Donald Trump is a failure. Republicans have a moral responsibility to remove him from office: Senator Susan Collins

Trump’s Failure to Lead Is Costing America and the World
"The world is facing at least three crises today that cannot be resolved by any one country."

Echo New York Times Editorial 

Does Senator Susan Collins know this❓

The world is facing at least three crises today that cannot be resolved by any one country. Two are longer-term and arguably existential: the threat of uncontrolled artificial intelligence and the growing impact of climate change. One is shorter-term and damaging the global economy: the disruption of shipping lanes in the Middle East. All three require the kind of high-level international cooperation that helped manage other challenges, like the threat of nuclear warfare during the Cold War and the damage to the ozone layer.

Yet almost nobody expects meaningful progress during this week’s meetings in Washington between the leaders of the two most powerful countries, President Xi Jinping of China and President Trump. Beneath the pomp of Mr. Xi’s visit, the agenda appears notably unambitious. At most, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent signaled that America can hope for commercial deals and modest A.I. safety progress.

The low expectations for the visit underline the damage that Mr. Trump is doing to American influence and global well-being. He is an undisciplined politician who puts his personal interests above the nation’s, running an administration that has no coherent strategy for solving major problems. He is instead often exacerbating the world’s biggest problems.

No matter who was president, negotiations with China would be difficult. Mr. Xi is an autocrat who has centralized authority, oppressed his country’s citizens and built partnerships with the world’s most repressive regimes. Mr. Xi does tend to be a ruthless tactician. But China and the United States do have overlapping interests on several major issues, including A.I., climate change and Middle Eastern shipping lanes.

The world is facing at least three crises today that cannot be resolved by any one country. Two are longer-term and arguably existential: the threat of uncontrolled artificial intelligence and the growing impact of climate change. One is shorter-term and damaging the global economy: the disruption of shipping lanes in the Middle East. All three require the kind of high-level international cooperation that helped manage other challenges, like the threat of nuclear warfare during the Cold War and the damage to the ozone layer.

Yet almost nobody expects meaningful progress during this week’s meetings in Washington between the leaders of the two most powerful countries, President Xi Jinping of China and Trump. Beneath the pomp of Mr. Xi’s visit, the agenda appears notably unambitious. 

At most, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent signaled that America can hope for commercial deals and modest A.I. safety progress.

The low expectations for the visit underline the damage that Mr. Trump is doing to American influence and global well-being. He is an undisciplined politician who puts his personal interests above the nation’s, running an administration that has no coherent strategy for solving major problems. He is instead often exacerbating the world’s biggest problems.

No matter who was president, negotiations with China would be difficult. Mr. Xi is an autocrat who has centralized authority, oppressed his country’s citizens and built partnerships with the world’s most repressive regimes. Mr. Xi does tend to be a ruthless tactician. But China and the United States do have overlapping interests on several major issues, including A.I., climate change and Middle Eastern shipping lanes.

The notion that Donald Trump can effectively represent America’s interests on these issues seems ludicrous at this point. Even on his own terms, his signature second-term actions, like the tariffs and the war in Iran, are failing. No wonder that China’s leaders reportedly see his presidency as a gift to their ambitions for greater global influence. Americans are left to imagine the progress we could have been attempted this week with a different U.S. president.

The first area of potential cooperation is A.I. safety. The rapid advancement of A.I. capabilities requires government regulation to limit the possibility that such tools could become uncontrollable and destructive. No one country can assure its own safety from these dangers. International cooperation is needed to mitigate the threat.

American A.I. models pose great risks because they are the most powerful. But China’s models are not far behind and pose their own risks because they tend to be open-weight, with their internal rules available for other users to alter. Fortunately, China has reasons to want safeguards. Its spy chief recently warned that A.I. threatens one-party control there. China, like every country, also fears biological weapons.

Mr. Trump evinces little concern about the risks posed by A.I. and little interest in regulating it. He has said that the United States must beat China in the A.I. race, without regard for safety. That race does matter, but there are ways for the United States both to compete with China and to work together on the risks. The right policy is a mix of competition and cooperation, as this country pursued with the Soviet Union during the Cold War. Today, the United States should make the scientific investments to remain ahead of China while negotiating over shared threats like bioweapons and A.I. systems that escape human control.

A second issue on which America urgently needs China’s help is in the Middle East.

In response to Trump’s reckless war, Iran restricted traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, while the Houthis, a terrorist group allied with Iran, have expanded their disruption of traffic through the Red Sea. The price of oil has risen worldwide as a result.

Persuading Mr. Xi to pressure Iran to reopen the strait would not be easy. In fact, Trump is damaging America’s international status so badly that the Chinese leader can follow the dictum attributed to Napoleon: “Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake.” 

Still, China has an interest in the free flow of oil and lower energy prices. China’s economic growth has weakened in recent years, and higher oil prices do not help. The government’s stated position in talks with Iran is that it should reopen the strait. China certainly has the leverage to push Iran for a deal: It has been Iran’s largest customer for oil, buying 90 percent of its exports in recent years.

If anything, the third issue — climate change — is the one on which U.S.-China talks could offer the most promise if Trump were not president. China once was an obstacle to climate progress, complicating the attempts of the Obama administration to negotiate a global framework. Over the past decade, though, China has increasingly been willing to address climate change. Its world-leading renewable energy industry would benefit from international agreements that increase reliance on batteries and electric cars.

These three issues obviously do not represent a complete agenda for an ideal U.S.-China summit. Several others would be even trickier, including China’s support for Iran’s and Russia’s militaries and China’s increasing aggression toward Taiwan and several Asian countries. Realistically, any one meeting would probably not make much progress on the thorniest issues. But the United States and China are not merely rivals for international power; they also have shared interests in global stability.

American presidents going back more than 100 years have believed that their country had an interest in taking a leading role in the world. America is far from perfect. But when it led, the world often benefited through expanded prosperity, security and democracy. The progress enhanced this country’s global prestige and influence along the way.

