Tag: Donald Trump

ONE PICTURE SAYS IT ALL

By Terence Smith

The photo, spread across four columns at the top of the front page of the print edition of The New York Times that was delivered to my doorstep this morning (yes, I’m one of the 500,000 or so ancients who still get the daily print edition) told the whole story:
The picture showed Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu and President Donald J. Trump, each with an arm around the other’s back, walking away from the camera, perhaps after one of their several closed-door meetings plotting the U.S.-Israeli assault against Iran. The unmistakable message — “we’re in this together” — was so obvious that The Times did not even bother with a cutline under the picture.
But the article’s sub-head underscored the message: “From Netanyahu’s Hard Sell to Inner-Circle Talks That Greenlit Attack.”
The piece, a brilliant, must-read reconstruction of the high-stakes deliberations that led to the costly, perilous assault on Iran, made it clear that the idea for the attack was pushed relentlessly by Netanyahu. In it, the authors Jonathan Swan and Maggie Haberman documented how the Israeli leader persuaded Trump that a joint attack would achieve a near-certain victory: Iran’s ballistic missile program could be destroyed, Iran would be so weakened that it could not choke off the vital Strait of Hormuz or attack its neighboring countries across the Persian Gulf. (All wrong, of course.)
Netanyahu also argued that the joint assault could decapitate the Iranian leadership by killing the Supreme Leader, induce regime change, prompt a popular uprising within Iran and install a more moderate, secular head of the country.
Those predictions apparently sounded good to Trump, but when U.S. intelligence analyzed Netanyahu’s argument, they disputed two of his four major points, describing the likelihood of regime change as “farcical.” Secretary of State Marco Rubio went further, dismissing it as “bullshit.” And Chairman of the Joint Chiefs General Dan Caine, asked by the President for his opinion, said the Netanyahu pitch was “standard operating procedure”for the Israelis.
The article quotes Caine as saying of the Israelis: “They oversell, and their plans are not always well developed. They know they need us, and that’s why they are hard-selling.”
Hard-selling, indeed. But Trump remained open to the pitch, which Netanyahu repeated in several meetings, and ultimately the President gave the go-ahead.
The news article quite rightly does not attempt to describe either leader’s motives in deciding to attack Iran. But both men surely could see the political benefit:
For Netanyahu, a successful assault on Iran and the Hezbollah in Lebanon would keep Israel on a war footing and likely rally support as he approaches upcoming national elections. Like most people, Israelis are reluctant to turn out a leader in the midst of war. An added plus for Bibi: the fighting would further postpone his long-running corruption trial and keep him out of jail.
As for Trump, the war would divert attention from the Epstein files, a stagnant economy, inflation and declining polls in the run-up to the mid-term elections.
Of course, neither man would or did offer the political considerations as a justification for the war. Nor did they have to; it was obvious. Now, however, with a shaky, two-week ceasefire in effect and the status of navigation in the Strait of Hormuz uncertain, the true and lasting impact of the war remains to be seen.

A WAR WITHOUT END?

By TERENCE SMITH

   Having covered four wars on three continents over two decades, I have never seen such an ill-planned, thoughtless,  unrealistic conflict comparable to the current U.S.-Israeli assault on Iran.

   I wrote about two Israeli-Arab wars, the decade-long travesty in Vietnam and the short-but-bloody 1974 Turkish invasion of Cyprus in my 2021 memoir, “Four Wars, Five Presidents, A Reporter’s Journey from Jerusalem to Saigon to the White House.” None of the four wars resulted in a lasting, genine peace, but none was as chaotic and capricious as the ongoing fracas in the Persian Gulf.

   Nor did any of the five Presidents I covered ever describe the conflicts as “an excursion,” or publicly offer such confused and contradictory goals and outcomes as President Trump has put forward in the last four weeks. He clearly does not know what he is doing.

   The 1967 Six Day War between Israel and her Arab neighbors lasted less than a week and ended in a ceasefire that was a prelude to the 1973 Yom Kippur War that lasted 19 days and set the stage for eventual peace agreements between Israel and Egypt and Jordan that continue to this day.  

   The agony that was the U.S. role in Vietnam lasted a decade. It was based on a fundamental misunderstanding of the country and its history —the so-called domino theory, the notion that if communists took over South Vietnam, the rest of Indochina would fall like dominos on a board. Nothing of the kind happened, of course, and today Washington and Hanoi are at peace. 

