies and other foreign intelligence agents. The Elon Musk who, himself, has also reportedly been having secret conversations with Putin.

If it turns out the Trump has been acting as an agent for Russia, how long might this have been going on?

Czechoslovakia’s Státní bezpečnost (StB) first started paying attention to Trump back in 1977, as documented by the German newspaper Bildwhen the StB’s files were declassified, because Trump married Czech model Ivana Zelnickova, his first wife, recently buried on his golf course in New Jersey.

Czechoslovakia at that time was part of the Warsaw Pact with the Soviet Union, and Ivana and her family had been raised as good communists. Now that a Czech citizen was married into a wealthy and prominent American family, the StB saw an opportunity and started tracking Trump virtually from his engagement.

As 2016 and 2018 investigations by The Guardian found:

“Ivana’s father, Miloš Zelníček, gave regular information to the local StB office about his daughter’s visits from the US and on his celebrity son-in-law’s career in New York. Zelníček was classified as a ‘conspiratorial’ informer. His relationship with the StB lasted until the end of the communist regime.”

An investigative reporting breakthrough by Craig Unger for his book American Kompromat led Unger to Uri Shvets, a former KGB spy who’d been posted to Washington, DC for years as a correspondent for the Soviet news agency TASS.

Shvets told the story — from his own knowledge — of how Trump and Ivana visited Moscow in 1987 and were essentially recruited or seduced by the KGB, a trip corroborated by Luke Harding in his book Collusion: Secret Meetings, Dirty Money, and How Russia Helped Donald Trump Win.

Their trip was coordinated by Intourist, the Soviet travel agency that was a front for the KGB, and the Trumps’ handlers regaled Donald and Ivana with Soviet talking points, presumably about things like the horrors of NATO.

The KGB’s psychological profile of Trump had determined he was vulnerable to flattery and not much of a deep thinker, so they told him repeatedly how brilliant he was and that he should run for president in the US.

Much to the astonishment and jubilation of the KGB, Trump returned from Moscow to the US to give a Republican presidential campaign speech that fall in Portsmouth, New Hampshire.

He then purchased a large ad in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Boston Globe on September 1, 1987 that questioned America’s ongoing support of Japan and NATO, both thorns in the side of the USSR and their Chinese allies.

Trump’s ad laid it on the line:

“Why are these nations not paying the United States for the human lives and billions of dollars we are losing to protect their interests? ... The world is laughing at America’s politicians as we protect ships we don’t own, carrying oil we don’t need, destined for allies who won’t help.”

As The Guardian reported in 2021:

“The bizarre intervention was cause for astonishment and jubilation in Russia. A few days later Shvets, who had returned home by now, was at the headquarters of the KGB’s first chief directorate in Yasenevo when he received a cable celebrating the ad as a successful ‘active measure’ executed by a new KGB asset.

“’It was unprecedented,’ [Shvets said.] … It was hard to believe that somebody would publish it under his name and that it will impress real serious people in the west but it did and, finally, this guy became the president.’”

Meanwhile, Putin was making friends with powerful influence over American foreign policy.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who flipped his nation into a strongman neofascist state following an unsuccessful attempted coup in 2016 (he imprisoned and tortured numerous journalists and political opponents), has been deepening his relationship with Russian President Vladimir Putin ever since that US election year.

In 2017, Erdoğan apparently gained access to America’s deepest secrets by secretly paying off General Michael Flynn even as Flynn became Trump’s National Security Advisor, who also had at least one secret phone conversation with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak after Flynn started working in the White House.

Flynn pleaded guilty in December of 2017 to “willfully and knowingly” making “false, fictitious and fraudulent statements” to the FBI about one of those conversations with Russian Ambassador Kislyak. Flynn was also an unregistered agent of a foreign government while working in the White House: he had also taken about a half-million dollars from Erdoğan.

Around the time he was leaving office, Trump pardoned Flynn, essentially burying the entire story.

The plot thickened when America learned, from a blockbuster 2022 report in Axios by Jonathan Swan, that just before leaving office, back on October 21, 2020, Trump had signed Executive Order 13957, aka Schedule F.

It would allow him to instantly fire as many as 50,000 senior federal employees encompassing the Civil Service management of every government agency including the FBI, CIA, NSA, large parts of the Pentagon, and DHS, and allow Trump to replace all of them with nakedly political loyalist appointees.

And now Musk is doing it for him. Deconstructing the American government. For Trump. Or for Putin.

From campaigning to destroy NATO to selling out Ukraine this week to demolishing the free world’s confidence in America’s ability to keep top secret information confidential, Trump’s goal appears to be, to paraphrase Ron DeSantis, to “Make America Russia.”

After all, it’s not like we’ve never had a rightwing coup attempt before in this country: wealthy Republican industrialists tried to kidnap and kill President Franklin Roosevelt 92 years ago and turn America into an Italian/German-style fascist state “friendly to capitalism.”

Not a single one of those traitors, some aligned with Hitler, was ever arrested or tried; why not try again?

NOW READ: Trump's view of the world is becoming clear

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AN 2 25

'Aren‘t you the boss?' Maddow supercut shows Trump being 'palpably scared' to talk about Putin

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--==

ay que lastima

an 2 25

The Senate on Wednesday confirmed former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-Hawaii) to serve as President Donald Trump’s director of national intelligence. Republican senators almost unanimously voted for Gabbard despite unified Democratic opposition, with a final vote tally of 52-48.

Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), who was the Senate Republican leader for nearly two decades and a former member of the "Gang of Six" that gets classified intelligence briefings, was the lone dissenter among his party. After casting his "no" vote with Democrats, McConnell ripped Gabbard over her "history of alarming lapses in judgment."

"The Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) is a key participant in the process that informs every major national security decision the President makes. The ODNI wields significant authority over how the intelligence community allocates its resources, conducts its collection and analysis, and manages the classification and declassification of our nation's most sensitive secrets," he stated. "In my assessment, Tulsi Gabbard failed to demonstrate that she is prepared to assume this tremendous national trust."

Multiple Democratic elected officials also tore into their GOP colleagues over their decision to be a rubber stamp for Trump. On Bluesky, Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-Texas) wrote that Gabbard amplified "propaganda" for Russian President Vladimir Putin and deposed Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad for years. Anti-Trump group the Lincoln Project tweeted that Russia refers to Gabbard as "Putin's girlfriend." And Rep. Sean Casten (D-Ill.) slammed Republicans as "worse than useless" for confirming "Tulsi F—ing Gabbard."

"Confirming her as DNI serves only to tell Trump that Senate Rs would rather lick his boots than do a single damn thing to protect our national security," he tweeted. "They are worse than useless. And they are putting every American at risk."

Around the same time Gabbard was confirmed, Fox News liberal host Jessica Tarlov tweeted a video of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth (also one of her former Fox News colleagues) calling for Ukraine's Crimean Peninsula — which Russia has been illegally occupying since 2014 — to be considered Russian territory. Hegseth added that Ukraine shouldn't be considered for membership in the NATO alliance anytime soon.

"Tulsi confirmed at virtually the same time," Tarlov wrote. "A sunny day in Moscow even if's still only 19 degrees out."

Software engineer Alex Cole wrly noted on Bluesky that Gabbard — who was once the vice chair of the Democratic National Committee — has found far greater political success after abandoning the Democratic Party.

"Tulsi Gabbard was once on a government watchlist. Now she’s running U.S. intelligence," Cole wrote. "Moral of the story? If at first you don’t succeed, just switch political parties."

Gabbard's alleged closeness to Russia didn't go unnoticed by MSNBC columnist Brandon Friedman. He recalled a time when social media platform Instagram announced it was going dark in Russia on March 13, 2022. He then posted a screenshot of a March 23, 2022 Fox News interview with Gabbard where the former congresswoman complained that her Instagram video views had dropped from 250,000 to 300,000 to just 15,000, suggesting that Russian Instagram users were the main source of her traffic. Friedman called that complaint "the funniest thing" Gabbard said.

Former Chicago Tribune editor Mark Jacob took a more somber tone, writing: "No foreign country in its right mind will share sensitive intelligence with Tulsi Gabbard. We are now a country that's flying blind in a dangerous world."

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an 12 24

'Certainly bring us lots of joy': Kremlin insider optimistic Trump will be Putin’s puppet

// ~

coronation fail orban?

'Wants a global stage': Trump’s 'power move' fizzles as China’s Xi blows off inauguration an 12 24 orban yes?

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12 24 david corn mojo

With Donald Trump tapping Kash Patel, the MAGA provocateur, conspiracy theory monger, and grifter, to be FBI director, it’s time to revisit the Trump-Russia scandal. I know many folks think this is old news. The matter was long ago swept under the rug. Yet the basic facts remain incontrovertible:

Vladimir Putin attacked the 2016 election with a covert hack-and-leak operation to help Trump win, and Trump aided and abetted that assault by denying it was underway—thus providing cover to a foreign adversary subverting American democracy—while seeking to exploit it. As president, Trump continued the cover-up by echoing and affirming Putin’s phony professions of innocence. Despite the clear evidence, Trump has gotten away with this act of profound betrayal. Patel is a big reason for that.

As an aide to then-Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), the chair of the House Intelligence Committee, Patel led an investigation after the 2016 election of the FBI’s probe of the Kremlin’s attack and contacts between the Trump campaign and Russia. It’s important to remember that there were two different components of that probe.

The bureau was looking at the Russian operation—which entailed hacking Democratic officials and operatives and then publicly disseminating through WikiLeaks internal memos and private emails to harm Hillary Clinton’s campaign—and it was also examining ties between the Trump crew and Russians. This inquiry was triggered when the bureau learned that a Trump foreign policy adviser named George Papadopoulos supposedly told a senior Australian diplomat he had been informed that Russia could secretly assist the Trump campaign by releasing derogatory information on Clinton.

After that, the FBI began looking at Trump associates with connections in Russia. One lead for the investigators was a campaign adviser named Carter Page, a business consultant who had mucked about in Russia for years and who made a trip to Moscow in July 2016 and met with Russian officials.

With Page of interest to the investigators, the bureau sought and received a secret surveillance warrant—in government parlance, a FISA warrant—to spy on Page. Here’s where things get tricky. The FBI used what became known as the Steele dossier in its applications for a series of FISA warrants for Page. This was the now infamous collection of private memos produced by former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele that contained a host of unproven accusations about Trump-Russia links. (Remember the golden showers?)