Mr. Trump shows little care for these benefits. He uses international relations to seek personal enrichment, praise from sycophants and equal standing with authoritarians. Trump's flailing leadership leaves Americans with the thinnest of hopes for this week’s summit: that he does not further damage the national interest.

Donald Trump and maga Republicans approve importing beef or unknown origins: An important essay reports stomach turning information

Why Did Trump Order Up 660 Million Pounds of Mystery Meat?

Echo New York Times opinion by Eric Schlosser author of the book Fast Food Nation.

If you buy a T-shirt at Gap, it will have a label that tells you where it was made. That’s federal law.

The same is true for automobiles, appliances, television sets, every fresh or frozen fruit and vegetable sold at the supermarket.

Beef and pork are notable exceptions to these laws. And that may help to explain why Donald Trump signed a proclamation last month that will allow the duty-free importation of about 660 million pounds of inexpensive beef.

If American consumers knew where that beef was coming from, they might not want to eat it.

The cuts of meat covered by Trump’s proclamation aren’t fresh sirloins, rib-eyes and filets. They’re lean beef trimmings that will be added to fattier American cuts to make ground beef. 

They’re small chunks of frozen meat that could have been kept in cold storage overseas for years. They are the quintessence of generic industrial meat, imported here to be subsequently processed in massive grinders that combine pieces of tens of thousands of cattle from multiple countries, mainly into fast food hamburgers.

I’ve been a longtime critic of food-safety practices in the U.S. meatpacking industry. But some of the practices in the 16 countries currently authorized to export raw beef to the United States are worse than any on these shores. During the past year, China rejected two shipping containers of beef from Uruguay after finding residue of an anti-parasitic drug in the meat, and rejected beef from Argentina reportedly because it tested positive for a banned antibiotic that can cause serious blood disorders.

One of the worst food-safety scandals occurred in Brazil, the world’s largest exporter of beef. In 2017, the Brazilian federal police raided nearly 200 meatpacking plants after allegations that government inspectors and politicians were being bribed to allow the sale of contaminated beef. Rotten meat treated with ascorbic acid and other chemicals to mask the contamination had been sold to hospitals and schools in Brazil and also exported. Executives at the Brazilian company JBS, the largest beef producer in the world, later admitted to bribing inspectors.

American cattle industry leaders say that Mr. Trump’s move will hurt domestic ranchers and do little to reduce the price of ground beef. They say the real cost savings will be enjoyed by meatpacking companies, fast food chains and supermarkets.

Why did Trump come up with this scheme to import hundreds of millions of pounds of beef❓

“Regime Change,” the recent book by the Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, contains an interesting clue: a White House meeting last November between Trump and Joesley Batista, whose family controls JBS.

Mr. Batista had long been considered persona non grata in Washington, having been jailed in Brazil as a result of, among other things, paying $186 million in bribes to almost 2,000 politicians, including three Brazilian presidents, to obtain state financing for his family’s company. In 2019, after JBS bought several American meatpacking companies, Senator Marco Rubio and his colleague Robert Menendez deplored JBS’s “admitted criminal conduct,” its “business relationships with Venezuela’s Maduro regime, as well as its growing reliance on financing from entities aligned with the Chinese government.” The senators argued that allowing JBS to own U.S. companies could endanger America’s food supply and national security.

Mr. Batista gained the White House meeting last November, Ms. Haberman and Mr. Swan wrote, because of his friendship with Melania Trump. In addition, a JBS subsidiary had donated $5 million to Trump’s second inauguration, the largest gift from any individual or corporation. Not long afterward, JBS got approval from the Securities and Exchange Commission to be listed on the New York Stock Exchange, a privilege the company had sought for almost a decade.

After the White House meeting with Trump, Mr. Batista flew to Venezuela at Trump’s request, met with President Nicolás Maduro and urged him to resign. Mr. Batista’s unusual diplomatic endeavor did not succeed, but in July, a company owned by his family acquired a major stake in Venezuelan oil production, with the blessing of the new Trump-backed government there.

The European Union suspended imports of beef from Brazil this past Thursday because of concerns about antibiotic misuse. Trump’s proclamation facilitating beef imports from Brazil took effect the same week. Calling these facts to public view, the writer Shanley Hunt allowed that perhaps it’s just a coincidence. According to The Wall Street Journal, Trump announced his intention to allow duty-free foreign beef just a day after another meeting with Mr. Batista at the White House. Perhaps that’s a coincidence, too.

And yet it’s remarkable that the livelihood of American ranchers is being shaped in private meetings between the president of the United States and a representative of Brazil’s largest exporter of beef.

Country-of-origin labeling on beef used to be mandatory in the United States. That changed in 2015, when a Republican-controlled Congress, led by Speaker of the House John Boehner, ended the requirement. Just over a year later, Mr. Boehner was appointed to the board of JBS Foods International.

Today, four large meatpacking companies control about 85 percent of the market for beef in the United States. Two of those companies — JBS and National Beef — are Brazilian-owned. Smithfield Foods, America’s largest pork company, was purchased by a Chinese company in 2013. Although Smithfield doesn’t currently import pork from China, if it ever does, that fact won’t appear on the label.

Last year the Senate majority leader, John Thune, and Senator Cory Booker introduced bipartisan legislation that would once again require that meat be labeled according to its country of origin. In March, the Senate minority leader, Chuck Schumer, introduced separate legislation that would require tougher antitrust enforcement in the meatpacking industry, break up the big four beef companies, strengthen protections for independent ranchers and place limits on foreign ownership of American meat companies.

Those bills are a good start. In the early 1970s, before the administration of President Ronald Reagan gutted antitrust enforcement, the top four beef companies had only 21 percent of the U.S. market. When that market was truly competitive, Americans ate more beef than they do today, the nation had more than twice as many cattle ranchers — and foreign corporations didn’t control the most valuable sector of American agriculture.

Until a new labeling act gets passed, if you want to eat a hamburger, I suggest going to your local butcher shop, rather than the supermarket, ordering cuts of American beef and asking for them to be ground on the premises. Or grind it at home. Otherwise, there’s really no way of knowing what’s in your meat, or how many international borders it crossed to reach your plate.

