Latest news with #Reaganite
Axios
09-07-2025
- Politics
- Axios
Senate Republican hawks cheer Trump's slams on Putin
Senate Republican hawks are eagerly embracing President Trump's increasingly critical comments on Russian President Vladimir Putin. Why it matters: U.S. military support for Ukraine has become one of the biggest flashpoints between the GOP's growing isolationist wing and more traditional Reaganite hawks. "I'm very happy that President Trump has recognized that Putin was giving him the Heisman," Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) told Axios. Trump "is spot on about the games Putin is playing," Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) posted on X, adding, "The Senate will move soon on a tough sanctions bill." During a Cabinet meeting on Tuesday, Trump lamented that Putin's warm words are ultimately "meaningless," saying, "We get a lot of bullsh*t thrown at us by Putin." Asked about who made the initial decision to briefly pause weapons shipments to Ukraine last week, Trump said, "I don't know. Why don't you tell me?" That pause sparked grave concerns among GOP hawks. "The self-indulgent policymaking of restrainers — from Ukraine to AUKUS — has so often required the President to clean up his staff's messes," Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said in a withering statement on Tuesday. He urged Trump to "reject calls from the isolationists and restrainers within his Administration to limit these deliveries to defensive weapons." What's next: Graham told reporters on Tuesday he feels confident Trump is on board after some changes have been made to the lawmaker's Russia sanctions bill — including a 180-day waiver. After that, any next waiver would be subject to congressional approval.
Yahoo
10-04-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
‘Economically Indefensible': Trump's Bad Tariff Math Was Too Stupid To Implement
Donald Trump blinked, and his massive new trade war has been drastically scaled back. Or, maybe not? Perhaps he's just tweaking the details during a partial 90-day pause, and he preps other, different and more magnificent tariffs. Regardless, the president of the United States will continue to hold the American economy — not to mention the global economy — captive for the foreseeable future, with recurring and very loud threats to execute the hostage. But for this one fleeting moment, per Trump's announcement Wednesday afternoon, he's smashing the 'PAUSE' button on his tariff warfare, imposing 'substantially lowered' (though still substantial) tariffs of 10 percent for most nations, while escalating an all-out trade war on China. This latest gyration comes less than a week after Trump triumphantly posted a video online that said he was 'purposely crashing the stock market,' as a favor to his fellow Americans. His sudden change of approach comes just one week after he publicly launched his tariff blitz, with numbers, math, and tactics that made absolutely no sense to pretty much anyone who looked at it. For now, it seems as if the president's economy-nuking bad math was somehow too stupid to implement, even for this uniquely depraved administration. 'I can breathe now… But everything could change tomorrow,' one big Trump and GOP donor says, days after telling Rolling Stone: 'I don't know if I would be this worried about what will happen to the economy if Bernie fucking Sanders were president. That's how bad this is.' In fact, mere hours before the president cried 'PAUSE,' an array of Trump advisers and close associates were watching through splayed fingers, unsure if catastrophe and collapse were waiting around the next news cycle. 'I am cautiously optimistic about the future. But I'm scared to death right now,' Art Laffer, a well-known Reaganite economist who remains an informal adviser to Trump, said in a phone interview Wednesday morning. 'I am a wuss. I really don't like taking things to the brink,' he said, explaining that Trump was 'doing something I never would do, because I'm a chicken, and he's not. It frightens me, but can I say he's wrong? I don't know.' One reason that conservative bigwigs were so freaked out by Trump's economic warfare was the bonkers math that took the country to this brink. The administration's baffling tariff formula, which was used to determine each nation's tariff rate and launch Trump's ill-fated trade war, is still shrouded in surreal mystery. Because nobody, apparently, in Trump's administration wants to claim credit for devising a formula derided as world-historically nonsensical, even by some of the president's most ardent supporters. 'I don't know who came up with that formula — but it doesn't surprise me that nobody is taking credit for it, if only because it is an economically indefensible formula on the merits,' Stephen Moore, a conservative economics author and Project 2025 contributor who has advised Trump for years, said on Tuesday. 'But the president wants a level playing field, so right now he's waiting for other nations' leaders to come to him and make the best deal. I'm not a big tariff guy, I think we should be focusing on the Trump tax cuts; but if he can negotiate lower tariffs around the world with this trade war, then that would ultimately be a win.' Within hours of Trump's initiation of the trade war last Wednesday, a game of hot-potato erupted within his administration over which senior official was most responsible for the mysterious math. According to White House officials and other Republican sources familiar with the matter, many advisers and aides were left in the dark about who was the principal author of the formula. There was lots of finger-pointing — including at top Trump trade adviser and uber-loyalist Peter Navarro — but fewer concrete answers for public consumption. 