Tag: Canada
Respect
Hard not to write about John McCain, but most of what needs saying has been said: he was a Vietnam War hero, a stalwart supporter of a strong and democratizing American role in the world, and a flawed presidential candidate who lowered the level of electoral discourse with his choice of a know-nothing vice presidential candidate whose name should be forgotten. I disagreed with many of the Senator’s domestic policy preferences and didn’t vote for him, but give him ample credit for saving the Affordable Care Act at a crucial moment.
McCain liked to be called a maverick, but he only occasionally behaved like one. A Republican loyalist to the end, McCain was critical of President Trump but never quite broke with him completely. This is unfortunate, as he might have led a Congressional rebellion to limit Trump’s worst impulses. But to expect that of someone dying of a malignant brain tumor really is too much. McCain merits a lot of credit, especially for his principled stand on supporting human rights and democracy, at home and abroad.
It is apparently also too much to expect the President to show even minimal respect for a war hero whose entire life is admittedly a condemnation of Trump’s. He managed to issue a pro forma recognition of McCain a day or two after his death and to order flags flown at half mast, after pointedly refusing to answer questions about McCain and having the White House flag raised in a purposeful show of disrespect.
It is hard for me to understand how the US military puts up with Trump, never mind likes him. It is not only McCain he disdains. Trump has failed to visit troops in a conflict zone since becoming president. His most intense personal interest in the troops was on display when he needed them for his now-cancelled parade in Washington. The troops will be grateful that isn’t happening.
McCain’s death represents a big loss for American foreign policy. He was a stalwart of NATO and advocate for a strong American leadership role abroad. Trump thinks the allies are worthless and the leadership role too expensive. His Make America Great Again has amounted to making America alone again, as it was after the first world war when it declined to join the League of Nations. We know how well that worked.
Trump touts his trade deal with Mexico, which updates a small portion of NAFTA. It is only a little more real than his denuclearization agreement with North Korea and his “deal of the century” between Israel and the Palestinians, both of which amount to nothing. Never mind that the Mexicans have refused to pay for his wall and he is stiffing the Canadians over a few million additional dollars of dairy exports, wrecking relationships that the US should be treasuring.
Everyone is looking for a hedge against Trump’s bombast and unpredictability. My own today is to think about the other great American to be buried this week: Aretha Franklin. I saw and heard her at Radio City Music Hall about 1995, but here she is the year I graduated:
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Putin’s pet
President Trump is on his way to a meeting Monday with Russian President Putin. Along the way, he is doing precisely what Putin most wishes for.
First Trump trashed NATO. That’s the alliance Putin loves to hate. Trump not only criticized the allies for failing to meet the 2024 2% target for defense spending, he also fired a salvo at Germany for importing gas from Russia. Sitting next to him when he did that at breakfast were Secretary of State Pompeo, Ambassdor to NATO Hutchison, and Chief of Staff Kelly. All looked stunned, but Kelly did not bother hiding his discomfort. The White House spokesperson put him in his place by claiming he was disappointed in the breakfast offerings.
Then last night, in an interview that became public while he was at dinner with Prime Minister May in London, Trump compounded the felony. He not only blasted his host for not favoring “hard” Brexit and allowing immigrants to damage the “fabric” of British society, but also attacked the mayor of London for being soft on terrorism. The racist tone of these remarks is apparent to anyone who listens. The “special relationship” between the US and UK hasn’t known a lower moment in the past 100 years.
Then this morning we read that Trump is preparing to cut a “deal” on Syria in which Putin promises something he can’t deliver: withdrawal of the Iranians and their proxies from Syria’s border with Israel. In return, the US would withdraw from Syria, something Trump has promised publicly he would do, leaving the Kurds to cut a deal with Assad. This is an idea Netanyahu is pushing, along with relieving Russia from US and European sanctions.
The next shoe to drop will be Ukraine. Trump believes Crimea rightfully belongs to Russia, since people speak Russian there. Never mind that many people throughout Ukraine speak Russian, as well as Ukrainian. He may accept the Russian annexation, thereby putting a big smile on Putin’s face and completing an extraordinary week for the Russian president: NATO undermined, the UK/US relationship weakened, Syria won, and Crimea absorbed. What else could go right?