Donald Trump and maga Republicans continue to lie about elections in America. Does Senator Susan Collins know this?

Echo opinion published in the Boston Globe by Ilya Somin:

Trump's big lie isn’t about the six year old 2020 election. He’s targeting the midterms.

During another rambling speech on July 16th, Donald Trump falsely claimed without credible evidence about there have been serious breaches of election security and repeated his assertions that the 2020, election was compromised. As in the past, these remarks are utterly indefensible. And they are likely part of an illegal effort to federalize control over the upcoming midterm elections, so as to tilt the results in his party’s favor. 

Hopefully, America’s courts and federal system will continue to stymie him.

Trump claimed in his speech that some 278,000 non-citizens illegally registered to vote . There is no real evidence to support this, and even he didn’t claim proof there was any significant actual illegal non-citizen voting. 

Decades of efforts to find such evidence — including by the right-wing conspiracy creating Heritage Foundation — have turned up no more than a few dozen cases, over a span of several decades. A search of the Heritage’s election fraud database turns up only 99 supposed cases of non-citizen voting from 1982, to 2025.

Trump also claimed foreign powers intervened to prevent his election in 2020, and that China “obtained” some 220,000 voter files. In January 2021, the US intelligence community — then led by Trump’s own first-term political appointees — concluded foreign interference did not tilt the election against him and that China did not even try to do so. The voter-file access claim makes no sense. As my Cato Institute colleague Walter Olson — an election law specialist — points out, “this means nothing” because it is possible to buy or rent

 voter information from states that make them public information.

These fake claims are intended to bolster Trump’s long-standing assertions that the 2020, election was somehow “stolen” from him. But, overwhelming evidence shows the contrary. 

In 2020-21, Trump and his political allies filed 64 court cases challenging the results in six key swing states. As detailed in “Lost, Not Stolen,” a review of these cases conducted by prominent Republican lawyers, election law specialists, and former federal judges, none of these decisions found significant evidence of voter fraud.

While some cases were dismissed on procedural grounds, 30 were decided on the merits, and in 14 others the plaintiffs voluntarily withdrew their suits (likely because they lacked evidence to substantiate their claims). 

Trump only prevailed in one case — a Pennsylvania decision involving procedural flaws that did not involve near enough votes to overturn Joe Biden’s over 80,000 vote margin of victory in that state. Later investigations conducted in various swing states — including those undertaken by Republicans in Arizona and Michigan — likewise found no meaningful evidence of significant fraud.

If some combination of Democrats and foreign powers had managed to “steal” the 2020, election while Trump was in the White House, and avoid detection in the process, one wonders why they didn’t do it again in 2024, when a Democratic president was in power and in control of the Justice Department and the intelligence community. The fact that no such thing happened then is yet further evidence that it didn’t happen in 2020.

The real purpose of Trump’s ongoing lies about the 2020 election and election security may be to bolster his efforts to “nationalize” control of the 2026 midterm elections, so that he can skew results in his party’s favor, at a time when most pollsters and election analysts expect Republicans to lose control of at least one house of Congress, and possibly both.

Fortunately, Article 1, Section 4 of the Constitution gives states primary responsibility for election administration, subject to override by congressional legislation. 

No current federal law gives Trump the authority he seeks. Numerous federal courts — including in cases presided over by Republican-appointed judges — have rejected his attempts to change voter ID rules by executive order and take control of state voter rolls. Courts should similarly rule against any potential efforts to use federal law enforcement agencies or — worse still — troops, to seize control of polling sites and ballots, just as the Supreme Court in December rightly rejected Trump’s illegal efforts to use the National Guard in Illinois and other blue states. State governments should also do everything possible to resist such power grabs through the political process and mobilize public opinion against any attempts.

America’s decentralized system of election administration has downsides, as well as virtues. But, as leading election law scholar Richard L. Hasen notes, it provides valuable protection against “a president hell-bent, like Trump, on election subversion.” 

Hasen, previously an advocate of election law centralization, adds that this has led him to reconsider. Americans would do well to heed Hasen’s point and also reject Trump’s bogus claims of fraud, intended to pave the way for his own very real efforts to undermine our elections.

Reader response on this opinion: Trump is laying the foundation for his Big Bad Pouting Party that will follow the coming mid-terms.
Echoing Roy Cohn's advice, Trump makes a practice of stating a LIE, and then REPEATING that lie, over and over, until the lie is gradually ACCEPTED AS TRUTH by the sheep in his flock.

He is claiming voter fraud already, and will continue to bleat this lie, hoping the sheep will swallow it.
Get ready for this latest Feces 💩Fest, America❗ Adolf Hitler's propaganda creator Joseph Goebbels made The Big Lie theory a reality. 

Senator Susan Collins should use her seniority to call for the impeachment of Donald Trump NOW, because he is clearly on the way to declaring martial law in America, rather than accept the outcomes of the 2026, mid term elections. 

Donald Trump continues to obsess about old election news while American military are being killed in his illegal war of choice with Iran

RECKLESS❗ It is insane and outrageous that — once again — the keepers of our election system have to issue statements responding to preposterous claims by Donald Trump and other Republican maga U.S. leaders that the system has been somehow compromised and co-opted by threats here and abroad.

Rather than tell Americans about his plan to end the illegal Iran war he declared and is now shackled with, he went on and on about old news and fake claims about election fraud.  #ImpeachTrumpNOW

Where is Senator Susan Collins❓

Echo editorial board opinion published in the Rutland Herald, a Vermont newspaper:

In Vermont, Attorney General Charity Clark and Secretary of State Sarah Copeland Hanzas released a joint statement responding to the claims made by Trump during a national address on July 16, Thursday night concerning the integrity of the nation’s elections.
(Two national networks NBC and ABC did not carry Trump's address live and CBS cut away to regular programming after only a few minutes.)

In the speech, (for those with the intestinal fortitude to endure it) Donald Trump repeated false claims about the 2020, election that have been investigated and disproven. 