As a Justice Department inspector general later concluded, the FBI erred in using this document to justify its request for the FISA warrant on Page and screwed up in other disturbing ways in obtaining these warrants. That is, Page’s civil rights were violated. (Interest declared: I was the first reporter to reveal the existence of the Steele dossier—with an article in Mother Jones that appeared on October 31, 2016. But I did not publish the unsubstantiated memos.)

Now pay close attention to follow Nunes and Patel’s dodgy sleight of hand. They contended (loudly) that the FBI misconduct regarding its use of the Steele dossier and the Page warrants meant that the entire Trump-Russia investigation was a witch hunt and that all talk of the Russian attack mounted to boost Trump was a hoax.

And as some Trump critics and journalists raised the notion that the Trump campaign might have colluded with Putin’s operation, Patel and other Trump defenders used the Steele dossier mess-up to counter that accusation and to contend that the entire matter was nothing but a phony Democratic dirty trick. (Steele had written his memos as a consultant to an opposition research firm paid by a law firm working for the Clinton campaign.)

In a brilliant stroke of disinformation, Trump, Nunes, Patel, and others falsely asserted that it had been the Steele memos that had prompted the FBI to launch its Trump-Russia investigation—called Crossfire Hurricane—meaning the inquiry, based on a purportedly fraudulent document that was a product of a Democratic oppo initiative, was utterly illegitimate and illegal. The realscandal, they insisted, was not Moscow clandestinely helping Trump win the White House and Trump accepting and assisting that effort, but rather the Deep State fabricating this so-called scandal.

In his 2023 book, Government Gangsters: The Deep State, The Truth, and Our Battle for Democracy, Patel claims credit for “breaking open the biggest criminal conspiracy by government officials since Watergate — Russia Gate.” He repeatedly boasts that by exposing this supposed scandal—the Deep State concocting a bogus investigation to sabotage Trump—he helped save American democracy. He also asserts over and over that the FBI’s Russian investigation was predicated on the Steele dossier, which he alleges was purposefully manufactured as part of a conspiracy against Trump—“a political hit job”—run by Democrats, the FBI, the “fake news mafia,” and the Deep State.

What Patel did from the start was to engineer a wonderful deflection to defend and protect Trump. He created a false narrative in which the FBI’s misuse of the Steele dossier delegitimized Crossfire Hurricane and proved the whole investigation was baseless and a criminal conspiracy against Trump—and nothing else mattered. This is the cover story that Trump and his acolytes have been deploying for years.

Patel’s book makes almost no mention of the actual Russian attack on the 2016 election. Absent is any reference to the material stolen by Moscow’s hackers and leaked to hurt Clinton and aid Trump. (The worst leaking began right after the “grab-’em-by-the-pussy” video came out.)

Nor does he acknowledge that Trump and his team repeatedly issued false denials and covered for Putin. He doesn’t include the meeting at Trump Tower in June 2016 between Trump’s senior aides and a Russian emissary who they were informed was part of a secret Kremlin operation to assist the Trump campaign. WikiLeaks does not appear in these pages.

Patel ignores Trump’s own secret efforts during the campaign to score a huge real estate deal in Moscow—and his company’s attempt to obtain assistance from Putin’s office. Not surprisingly, he leaves out the Justice Department IG’s finding that the FBI’s initiation of Crossfire Hurricane was not based on the Steele document and not the product of “political bias or improper motivation.”

It was legitimate. Also missing from the book is the key fact that John Durham, a special counsel handpicked by Attorney General Bill Barr to investigate and advance the Patel-promoted conspiracy theory that the Deep State illegally whipped up the Russia “hoax” to destroy Trump, flopped and found no massive criminal plot or significant and widespread wrongdoing.

No, all that counts is the Steele dossier and the Page FISA warrants. In Patel’s world, the various government reports that confirmed that Russia waged information warfare to boost Trump do not exist. Most notably, there’s not a hint in his book that in 2020, the Senate Intelligence Committee, then chaired by Republican Sen. Marco Rubio, released a bipartisan 966-page report that detailed the Russian assault, stating it was designed to help elect Trump and that the “Trump Campaign publicly undermined the attribution of the hack-and-leak campaign to Russia, and was indifferent to whether it and WikiLeaks were furthering a Russian election interference effort.” That is, the Trump campaign helped the Russians.

This report disclosed that Paul Manafort, who was Trump’s campaign chair for months during 2016, repeatedly held covert meetings with a former business associate named Konstantin Kilimnik, who was a Russian intelligence officer, and “sought to secretly share internal Campaign information” with him. The committee put it bluntly: “Kilimnik likely served as a channel to Manafort for Russian intelligence services.”

Moreover, the committee reported it had “obtained some information suggesting Kilimnik may have been connected to [Russian intelligence’s] hack and leak operation targeting the 2016 U.S. election.” And the committee said it had uncovered “two pieces of information” that “raise the possibility” that Manafort himself was connected “to the hack-and-leak operations.” The report’s discussion of that information, though, was redacted.

Trump’s top campaign adviser clandestinely huddling with a Russian intelligence officer who was possibly involved in Moscow’s attack—that sure smells like collusion. At the least, it’s a real, honest-to-God scandal. The committee’s conclusion: Manafort posed a “grave counterintelligence threat.” (Manafort was imprisoned in 2018 for committing fraud and money laundering. Trump pardoned him in late 2020.)