   The Turkish invasion of Cyprus, by contrast, led to the occupation of 40 per cent of that beautiful island, an occupation that continues to this day. 

   Wars are not pretty, of course, nor simple, but the U.S. and Israel find themselves in a dilemma of their own making in the ongoing battle with Iran. Both President Trump and Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu had their own political reasons to launch this war when they did, but neither has been able to provide a coherent rationale and justification for this fast-spreading conflict.

   Nor is there any clear path to a conclusion. Iran has, predictably, rejected President Trump’s 15-point proposed peace plan and issued its own set of unrealistic demands before it will end the fighting. Meanwhile, thousands more U.S. troops are on their way to the Persian Gulf, the bombing and missile exchanges continue, Lebanon is being pummeled, people are being killed on both sides and the stakes keep getting higher.

   The only clear lesson Trump seems to have learned so far is that Iran is no Venezuela, and that this “excursion” will not be as easy or brief as he hoped and predicted.

ITS ALL ABOUT THE OIL

By Terence Smith

   The Trump Administration’s overnight snatch of Nicolas Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, from their unsafe house in Caracas, Venezuela, is being presented as the prosecution of a drug kingpin. In fact, as President Trump made crystal clear in his rambling news conference Saturday, it is all about Venezuela’s vast and under-developed oil reserves.

   The formal indictment speaks of the Maduros’ alleged role in shipping drugs to the United States, even though Columbia and other nations clearly produce and ship more illegal drugs than Venezuela. 

   But Trump made the true motive and purpose of the operation crystal clear when he talked repeatedly about Venezuela’s oil, which was once profitably developed by U.S. oil companies until it was nationalized decades ago. Of all the U.S. firms, only Chevron continued to operate in Venezuela and most of the profits went into the coffers of  the Maduro regime.

   “Venezuela unilaterally seized and sold American oil, American assets and American platforms, costing us billions and billions of dollars, ” Trump asserted, “they took all of our property.”

   Trump also told reporters that Venezuela’s Vice President, Delcy Rodriguez, could remain in power “as long as she does what we want” while the U.S. would “run” the country. He seemed to be describing an arms’-length occupation of a sovereign nation that would be enforced by the vast U.S. armada just offshore.

   This was immediately dubbed the “Donrow Doctrine,” a unilateral update of the Monroe Doctrine, in which the U.S. feels free to grab everything in the Hemisphere and turn a profit in the process. Tina Brown defined the Donroe Doctrine online as “chin-jutting hubris, flailing testosterone and greed, greed, greed.”

   It fell to Secretary of State Marco Rubio to clean up the President’s comments on the Sunday shows. He said it was not right to say that the U.S. was “running” Venezuela, but that it was “running policy, the policy with regard to this.” The “this” clearly referred to Venezuela’s oil.

   Bottom line: there seems to be no coherent strategy for managing Venezuela and its deeply divided people, much less its oil reserves, beyond a remote-control occupation run out of Washington D.C. It is hauntingly familiar to the chaos that followed in Iraq two decades ago after the unseating of Saddam Hussein: another forever war.

CBS AND PBS: PART II

By Terence Smith

Two of the more shameful challenges to media independence in this country continue apace:

   *CBS, unfortunately, is still in “active settlement discussions” with President Trump’s lawyers over his $20 billion lawsuit that claims 60 Minutes deceptively edited an interview with Vice President Kamala Harris during the campaign that made her look good. The suit argues that the standard, professional editing caused Trump “mental anguish and confusion.” The notion of Trumpian “confusion” seems beyond argument, but the rest of the suit is nonsense. 

   Nonetheless, CBS has offered to settle for $15 million, while Trump is demanding $25 million and — poke in the eye — an apology. The suit comes just as Paramount, CBS’s parent company seeks regulatory approval for its pending $8 billion merger with Skydance Media. Meanwhile, California lawmakers are investigating whether the proposed settlement of a meritless Trump suit violates federal bribery laws. All parties have agreed to a delay in the proceedings, pushing the next filings into July. 

