Latest news with #MAGA
Scoop
4 hours ago
- Politics
- Scoop
The Five Percenters: NATO's Promise Of War
The confidence trickster was at it again on his visit to The Hague, reluctantly meeting members of the overly large family that is NATO. President Donald Trump was hoping to impress upon all present that allies of the United States, whatever inclination and whatever their domestic policy, should spend mightily on defence, inflating the margins of sense and sensibility against marginal threats. Never mind the strain placed on the national budget over such absurd priorities as welfare, health or education. The marvellous irony in this is that much of the budget increases have been prompted by Trump's perceived unreliability and capriciousness when it comes to European affairs. Would he, for instance, treat obligations of collective defence outlined in Article 5 of the organisation's governing treaty with utmost seriousness? Since Washington cannot be relied upon to hold the fort against the satanic savages from the East, various European countries have been encouraging a spike in defence spending to fight the sprites and hobgoblins troubling their consciences at night. The European Union, for instance, has put in place initiatives that will make getting more weaponry and investing in the military industrial complex easier than ever, raising the threshold of defence expenditure across all member countries to 3.5% of GDP by the end of the decade. And then there is the Ukraine conflict, a war Brussels cannot bear to see end on terms that might be remotely favourable to Russia. The promised pecuniary spray made at the NATO summit was seen by NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte as utterly natural if not eminently sensible. Not much else was. It was Rutte who remarked with infantile fawning that 'Sometimes Daddy has to use tough language' when it came to sorting out the murderous bickering between Israel and Iran. Daddy Trump approved. 'He likes me, I think he likes me,' the US president crowed with glowing satisfaction. Rutte's behaviour has been viewed with suspicion, as well it should. Under his direction, NATO headquarters have made a point of diminishing any focus on climate change and its Women, Peace, and Security agenda. He has failed to make much of Trump's mania for the annexation of Greenland, or the President's gladiatorial abuse of certain leaders when visiting the White House – Ukraine's Volodymyr Zelensky and South Africa's Cyril Ramaphosa come to mind. 'He is not paid to implement MAGA policy,' grumbled a European NATO diplomat to Euroactive. In his doorstep statement of June 25, Rutte made his wish known that the NATO collective possess both the money and capabilities to cope, not just with Russia 'but also the massive build-up of military in China, and the fact that North Korea, China and Iran, are supporting the war effort in Ukraine'. Lashings of butter were also added to the Trump ego when responding to questions. 'Would you really think that the seven or eight countries not at 2% [of GDP expenditure on defence] at the beginning of this year would have reached the 2% if Trump would not have been elected President of the United States?' It was only appropriate, given the contributions of the US ('over 50% of the total NATO economy'), that things had to change for the Europeans and Canadians. The centrepiece of the Hague Summit Declaration is a promise that 5% of member countries' gross GDP will go to 'core defence requirements as well as defence and security-related spending by 2035 to ensure our individual and collective obligations'. Traditional bogeyman Russia is the predictable antagonist, posing a 'long-term threat […] to Euro-Atlantic security', but so was 'the persistent threat of terrorism'. The target is optimistic, given NATO's own recent estimates that nine members spend less than the current target of 2% of GDP. What is misleading in the declaration is the accounting process: the 3.5% of annual GDP that will be spent 'on the agreed definition of NATO defence expenditure by 2035 to resource core defence requirements, and to meet NATO Capability Targets' is one component. The other 1.5%, a figure based on a creative management of accounts, is intended to 'protect our critical infrastructure, defend our networks, ensure our civil preparedness and resilience, unleash innovation, and strengthen our defence industrial base.' Another misleading element in the declaration is the claimed unanimity of member states. The Baltic countries and Poland are forever engaged in increasing their defence budgets in anticipation of a Russian attack, but the same cannot be said of other countries less disposed to the issue. Slovakia's Prime Minister Robert Fico, for instance, declared on the eve of the summit that his country had 'better things to spend money on'. Spain's Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez has also called the 5% target 'incompatible with our world view', preferring to focus on a policy of prudent procurement. Rutte seemed to revel in his role as wallah and jesting sycophant, making sure Trump was not only placated but massaged into a state of satisfaction. It was a sight all the stranger for the fact that Trump's view of Russian President Vladimir Putin, is a warm one. Unfortunately for the secretary general, his role will be forever etched in the context of European history as an aspiring warmonger, one valued at 5% of the GDP of any of the NATO member states. Hardly a flattering epitaph.
