As you know, Donald Trump has been recently trying to extort Ukraine out of half its mineral wealth. The odd thing about this is that Ukraine doesn't have very much mineral wealth:
Revenues from Ukraine’s resources would be directed to a fund in which the United States would hold 100 percent financial interest, and that Ukraine should contribute to the fund until it reaches $500 billion.... That figure far exceeds the country’s actual revenues from resources, which were $1.1 billion last year.
Trump has also been nonsensically insisting that Ukraine started the war even though we were all there and saw Russia cross the border and try to run a tank column into Kyiv. And he's been calling Zelensky a dictator even though if there's a dictator around it's obviously Vladimir Putin.
What the hell is going on? It's easy. In 2019 Trump asked Zelensky for dirt against Joe Biden in return for military aid. Zelensky declined and Trump was impeached. Trump has felt aggrieved ever since.
There's nothing complicated here. Trump is motivated by revenge and now he's finally getting it. He's a simple man.
I bet the world's biggest mining companies can't wait to invest hundreds of millions of dollars in operations in Ukraine, knowing they could be over-run by invading Russians any time Putin decided Zelenskyy's successor is also a "Nazi" insufficiently deferential to Moscow. I forget for the moment why they're not already doing it.
To me, the outstanding feature of most political commentary in America is its stubborn pretence that Trump is a rational man pursuing a rational agenda using rational means.
... most political commentary in America ...
Most political commentary in America is interested in maintaining the market share of its outlets and the brands of the commentators. That is best achieved by pretending that "Trump is a rational man pursuing a rational agenda using rational means." Simple enough.
The terrible irony is, it doesn't really matter to his political standing. It may keep the stans watching/reading, which is what the media care about, but that's incidental.
Trump's fans DO NOT CARE about his rationality. If anything they celebrate his lack of it. It's an EMOTIONAL bond, based heavily on bigotry. He professes to hate whom they hate, and that's good enough for them, because vast numbers of them have become anger junkies motivated by little more than hatred -- for non-Whites, for non-straights, for immigrants, for women who don't know their place, and of course for "Democrats", who are the embodiment of all those things. A lot of them are effectively embracing nihilism now, and the fact that it will blow back on them severely -- which would matter were they considering matters rationally -- doesn't affect them.
Rationality is mostly irrelevant in matters political right now, alas.
I think their hatred is mostly aimed at liberals and progressives. They see them as owning and running the deep state, which they say is destroying the country. And they think these people are diabolically duplicitous. For example, they stole the 2020 election, even though so far it's been hard to catch them. But you can be certain it was stolen, it’s a matter of faith.
I debate online with MAGA people a lot, and I really don't hear much hatred for anyone else but "leftists", as they call them. Recall Trump calls his enemies “human scum”, “vermin”, and “evil”.
I think their hatred is mostly aimed at liberals and progressives. They see them as owning and running the deep state, which they say is destroying the country.
There's a kernel of truth here. Most Democrats, certainly most Democratic politicians, have for several decades bought into the neoliberal model of free trade, deregulation, and deference to financial markets. Even aside from the billionaires, some parts of American society - mostly urban educated people, including a lot of us here - have done at least fairly well under neoliberalism. But for the former factory worker it's been an existential disaster.
To me, MAGA is terrifying and I want it beaten back by any means necessary. I can see the problems with the neoliberal model ... but not the solution. And I can sure see that if I was on the receiving end of neoliberalism I'd be hate-filled and irrational and looking for scapegoats too.
Until Democrats can mount a credible critique of neoliberalism - and a vision of what comes next - we will be at war with MAGA. The most important barrier to making this critique is Citizens United (Supreme Court case removing restrictions on political donations).
+1
Those former factory workers only had their jobs in the first place because of the neoliberal free trade policies that opened up export markets. Only a fool would not have foreseen that the rest of the world would rebuild after WWII and become exporters themselves.
Even aside from the effects of international competition, manufacturing jobs are not what they were. Automation drastically reduced the labor hours needed and the steady war against unionization put downward pressure on wages. Economies change. It's always been so.