   *PBS, meanwhile, is holding its corporate breath while Congress considers a Presidential “rescission order” to eliminate roughly $1billion in previously approved federal funds for public broadcasting. The House has approved the rescission by a two-vote margin; the Senate is considering it. Several Republican senators are said to be skeptical that the saving, modest by Congressional standards, is worth the heat they’ll get for approving it. We shall see.

   In the course of a long journalistic career, I worked as a correspondent for both CBS and PBS. Both are excellent news organizations, well worth saving. But when I moved from the Tiffany Network to the PBS NewsHour, I found their priorities were remarkably different.The story conferences and correspondent meetings at CBS invariably opened with a report of the latest ratings. The number of eyeballs watching the CBS Evening News, for example, was vital because it determined advertising revenue (as well as the anchor’s career prospects.) Put simply, it paid the bills.

   At The NewsHour (then the NewsHour with Jim Lehrer,) I was startled to find that the 10 a.m. story conferences were about The News, with nary a mention of the show’s ratings.  The conversation focused on what stories were most important, not how many people were watching. Why? Because the NewsHour was underwritten by private funders and, crucially, Congressionally-approved funds through the Corporation for Public Broadcasting that support both PBS and NPR and member stations.

   That public funding is at stake now. The Trump Administration is determined to cut it off. Stay tuned to what happens in the Senate, and in the suit against CBS, please.

SENSE AND NONSENSE

By Terence Smith

   Of all the extraordinary numbers that came out of the comedy show/debacle that was the 2024 Presidential election, one obscure statistic caught my eye: 20 percent of Americans — one-in-five, get their news these days from digital news influencers, according to the Pew Research Center.

   Think about that. One in five of us drinking the fire hose of unverified, misleading, frequently vicious, occasionally racist, accidentally comical, sometimes accurate reporting that proliferates online. Much of this appears on the social platform X. Very little of it holds up to scrutiny. But 20 percent of us get our news that way and did so during this election.

   Add to that the hugely popular podcasts like Joe Rogan’s self-indulgent, near-endless ramblings and you can see that the media landscape today bears little or no resemblance to what it was a decade or two ago. Some 47-million Americans listened to all or part of Donald Trump’s three-hour star turn on the Joe Rogan show shortly before voting. Kamala Harris spent hundreds of millions on advertising during her 107-day campaign, and did some social media, but chose to skip Joe Rogan and others. Understandable, but self-defeating when it comes to attracting the votes of younger men.

   So, ours is a world today where Elon Musk on X and others too numerous to mention provide the “facts.” Not The New York Times, not PBS, but influencers. The net result is that the burden of sorting truth from fiction falls upon the the viewer or listener. They become their own “gatekeepers,” responsible for sorting out facts from nonsense. Sometimes they get it right — common sense helps — but not always.

   The consequences can be enormous, as the Pew Research Center and others have concluded.

Herewith, a droll set of reasons to vote for Donald Trump (or Not!)

by Phillip Kopper, author and publisher

Ten Best Reasons to Vote for Trump (or Not)

1) Approaching 80, if he dies in office (or succumbs to the 25th Amendment) he will be succeeded by a graduate of the Yale Law School.

2) Claiming abuse by Biden’s pesky Justice Department, he will bring the DoJ to heel and show how prosecutory persecution is done.

3) He will pardon the thousand-plus “patriots” convicted of storming the Capitol in order to reduce federal spending (in Bureau of Prison outlays at least).

4) To shrink the federal bureaucracy, he will appoint Elon Musk to disband the regulatory agencies that inhibit his operations.

5) He will impose tariffs in order to grow the GNP by raising prices across the board.

6) He will run the government “like  a business,” applying his own experience as a businessman whose acumen is proved by his six bankruptcies.

          7) Rather than follow the complex “rule of law” dating from 1789, he will simplify governance by suspending the Constitution.

          8) With the economy growing at 3.2%, wages rising faster than inflation, and the stock market soaring, he says America is in decline and boasts “I can fix it.”

9) Speaking in opaque generalities, sentence fragments and random rambles, he continues to relieve listeners from having to pay attention.

10) He will expand presidential power exponentially to compensate for Congress’s dysfunction (thanks especially to the House Republican Caucus).

Bonus) Since America’s motto E Pluribus Unum is in a foreign language, he will replace it with the pithy “So what?”