The Independent
9 hours ago
- Politics
- The Independent
Marjorie Taylor Greene offers rare GOP praise of Mamdani's campaign: ‘He talked directly to the people'
MAGA firebrand Marjorie Taylor Greene has offered some rare Republican praise for the New York mayoral primary campaign of Democrat Zohran Mamdani. The Georgia congresswoman initially reacted to the presumed victory of the three-term New York State assemblyman, a Muslim, with an edited image of the Statue of Liberty cloaked in a burqa. She now calls his campaign 'unique and smart.' In an appearance on Steve Bannon 's podcast War Room on Real America's Voice, Green attributed Mamdani's apparent win over the frontrunner, former Governor Andrew Cuomo, to having 'talked directly to the people.' She said Mamdani 'was focused on their issues, focused on their problems, and talking to the people about his solutions.' Greene added: 'I think it's extremely important that we get a hard focus on solving our problems, and that's what people really want. And you know that guy that won … the Democrat primary in the [New York] mayor's race. I've watched quite a few of his videos, and he did something pretty unique and very smart, even though I don't agree with anything he says.' She continued: 'He really ran a campaign where he talked directly to the people. He was focused on their issues, focused on their problems, and talking to the people about his solutions, even though his solutions are insane and they're socialist, probably communist, but … he was talking directly to the people.' 'When we are not talking to the people and not working on the people's problems, we lose the people, and the people will turn elsewhere,' she concluded. While the Georgia lawmaker is no fan of Mamdani, acknowledging his abilities on the campaign trail is of note amidst the torrent of Islamophobic bigotry otherwise directed at the man who is likely to become the next mayor of New York. The New York Young Republican Club reacted to the primary results with a 'call to action' on X. 'The radical Zohran Mamdani cannot be allowed to destroy our beloved city of New York,' the group wrote. The group urged the president to invoke the Red Scare-era Communist Control Act to yank Mamdani's citizenship and 'promptly deport him.' The club called on White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller and Trump's border czar, Tom Homan, to take action. Miller claimed New York City is the 'clearest warning yet of what happens to a society when it fails to control migration.' 'The entire Democrat party is lining up behind the diehard socialist who wants to end all immigration enforcement and abolish the prison system entirely,' he added. Republican Rep. Andy Ogles of Tennessee referred to Mamdani as 'little Muhammad' and said he's 'an antisemitic, socialist, communist who will destroy the great City of New York.' 'He needs to be DEPORTED. Which is why I am calling for him to be subject to denaturalization proceedings,' he added. President Donald Trump reacted to Mamdani's win on Truth Social: 'Zohran Mamdani, a 100% Communist Lunatic, has just won the Dem Primary, and is on his way to becoming Mayor. We've had Radical Lefties before, but this is getting a little ridiculous.' He added: 'He looks TERRIBLE, his voice is grating, he's not very smart, he's got AOC+3, Dummies ALL, backing him, and even our Great Palestinian Senator, Cryin' Chuck Schumer, is groveling over him. Yes, this is a big moment in the History of our Country!' Mamdani, who could become the city's first Muslim and Indian-American mayor, won one of the first major Democratic primaries since the start of Trump's second stint in the White House. His platform has largely focused on a growing affordability crisis, with plans for universal childcare, free buses, and a freeze on rent increases in rent-controlled units.