^^^ This. America coasted in prosperity unmatched in most of the rest of the world for decades after World War 2 because it was practically the only country capable of manufacturing the capital equipment and consumer goods the world needed. That's the "Golden Age" people of Trump's generation remember, when there was an American car in every driveway and US-made ships, planes and heavy industrial equipment were being exported all across the non-communist world.
Slowly other countries recovered, the "Asian tigers" worked out how to make things more cheaply than the yanks and often of better quality, and the party was over. Instead of telling Americans the truth - that there's no going back - MAGA leaders keep pretending the good times will return if only Trump is allowed to run the country without interference.
I think you are both very wrong. From the end of WWII thru the boom times of the 1960s, foreign trade was a very small part of the US economy. The US would have been doing great without any trade with the rest of the world. Most of our trade was internal.
By the 1970s rising trade imbalances led to Nixon's repudiation of Breton Woods and the end of the gold standard. Reagan broke the unions and killed the US machine tool industry. It was only during Reagan that neoliberal economics took firm hold with its goal of moving as much wealth and income as possible from the bottom 95% of the population to the top .1%.
Automation was never much of an enemy of manufacturing employment. But the rise of the financial sector and the reduction of corporate taxes were. If you don't understand this, then you didn't live thru it.
Exactly right. Also you can't export anything to countries devastated by war since they don't have anything to trade. This myth that USA superiority followed because of lack of competition after WW2 needs to go away.
Ain’t that the truth about the MSM. Josh Marshall at TPM has proposed Trump’s Razor: the stupidest explanation is always the correct one.
The European media have no problem identifying Trump and TrumpCo for exactly who and what it is., and they are absolutely clear about what TrumpCo is doing and why. The problems with American legacy media run deeper than market share, profitability, or corporate self-protection. There's a culture of fearfulness where an ostensibly 'objective' approach hides a lack of courage, cowardice actually, not just an unwillingness but an inability to call out character and behavior, even character and behavior that's obvious to everyone and is destroying this country, and by stated intent wants to destroy a free democratic world. It pervades all levels of American media, from the bigs to John Stewart to MSNBC, which itself hides behind juvenile epithets like "fascism." The difference between American media and Euro outlets like France 24 English, Deutsche Welle, and Times Radio are stark and illuminating. American media in comparison look and sound like what they are - simplistic to the point of childish, shallow, uninformed, sycophantic, incurious, remarkably lacking in adult level thought.
What's important is this impotence results in functional complicity in the authoritarian project. For a whole suite of reasons, the institutional American media are not in any effective way capable of even acknowledging the obvious when that obvious falls outside the implicit limits of the national media discourse. They just can't do it, and that is a failure of massive proportion.
As always with Trump, the details don't matter.
All he's ever after is something that feeds his ego, and kicking anyone who's down is always at the top of his list.
More Bernie, please.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rKBM2kS6B8o
I'm all for Bernie, myself, but the Clinton/Biden/DNC faction hates him with a burning passion and will pull the whole country down to keep him from becoming President.
"the Clinton/Biden/DNC faction hates him with a burning passion and will pull the whole country down to keep him from becoming President."
???
Bernie is 83 years old. No "faction" need hate him/pull him down; Father Time already has that well in hand.
Seventy years ago, Iran was a secular, democratic, and largely friendly nation. A bunch of Americans wanted control of their natural resources, and betrayed their people to get it.
Had we been good friends to them, today Iran would be prosperous and stable and democratic and friendly.
We're now making a fresh new similar mistake in Ukraine. We've been good friends to them for years, but now we're shaking them down for the coins in their pockets and delivering them into the hands of their enemies. This is a shameful betrayal that their people will remember for generations. They'll never hate us as much as they hate Russians, but we'll run them close.
We're turning a friend into a future enemy for no good reason at all.
Either Trump and his advisors don't know the Memorandum of Understanding between the European Union and Ukraine on a Strategic Partnership on Raw Materials exists, or they are deliberately coercing Ukraine to repudiate a four year-old deal with countries that until a few weeks ago were America's oldest friends and allies.
https://ec.europa.eu/docsroom/documents/46300
Exactly. The problem is 100% the media. They should be contextualizing this EXACTLY as Kevin puts it, naturally in more news-acceptable terms, but clearly. For example, just SAY that Trump's demand is 500 times Ukraine's resource revenue -- and not that "Democrats say" it is.