MONDAY MONDAY MORNING MEDIA XVIII

   In the midst of a busy, newsy week full of shootings, assassinations and resignations, The New York Times’s redoubtable Michael S. Schmidt had a remarkable page one piece on Thursday, July 7, about one of the great “coincidences” of the Trump Era: how two of his perceived enemies suddenly found themselves being audited by the IRS.

James B. Comey, the FBI director Donald Trump fired in 2017, and Comey’s Deputy, Andrew G. McCabe, whom Trump fired later, were subsequently selected for the most invasive type of random audit carried out by the IRS, an audit referred to as “an autopsy without benefit of death.” Neither incurred much tax liability as a result; Comey even got a modest refund.

A coincidence? A one-in-30,000 happenstance? Hardly, even though the taxmen insisted that politics and presidential vengeance had nothing to do with the audits. Of course, their boss, the 45th President, Donald  J. Trump, had railed privately and publicly about both men accusing them of treason and calling for their prosecution.

Schmidt’s thoroughly-documented piece brought back the memory of another “coincidence” decades ago in the Vietnam War era when I was the New York Times’ Saigon Bureau Chief and later Diplomatic Correspondent covering Richard Nixon’s foreign policy from Washington. I wrote several pieces criticizing the conduct of the war and Nixon’s diplomatic strategy, articles that annoyed the President repeatedly. He rails against them, and me, in the famous Watergate Tapes.

Then — surprise —I was audited by the IRS three years running. Then, as now, no political motive or presidential recrimination was ever publicly suggested.  I didn’t even make the famous Nixon “enemies list” as far as I know. Instead, the government poured over my reporter’s salary and modest income looking for…who knows what? The undeniable fact was the three consecutive audits followed my articles that annoyed the President.

Sheer coincidence? All in the interest in protecting the U.S. treasury from fraud, no matter how minor? That’s a stretch. Every bit as coincidental as the audits of Comey and McCabe, I’d say.  

            Footnote: The three years of audits concluded with me having to pay a few hundred dollars in additional tax because the IRS determined that the considerable moving costs paid by The Times to ship me and my family to the Middle East and Far East and home had to be considered income to me. The Times legal department objected to that conclusion, but lost. 

MONDAY MORNING MEDIA VI

   True confession: I actually watched most of Donald Trump’s rambling, repetitious parody of himself before the CPAC conference yesterday afternoon. It was like watching a train wreck in slow motion: dreadful, but impossible to look away as it is happening.

   I had to search to find it live. Neither CNN nor MSNBC carried it in real time, showing more news judgement than they did during Trump’s 2016 campaign, when his self-indulgent rallies consistently boosted their ratings. Fox, of course, featured it yesterday, along with C-SPAN, Newsmax TV, BBC News 24, BBC World and the Murdochian Sky News.

   The New York Times had a straight-ahead report of the speech on page A14 of this morning’s print edition, along with a sidebar noting that Trump had won the support of “only 68%” of the slavishly loyal CPAC attendees for another run for the brass ring in 2024. 

   The Washington Post led its Monday edition with a one-column “news” story noting that Trump had ruled out a third party, sought to cement control of the GOP and – surprise – hinted at a 2024 comeback. As for the speech itself, the estimable E.J. Dionne Jr. got it right when he wrote: “The act was old. The self-involvement was as intense as ever.”

   Even more so, I’d say. The obvious purpose of the speech was to generate contributions to the two new PACs Trump has created ostensibly to finance his political reincarnation (and cover his day-to-day expenses,) and to remind the Fox News regulars that he is not going away. The 45th president showed up an hour late and went on for nearly two hours reading from a teleprompter and ad-libbing his golden oldies.

   It was a pathetic performance, as you might expect. CNN and MSNBC got it exactly right with their measured, arms-length treatment. As did The Post’s editorial page headline over E.J. Dionne’s column: “The GOP: Trapped in Trump’s Rendezvous with Yesterday.”