NBC News
9 hours ago
- Business
- NBC News
Congress set to hand Trump billions to recruit more ICE agents
President Donald Trump is on the verge of getting billions of dollars from Congress to recruit and retain agents to carry out the mass deportation campaign that was one of the central promises of his campaign. Trump has been on a roll in his efforts to combat illegal immigration and remove undocumented immigrants from the country, and both advocates and critics of his plans say that bolstering border security and interior enforcement will make it easier for him to execute on his vision. The issue, a key tenet of his MAGA movement for a decade, helped him win back the White House in 2024. It remains his strongest issue, with 51% of adults approving of his handling of immigration and 49% disapproving, according to an NBC News Decision Desk poll powered by SurveyMonkey that was released this month. Illegal border crossings, as he and other administration officials often point out, have dropped precipitously, even without the completion of a long-pursued border wall. And the Supreme Court ruled Friday in a way that allows him to continue his push to deny the 14th Amendment's guarantee of birthright citizenship to some people born in the U.S. — at least for now. But the heart of his campaign to deport millions of undocumented people has been beating more slowly than he would like. Administration officials say they can kick-start it if Congress delivers on a budget measure Trump nicknamed the "big beautiful bill," which would spend billions of dollars to boost the ranks of border agents and Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials. The House-passed version includes $8 billion to hire an additional 10,000 ICE employees over five years, boosting the agency's ranks by nearly 50%, and $858 million more for signing and retention bonuses. At full employment of 30,000 people, the money would cover about $28,600 per employee. Customs and Border Protection would get $2 billion to spread around for such bonuses to its larger workforce, which currently can range as high as $30,000 for new recruits. It can be hard to hire and keep immigration agents, especially at a time when highly trained investigators who normally work on complex issues such as anti-trafficking and anti-money-laundering probes are being pulled into more routine immigration enforcement, said Chris Musto, the former assistant special agent in charge of the Homeland Security Investigations at ICE's Newark, New Jersey, field office. "There are hundreds of agents that are leaving," said Musto, who retired in June 2024. "Anybody that's eligible is departing." Beyond ICE, the federal government has diverted resources from across the government to focus on immigration — an indication both of the priority Trump has placed on executing his policy and the need for more help to do that. In Los Angeles, where the administration has met resistance from state and local officials, as well as protesters, Trump deployed the National Guard to protect federal agents and Marines to bolster the Guard. Critics predict that new money, and new agents, will mean a landscape that looks like Los Angeles across the country. "It's going to be unrecognizable in American history, the level of immigration enforcement, street harassment, that you will see by border patrol, ICE and all the law enforcement they have helping them out," said David J. Bier, director of immigration studies at the nonpartisan, libertarian-oriented CATO Institute. "The average American probably hasn't seen an ICE raid in action, but they will if this bill passes," Bier said. "It's going to be everywhere." White House officials say the money, part of a bigger injection that includes appropriations for detention facilities and other needs for scaling up deportation efforts, is necessary to execute on Trump's vision. "We got over 600,000 illegal aliens with criminal histories walking the streets of this country. We got less than 5,000 deportation officers," Tom Homan, Trump's border czar, said Thursday at the White House. "More agents means more bad guys arrested, taken off the streets of this country every single day," he added. "Every day we arrest a public safety threat or national security threat, that makes this country much safer. Who the hell would be against that?" But for the most part, arrests and deportations under Trump have not focused on his promise to go after the "worst of the worst." Instead, as White House officials lean on agencies to increase the raw number of enforcement actions, the vast majority of people scooped up have no criminal record. In mid-May, White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller tore into ICE officials over the failure to detain more undocumented immigrants. According to two people who spoke with the attendees, Miller was 'screaming' and threatening to fire senior ICE officials if they did not begin detaining 3,000 migrants a day. Since then, the Trump administration has expressed, and then reversed, a commitment to exempt what the president called "good, long time workers" in the agricultural and hospitality industries. The focus matters, both to members of Congress and in public opinion polls. The more Trump goes after hardened criminals, the more popular his effort is. But he has less support for workplace raids, ending temporary protections for immigrants who were given asylum in this country and blocking asylum claims. While Americans are almost evenly split on using state and local law enforcement to aid immigration enforcement efforts and assigning more federal employees to combat illegal immigration, according to a Pew Research Center poll released this month, 54% oppose workplace raids, 55% are against building more detention facilities, and roughly 3 in 5 disapprove of ending temporary protected status and suspending asylum claims. There are divisions in Congress. Democrats have been nearly uniformly opposed to Trump's mass deportation efforts, with most Republicans fully supportive. But there are small signs of dissent within the GOP. The Senate's version of the reconciliation bill is still being finalized but, after a fight between Budget Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., and Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee Chairman Rand Paul, R-Ky., it is likely to reflect the House-passed measure. Paul, who wants the government to spend less, had wanted to scale back. His draft would have assigned $2 billion to Customs and Border Protection — for hiring and training — and less than $500 million for investigators at ICE. The result of increased spending, advocates and critics say, will enable immigration enforcement officers to execute Trump's mass deportation program on a grander scale. Trump administration officials naturally focus on the public safety aspect of rounding up hardened criminals, while critics, including some Republicans, have raised objections to the detention of people in the country illegally who have not committed crimes. Earlier this month, a half-dozen House Republicans sent a letter to ICE urging the agency to put its focus on violent offenders, not people with a "clean record." The CATO Institute's Bier cited data this week showing that 71% of the people ICE arrested and 67% of the people detained by ICE in the first week of June had no criminal convictions. Nearly half of the 55,000-plus migrants in ICE detention as of June 20 had no convictions or criminal charges pending, according to an NBC tracker of data compiled by the ICE and CBP agencies. "He's shifted law enforcement away from enforcing criminal law," Bier said of the president, "and focused on nonviolent, peaceful people."
