"I doubt that Trump understands -- or cares about --
what message he's sending. Wealthy Saudis, including members of the extended
royal family, have been his patrons for years, buying his distressed properties
when he needed money. In the early 1990s, a Saudi prince purchased Trump's
flashy yacht so that the then-struggling businessman could come up with cash to
stave off personal bankruptcy, and later, the prince bought a share of the
Plaza Hotel, one of Trump's many business deals gone bad. Trump also sold an
entire floor of his landmark Trump Tower condominium to the Saudi government in
2001."
Trump in Tulsa: Fascist ranting and political debacle
22 June 2020
President Donald Trump’s attempt to reignite his faltering reelection campaign with a mass rally in a conservative city turned into a political debacle Saturday night. Despite claims by his campaign than one million people had registered and that more than 100,000 would turn out for the event in Tulsa, Oklahoma, making it necessary to combine indoor and outdoor rallies, the turnout was poor and the outdoor portion was cancelled.
All the Trump supporters who came to Tulsa were able to fit easily inside the BOK Arena, with thousands of seats, including nearly the entire upper deck, showing empty on television camera sweeps. The Tulsa Fire Marshal estimated that only 6,200 people were seated inside the facility, which holds 19,200, although some press accounts suggested that the arena was roughly half full.
Campaign manager Brad Parscale and other top officials were apparently deceived by an anti-Trump campaign waged over social media by thousands of youth, many responding to a video appeal from an Iowa grandmother that went viral last week, urging people to register for the Tulsa rally and then not attend it, as a sign of opposition to the Trump administration.
Trump speaks during a campaign rally at the BOK Center in Tulsa, Oklahoma, June 20, 2020 (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)
The Trump campaign admitted that false accounts accounted for hundreds of thousands of the registrations for the rally, and they were reduced to touting the audience for the livestreaming of the rally as a sign of political support.
The rally was the first held by the Republican campaign in 110 days, which have been marked by the coronavirus pandemic and the mass protests against police violence triggered by the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, both of which have dramatically undermined Trump’s political standing. He has fallen well behind his presumptive Democratic Party opponent, former Vice President Joe Biden, in both national surveys and polls in key states in the Midwest and South that are likely to determine the outcome in the Electoral College if the presidential election is close.
The mounting threat to his reelection clearly preoccupied Trump in the course of his 107-minute address in Tulsa, which meandered even more than usual. He was clearly far more concerned with his own political survival than with the survival of hundreds of thousands of Americans whose lives are threatened by the worst epidemic in a century. He made no mention of the human toll of the pandemic, which should have led local authorities to ban the rally on public health grounds, while remarking that he had told his aides to slow down the rate of coronavirus testing, which White House officials later claimed was a joke.
Trump began the speech with a declaration that “the silent majority is stronger than ever,” reviving a Nixonian turn of phrase without apparently considering Nixon’s eventual fate as the only president to be forced to resign. Then followed the usual praise of the performance of Wall Street (“the strongest 50 days in the history of the stock market”), always the central focus of the White House.
The Republican president howled that the Democratic Party—the other half of the right-wing two-party system controlled by the US financial aristocracy—was in the grip of “left-wing radicals.” While conceding that Biden was no radical, he claimed that his opponent was “a willing Trojan horse for socialists” and had “surrendered to the left-wing mob.” He continued this fascistic rant against liberals like representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ilhan Omar.
Perhaps most significantly, Trump made not the slightest overture to the protesters who have filled the streets over the past month denouncing police brutality and racism. He made no mention of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, or Rayshard Brooks, all victims of racist murders by white policemen or vigilantes linked to the police.
Instead, he declared, “As president, I will always support the incredible men and women of the law enforcement.” He gloated about his mobilization of National Guard troops in Washington, D.C. against the protesters there. And he denounced efforts to remove the statues of Confederate generals, which he described as an effort to “desecrate our monuments, our beautiful monuments,” and as a “cruel campaign of censorship.”