Going into the Midterm elections, Trump continues to raise doubts and conspiracies to negate Republican losses and carry on with his drumbeat that elections are “rigged” when they don’t go his way.

However, there is no evidence that China actually used that information in any way. It has long been established that China collects immense volumes of data on Americans unrelated to any efforts to manipulate votes or alter election outcomes. And public versions of voter files are widely available, including online, and can be bought and sold by campaigns and political parties so they know which doors to knock on and where to send mail.

An Associated Press reports that China’s efforts to influence the 2020, campaign were already well-documented, and there was no assessment of any direct election interference. The records released Thursday do not refute that conclusion but reveal an internal intelligence community debate about how to characterize Beijing’s efforts and motives.

In addition, Trump touted the release of a new Department of Homeland Security investigation, based on state voter rolls and public records, that he said had identified approximately 278,000 noncitizens registered to vote in federal elections.

According to published reports, the agency uncovered more than a quarter of a million noncitizens illegally registered to vote in California, Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Nevada, based on public records, which are often erroneous or incomplete. Another 28,000 noncitizens, it claimed, were found on voter rolls in 25 states using the new Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements system.

Nevertheless, there is no allegation that any of those people actually voted, which would be a crime. That data has also not been verified. Reports have found that the SAVE database is plagued with errors, including outdated information that has often classified naturalized citizens as noncitizens. Indeed, a federal judge has barred the database from being used over fears that voters will be wrongly purged from voter rolls, the AP reports. Studies have found noncitizen voting to be extremely rare. Noncitizens are also allowed to vote in some local elections and could be on the rolls for that reason.

Trump also cited Russia, as well as issues domestically in Michigan concerning canvassing voters.

Notably, Trump told the nation the intelligence included “revealing shocking vulnerabilities in our election infrastructure” that leave it vulnerable “to hacking, exploitation and foreign interference.” 

One report in the files included a list of recent breaches — mostly by Russia — and called on state and local election officials to step up their defenses to prevent information from being used to obtain absentee ballots or alter voter rolls.

According to the AP, election officials acknowledge that voting machines also carry risk — which is why they don’t rely on them alone to ensure the accuracy of the vote. Safeguards like physical security, equipment testing, paper ballot backups and post-election audits help to catch machine errors or threats.

But it is unclear what the administration is doing to facilitate their efforts. Earlier this month, Trump ousted members of a bipartisan federal election commission that distributes federal grants to states, oversees the testing of voting systems, and maintains the national voter registration form after the group resisted his efforts to require potential voters to document their U.S. citizenship before registering.

Trump’s address had the intended effect, with renewed claims of old news about fraud and conspiracies. So much so that election officials across the nation are having to tamp down the fires yet again. It is irresponsible and reckless to stoke these fears.

We in Vermont commend Clark and Copeland Hanzas for working diligently with our town and city clerks to ensure secure and fair elections here in Vermont. There definitely is a lack of integrity in play here, but it’s all on Trump — not within the states❗

Donald Trump and maga Republicans are losing the Iran World War because of cheap drones.

(Meanwhile, the cost of oil keeps going up because Donald Trump declared an illegal war without any plan about how to win or exit.)

Drones are blowing up old assumptions about US foreign policy.

#ImpeachTrumpNOW attention Senator Susan Collins

Echo essay published in the Boston Globe by Stephen Kinzer

America will find it harder to win arguments with military might alone. 

Waging war is one of humanity’s oldest pursuits. That is unlikely to end. Leaders seeking power or glory will always want to prove themselves on battlefields. The way wars are fought, however, changes over time. Today those changes are especially dramatic. Wars used to be won by the side that fielded the biggest, meanest, and best-equipped army. America’s misadventure in Iran is the latest proof that those days are over.

War is becoming democratized. Weaker powers can now resist
stronger ones in new ways. Revolutionaries, like those in Algeria, Vietnam, and Cuba, have often shown that smaller and more agile forces can triumph over larger ones.
Now governments are learning the same lesson. America’s failure to crush Iran, and Russia’s failure to impose its will in Ukraine, show that superior force is no longer enough to guarantee victory. In the new age of cheap drones, the value of expensive missiles, bombs, and fighter jets is suddenly limited. Today’s conflicts in Iran and Ukraine are opening a new era of warfare.

This is more than just an evolution in weapons technology. It is a paradigm shift that threatens the long-term power of countries that rely on military force to deter or resist enemies. The United States is the most prominent of those countries. 

That has profound implications for the course of American power.
The most immediate cause of this sudden reversal of fortune is the development of drones. They have become the poor man’s weapon of choice. That makes them the future of warfare.
Drones are cheap and easy to build. Depending on size and power, they can cost anywhere from 💲300 to 💲50,000. Compare that with the cost of American-made missiles that can shoot down drones: 💲3 million for each Patriot missile, at least 💲10 million for a THAAD interceptor. A drone factory can churn out hundreds in a week. Producing and delivering a Patriot battery takes a minimum of two years. Seeking to take advantage of this mismatch, Iranian leaders have sent swarms of drones to attack targets in Israel and the Persian Gulf. These are not intended to produce military victory. Iranians have realized that they can win simply by surviving. This is naturally unsettling to the United States, which is used to winning wars according to the old rules.
A similar dynamic shapes the war in Ukraine. Russia’s overwhelming military advantage should have allowed it to achieve its war goals in Ukraine just as easily as the Americans were supposed to achieve theirs in Iran. But as the Prussian general Helmuth von Moltke the Elder tartly observed more than a century ago, no war plan survives contact with the enemy. In the early stages of the Ukraine war, infantry charges and armored attacks were common. Now they are rare. The reason is simple: Any operation on open ground can be quickly spotted and attacked by drones.
One key difference between these two wars is the adaptability of the attacking power. Russia shifted its strategy just as Ukraine has. The two belligerents match each other drone for drone.
The United States has proved less willing or able to make such a sharp shift. Our lumbering and overfed defense industry is focused on making highly complex weapons systems that are also highly profitable. As Iran steadily churns out drones, the United States has scrambled to respond. Americans have even turned to their Ukrainian partners for advice on drone technology — a remarkable case of a student surpassing the teacher. 