Yahoo
10 hours ago
- Politics
- Yahoo
Trump Is Suddenly Raging at Tucker Carlson—and MAGA Is Deeply Rattled
You may have heard it said that Donald Trump won in 2024 in part by vowing to end 'forever wars.' During the campaign, Trump ripped Democrat Kamala Harris for campaigning with Liz Cheney, slamming her for wanting 'war with every Muslim Country known to mankind.' News organizations credulously insisted that this sort of anger over military entanglements in Iraq and Afghanistan fueled Trump's 'movement.' Some even suggested that war fatigue—not his unflagging affection for Vladimir Putin—drove Trump-MAGA opposition to arming Ukraine. A new battle between Trump and Tucker Carlson over Israel's war with Iran is severely undermining that understanding of MAGA. Carlson and MAGA podcaster Steve Bannon, among others, have been urging Trump not to deploy the U.S. military in tandem with Israel. Trump appears close to doing so, and people like Carlson and Bannon are loudly proclaiming that this would betray the MAGA movement—which in turn is angering Trump. 'Somebody please explain to kooky Tucker Carlson that IRAN CAN NOT HAVE A NUCLEAR WEAPON!' Trump raged on Truth Social late Monday. Trump also vented about this to reporters, declaring: 'I don't know what Tucker Carlson is saying.' What's triggering Trump is Carlson's surprisingly direct criticism of him over Israel's hostilities with Iran. Carlson claimed Trump is 'complicit' in this war, apparently due to Trump's expressions of support for Israeli strikes on Iran's nuclear facilities and top military leadership. Trump is now weighing whether to deploy American B-2 bombers to help destroy Iran's nuclear enrichment facility at Fordo, which would entangle the United States in exactly the sort of Mideast conflict he vowed to avoid. All this has deeply split the MAGA coalition. Carlson has denounced top Fox News figures like Sean Hannity for actively encouraging Trump to pursue 'direct U.S. military involvement' abroad, slamming them as 'warmongers.' In an online discussion, Carlson and Bannon argued that this threatens to drive away supporters who want to 'stop the forever wars,' describing them as crucial to the MAGA coalition. And MAGA stalwarts like Matt Gaetz and Marjorie Taylor Greene have sounded rattled as they urge Trump not to sell out MAGA here. But how deep does this supposed antiwar sentiment really run inside MAGA? Well, here's a test: Republican Representative Thomas Massie on Tuesday introduced a House resolution barring Trump from entering into war with Iran without Congress's explicit authorization. Co-sponsored by Democratic Representative Ro Khanna, this 'privileged' measure will get a vote if House Speaker Mike Johnson doesn't procedurally thwart it. There's some debate over whether the legislative vehicle this measure uses is binding on a president (and Trump would veto anything that's binding). But a vote would force members on record, and a statement of broad opposition to war without authorization would send a strong message that MAGA really does want him to resist foreign entanglements. 'It's a test of whether the MAGA movement is really antiwar,' Khanna told me. Theoretically, a coalition of some Republicans and some Democrats should back such a resolution. Many liberals have long wanted Congress to stop ceding its warmaking powers to presidents. Some (including yours truly) opposed Barack Obama's efforts to appropriate these authorities at the time. What's more, many Democrats oppose war with Iran. As Matt Duss argues, Trump helped pave the way to this moment by withdrawing from America's 2015 nuclear deal with Iran; our intelligence services have not assessed that Iran has decided to produce nuclear weapons; and rushing into war now would be illegal and further destabilize the Mideast. Leading Democratic officials have endorsed a similar view, and Massie's resolution has a number of Democratic co-sponsors. Meanwhile, Senator Tim Kaine has introduced a similar resolution in the upper chamber. Khanna says he believes that all but about 20 Democrats will support the House measure, and he hopes to keep the defections much lower (a Senate Democratic aide expects a few defections on Kaine's resolution, as well). As Khanna put it to me, this is a test for both parties, and at bottom a test of whether we're 'going to have an antiwar party in America' at all. So some Republicans will be needed. But how many self-described MAGA Republicans will step up? There are reasons for skepticism. Zack Beauchamp has persuasively argued that the whole idea of Trump's 'antiwar' appeal rests on deep confusion. While Trump didn't start major wars, he does favor targeted but extremely aggressive military violence where he perceives it as being in narrow U.S. interests (or perhaps his own). In his first term, Trump relaxed rules on drone killings and other types of protections against civilian casualties, leading both to soar. Meanwhile, some confuse Trump's hostility to the postwar liberal international order with an 'isolationism' that eschews foreign military entanglements. But as Nicholas Grossman points out, this doesn't reflect principled opposition to military action. It reflects Trump's desire to shred the Western alliance and suck up to authoritarians who similarly hate that alliance, while generally undermining multilateralism and any other international frameworks he might perceive as constraining to the U.S.