The pattern is clear: Trump is Putin’s pet president doing precisely what Moscow wants. The only real question is why.
I have favored the view that money is the main reason. Trump’s real estate empire, about which he cares more than anything else, is heavily dependent on Russian investment and purchases of condos. Putin could turn off the flow of rubles in an instant. No wealthy Russian would buck the president, who gets to decide which oligarchs prosper and which don’t. Trump’s finances wouldn’t survive a month without Moscow’s support.
But it is also possible that Trump himself was recruited long ago. He hired people for his campaign who were Russian intelligence assets. Special Counsel Mueller has already indicted some of them. Trump’s visit to Moscow in the late 1980s, when it was still the capital of the Soviet Union, has raised questions. The Republican attempt yesterday in Congress to discredit the former chief of FBI counter-intelligence operations, Peter Strzok, suggests how desperate they are to stymie an investigation that has already gotten to one degree of separation from Trump.
But the Congress is also beginning to react appropriately to Trump’s surrender of American interests to Putin. It has passed a strong resolution in support of NATO and against concessions to Putin on Ukraine. Republican discomfort with Trump’s “national security” tariffs on imports from Canada, Mexico, and the European Union is starting to show. The trade war with China is causing a lot of heartburn in the Middle West and other areas of the country the Republicans need to keep on their side.
But Putin is still making Trump sit and beg. He is Putin’s pet.
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A new low, but not the bottom
President Trump hit it this morning, when he tweeted from his golf weekend in New Jersey that the mayor of San Juan was only complaining about the slow Federal reaction to Hurricane Maria because Democrats had told her to do so. What’s more, he added, the people of Puerto Rico are expecting everything to be done for them rather than pitching in to help. Lest you think I exaggerate, here are the tweets in question:
The Mayor of San Juan, who was very complimentary only a few days ago, has now been told by the Democrats that you must be nasty to Trump.
…Such poor leadership ability by the Mayor of San Juan, and others in Puerto Rico, who are not able to get their workers to help. They….
…want everything to be done for them when it should be a community effort. 10,000 Federal workers now on Island doing a fantastic job.
Here’s that mayor reacting to the Acting Homeland Security Secretary claiming Puerto Rico is a good news story:
Words fail me: how can someone as crass and callous as Trump even pretend to be President of the United States?
The answer is that Americans voted for him. Fewer than voted for Hillary Clinton, but enough (by 70,000 votes in three states) to get him elected.
What is the cure? There is only one: the Republicans in Congress, who so far have proven unwilling even to begin to challenge Trump in a serious way. Despite harsh criticism from the White House, Senate Majority leader McConnell and Speak Ryan have lined up to salute repeatedly.
The only hope at this point is that a few Republicans outside the leadership will refuse to go along. That is what happened on the health care votes. There is still a possibility that a few of them will join with Democrats in fixing what ails Obamacare, rather than throwing it out with the bathwater. The odds may improve without Tom Price as Health and Human Services Secretary: he was a pernicious influence, aside from being a spendthrift with the public’s money.
On taxes, the Administration is proposing a massive cut for the very wealthy like himself and nothing for the poor, plus barely a smidgen for the middle class. That won’t pass, but it creates an uphill fight for those who would like to do something much more sensible. The process will be slow. Nothing is likely to pass this year, which pretty much guarantees that we will head into next spring with a president who has accomplished nothing beyond a single Supreme Court nominee, who admittedly will do a great deal of damage for decades to come.
This disastrous performance on the domestic front has implications for foreign policy. A president who can’t get a Congress with his own party in the majority in both houses to pass any significant legislation is one foreigners don’t feel much need to respect.The Canadians and Mexicans are busy with diplomatic offenses targeting the states, which are likely to resist the worst of Trump’s trade proposals. The Europeans are biding their time until he is gone, when they hope to take up the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership again.