'Don't ask me… Not my department,' a senior White House official said last week, adding that the formula 'may not have been the best version.' In the days since, some of Trump's most prominent economic counselors have publicly performed their own rendition of 'don't ask me,' with Treasury secretary Scott Bessent saying, 'I wasn't involved in the calculations of the numbers,' and Council of Economic Advisers chair Stephen Miran claiming that 'the president chose to go with a formula… suggested by someone else in the administration.' Even during last week's Rose Garden ceremony where Trump unveiled his plan for sky-high import taxes, broken down by both country and penguin-inhabited sub-Antarctic territory, economists began puzzling over how these tariff rates — as high as 50 percent on tiny, impoverished Lesotho — had been calculated. According to Trump, these new tariffs were meant to be 'reciprocal,' striking back against taxes and unfair trade barriers allegedly already imposed by America's trading partners. Yet the big new numbers didn't correspond to any actual tariffs already on the books. So where had the figures come from? Academics and economics writers, doing back-of-the-envelope calculations, quickly reverse engineered a formula that seemed to crack the code. It was a blunt equation, starting with the trade deficit for each nation and dividing that by the value of that country's imports of U.S. goods. James Surowiecki, best known for his longtime finance column in the New Yorker, posted this math on X, calling the Trump formula 'extraordinary nonsense.' Au contraire, the White House responded, insisting its calculations were far more complicated. It revealed a formula that had not one, not two, but three Greek letters — in addition to a subscript i for some reason. (The i was a placeholder for the name of the country and not involved in the math.) This surface-level complexity notwithstanding, the administration's supposed formula was actually as simple it had seemed to critics. The numerator is exports minus imports — in other words the trade deficit. And while two fancy variables got added to the denominator, the figures the White House plugged in for ε and φ — 4 and ¼ respectively — reduced to 1, and therefore didn't impact the calculation. Meaning that the bottom half of the equation, indeed, represented a country's imports of U.S. goods. The White House approach appeared to seasoned economists like someone added a dollop of grad-school gloss atop some middle-school math, rather than a sophisticated new method to counter international trade imbalance. 'It's definitely the former,' Stan Veuger, a senior fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, tells Rolling Stone. He points to the improbability that the two variables would neatly cancel each other out. 'There's an infinite number of values that the products could take on — and they happen to land on 1?! I mean, come on.' Given the enormous consequences of the new tariff policy, economists nonetheless interrogated the logic of the variables the White House claimed to use. And here, the academics assert, there was a huge error that led the White House to set tariff rates four times higher than they should be. In the Trumpy formula, φ supposedly represents how much prices are likely to rise for each dollar tariffs go up. The White House calculates this as a quarter. But the economists whose work is cited by the White House in justifying its math, insist that the real value is nearly one dollar (meaning the resulting tariffs should be about 'four times smaller'). Veuger, the AEI economist, published an analysis arguing that the White House should correct this mistake, and slash its proposed tariff rates. Doing so would lead to a still-high maximum rate of 13.4 percent on countries like Lesotho, while lowering most nations to the minimum tariff set by administration, 10 percent. 'They need to use the right numbers,' Veuger says. 'The 0.25 in particular, they claim they took it from [an academic] paper, and the number in that paper is just completely different.' The White House pushed back on AEI Monday, insisting it didn't need to adjust shit, because the other variable, ε, is itself extremely variable. This figure supposedly represents 'the elasticity of imports with respect to import prices' — a measure of how demand is likely to be impacted by rising prices. A White House official told Axios that the figure the White House chose, 4, was 'conservative' and could just as easily have been 2, which would have created tariffs 'twice as big' as those imposed by Trump. Veuger found this reaction 'quite defensive' and further evidence that Trump's market-crashing trade offensive was based on economic hokum. 'They're saying that, for the foundation under our trade policy, we're plugging in numbers that could easily be double! Or half! That's not a compelling defense of their approach,' he says. The economist emphasizes that AEI doesn't take an institutional stance on matters like trade policy. But he shares that 'the broad sentiment among my colleagues' has been that the Trump tariff proposal was 'not impressive in terms of process — and that the policy itself is just extremely bad.' More from Rolling Stone Trump Crony Did Not Want to Answer Yasmin Williams' Kennedy Center Shake-Up Questions Trump Suddenly Pauses Tariffs, Jacks Up Tax on Chinese Goods Trump Is Trying to Deport a Purple Heart Veteran. You Could Be Next Best of Rolling Stone The Useful Idiots New Guide to the Most Stoned Moments of the 2020 Presidential Campaign Anatomy of a Fake News Scandal The Radical Crusade of Mike Pence
Al Arabiya
26-03-2025
- Business
- Al Arabiya
Kwarteng warns: Tories face extinction if reform UK surge continues