—and to himself. Some also confuse Trump's hatred of the 'deep state' with dovishness. But Trump despises the deep state because it tried to hold him accountable for his lawbreaking, and because a professionalized civil service is a barrier to unchecked authoritarian rule—not because it's a locus of warmongering. You can see that reality playing out in the Trump-Carlson battle: Carlson is loudly telling Trump that the deep state is duping him into war with Iran: Shouldn't Trump be wary of deep-state enemies trying to bring him down? But Trump is now lashing out at Carlson, not at the deep state. People become enemies of Trump not when they substantively work against some principle he supposedly holds dear but rather when they publicly criticize him, hold him accountable, fail to be sufficiently worshipful of his glory, or become an inconvenience in any way. The push for a resolution constraining Trump also highlights another impulse of MAGA that counters the 'antiwar' canard: its desire for Trump to harbor quasi-unlimited powers and aggressively channel the people's pure, unified will (i.e., MAGA's will) in the form of a Caesarist, world-historical figure unconstrained by grubby parliamentary busybodies. It's hard to see how MAGA will support limits on his warmaking powers or anything else that risks diluting his aura of 'strength.' But guess what? MAGA Republicans can prove all this wrong, by supporting the resolution reasserting congressional control over warmaking authority, geared toward accomplishing what MAGA itself claims to be for: fewer 'forever wars' abroad. It's unlikely that many congressional Republicans, who've ceded so much authority to Trump already, will do anything of the sort. Trump demonstrated exactly what MAGA is really made of when he tweeted this: AMERICA FIRST means many GREAT things, including the fact that, IRAN CAN NOT HAVE A NUCLEAR WEAPON. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!!! In other words, Trump grasps that 'America First,' or MAGA, is simply whatever he says it is at any given time. And here it may mean enthusiastically backing war with Iran. Will MAGA robotically go along? We'll soon find out.
Buzz Feed
10 hours ago
- Politics
- Buzz Feed
MTG Tweets Racist Statue Of Liberty After Zohran Win
Sometimes, just for one blissful moment, I forget just how much Islamophobia this country still breeds. Then, a political candidate like Zohran Mamdani comes along. Republicans (or, let's be real, Americans) stop hiding their hate, and I am shamefully reminded that we have a long, long way to go. If you missed the news this week, Mamdani, a 33-year-old Muslim New Yorker of Indian descent born in Uganda, shocked the political establishment by definitively defeating Andrew Cuomo in the NYC mayoral Democratic primary election. He currently represents a district in Queens as a member of the New York State Assembly and is a Democratic Socialist. Republicans, including Donald Trump, are pretty publicly flipping out over Mamdani's win, which many have referenced as the beginning of a "Communist" takeover of the United States. Unfortunately, Congressperson Marjorie Taylor Greene has joined their ranks with a blatantly racist AI-generated photo. Early on Wednesday, the morning after Mamdani's win, Greene tweeted this: The image depicts New York's Statue of Liberty replaced with a woman in a burqa, a full-body covering worn by some Muslim women and often vilified by Islamophobes. In Afghanistan, the Taliban requires women to wear the veil, but it is not required by the Quran. It also would most certainly not be required under Mamdani's mayorship. "You are not a serious person. Islamophobia is disgraceful and Unamerican," this person replied. "bet this hits hard if you're stupid," this person simply said. Someone reminded Greene that "The founding fathers were immigrants." This person called her a "disgraceful, disgusting, pathetic human being." A couple of people said she was "doing so well there for a minute," presumably in reference to when she finally seemed to turn the slightest bit against her MAGA ways, boldly disagreeing with the president about his decision to strike Iran. This person wrote that "Your Islamophobia isn't edgy, it's pathetic. You don't hate the hijab, you hate that a Muslim dared to win." "I'm so sorry that other religions and races are scary," someone else wrote. "Y'all are so proud to put your racism on full display," another user said. "This image hits harder, for me," this person said, along with a photo of a woman posing with the noose erected outside the Capitol on January 6, 2021. Someone told Greene, "You are a racist and should not be in Congress." And finally, people made some truly excellent jokes — because sometimes, all you can do is laugh at the racists. What do you think? Let me know in the comments.