Trump had earlier threatened protesters planning to go to Oklahoma, “Please understand, you will not be treated like you have been in New York, Seattle, or Minneapolis. It will be a much different scene!” In the course of his speech, he suggested shooting at the hundreds demonstrating outside the BOK Arena, saying, “When you see those lunatics all over the streets, it’s damn nice to have arms.”
Some Trump supporters displayed military-style rifles, but there were no clashes with counterdemonstrators, who were walled off from the Trump venue by Tulsa police and hundreds of National Guard troops, some of them carrying weapons.
One Catholic school art teacher with a ticket to the event was arrested at the orders of the Trump campaign because she was wearing a T-shirt bearing the statement, “I can’t breathe,” the last words of George Floyd as a Minneapolis cop ground his knee into Floyd’s neck for nearly nine minutes. The fear of such an innocuous opponent only demonstrates the extremely beleaguered character of the Trump campaign and the Republican Party as a whole.
Trump has suffered a recent series of political setbacks in the courts that suggest that important sections of the ruling elite have turned sharply against him. Last week the U.S. Supreme Court issued surprise rulings that shocked the Trump White House, both for their content and because of the judicial line-up revealed.
On June 16, a 6-3 majority ruled that on-the-job discrimination against gays and lesbians was illegal under the 1964 Civil Rights Act, an opinion written by Justice Neil Gorsuch, Trump’s first nominee to the high court, a direct rebuke to Trump’s Christian fundamentalist supporters who have made anti-gay bigotry a key political issue. Chief Justice John Roberts also joined the majority and assigned the opinion to Gorsuch.
On June 19, a 5-4 majority ruled against the Trump administration’s rescinding of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), the 2012 Obama executive order that granted limited protection against deportation to more than one million people brought as children to the United States by their undocumented parents. While the ruling was on procedural grounds rather than substantive, and Trump can remedy the technical errors and renew the attack on DACA recipients, the ruling pushes back any such mass deportation until after the November election.
On June 21, a federal judge declined to order the suppression of the insider account of the Trump White House written by former National Security advisor John Bolton, which is to go on sale at bookstores on Tuesday. The Room Where It Happened depicts Trump as an ignorant, bullying and completely feckless “commander-in-chief,” preoccupied with his own personal and financial interests.
Finally, there was the 24-hour defiance by the US Attorney for the Southern District of New York, Geoffrey Berman, whose “resignation” was announced June 20 by Attorney General William Barr. Berman then declared that he had not resigned and would not leave office unless dismissed directly by the president, which he eventually did the next day. Berman became a target by aggressively prosecuting pro-Trump Republican Congressman Chris Collins for securities fraud, forcing his resignation, and for investigating the business affairs of Trump’s close adviser, former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani.
Berman’s firing has created something of a political crisis for the White House, since Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham said that he would observe the traditional Senate rule that any nominee to replace Berman would have to be acceptable to the two senators from the state in question—in this case, Democratic senators Charles Schumer, the minority leader, and Kirsten Gillibrand.
Seoul: Bolton’s Trump-Kim Claims ‘Distorted’
Seoul (AFP) – South Korea’s presidential office on Monday accused former US national security advisor John Bolton of distorting facts and jeopardising future negotiations with his scathing account of Donald Trump’s North Korea summit strategy.
Bolton’s forthcoming memoir “The Room Where it Happened” takes both Trump and South Korean President Moon Jae-in to task for their handling of a series of historic meetings with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un beginning in 2018.
Chung Eui-yong, Moon’s security adviser — who first told Trump that Kim wanted to meet and appears repeatedly in the book — said it “does not convey accurate facts and a large chunk of it distorts facts a great deal”.
He did not cite specifics.
But he said that disclosing details about the bilateral nuclear negotiations “violates basic diplomatic principles and would seriously undermine interest in future talks” by all sides.
The presidential Blue House issued a separate statement, saying: “It is inappropriate to distort facts with prejudice and bias.”