Bibi and The Donald

It is hard, these days, to miss the striking similarities between Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin “Bibi” Netanyahu and President Donald “The Donald” Trump.
It goes well beyond their nicknames.
Both of these embattled leaders are facing multiple investigations, both have launched relentless assaults on the media, both use the megaphones of their offices to push a nationalist, autocratic approach to power and both, of course, are running for re-election, Bibi in April and The Donald, presumably, in 2020.
Bibi is currently under the Israeli state prosecutor’s microscope; The Donald is a featured player in Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s inquiry into Russian interference in the 2016 election.
Recent reports from Israel suggest that Bibi will be indicted for bribery in a month or so, before his April 9 re-election bid to become the longest-serving Prime Minister in Israeli history; The Donald, aka “Individual 1,” has already been depicted as an unindicted co-conspirator in the Michael Cohen case and could well be the subject of a sealed indictment from the Southern District of New York, now universally described on cable news as SDNY.
Both men have dismissed the investigations as groundless witch hunts mounted by their respective “deep states.”
And both leaders are curiously close to Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Bibi has traveled repeatedly to Moscow to confer with Putin on the growing Iranian presence in Syria; The Donald has met the Russian leader five times and had nothing but kind words for him since his 2016 campaign. One major difference: Bibi has not, as far as is known, been negotiating behind the scenes to build a Netanyahu Tower in Moscow.
When it comes to attacking the media, both men have launched full-scale campaigns. Bibi has complained early and often about his treatment in the feisty Israeli press and broadcast networks. His Likud Party recently unveiled a splashy election billboard featuring huge pictures of four leading Israeli journalists with the slogan: “They won’t Decide.”
The Donald, of course, has repeatedly denounced the U.S. media as “fake news” and “enemies of the people.” Over the weekend, the President celebrated the staff cuts at numerous news operations. One minor difference: Bibi is not known to spend hours each day watching cable news and tweeting his reactions.
The two men have been and remain politically close: Bibi has applauded The Donald at every opportunity, Trump has taken page after page from the Israeli playbook by withdrawing from the Iran nuclear deal and moving the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem, an empty, but symbolic move that Bibi has sought for years. If there is anything else Bibi wants from The Donald, apparently he just has to ask.
Both men are adept at manufacturing crises, real and imagined, to distract attention from other problems. The Donald has conjured caravans of drug dealers and criminals assaulting the southern border in order to build support for his Wall; Bibi has repeatedly and dramatically pointed to Iran as an existential threat to Israel, launched multiple attacks on Hamas forces in Gaza, confronted Hezbollah along the Lebanese border and mounted hundreds of air strikes against Iranian targets in Syria. Many of these threats to Israel are real; confronting them aggressively tends to divert the public’s attention from other, politically awkward headlines.
Finally, both men are gifted political operators: Bibi became Israel’s youngest prime minister when he served in the late 1990’s, returned to office in 2009 and has beaten back repeated challenges over the last decade; Trump pulled off an amazing political upset in 2016 and has dominated the headlines and airwaves ever since.
At this point, the public opinion polls in Israel favor Bibi’s re-election, albeit by a narrow margin; Trump’s prospects are less promising. The President’s standing in the polls descended to new lows after the abortive government shutdown. But it is too early to count him out for a second term. No appealing Democratic candidate has emerged from the growing crowd of declared and undeclared, and the 2020 election is a political lifetime away.

Putin’s Delight

Even in the midst of a cold Moscow winter, Vladimir Putin must be feeling warm and satisfied as he reads the headlines these days from Europe and the United States.
I suspect he smiles to himself as he watches Britain’s Brexit debacle, Emanuel Macron’s desperate “listening tour,” Germany’s sagging economy and the nationalist, anti-immigrant, right-wing rumblings coming from Italy, Hungary, Poland and beyond. Yes, he must say to himself, yes, indeed.
And he no doubt feasts his eyes on the chaos in Washington: a shuttered government, a paralyzed Congress, daily Trumpian tantrums, trade wars, counter-intelligence investigations and roiling markets. Yes, yes indeed. It is all going according to plan, Putin says to his aides and cyberwarfare specialists.
Putin knew it would be a long-term project to destabilize the West; he never thought the wheels would start coming off so soon. He certainly never dreamed that Trump would suddenly pull U.S. troops from Syria, creating an inviting vacuum for Russia and Iran to fill. It’s simply too much to hope for.
So, now the stage is set for more Russian adventures in Ukraine, increased pressure on the Baltic states and more mischief in Syria and Afghanistan.
What a happy new year it is turning out to be!