Just SAY that Trump was displeased that Zelenskyy refused to launch an investigation of Biden in 2018, which COULD help explain his recent hostility.
Just SAY that no president has ever demanded repayment for military assistance to an ally that has been invaded.
These are historical facts, not things that "Democrats say."
If the newscasters don't tell people these things, how will they know them?
msm needs to hold trump accountable for his insane comments instead of rationalizing as if trump were a normal human being.
Bingo. Exactly. It's functional cowardice, complicity, and appeasement. See my comment above.
Zelensky should sign over all of Ukraine's mineral wealth to Trump. Hell, he should ask to be the 51 state. Whatever it takes to keep US support until Trump is out of office. No treaty signed with a gun to Ukraine's head will be valid after Trump is gone.
I think you're letting Trump off the hook a bit too much here. Remember when he sided with Putin, while standing right next to him, over our intelligence services? Remember all the false denials about contacts with Russia? Remember him hiring Paul Comrade Manafort as his campaign manager? There's something going on with Putin/Russia far bigger than his botched Ukraine Shakedown.
He does want to help Putin, because he admires Putin, and got and probably still getting a lot of help from him.
Another motivation for Trump is alienating the European democracies, which is useful for him because it makes it easier to become a dictator.
You completely nailed it. Trump is far and away the most despicable person ever to have been President (and before him there was some competition; now its not even close). And people with IQs above room temperature, and support him, are nearly as despicable.
+1
I'm convinced that much of what Trump has done in his first month is driven by his need for vengeneance against those he thinks have crossed him in some way.
Swedish professor Magnus Ericsson claims one cannot find that much rare metals worth mining in Ukraine. According to him are Trump living in a fantasy
Ukraine has quite a lot of valuable mineral resources, plus oil and gas. However most of it is either in the Donbas region occupied by Russia or close to the front line in the war. I'm sure Trump is blissfully unaware of that.
Rare Earth Elements are not rare at all.
Despite the name, these elements – defined as the 15 lanthanides plus scandium (Sc) and yttrium (Y) – are not as rare as one might think. Although originally thought to be rare, many of the minerals are actually common in the Earth’s crust. However it’s difficulties in extracting the metal from the ore in most places. That goes for Ukraine . No extraction is done today and it’s definitely debatable if it’s worth trying
Roy Cohn would approve.
Holding Starlink hostage is not a bright strategy either because it teaches potential customers that the service can be discontinued on a whim or political gambit. Now everyone will view it as a control lever and it becomes much less attractive.
His whole life is transactional. He sees us sending money to Ukraine and getting nothing in return. He is incapable of understanding the non financial benefits of supporting Ukraine or N.A.T.O. He is indeed a very simple man.
You're mischaracterizing the size of Ukraine's mineral deposits; they have some of the world's largest deposits (relative to land area) of some of the most valuable resources.
It's a mix of his greed (which drives his transactional behavior in all things) and his ego (which has now been burned twice by Zelensky).
His transactional greed has a few layers. The uppermost layer is that which everyone can plainly see, is the quid pro quo demand of a '$500B payback for military support'. Then there are the hidden layers of his greed. You can get a hint of it by Russia's chase for control of Ukraine's mining operations in the eastern part of Ukraine, and the potential of the lifting of sanctions on Russia, post-cessation of military action.
We already know of the two episodes of when Zelensky burned Trump: (1) the quid pro quo for nonexistent Burisma fraud, and (2) the comment that he lives in a sphere of Russian disinfo. Both (correctly, I might add) infer that Trump is too stupid to recognize when he's being taken advantage of and made a fool. That is why Trump is angry and discombobulated in public.
My theory is that trump is running our foreign policy as a protection racket for his own benefit. He threatens our allies with tariffs or something else nasty, then demands a bribe under the table, and then backs down in exchange for a small-ball public concession to keep up appearances plus the secret bribe.
In the case of Ukraine and Russia, he's setting it up as a bidding war: he'll support whoever bribes him more, and Putin can unfortunately offer a bigger bribe than Zelensky can.