In the future, if Iran and Ukraine are any indication, countries that adapt more quickly and imaginatively to strategic challenges will have an advantage over those that are slow-moving and tradition-bound.
This presents the United States with profound challenges. The most obvious is a challenge to our way of waging war. There was a time when a simple demand from Washington was enough to terrify a national leader into resigning. But obviously, that no longer works. If the United States wants to continue exercising military power over faraway lands, it will have to find new ways to do it.
The larger challenge for Americans is to decide whether exercising coercive power is what the United States should be doing in the 21st century. Our foreign policy is largely a matter of identifying enemies and finding ways to weaken or destroy them. The alternative would be to accept other countries as they are, and even seek to make them partners in a shared prosperity. Yet in Washington, it is an absolute taboo to suggest that compromising with Russia, China, or Iran could contribute more to our national security than any weapons system.
Raw power no longer brings either victory or stability. This is a gleeful moment for the underdogs. Superpowers do not seem so super anymore.
Stephen Kinzer is a senior fellow at the Watson School of International and Public Affairs at Brown University.

Donald Trump and maga Republicans were overconfident about U.S. military power while cheap drones and A.I. are advancing war strategies

Echo opinion published in The New York Times by Thomas L. Friedman: Trump Is the One Without the Cards at the Poker Table

Donald Trump often falls back on poker metaphors. 

He told President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine that he had “no cards” when it came to standing up to Russia. 

Trump told Iran’s leaders that they had “no cards” when it came to standing up to him.

Would somebody please tell me when it’s poker night at the Trump White House, because I’d really like a seat at that table❓🃏

Trump is betting that by blockading Iran to prevent it from exporting its oil he can force Tehran to negotiate on his terms. But some experts think Iran has enough income and can store enough oil to hold out for at least several months.

Meanwhile, Iran is betting that by choking off the Strait of Hormuz — and driving up gasoline and food prices for Americans and all their allies — Trump will eventually act in accord with his TACO label: Trump Always Chickens Out.

This is painful to watch. Trump and Tehran are each saying: “I will hold my breath until you turn blue.” We’ll see who gasps first.

The real question is: How in the world has Iran’s regime lasted this long — two months — against the combined military might of Israel and America? The answer: Trump does not understand how much asymmetric warfare has reshaped geopolitics in just the last few years.

Let's cut to reality. I don’t want to be too hard on Trump.  Afterall, he is not alone. Iran is to Trump what Ukraine is to Vladimir Putin, what Hamas and Hezbollah have been to Benjamin Netanyahu and — wait for it — what the next generation of cyberhackers will be to China and America and every other nation-state.

Think about it: Last June, Ukraine smuggled 117 cheap drones into Russia hidden inside trucks and destroyed or damaged about 20 of Russia’s strategic aircraft, including multimillion-dollar long-range, nuclear-capable strategic bombers.

This year, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps used $35,000 Shahed-136 drones to strike two Amazon Web Services data centers, costing tens of millions of dollars, in the United Arab Emirates (a third Amazon data center, in Bahrain, was damaged in a nearby strike), knocking them offline and disrupting banking and other services across the Persian Gulf region.

Previously, Hamas commanders said that they fashioned small rockets from piping from abandoned Israeli settlements, unexploded Israeli bombs and other munitions and even parts from a sunken British World War I warship off the Gaza coast. Israel was forced to use Patriot missiles costing $4 million each to intercept them.

In other words, we’re already in a new era in which small powers and small groups can leverage information-age tools — guided by GPS and digitally controlled — to gain asymmetric advantages.

“We have always thought of power in terms of the ability to create mass destruction,” John Arquilla, a former professor of defense analysis at the Naval Postgraduate School and the author of the forthcoming “Troubled American Way of War,” told me in an interview. In an interdependent world, “the many and the small now have the ability to create ‘mass disruption’ in the physical or the virtual world” — from the Strait of Hormuz to cyberspace.

Trump recklessly started this war without allies, without any scenario planning and, obviously, without any real understanding of Iran’s assets in asymmetric warfare. Nevertheless, it would be a disaster for the region and the world if Iran’s malign regime emerges from this war intact and unreformed, because an even more powerful asymmetric tool kit for bad guys is just arriving.

Here’s what’s truly new and disturbing: We are rapidly moving from the age of asymmetric warfare based on “information-age tools” that can wreak mass disruption to what my technology tutor, Craig Mundie, a former head of research and strategy at Microsoft, calls an age of asymmetric warfare based on “intelligence-age tools” that can cheaply wreak disruption at a much larger scale anywhere on demand.

My translation: You’ve read a lot about how Iran has used cheap $35,000 drones to close the Strait of Hormuz. Wait until you see how it can leverage large language models and their A.I. agents at a very low cost.

How will Iran gain access❓ Just recall the story that broke a few weeks ago: The A.I. giant Anthropic announced that its newest artificial intelligence model, Mythos, was simply too good at finding vulnerabilities in the operating systems and other software programs that so many companies and utilities run on. Days later, OpenAI made a similar announcement about its own cybersecurity-focused model, GPT-5.4-Cyber.

As Bloomberg reported, the flaws Mythos has discovered are the kind that “often represent a gold mine for hackers because they offer a window of free rein inside vulnerable systems.”

Anthropic and OpenAI both elected to restrict the release of these A.I. systems to only the most critical and responsible software generators so they could find and patch their vulnerabilities before these tools might one day be released more widely. But guess what happened❓

Unauthorized users got hold of Mythos anyway.

Bloomberg reported last week that a few outsiders gained access but that Anthropic said it had no evidence that the access impacted any of its systems. The group of unauthorized users “is interested in playing around with new models, not wreaking havoc with them,” Bloomberg reported, based on information from an unidentified source.