Manafort does not appear anywhere in Patel’s book. Not a single sentence. (Here’s a suggestion for members of the Senate Judiciary Committee: Should Patel make it to a confirmation hearing, ask him if he read the Senate Intelligence Committee report and if he accepts its findings. If he says he hasn’t, he’s not a serious nominee for this job.)

For eight years, Patel has been engaged in Soviet-style revisionism. Create a sham story and airbrush out the truth. He bears much credit for concocting the fraudulent tale that Trump and MAGA have used for years to hide a truth they can’t handle: Trump was elected with covert Russian assistance, and, if the campaign didn’t collude directly with the Russians, Trump and his gang winked at this attack on America and joined Putin in the cover-up. In part thanks to Patel, this has never become the dominant narrative.

Put simply, Patel has been a useful idiot for Putin.

Given that Patel, a QAnon supporter who has peddled the Big Lie that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump and championed the ridiculous idea that the January 6 riot Trump incited was sparked by “strange agitators” and federal agents, has sued his critics for defamation, let me be explicit:

By calling him a useful idiot I’m not suggesting he has been a Russian asset or in cahoots with Russian operatives. But his effort to help Trump escape the treasonous stench of the Trump-Russia scandal by promoting a misleading account of this affair has been of tremendous value to Moscow. Patel essentially created a false alibi for Trump and a distraction that took the heat off Trump and Russia.

And he has vowed to seek revenge against those Deep State schemers who he claims illegally plotted against Trump by investigating the Russia matter. In the distorted view of reality Patel pushes, they are the wrongdoers in this episode, not Trump and not Putin. Patel hasn’t stopped selling this bunk. Yesterday, he sent out an email solicitation for the foundation he operates—under the subject heading “The Deep State can not be trusted”—that opened with this exclamation: “Remember Russia Gate? Fraud!”

One component of the FBI’s mission is to counter Russian espionage and covert actions aimed at the United States. Is this a mission Patel can take on? There are few MAGA advocates who have done more than him to help Trump and Putin dodge accountability for their devious misdeeds of 2016. Placing Patel in charge of the FBI could be akin to putting it in the hands of a mole. One can imagine the joy within the Kremlin prompted by the prospect of Patel leading this critically important agency. The Russians certainly would have reason to call him “our man in the bureau.”

===

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an 12 24

Is Tucker Carlson the carrier pigeon between Trump and Putin?

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russ media praise trans wackos tulsi, kash and pete h

[### Fact Check: Did Pete Hegseth Call Putin a 'War Criminal?'

Newsweek

https://www.newsweek.com › pete-hegseth-vladimir-put...](https://www.newsweek.com/pete-hegseth-vladimir-putin-war-criminal-1985251)

Claim: Did Pete Hegseth call Putin a 'war criminal'?

Claimed by: Adam Lowisz

Fact check by Newsweek: Needs Context

[### 'Putin's Give-Me-My-S***-Back War': Trump Defense ...

Kyiv Post

https://www.kyivpost.com › Ukraine](https://www.kyivpost.com/post/42139)

Nov 13, 2024 — Pete Hegseth, a Fox News co-host, author, and National Guard veteran, has been nominated to lead the world's most powerful military as Secretary of Defense.

[### Trump's Pentagon Pick Has Criticized US Involvement in ...

Business Insider

https://www.businessinsider.com › trump-pentagon-pic...](https://www.businessinsider.com/trump-pentagon-pick-pete-hegseth-criticized-us-involvement-ukraine-aid-2024-11)

Nov 13, 2024 — President-elect Donald Trump announced Pete Hegseth, a military veteran and Fox News host, as his pick for defense secretary on Tuesday.

---

:{:{Alternet+ no lnx}:

Trump’s appointees are the Trojan horse that could lead to America’s strategic collapse

Thom Hartmann November 21, 2024

The mainstream media is baffled: Why would Trump promote candidates to oversee critical agencies with millions of employees and multi-billion-dollar budgets who have little to no management experience and have openly expressed hostility toward the institutions they’ll oversee?

I’ve seen legendary reporter Bob Woodward, who wrote several books about Trump, on three different TV shows this week asking to the effect of, “What could Trump possibly gain from these incompetent appointments?

If he just wanted loyalty, there’s no shortage of rational, competent members of the military and intelligence community who’re loyal to Trump.

So why is he selecting people like Hegseth, Gaetz, and Gabbard to run agencies that could directly involve confrontations with Russia?

Trump wants Gaetz for the job as our nation’s top law enforcement officer, Attorney General (who oversees the FBI), where he could block the FBI from investigating Trump’s embrace of Putin and Russia’s spying and disinformation efforts here in the US.

Why? Gaetz, after all, has called for Trump to “defund, get rid of, abolish the FBI…”; he apparently hates the agency that investigated and threatened to prosecute him.

Pete Hegseth, who Trump wants to put in charge of our Department of Defense, is openly critical of our NATO allies, saying they are, “self-righteous and impotent nations asking us to honor outdated and one-sided defense arrangements they no longer live up to.”