In the book, Bolton says Trump was not prepared for his first summit with Kim in Singapore, but expected it to be “great theatre”.
He also criticises Moon, saying the “whole
diplomatic
fandango
was
South Korea’s
creation,
relating
more
to
its
‘unification’ agenda
than
serious strategy
on
Kim’s part or ours”.
“
The
South’s
understanding
of
our
terms
to denuclearise
North
Korea
bore
no
relationship
to
fundamental
US
national interests,
” Bolton writes.
He describes Moon’s view on one issue as “nonsense” and “schizophrenic
.”
Asked Monday about Bolton’s description of Moon as “schizophrenic”, a South Korean presidential official responded: “It is an issue Bolton has to judge for himself. I think he might be one”.
WHO IS FINANCING ALL THE TRUMP AND
SON-IN-LAW’S REFINANCING SCAMS???
FOLLOW THE MONEY!
"I doubt that Trump understands -- or cares about --
what message he's sending. Wealthy Saudis, including members of the extended
royal family, have been his patrons for years, buying his distressed properties
when he needed money. In the early 1990s, a Saudi prince purchased Trump's
flashy yacht so that the then-struggling businessman could come up with cash to
stave off personal bankruptcy, and later, the prince bought a share of the
Plaza Hotel, one of Trump's many business deals gone bad. Trump also sold an
entire floor of his landmark Trump Tower condominium to the Saudi government in
2001."
“The Wahhabis finance thousands of
madrassahs throughout the world where young boys are brainwashed into becoming
fanatical foot-soldiers for the petrodollar-flush Saudis and other emirs of the
Persian Gulf.” AMIL
IMANI
I recommend that Ignatius read Raymond
Ibrahim's outstanding book Sword and Scimitar, which contains accounts of dynastic
succession in the Muslim monarchies of the Middle East, where standard
operating procedure for a new monarch on the death of his father was to
strangle all his brothers. Yes, it's awful. But it has
been happening for a very long time. And it's not going to change
quickly, no matter how outraged we pretend to be. MONICA SHOWALTER
TRUMP AND THE
MURDERING 9-11 MUSLIM SAUDIS…
Why is the Swamp Keeper
and his family of parasites up their ar$es??
WHAT WILL TRUMP AND
HIS PARASITIC FAMILY DO FOR MONEY???
JUST ASK THE
SAUDIS!
JOHN DEAN: Not so far. This has been right by the letter of the special counsel’s
charter. He’s released the document. What I’m looking for is relief and
understanding that there’s no witting or unwitting likelihood that the
President is an agent of Russia. That’s when I’ll feel comfortable, and no
evidence even hints at that. We don’t have that yet. We’re still in the process
of unfolding the report to look at it. And its, as I say, if [Attornery General
William Barr] honors his word, we’ll know more soon.
WHAT WILL TRUMP AND
HIS PARASITIC FAMILY DO FOR MONEY???
JUST ASK THE
SAUDIS!
*
*
JOHN DEAN: Not
so far. This has been right by the letter of the special counsel’s charter.
He’s released the document. What I’m looking for is relief and
understanding that there’s no witting or unwitting likelihood that the
President is an agent of Russia. That’s when I’ll feel comfortable, and no
evidence even hints at that. We don’t have that yet. We’re still in the process
of unfolding the report to look at it. And its, as I say, if [Attornery General
William Barr] honors his word, we’ll know more soon.
“Our
entire crony capitalist system, Democrat and
Republican
alike, has become a kleptocracy
approaching
par with third-world hell-holes. This
is the
way a great country is raided by its elite.” ---
-
Karen McQuillan AMERICAN THINKER
PRESIDENT of the UNITED STATES DONALD TRUMP: Pathological
liar, swindler, con man, huckster, golfing cheat, charity foundation fraudster,
tax evader, adulterer, porn whore chaser and servant of the Saudis dictators
Opinion: Trump And
Pompeo Have Enabled A Saudi Cover-Up Of The Khashoggi Killing
In the weeks
following the death of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, President Trump spent
more time praising Saudi Arabia as a very important ally than he did
reacting to the killing.