It is hard to exaggerate how destabilizing these rapid advances in A.I. sophistication could become, and it is why Mundie and I have been arguing for a while now that the two A.I. superpowers — the United States and China — need to figure out how they can (and surely will) continue to compete strategically while also cooperating to neutralize these new asymmetric intelligence-age threats — not unlike the United States and the U.S.S.R. did to limit the proliferation of nuclear weapons in the Cold War.

Otherwise, neither of them will be safe. Nor will anyone else be.

Donald Trump has failed miserably in his self declared war with Iran. His lack of strategy is extremely dangerous

Echo message published on X/ (formerly Twitter) by Jürgen Nauditt

Jürgen Nauditt

Stupid Donald Trump, the biggest failed strategist in US history, has plunged America into a strategic catastrophe. During his self-proclaimed “victory parade” against Iran, he squandered at least 45% of the US's precision-guided missile arsenal in just seven weeks—including half of all THAAD* (Terminal High Altitude Area Defense) missiles and nearly 50% of Patriot interceptor missiles. This isn't some fake news blog reporting this, but CNN, citing a CSIS analysis and internal Pentagon data. The result? An “imminent risk” of munitions depletion should a real conflict erupt in the coming years—for example, with China. Trump has ruined the US defense capability for years to come. And for what? For nothing. No regime change in Iran. No destroyed nuclear program. No strategic breakthrough. Just a shaky ceasefire that gives the mullahs time to rearm while America stands naked. 

Trump, the great (flunkie❗) “Art of the Deal” master, has once again only produced hot air – and in doing so, burned through the most expensive and scarce weapons in the USA like a pubescent boy with fireworks.

*The Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) is a premier U.S. Army anti-ballistic missile system designed to destroy short-, medium-, and intermediate-range missiles in their terminal phase using kinetic "hit-to-kill" technology. Deployed since 2008, and developed by Lockheed Martin, it is a highly mobile system that intercepts threats both inside and outside the atmosphere.

#ImpeachTrumpNOW❗💢

Donald Trump and maga Republicans must support American beef farmers stop subsidies to Argentina

To the Editor of Daily Republic in South Dakota- Mitchell Report: By suggesting we import beef from Argentina to solve high domestic prices, Donald Trump is once again proving that his economic instincts are misguided and potentially dangerous.

Argentina has a documented history of foot-and-mouth disease, a highly contagious livestock illness that could devastate already depleted herds if introduced in the U.S. 

Importing beef from a country with this track record is reckless, especially when ranchers have spent decades safeguarding against such outbreaks.

What ranchers actually need is stability, not short-sighted panic policies. Yes, tighter supply can mean higher prices for beef in the short term, but those price spikes are symptoms of a broken system that discourages investment and sustainability.

There are smarter, safer solutions. Rebuilding domestic herds would increase supply sustainably. Lowering tariffs on traditional, safe suppliers and addressing the soaring costs of animal feed would help stabilize both supply and prices.

Ranchers and farmers have had to make hard decisions during droughts and lost thousands of cattle in the 2013, Cattlemen’s Blizzard. While I know ranchers will weather these bad policies, this isn’t how they should be treated. Ranchers and consumers deserve better.

But even if safety weren’t a concern, the economics just don’t add up. Data from the USDA shows that even a substantial increase in beef imports would only have a marginal effect on consumer prices. In a market where Americans consume over 27 billion pounds of beef annually, an additional 100–200 million pounds from Argentina would barely register.

The real drivers of high beef prices aren’t shortages that can be solved by imports — they’re structural issues made worse by Trump’s own policies. His trade war with China triggered retaliatory tariffs on U.S. agricultural exports, shrinking overseas markets. Tariffs on steel and aluminum raised the price of ag equipment. Broader trade volatility also contributed to higher fuel, seed, and fertilizer costs.

Now, with Brazilian beef subject to tariffs and imports from Mexico halted due to a screwworm outbreak, the supply of foreign beef is tight. But instead of supporting American producers, Trump’s quick fix is to open the door to risky imports.

From Steve McCleerey in Roberts County, South Dakota

 

Donald Trump and Republicans must creat a plan about economic growth and end the TTTT: Trump TerribleTariffs Tradwar

Free Trade’s Bounty Went to the Rich. Trump’s Sloppy Tariffs Won’t Fix That.  Echo opinion published by The New York Times editorial board: 

🚀"TTT" Trump Tariffs Tradewar❗

Presidents who make big changes in government policy usually lay their plans with care. They game out what might happen next. They sweat the little things. 

• Richard Nixon did not just decide one morning to fly to China.
• Ronald Reagan’s tax cuts were the better part of a decade in the making. 
• Details of President Barack Obama’s expansion of health insurance emerged from countless public debates.

Trump prefers to shoot before aiming. Declaring that he intends to reboot America’s relations with the rest of the world, he has imposed tariffs on imports with abandon, demonstrating a disregard for the details or the collateral damage. His careless conduct of the public’s business has roiled stock and bond markets, threatened to cause a recession and damaged America’s global standing. The president’s decision-making has been so erratic that at one point this week, the administration’s top trade official was interrupted in the middle of testimony before Congress because the president had just changed the policy the official was defending.

The original version of Trump’s plan, which he paused on Wednesday, imposed tariffs on foreign nations at rates that bore no apparent connection to America’s national interests. 

The highest tariff rate, 50 percent, applied to Lesotho, a tiny and impoverished nation in southern Africa❗

The latest version isn’t much better. Trump is imposing a 10 percent tariff on imports from most nations, along with higher rates on imports from America’s three largest trading partners: Canada , Mexico and China. 

In fact, the average tax on imports will rise to the highest level in more than a century, raising the prices on many consumer goods. The 145 percent maximum rate on Chinese imports is intended to isolate that nation economically, but the simultaneous tariffs on everyone else will undermine that goal. And while the stated purpose of all the tariffs is to expand American manufacturing, putting them in place immediately doesn’t give companies time to build factories. It will cause pain without any benefit💢❗

Nevertheless, we want to emphasize that Trump has a point about the pain caused by free trade. The decades in which the United States threw open its doors to imports from other countries left many Americans without jobs and decimated the nation’s industrial heartland.