Who else hates NATO? Vladimir Putin. Hegseth has also echoed Putin’s assertion that he doesn’t have designs on the Baltic states, arguing that he doubted Putin would go “much further” than the Polish border.

And both Hegseth and Gaetz have a history of lurid, possibly illegal sexual activity that could subject them to blackmail by a foreign power…like Russia.

Tulsi Gabbard, who Trump wants to put in charge of all 18 of America’s intelligence agencies — giving her full access to America’s darkest secrets and our spies buried deep within Russia and China — has repeatedly and openly embraced Vladimir Putin’s positions on world affairs.

Regarding Ukraine, she argued that Russia was forced to invade that country because, echoing Putin, she falsely claimed Ukraine was developing (with US help) biological weapons and conspiring with NATO to put troops on Russia’s border.

Former Secretary of State Clinton said Russia was “grooming” Gabbard, and Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz was equally blunt:

“There’s no question I consider her someone who is likely a Russian asset.”

And JD Vance, also selected by Trump and now our vice-president elect, has famously said:

“I don’t really care what happens to Ukraine one way or another,” no doubt bringing cheers from the Kremlin.

So, what’s really going on here?

Is it possible that Trump isn’t trolling us or trying to do “dominance plays” with Congress, but actually wants these people to injure or destroy the agencies he’s putting them in charge of?

Is it even conceivable that Trump, in league with Putin (or at least sharing his goal of weakening and damaging America), actually wants our intelligence, defense, and investigative agencies to be gutted to the point of impotence?

That these appointees could be Trojan horses he’s planning to use to destroy America from within?

That he’s that angry with the country whose past leaders have ridiculed him, whose elites have rejected him all his life, and that has even tried to put him in prison?

That he’d like our country — which he disdains — to be brought to its knees?

That his loyalty, perhaps for years, has been to a country and system of government very different from America and what our founders envisioned?

In 2019 The Washington Post revealed that, throughout his presidency, Donald Trump was having secret phone conversations with Russia’s President Putin (over 20 have been identified so far, including one just days before the 2020 election).

Just months ago, we discovered that he and Elon Musk have both been having regular, secret conversations with Putin for at least the past two years.

This embrace of a foreign dictator first cranked into visibility in 2016.

The Moscow Project from the American Progress Action Fund documented more than 270 known contacts between Russia-linked operatives and members of the Trump 2016 campaign and transition team, as well as at least 38 known meetings just leading up to that year’s election.

Throughout the campaign, he let them know where Trump needed help, and when. Speculation is that they used that information for their successful 2016 Facebook campaigns.

Trump pardoned Manafort, which got him out of prison; he’s still fabulously rich from his work for Russia.

As The New York Times noted in 2020:

The Washington Post reported two years ago last August that Trump had a habit of carrying top-secret information that could severely damage our national security, leaving it in hotel rooms in hostile nations.

Was he bringing these documents with him to sell? Or just to show to leaders or oligarchs in those countries to impress them? Or for bragging rights to impress dignitaries, businessmen, or ladies he brings back to his room?

Trump doesn’t put all that effort into hauling things around unless it’s extraordinarily important to his ego or he thinks he can make money off them.

When Robert Mueller’s team tried to investigate Trump’s ties to Russia and his possibly sharing sensitive military information with them, they were stonewalled by the Trump administration.

The Mueller Report identified ten specific instances of Trump trying to criminally obstruct the investigation, including offering the bribe of a pardon to Paul Manafort, asking FBI Director Comey to “go easy” on General Flynn after his dinner with Putin, and directing Attorney General Jeff Sessions to limit former FBI Director Mueller’s ability to investigate Trump’s connections to Russia.

As the Mueller Report noted:

It adds, detailing Trump’s specific Obstruction of Justice crimes:

There are, after all, credible assertions from American intelligence agencies that when Trump was elected, members of Russian intelligence and Putin’s inner circle were literally partying in Moscow, celebrating a victory they believed they made happen.

And apparently Putin and his intelligence operatives had good reason to be popping the champagne in November, 2016. They were quickly paid off in a big way.

In his first months in office, Trump outed an Israeli/American asset/spy to the Russian Ambassador in what he thought was going to be a “secret Oval Office meeting” (the Russians released the photo to the press), resulting in MOSAD having to “burn” (relocate, change identity of) that spy.

The undercover agent was apparently working in Syria that year against the Russians, who were embroiled in the midst of Assad’s Civil War and indiscriminately bombing Aleppo into rubble.

That, in turn, prompted the CIA to worry that another longtime American spy, this one buried deep inside the Kremlin, was similarly vulnerable to Trump handing him over to Putin.

As CNN noted (when the story leaked two years later):

“According to CNN’s sources, the spy had access to Putin and could even provide images of documents on the Russian leader’s desk.”

Similarly, when they met in Helsinki on July 16, 2018, Trump and Putin talked in private for several hours and Trump ordered his translators’ notes destroyed; there is also concern that much of their conversation was done out of the hearing of the US’ translator (Putin is fluent in English) who may have been relegated to a distant part of the large empty ballroom in which they met.

The Washington Post reported, after a leak six months later, that when Trump met privately for those two hours with Putin the CIA went into “panic mode.” A US intelligence official told the Post:

“There was this gasp’ at the CIA’s Langley, Virginia headquarters. You literally had people in panic mode watching it at Langley. On all floors. Just shock.”