Hasan Jamali/AP
Aaron David Miller (@aarondmiller2) is a senior fellow at the
Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and a former State Department Middle
East analyst, adviser and negotiator in Republican and Democratic
administrations. He is the author most recently of the End of
Greatness: Why America Can't Have (and Doesn't Want) Another Great President.
Richard Sokolsky, a nonresident senior fellow at the Carnegie
Endowment for International Peace, worked in the State Department for six
different administrations and was a member of the secretary of state's Office
of Policy Planning from 2005 to 2015.
It has been a year since Saudi journalist and Washington Post columnist
Jamal Khashoggi entered Saudi Arabia's Consulate in Istanbul where he was slain
and dismembered. There is still no objective or comprehensive Saudi or American
accounting of what occurred, let alone any real accountability.
The Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman's admission in a
recent CBS interview that
he takes "full responsibility," while denying foreknowledge of the
killing or that he ordered it, sweeps under the rug the lengths to which the
Saudis have gone to obscure the truth about their involvement in the killing
and cover-up.
The Saudi campaign of obfuscation, denial and cover-up would never
have gotten off the ground had it not been for the Trump administration's
support over the past year. The president and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo
not only refused to distance themselves from the crown prince, known by his
initials MBS, but also actively worked to relegitimize him. The Saudis killed
Khashoggi but Trump acquiesced in the cover-up and worked hard to protect the
U.S.-Saudi relationship and soften the crown prince's pariah status. In short,
without Trump, the attempted makeover — such as it is — would not have been
possible.
The
Saudis killed Khashoggi but Trump acquiesced in the cover-up and worked hard to
protect the U.S.-Saudi relationship and soften the crown prince's pariah
status.
Weak administration response
The administration's weak and feckless
response to Khashoggi's killing was foreshadowed a year before it occurred. In
May 2017, in an unusual break with precedent, Trump visited Saudi Arabia on his
inaugural presidential trip; gave his son-in-law the authority to manage the
MBS file, which he did with the utmost secrecy; and made it unmistakably clear
that Saudi money, oil, arm purchases and support for the administration's
anti-Iranian and pro-Israeli policies would elevate the U.S.-Saudi
"special relationship" to a new level.
Predictably, therefore, the administration's reaction to
Khashoggi's killing was shaped by a desire to manage the damage and preserve
the relationship. In the weeks following Khashoggi's death, Trump spent
more time praising Saudi Arabia as a very important ally, especially as a
purchaser of U.S. weapons and goods, than he did
reacting to the killing. Trump vowed to get to the bottom of the
Khashoggi killing but focused more on defending the crown prince, saying this was another example of
being "guilty before being proven innocent."
Those pledges to investigate and impose accountability would
continue to remain hollow. Over the past year, Trump and Pompeo have neither
criticized nor repudiated Saudi actions that have harmed American interests in
the Middle East. Two months after Khashoggi's death, the administration, in what
Pompeo described as an "initial step," imposed sanctions on 17
Saudi individuals implicated in the killing. But no others have been
forthcoming, and the visa restrictions that were imposed are meaningless
because none of the sanctioned Saudis would
be foolish enough to seek entry into the United States.
What's more, the administration virtually ignored a congressional
resolution imposing sanctions on the Saudis for human rights abuses
and vetoed another bipartisan resolution that would have ended U.S. military
assistance to Saudi Arabia's inhumane military campaign in Yemen.
The Saudis opened a trial in January of 11 men implicated in the
killing, but the proceedings have been slow and secretive, leading the United
Nations' top human rights expert to declare that "the trial underway in
Saudi Arabia will not deliver credible accountability." Despite
accusations that the crown prince's key adviser Saud al-Qahtani was involved in
the killing, he's still advising MBS, has not stood trial and
will likely escape punishment. A year later, there are still no reports of
convictions or serious punishment.