Washington’s naïveté about China’s rise, accomplished partly through its own trade barriers and theft of intellectual property, is particularly regrettable.

A revival of American manufacturing is a worthy goal. It would not heal past wounds, but it could provide a basis for future generations of Americans to build lives and to rebuild communities that are more prosperous and more secure.

That is the tragedy of Trump’s trade war. Instead of addressing the ills he diagnosed, he instead embarked on a reckless campaign that threatens to discard the benefits of trade without delivering a meaningful economic revival.

From the end of World War II until the beginning of  Trump’s first term in office, American leaders of both political parties sought to expand trade, believing that it would increase the nation’s prosperity and help to maintain peace among nations.

The benefits of their efforts have been substantial. Globalization has lifted billions of people from poverty in Africa, Asia and Latin America. It has also enriched the United States, spurring innovation by increasing both competition and the rewards for success. Wall Street, Hollywood and Silicon Valley have all reaped the benefits of global markets. So have American farmers, weapons makers and pharmaceutical companies. Nine of the world’s 10 most valuable companies today are American, in part because of this country’s openness to trade.

But, the benefits accrued disproportionately to the affluent. In theory, the government could have redistributed those benefits more equitably; in practice, it did not. For many Americans, especially those who lost factory jobs, the availability of cheap goods at Walmart was an inadequate recompense.

A widely cited academic paper by the economists David Autor, David Dorn and Gordon Hanson estimated that expanded trade with China alone resulted in the loss of 2.4 million American jobs between 1999, and 2011. Many of the communities hit hardest by those job losses still have not recovered. Many former factory workers never returned to work.

Tariffs could be deployed as part of a broader strategy to expand the nation’s manufacturing base and create more inclusive growth. Taxing imports protects domestic manufacturers from foreign competition at the expense of domestic consumers, who must pay higher prices as a consequence. That trade-off is sometimes worth it.

There is a good case for imposing tariffs on carefully defined categories of products, including those that are necessary to maintain the nation’s security. Tariffs can also protect American industry from unfair competition, as when other countries are subsidizing exports. And tariffs can be effective as a shield for emerging industries, like electric vehicle manufacturing. Under President Joe Biden, the United States sought to expand manufacturing of green energy technologies by combining targeted tariffs with funding for research, investment in infrastructure and incentives for consumers. The result was an increase in factory building.

It is a bitter irony that even as Trump raises tariffs, he is axing federal support for these technologies, which are among the most promising areas of domestic manufacturing. Some companies are already abandoning their building plans.

Trump’s use of tariffs is indiscriminate. He is imposing tariffs on goods that the United States does not and cannot produce, like manganese from Gabon, which American companies need to make steel. He is imposing tariffs on nations that buy more goods from the United States than they sell to the United States, like Australia, and on nations that have offered to remove all their tariffs on American goods, like Israel. Even after Trump paused some tariffs under pressure from investors and members of his party, the measures he has imposed have raised the average effective tax rate on imports to the United States to 27 percent, the highest since the early 20th century, according to Ernie Tedeschi, an economist at Yale University.

In addition to raising prices, tariffs are likely to slow economic growth. And another danger looms: There are warning signs that  Trump’s provocations are reducing demand for Treasuries, forcing the government to offer higher interest rates to investors. If that continues, the federal debt will become even harder to repay.

Trump and his advisers say that the pain caused by tariffs is necessary to revive domestic manufacturing. But factories take years to build, and companies have good reason to doubt that his successors will maintain his policies. Companies have little basis for confidence that Trump will keep his tariffs in place. 

Trump has made clear, in word and deed, that his commitments are at best negotiable and at worst fickle.

Trump, of course, could return to the drawing board at any time. But Congress and the nation cannot afford to wait. Trump's behavior makes clear that Congress has ceded too much authority over trade, as it has on so many issues, and it should act to correct his course and to curb his trade powers.

One sensible reform is a bill introduced by Senator Charles Grassley, Republican of Iowa, and Senator Maria Cantwell, Democrat of Washington, under which tariffs would expire if they did not receive congressional approval within 60 days. That would preserve a president’s ability to respond to emergencies while preventing a president from causing emergencies. Moreover, congressional approval would demonstrate the broad political support necessary to give companies the confidence to make long-term investments.

Trump extols tariffs as a miracle cure for a wide range of economic ailments. He still seems to believe his first-term declaration that “trade wars are good and easy to win.” The truth is that tariffs can help the United States or they can hurt the United States. Unless the president changes course or is forced to do so, these tariffs will hurt — and the pain is going to get worse.

American infrastructure is third world quality- support President Biden's Build Back Better

Echo Commentary: Infrastructure bill offers US the chance to catch up with China and the developed world.

The Frederick News-Post

President Biden's infrastructure bill may help the United States close the huge gap with Beijing, China and its democratic allies on transportation, internet coverage, and infrastructure investment.

When the House of Representatives finally passed President Joe Biden’s $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill on Friday (November 12, 2021), my first thought was that maybe folks will no longer have to shake, rattle, and roll on Amtrak.

Anyone who regularly travels the Boston-to-Washington corridor on Amtrak has experienced train cars that shake so severely it’s almost nauseating (not to mention constant delays, lousy internet service, and dirty train station bathrooms).

These are just a few symptoms of our crumbling transportation systems, including roads, bridges, tunnels, and subways more suited to a third world country than a supposed superpower. Indeed, Beijing’s state-controlled media mocked the newly passed bill, calling it a “feeble imitation of China,” where bullet trains, broadband, and shiny new airports blanket the country.

Yet the bill’s $550 billion in new investments in roads, bridges, trains, aviation, broadband, and more offers Americans at least a chance to reenter infrastructure’s first world.

So hats off to Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s tenacity, along with the 13 House Republicans (and 19 GOP senators) who voted for the bill. Unlike the Republican leadership, they were honest enough to recognize that America needs an infrastructure overhaul ASAP, not just for its own citizens but to compete with China in the 21st century.