Ten days after Paul’s trip to Moscow, The New York Times reported that the CIA was worried because their sources inside Moscow had suddenly “gone silent”:

“[C]urrent and former officials said the exposure of sources inside the United States has also complicated matters,” noted the Times. “This year, the identity of an F.B.I. informant, Stefan Halper, became public after [Trump-loyal MAGA Republican] House lawmakers sought information on him and the White House allowed that information to be shared. Mr. Halper, an American academic based in Britain, had been sent to talk to Trump campaign advisers who were under F.B.I. scrutiny for their ties to Russia.”

Things were picking up the following year, in 2019, as Putin was planning his invasion of Ukraine while Trump was preparing for the 2020 election.

In July 2019, Trump had conversations with five foreign leaders during and just before a presidential visit that month to Mar-a-Lago; they included Putin and the Emir of Qatar.

As The Washington Post noted in an article titled “Trump’s communications with foreign leader are part of whistleblower complaint that spurred standoff between spy chief and Congress”:

On the last day of that month, July 31, Trump had another private conversation with Putin.

The White House spokespeople told Congress and the press that Trump said that he and Putin discussed “wildfires” and “trade between the nations.” No droids in this car…

But the following week, on August 2nd, The Daily Beast’s Betsy Swan reported that Trump had that week asked the Office of the Director of National Intelligence for a list of all its employees (including all of our spies) who had worked there more than 90 days, and the request had intelligence officials experiencing “disquiet.”

Did Trump ever return that document to the intelligence agencies? I can find no record of a news story suggesting that he did. It appears to have vanished.

If it turns out the Trump has been acting as an agent for Russia, a Trojan horse right here in America, how long might this have been going on?

Czechoslovakia’s Státní bezpečnost (StB) first started paying attention to Trump back in 1977, as documented by the German newspaper Bildwhen the StB’s files were declassified.

It began when Trump married Czech model Ivana Zelnickova, his first wife, recently buried on his golf course in New Jersey after she fell down a flight of stairs and died.

As 2016 and 2018 investigations by The Guardian found:

Their trip was coordinated by Intourist, the Soviet travel agency that was a front for the KGB, and the Trumps’ handlers regaled Donald and Ivana with Soviet talking points, presumably about things like the horrors of NATO.

The KGB’s psychological profile of Trump had determined he was vulnerable to flattery and not a deep thinker, so they told him repeatedly how brilliant he was and that he should run for president in the US.

Much to the astonishment and jubilation of the KGB, Trump returned from Moscow to the US to give a Republican presidential campaign speech that fall in Portsmouth, New Hampshire.

Trump’s ad laid it on the line:

As The Guardian reported in 2021:

Meanwhile, Putin was making friends with powerful influence over American foreign policy.

In 2017, Erdoğan apparently gained access to America’s deepest secrets by secretly paying off General Michael Flynn even as Flynn became Trump’s National Security Advisor; he also had at least one secret phone conversation with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak after Flynn started working in the White House.

Flynn pleaded guilty in December of 2017 to “willfully and knowingly” making “false, fictitious and fraudulent statements” to the FBI about one of those conversations with Russian Ambassador Kislyak. Flynn was also charged as an unregistered agent of a foreign government (Turkey) while working in the White House: prosecutors said he had taken about a half-million dollars from Erdoğan.

Around the time he was leaving office, Trump pardoned Flynn, essentially burying the entire story.

The plot thickened when America learned, from a blockbuster 2022 report in Axios by Jonathan Swan, that just before leaving office, back on October 21, 2020, Trump had signed Executive Order 13957.

And it wouldn’t stop there. As Donald Moynihan wrote for Slate about this “Schedule F” Executive Order:

“Schedule F would burn down the civil service system. It would be a government of the lawless leading the incompetent. …

“Government data unfavorable to the administration would be suppressed or altered. Public statements about what government actors are actually doing would become rarer and less believable. And questionable actions by the security forces to target political enemies and protect friends could become routine.

“Career public employees would be forced to choose between their oath to the Constitution—in effect, their oath to serve the public—and keeping their job. They will have their loyalty questioned based on which political organizations they associated with in college, or voter registration, or social media activity. Some will not go along with the program. They will be fired. Or never join the government in the first place.”

Trump didn’t have the time to push that executive order through the federal bureaucracy, but it gives us a clear picture of his vision for a second Trump administration, particularly since this is still on the Project 2025 agenda.

Campaigning to destroy NATO; opposing aid to Ukraine; demolishing the free world’s confidence in America’s ability to keep top secret information confidential; utterly destroying our senior-most intelligence and military agencies; installing Trojan horses to lead them: Trump’s goal appears to be, to paraphrase Ron DeSantis, to “Make America Russia.”

What are Trump’s real goals with these appointments?

As the old saying goes, “Watch what he does, not what he says.”

NOW READ: Until there’s a liberal media apparatus, the Democrats will live in Trump’s America

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mma 11 24

On MSNBC’s Deadline: White House, Angelo Carusone explains the role extremists in conservative media are playing in the Trump transition

Written by Media Matters Staff

Published 11/19/24

Video

From the November 19, 2024, edition of MSNBC's Deadline: White House

NICOLLE WALLACE (HOST): At a time when global tensions are high, the war in Ukraine is intensifying, Donald Trump's decision to tap Tulsi Gabbard as his incoming Director of National Intelligence is raising alarms, as you heard there. New reporting uncovers how she has become a favorite among the state media, of one of America's adversaries, Russia.

