Friday News Roundup
Foreign Policy Watch
Donald Trump extorted a minerals deal out of Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelenskyy in exchange for not abandoning Ukraine to the Russians. As America backs away from guaranteeing Ukraine’s security, an Italian defense analyst found evidence of Italian tanks in Ukraine, which suggests Europe may start militarizing in response to Trump’s pro-Russian tilt in foreign policy.
According to a recent article on Trump’s meeting to discuss foreign policy with UK prime minister Keir Starmer, Trump once said at a 2024 campaign event that he responded to a European ally like this:
European Leader: If we don’t pay and we’re attacked by Russia, will you protect us?
Trump: No, I would not protect you. In fact, I would encourage them to do whatever the hell they want.
Meanwhile, in the backlash against Donald Trump’s ridiculous threats to take over Greenland, the Salling Group, the company that operates the biggest grocery store chains in Denmark, has begun labeling European vs. US products to make it easier for Danish consumers to boycott anything labeled “Made in the United States.”
In presenting a new UN report on the war in Gaza, UN Human Rights Chief Volker Turk stated, "Nothing justifies the appalling manner in which Israel has conducted its military operations in Gaza which consistently breached international law.” Turk also added that Hamas’s indiscriminate firing of projectiles into Israeli territory constituted a war crime. The English version of the UN human rights report can be found here.
Trump’s War on Good Government
Donald Trump has banned Katherine Calvin, NASA’s chief scientist, from attending the next international climate assessment at the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change meeting in Hangzhou, China. In addition, NASA also canceled the funding for the team that supported America’s contributions to the climate assessment.
Trump has also canceled Chevron’s oil license with Venezuela, because Venezuela is not cooperating with Trump’s ethnic cleansing efforts in deporting nonwhite Venezuelan immigrants from the United States. Trump also cited Venezuela’s failure to implement electoral reforms, but that’s never stopped Trump from cozying up to Saudi Arabia’s oil dictatorship.
In another defeat for the Trump Administration, a federal judge in Seattle blocked Trump from killing the Refugee Admissions Program, because he ruled that Trump cannot singlehandedly nullify a program that was already authorized by Congress.
In yet more Trumpian nonsense, reporters from the Associated Press, Reuters, HuffPost, and Der Tagesspiegel were banned from a White House press event because they haven’t renamed the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America.
Global Fascism Watch
According to recent German parliamentary election results, Germany’s mainstream conservative CDU/CSU party bloc won first place with 28.6% of the vote, while far-right anti-immigrant party Alternative for Deutschland (AfD) won second place with 20.8% of the vote. CDU/CSU leader Friedrich Merz is a mainstream conservative by European standards who will likely encourage Germany to build up its defense capacity and keep distant from the United States, but he has also shown willingness to attack immigrants in order to get the AfD vote.
The AfD is a party that Germany’s own Der Spiegel viewed as too close to right-wing extremists and neo-Nazis. Yet when Donald Trump was asked what he thought about AfD’s second-place showing in the German elections, he said, "No, I'm not disappointed about anything." Time magazine also has a good article about how the Nazi-adjacent AfD has gotten a boost from supportive statements by Elon Musk and J.D. Vance.
The most distressing element of the Trump’s Administrations stance toward the German elections is the abandonment of America’s implicit policy of noninterference in European countries’ decisions to impose a cordon sanitaire, a term that refers to the informal policy among mainstream European political parties to exclude extremists from their parliaments. This is a policy of both Democratic and Republican administrations that goes back to U.S. support of denazification after World War II. J.D. Vance said of the AfD, “Shutting people out of the political process protects nothing,” a statement which has led Germans to view Vance as practically supporting a process of “renazification” in their country.
Mass Deportation Watch
Church World Service and the Jewish group, the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, have reported that the Trump Administration is circumventing a court order by canceling their contracts with the State Department to assist refugees.
Up to 112 deported migrants are being held in a “black box” facility in the Panamanian jungle. The presence of many nonwhite non-Spanish speakers in this facility (including people from Afghanistan, China, India, Iran, Nepal, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Turkey, Uzbekistan and Vietnam) illustrates the white nationalist character of Donald Trump’s anti-immigration program.
Donald Trump plans to invoke the 1798 Alien Enemies Act, the same law that led Jeffersonian Democrats to denounce John Adams as a tyrant, to speed up mass deportations.
The Donald Trump administration is creating a computerized registry for all migrants in the United States. The obvious goal is to declare failure to participate in Trump’s Big Brother registry as a crime so that non-criminal immigrants will get deported based on Trump’s bias that immigrant = crime. Meanwhile, Donald Trump enables the crime spree of American-born sex trafficker Andrew Tate and rapists and wife-beaters among the January 6th insurrectionists, as well as the blatant corruption of NYC mayor Eric Adams.