“If we don’t get moving, they [China] are going to eat our lunch,” Biden rightly warned, when pitching the bill in February. “We have to compete more strenuously than we have,” the president added. This infrastructure bill is about proving — or disproving — that America’s democracy can deliver as well as an authoritarian regime.

Many Americans have failed to grasp how far we have fallen from global leadership in critical areas, but the rest of the world clearly takes notice — especially Chinese leaders.

The American Society of Civil Engineers gave U.S. infrastructure a C- overall in its 2021 report card. But that includes a D+ for aviation, given delays and lack of capacity (before COVID-19); a D for dams and levees; and a D- for aging public transport.

Aviation industry rankings cited by Business Roundtable put only four U.S. airports in the top 50 worldwide, with the top-ranked coming in at 30.

Meantime, China* has poured funds into infrastructure at a rate that dwarfs U.S. efforts.

*My husband and I were in China about six years ago. We heard from our travel guides about how China was investing in infrastructure- especially in high speed rail.  

Tariffs are Donald Trump taxes on American citizens

Where are the free trade Republicans?

An echo opinion letter published in the Denver Post:

Tariffs! A new JP Morgan analysis predicts that the average American family will shoulder $1,000 per year, as a result of Donald Trump’s tariffs with China and the failed (stupid) trade war. 

These are taxes that our so-called lowering-taxes Republicans, including Sen. Cory Gardner, appear to ignore. They do no help to us, and it appears that rural Coloradans — especially our hardworking farmers and ranchers — will be hurt the most.

Apparently, China tariffs already in place are expected to cost the average household $600, per year!  Really, the only ones who have benefited from the huge reduction of taxes and the huge increase of the deficit are the rich, such as Trump himself and corporations. And it appears that Trump and Gardner’s answer to reduce the deficit is to take food assistance (food stamps) away from 90,000, people in Colorado, including about 11,000 children. Trump and Gardner are not working to help Colorado, except for the rich.

Wayne Wathen, Highlands Ranch, Colorado

What to do when Donald Trump orders you out of China? (Oh paaaaleeze!)

Excerpts from the Bonner Report! Bonner and Partners

"Herewith a confession: We have an office in Beijing. And we have been ordered by the president to pack up and leave. What to do? Stay tuned…"~ Bill Bonner 

Chosen One

The chosen one Church of the Donald!

Writing from Poitou, France (Bonner) ~ POTUS (aka tRump!) told the world that he is the “chosen one” to deal with the China issue (whatever the issue is…), and then he tweeted a proclamation…

Henceforth, American businesses are “ordered” to withdraw from China, and they shall have no truck with the Middle Kingdom, unless and until, of course, their lobbyists pay off the appropriate Deep State fixer.

Then, over the weekend, Mr. Trump let fly that he had regrets about his China trade war.

The press corps was shocked; this was the first time Mr. Trump showed a hint of doubt or reflection.

But a White House press secretary quickly clarified that the president regrets not having hit the Chinese harder!
Divine Right

One of the remarkable features of modern American democracy is that a president may win with the support of only about a third of adults… but then he feels entitled to tell the other two thirds what to do.

Back in the days of kings and queens, a monarch justified his power by claiming a “divine right” – given to him by God.

Donald Trump "the chosen one" syndrome

Now, he asserts a more profane source of power, a majority vote.

On the evidence, the chosen ones of democracy are no better leaders than the accidents of birth that gave us the Sun King (Louis XIV) or Mad King Ludwig of Bavaria.

Venezuela elected its nutty government; Argentina’s recent election led to an immediate 50% drop in stock prices. Hitler won 44% of the popular vote in 1932. (Trump got 46% in 2016.)

It was a genetic lottery that gave us King Charles VI of France, who refused to bathe and believed he was made of glass, and Ferdinand I of Austria, who reportedly never opened his mouth except to ask for dumplings.

But the ballot box gave us George Dubya Bush; in apparent revenge for an attack on New York, he started a $5 trillion war against a country that had nothing to do with it.
Murderous Mischief

As far as we know, the voters have never rejected a candidate because he was too stupid, too ignorant, or too malevolent.

Instead, they are like turkeys voting to make Thanksgiving a national holiday.

Nor does there seem to be any limit to the zany and murderous mischief a leader will get up to.

Stalin personally approved the lists of thousands who would be rounded up and sent to the gulags.

And now, Trump subcontracts the work of keeping 500,000 people on the “sanctioned” list, where – without the benefit of formal charges or their day in court – they are cut off from travel, credit, and commerce.

More Fake Money

This brings us to the latest escalation of the trade war with China.

Mr. Trump’s main reelection selling point is the economy. People think it is doing well. And to maintain that illusion, Mr. Trump needs to put more fake money into the system.

How?

Another tax cut? There is no way Nancy Pelosi’s House is going to agree to another tax cut before the election. The Democrats want the economy to be sour in 2020… not robust.

Big infrastructure projects? Again, the Democrats will do nothing to boost the economy before the election. They will hope to win in 2020 and then roll out their own boondoggles.

Rate cuts? Yes, rate cuts can put some silicone in the sagging flesh of an aging bull market, but member banks and speculators can already borrow at or near the inflation rate. A few basis points lower is not going to make much difference to the economy.

Also, Federal Reserve Chief Jay Powell is beginning to show some backbone.

Again last week, the president blamed stock market volatility on the Fed. But Powell fired back that the trade war was the cause.
Mock Battle

No tax cut, no big boondoggles, not much from the Fed… What does that leave?

The China trade war!
This is a battle Trump needs to win. And wait… what’s this? This morning, Mr. Trump says trade talks will resume! Stocks are going back up!

Who could have seen that coming?

So, we stick with our prediction: Trump will not go Full Retard. Instead, he will settle up with the Chinese before the 2020 election.

A further prediction: That won’t stop a recession or a crash on Wall Street.

Regards,



Bill

P.S. Herewith a confession: We have an office in Beijing. And we have been ordered by the president to pack up and leave. What to do? Stay tuned…