That's according to The New York Times, which reports, "In Russia, the reaction to her potential appointed has been gleeful, even if Putin's government remains weary of American policies, even under a second Trump administration. 'The CIA and the FBI are trembling,' a Russian newspaper wrote on Friday in a glowing profile of Ms. Gabbard, noting positively, that Ukrainians consider 'an agent of the Russian state.' A state television channel called her a Russian 'comrade' in Mr. Trump's emerging cabinet." The Times goes on to report, "among members from both parties, her tacit support of Russia's war games in Ukraine, and her repetition of Kremlin disinformation have raised doubts about whether she should be given oversight of the intelligence agencies, including the responsibility of preparing the highly classified daily intelligence briefings for the returning president."

Which, we have just learned Trump is now receiving as the President-Elect after having chosen not to receive them while he was a candidate. Trump receiving intelligence briefings is remarkable, for the fact that just last year he was criminally charged for mishandling national defense information and classified information. His already established as disregard for the safety of our nation's secrets makes his cabinet choices, especially those with access to top intelligence, all the more serious.

...

WALLACE: Angelo, there's something so impossible to articulate about the MOU that officially commences the landing team's arrival of the national security agencies and green lights this process that we're all talking about.

But the reason it's hard to bring that to life is because it's never really been an issue, even in 2000, where there was a recount, even in 2020 when Trump refused to concede the election, there was a transition. There were teams named, there were government officials to be selected, so that the FBI could back them and you would take an oath and you would swear that your allegiance was to the United States. That is the process that has a been aborted in the Trump transition. And with your expertise in what the plan was all along, just share your thoughts and reflections on where we are.

ANGELO CARUSONE (MEDIA MATTERS PRESIDENT): Yeah, the thing that is worth keeping in mind -- we're all pointing out your accurate assessment. And part of it is that they've spent the last four years -- and it started before them, but the last four years -- really entrenching this idea that all of the United States government is the actually enemy, is enemy number one.

So, every time you point out, accurately, that they want to dismantle it, undermine it, that it's going to make us less safe, they say "Yes, yes that is exactly right because that is the enemy number one." And where that starts from, what that originates, who that benefits, those are all real questions, and as has already been discussed, we don't even know necessarily to what extent, in this case, Gabbard's relationship is with foreign entities and whether it is just sympathies or something deeper than that because it is not being investigated. The normal channels and processes of a transition are not even being followed this time, which is a reflection of the fact that it is so deeply internalized that all of these institutions are the enemy and they need to go away or be dismantled or be destroyed.

To just put a wrapper on it, I think there's something unsettling that's hard to articulate, here. And so, the best way that I can sort of illustrate it is to start with, yea there is something unsettling here. And some ways to understand that is, where the news about Tulsi Gabbard's appointment was broken in the first place.

It was broken by Alex Jones on InfoWars. It wasn't broken by a far right-wing outlet or something like that, it was broken there. That's where that news came out first and that's significant. It wasn't by accident, it was by design, that the news of her being put there came first because that is a reflection of where the power is being organized now. It is being organized on what used to be considered the fringes.

And Gabbard is an example of somebody that came in as a Democrat, at least ostensibly, and she validated as a Democrat all of the right-wing narrative that they were telling about these government institutions and in a way, "See, even a Democrat believes all the things that we're saying about the deep state, about the nefarious forces."

And so, not only was she a part of that validation process, but she's also an illustration of what that transition is and how you live and survive and thrive in the right-wing fever swamps. And so, when you pull it all together, she not only helped validate and cultivate that narrative and is clearly a responsive to that audience and landscape, but now she's going to be in a position where when Trump was previously getting from right- wing media -- and we saw that play out in his first term -- is now going to be echoed in whatever the internal intelligence that he receives because the underlying institutions are in fact going to be actively and intentionally dismantled, or at least disrupted. And that's the reality that we're heading into here.

WALLACE: I mean Angelo, let me illustrate that this is Tulsi Gabbard describing the court approved search of Mar-a-Lago to retrieve classified national defense information on Fox News.

...

The only people known to have been targeted by all those agencies were Trump's political adversaries. I mean, the complete inverse is what comes out of her mouth, which is, again, whether her sympathies lie with Russia or whether it's something deeper I think is a known unknown, but the tactics are straight out of a Russian disinformation playbook.

CARUSONE: They are, and the thing that I always jump to is not only was she a fixture on Fox News for a while, but she guest hosted -- she used to be a guest host for Tucker Carlson, who as you know, did increasingly more sympathetic Russian content. He did that whole big thing in the supermarket laughing and talking about how great the country is and how what we're being fed is a lie.

And I think that to me is the tie-in here, is that we already know what she's going to do in this role because she's been doing it in the right-wing media for the past few years, which is taking these attacks on American institutions and American credibility -- and I agree with what Frank was saying, we shouldn't always defend reflexively institutions and bureaucracies that need to be adapted, modified, improved, optimized, that should always be something we aspire to.