Nor has Trump given either friend or foe any reason to go along with his harebrained schemes: withdrawing from a nuclear deal with Iran that is clearly in the US interest, threatening North Korea with “fire and fury” while trying to convince them everything will be just fine if they give up nuclear weapons, sending more troops to Afghanistan without any clear objective, doubling down on the drone wars in Syria, Yemen, Libya and elsewhere despite decades of evidence that won’t work. Even Vladimir Putin, who did so much to get Trump elected, is finding him a disappointment.
I can’t remember a time when we have been so ill-served by such obviously corrupt and ill-meaning people. But I suppose this new low is still nowhere near the bottom.
PS: This morning’s tweets about Rex Tillerson’s efforts to negotiate with Pyongyang illustrate how Trump can go lower: “I told Rex Tillerson, our wonderful Secretary of State, that he is wasting his time trying to negotiate with Little Rocket Man…Save your energy Rex, we’ll do what has to be done!” Tillerson should resign.
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More own goals
Donald Trump continues to score goals against his own and America’s interests. Just a few examples from the last couple of days:
- He announced the building of the border wall shortly before the planned visit of Mexican President Peña Nieto. This has put the visit in doubt and makes it nigh on impossible for Peña Nieto to cooperate with the effort in any way, least of all by paying a dime for the unnecessary and expensive project. Trump continues to claim the Mexicans will pay, but he doesn’t say how and admits it may be complicated. More likely done with smoke and mirrors, not a clear and verifiable transfer of resources.
- Trump continues to say that the US should have “taken” Iraq’s oil, has returned to claiming that torture works, and is considering an executive order reviving the “black sites” abroad in which much of it was done. Torture of course does work in the sense that it gets most people to talk, but the information they provide is mostly useless. The draft executive order on “black sites” reportedly denies access to the International Committee of the Red Cross, which is required by the Geneva Conventions. The Islamic State and Al Qaeda will welcome all three of these points, as they help with extremist recruitment and put Americans serving abroad (military and civilian) at heightened risk.
- He has revived the Keystone XL pipeline to bring Canadian oil to the US. This will benefit Canada but put excessive amounts of crude into an already oversupplied US market. My bet is that it won’t be built, even if the permits are forthcoming, both because of environmental opposition in Canada and because the economics just don’t work at current oil prices in the mid-$50 range.
- He intends to block Syrian refugees from entering the US indefinitely as well as refugees from several other countries temporarily. Blocking carefully vetted Syrians when Europe is taking in many more will strain relations with the European Union, especially as he paired this announcement with repeat of his pledge to create a safe zone in Syria for which there are currently no clear plans. The other countries to be blocked temporarily from sending refugees (Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and Yemen) have produced few terrorists operating in the US, so this will be seen in those countries as arbitrary discrimination. Countries that have produced more terrorists, like Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Tunisia, are unaffected, presumably because their governments are friendly to the US.
- The Administration is preparing to cut UN funding dramatically. Press reports . say the overall cut will be 40%, which would save at most $2.8 billion, or much less than 1% of the defense budget. Such a cut will reduce US influence in the world organization and its specialized agencies, which are a relatively efficient way of dealing with issues the US does not want to handle on its own. The UN currently has over 117,000 troops in 16 peacekeeping operations, for which the US pays 22% of the total costs.
- Trump has pledged an investigation of fraudulent voting in the US. He is citing as evidence for his claim that millions voted illegally a story he says was told him by a non-citizen [sic] who stood in line to vote with people he doubted were citizens. He has also emphasized his concern with people who are registered to vote in two states. Both Trump’s strategist Steve Bannon and his daughter Tiffany are reported to fall in this category. Trump has failed to object to laws and practices intended to suppress voting, mostly by people unlikely to vote for him.
Anyone expecting Trump to moderate once in power should by now be admitting that this is a radical administration that intends to pursue all the bad ideas it campaigned on. There will be no maturation until he is blocked, and even then he is less likely to mature than simply retreat in order to fight another day. He is governing to please his supporters, whose adulation he craves. The rest of us are consigned to opposition. The next big anti-Trump demonstrations will be April 15. I think this time I’ll plan to be in the US.
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