Legitimizing Mohammed bin Salman
The Trump administration has not only given the crown prince a
pass on the Khashoggi killing, but it has also worked assiduously to remove his
pariah status and rehabilitate his global image. Barely two months after the
2018 slaying, Trump was exchanging pleasantries with the crown prince at the
Group of 20 summit in Buenos Aires and holding out prospects
of spending more time with him. Then this past June, at the G-20 in Osaka,
Japan, Trump sang his praises while dodging questions about the killing.
"It's an honor to be with the crown prince of Saudi Arabia, a friend of
mine, a man who has really done things in the last five years in terms of
opening up Saudi Arabia," Trump said.
And you can
bet that when Saudi Arabia hosts the G-20, scheduled to be held in its capital
of Riyadh in November 2020, the Trump administration will be smiling as its
rehab project takes another step in its desired direction.
What the U.S. should have done
Trump has failed to impose any serious costs or constraints on
Saudi Arabia for the killing of a U.S. newspaper columnist who resided in
Virginia or for the kingdom's aggressive policies, from Yemen to Qatar. In the
wake of the Khashoggi killing, the administration should have made it
unmistakably clear, both publicly and privately, that it expected a
comprehensive and credible accounting and investigation. It should have suspended
high-level contacts and arms sales with the kingdom for a period of time. And
to make the point, the administration should have supported at least one
congressional resolution taking the Saudis to task, in addition to triggering
the Magnitsky Act, which would have required a U.S. investigation; a report to
Congress; and sanctions if warranted.
Back to business as usual
The dark
stain of the crown prince's apparent involvement in Khashoggi's death will not
fade easily. But for Trump and Pompeo, it pales before the great expectations
they still maintain for the kingdom to confront and contain their common enemy,
Iran, as well as support the White House's plan for Middle East peace, defeat
jihadists in the region and keep the oil spigot open.
Most of
these goals are illusory. Saudi Arabia is a weak, fearful and unreliable ally.
The kingdom has introduced significant social and cultural reforms but has
imposed new levels of repression and authoritarianism. Its reckless policies
toward Yemen and Qatar have expanded, not contracted, opportunities for Iran,
while the Saudi military has demonstrated that, even after spending billions to
buy America's most sophisticated weapons, it still can't defend itself without
American help.
Meanwhile,
recent attacks on critical Saudi oil facilities that the U.S. blames on Iran
have helped rally more American and international support for the kingdom.
When it
comes to the U.S.-Saudi relationship and the kingdom's callous reaction to
Khashoggi's killing, the president and his secretary of state have been
derelict in their duty: They have not only failed to advance American strategic
interests but also undermined America's values in the process.
Bolton: ‘Hope’ History Remembers Trump as ‘One-Term President Who Didn’t Plunge the Country Irretrievably into a Downward Spiral’
1:30
In a Sunday interview which aired on ABC News, former National Security Advisor John Bolton said his “hope” is that history remembers President Donald Trump as a “one-term president who didn’t plunge the country irretrievably into a downward spiral” from which it cannot recover.
As he discussed his forthcoming tell-all book, “The Room Where It Happened,” Bolton emphasized he does not believe Trump to be a conservative Republican nor “competent to serve” as commander in chief.
“I’ve made my case about the president’s not being a conservative and not being competent to serve in the book,” Bolton told ABC News chief global affairs correspondent Martha Raddatz.
“I don’t think he’s a conservative Republican,” he added. “I’m not going to vote for him in November. I’m certainly not going to vote for Joe Biden, either. I’m going to figure out a conservative Republican to write in.”
Raddatz asked, “How do you think history will remember Donald Trump?”
Bolton replied, “I hope it will remember him as a one-term president who didn’t plunge the country irretrievably into a downward spiral we can’t recall from. We can get over one term. Two terms, I’m more troubled about. Decisions are made in a very scattershot fashion, especially in national security policy. It’s a danger for the republic.”
Follow Trent Baker on Twitter @MagnifiTrent
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