But that's not what -- that what it sort of sounds like they are talking about to their audiences, but they're talking about something deeper. They've identified an enemy, which is the government and they're acting accordingly. And that is why they're not participating in this process, this transition, because they don't even want to undermine their own argument and their own narrative to the audience that they've been feeding this to. So every action and every day that goes by, they further reinforce the very story that they've been telling as they get one step closer to those official positions.

Video

From the November 19, 2024, edition of MSNBC's Deadline: White House

NICOLLE WALLACE (HOST): Some alarming news to tell you about, of Russia's unprovoked illegal invasion of Ukraine that proves the stakes have perhaps never been higher when it comes to supporting our Democratic ally over Vladimir Putin's Russia. Putin just formally lowered his own threshold for using nuclear weapons, now saying Russia can conduct a nuclear strike is attacked by not only a nuclear power, such as the United States, but also a nation that is backed by a nuclear power, such as Ukraine.

It was a long planned move that Putin first announced back in September after warning that he would do so for years. The Kremlin says the use of nuclear weapons still would be a "last resort measure" but its timing makes it appear to be a clear signal to the West from Vladimir Putin. U.S. Officials telling NBC News that Ukraine fired into Russia overnight, using U.S.-made missiles, the time after Joe Biden gave the Ukraine military the go-ahead over the weekend.

From the New York Times, "the doctrine's publication on Tuesday appeared to be the latest suggestion from the Kremlin that Russia could use nuclear weapons to respond to attacks by Ukraine carried out with American support and that the response could be directed against American facilities as well as Ukraine itself.

...

WALLACE: Angelo, the person who authored the most scathing report and indictment of Donald Trump's affinity for, ties to, and questions about Trump and Russia is his incoming Secretary of State, Marco Rubio. When he took over from Richard Burg for the Senate Intelligence Committee. Do you think they know that, do you think they don't care, do you think the chaos is the point in this mishmash of Gabbard and Rubio's Trumpian-mixed messaging? What do you think?

ANGELO CARUSONE (MEDIA MATTERS PRESIDENT): Yeah, I think they don't care, and I think ultimately, Rubio is sort of one small piece of it but it's certainly not reflective of the larger administration or their posture. And I think ultimately what has been signaled, both during the campaign and as well as by who he is putting into these places from Pete Hegseth on down, that the affinity for Russia is not just sort of the geopolitical worldview or that they have been fed right from the ground up because they are consumers of the right-wing media, what Russia has been doing with our information landscape for quite a while, and sort of seeing the ground.

But that we should also not lose sight of the fact that there's an affinity there that is born out of there that Russia is an ethno-nationalist state and that is one of the biggest appeals that Tucker sort of pushed into it, which is this idea that like with Mike, that Mike makes right. And that was one of the things that Tucker was advocating for when he was on Fox, when he was holding it up as an exemplary, saying, "Yes, we have to know who our enemies are, Russia's never hurt us, but more importantly look how well their society is because they embraced ethnic nationalism."

And if you put that in the context of other attacks on DEI or all these other issues, it does sort of boil down to this core idea that there is something there in Russia that is if not aspirational for them, at least something that we should take and incorporate into our society. And so Marco Rubio is not going to have a lot of influence or power in the broader administration and I feel like everybody knows that....

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omfg

'Email Putin all our war plans': Experts blast Trump for picking 'Russian spy' Gabbard as intel chief

AN 11 24

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an 11 24

Russia made an audacious public attempt to blackmail the incoming U.S. president, according to a military expert.

Vladimir Putin and his ministers are already trying to mess with Donald Trump's head when Kremlin intelligence chief Nikolai Patrushev claimed in an interview that Trump had "relied on certain forces" to win a second term in the White House and warned that he had "corresponding obligations" that he was "obliged to fulfill," wrote Slate columnist Fred Kaplan.

:{:{"This is a mind-blowing bit of psychological warfare!" Kaplan wrote. "The Russians are basically telling Trump: We put you in office. Now it’s time for you to pay us back.Did this make Trump wonder: WTF?"}:

The FBI, the director of national intelligence and the top cybersecurity agency all confirmed that Russia was sowing disinformation against Kamala Harris during the election campaign, and law enforcement blamed the foreign adversary for bomb threats called into polling stations in Black neighborhoods.

"However, there is no evidence — nor has anyone claimed — that Trump or his campaign staffers colluded in, or knew anything about, these videos or the bomb threats," Kaplan wrote. "If Trump did have some involvement, or if Russia possesses some other form of kompromat (compromising material) on Trump, Patrushev’s message constitutes an extraordinarily bodacious threat of blackmail, delivered in public, against an American president-elect.

"If Trump did not have any involvement in this escapade, Patrushev’s gambit shows — some would say, confirms— that Russia’s main goal, in all these misinformation ventures, is to sow chaos, breed mistrust, and weaken the sinews of democracy in Western countries, especially in the U.S., regardless of who is the president," Kaplan added.

Trump and the MAGA movement have long sought to improve relations with Russia, but Kaplan said the Kremlin's reaction to his re-election should serve as a warning.

"One can only wonder what Trump will do — whether he’ll change his position, whether he’s capable of changing his stance — when he realizes, if he realizes, that Putin is not his friend," Kaplan wrote. "Trump certainly should not act as if he is."

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