The Conservative Party faces a genuine threat of disappearing if it continues to lose ground to Nigel Farage's Reform UK, former Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng has warned. In remarks likely to deepen concern within Tory ranks about their future electoral viability, Kwarteng said the Conservatives have no automatic right to survive indefinitely in the face of rising populist pressures. 'I think you have to factor that in,' Kwarteng said bluntly. 'The Tory party is a very, very old party. I think it's unlikely, but it doesn't have a guarantee of life. It doesn't have a God-given right to exist forever. Politics is competitive. If you are not selling products politically that people want to buy, want to vote for, then you've got a limited shelf life.' Speaking to Al Arabiya News' Hadley Gamble, Kwarteng openly acknowledged Reform UK's potential to reshuffle the political landscape dramatically, drawing direct parallels to the unexpected rise of Donald Trump in the US. 'Nigel Farage could disappear, or he could actually get very close, if not get into Number 10,' Kwarteng admitted. 'Who knows? Still a long time. I remember I went to the Republican convention in 2008 when McCain was nominated. If you told me, in eight years, Trump would be the nominee, no one would have believed that. Even in 2015, US colleagues said, 'Kwasi, there's no way Trump is going to get the nomination.' All I could see was he was ahead by 10 points in all the polls.' Kwarteng's stark assessment reflects the anxiety among many Conservatives, still reeling from a series of electoral setbacks and internal disputes. Reform UK, buoyed by public dissatisfaction over immigration and economic management, has consistently polled higher in recent months, threatening to erode traditional Tory voter bases. He gave a damning critique of his own party's handling of immigration, assigning them a harsh grade. 'We screwed that,' he said bluntly. 'We didn't do very well on that, and Kemi Badenoch is right to say we didn't do well on this.' Explaining this failure, Kwarteng reflected on unfulfilled Tory pledges: 'We actually campaigned to reduce immigration to tens of thousands. It wouldn't have been as damaging if we hadn't made that pledge in 2010 and again in 2015. We said something and did – what happened was very different to what we said.' On public spending, Kwarteng admitted that the Conservatives had lacked the courage necessary to implement substantial cuts. He argued this was one of the critical failures during his brief but chaotic tenure as Chancellor under Liz Truss, whose premiership spectacularly collapsed after just 44 days. 'One of the problems we had in the mini-budget was that we didn't walk the walk on spending. We were quite happy to reduce taxes, you know, in that Reaganite way,' Kwarteng told Gamble. 'But you've got to show willing on expenditure reductions, and we weren't specific about what we were going to try and reduce.' Kwarteng's own dramatic departure from government was vividly recalled. He described the surreal moment of his sacking by Truss, revealing, 'I was summoned back from the IMF meeting early, driven into Number 10 with outriders, no traffic, all the trappings. Went into Number 10, and she said she'd sacked me. I was completely incredulous. I think she was crying, because it was very stressful. I just thought, 'This is over. Your premiership is done.' Six days later, she'd resigned.' Despite the turmoil of his tenure and the economic consequences of his fiscal policies, Kwarteng accepted personal responsibility but rejected guilt. 'I feel, you know, major responsibility,' he admitted. 'Is it guilt? No. I feel that it's such a waste because I still believe in the ideas. We squandered an opportunity to change the dynamics in Britain.' He remained cautiously optimistic about the new Conservative leader, Kemi Badenoch, though noted the challenges facing her were considerable. 'Do I think Kemi Badenoch can handle it? I think she's in a very difficult position,' Kwarteng said. 'I can't think of any leader that could deal with these circumstances easily. Even Winston Churchill, if he came back – do I think Reform would disappear? Probably not.' On the prospect of a coalition between Conservatives and Reform after the next election, Kwarteng notably refused to rule it out, indicating pragmatism might prevail. 'In elections, you fight, and then you see what the numbers are. A world in which Conservatives and Reform hold the balance—you can bet your bottom dollar they will come together and try to create a government,' he concluded firmly.
Yahoo
26-02-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Clipped Wings
From the Boiling Frogs on The Dispatch Marco Rubio has a 'minder.' Well, maybe. That's what HuffPost reporter Jennifer Bendery claimed back on February 5, citing a State Department source. 'He has a minder, like a Trump campaign minder,' the source told her of the man now ostensibly leading the agency. 'Someone in his office, not of his choosing…. They sent somebody over because he wasn't totally within the fold.' The thought of that pleases me, even though I'm no more than 50-50 on whether it's true. In my mind's eye I picture the 'minder' as a pimply 19-year-old twerp in the same mold as Elon Musk's DOGE henchmen. I like to imagine him having to officially approve the text whenever Secretary Marco drafts a new diplomatic communique to Russia or China. A 🔥 emoji means it's okay to send. A 💩 emoji means it's back to the drawing board. The only consolation classical liberals can expect from a second Donald Trump presidency is the schadenfreude that comes from seeing the toadies who serve him get what they deserve. The ongoing humiliation of Marco Rubio will be a delightful subplot of U.S. politics until either Trump tires of him or Rubio tires of being humiliated—almost certainly the former, as the new secretary's willingness to be embarrassed appears limitless. Some humiliations will be more enjoyable than others, though. For instance, it was not fun to read in Tuesday's Washington Post that two DOGE bros whose combined age is less than Rubio's have begun 'vetoing' USAID payments that the State Department had approved. Among them is funding for PEPFAR, which has saved millions of lives by providing HIV treatments to African countries and was lavishly praised in the past by … Sen. Marco Rubio. According to the Post, by mid-February the DOGE boys were the only officials capable of accessing the USAID payment system; with the PEPFAR funding in limbo, AIDS clinics in Africa have started shutting down. That episode, while tremendously humiliating for Rubio, isn't enjoyable at all. Other reports are more fun. Last week, for example, Politico alleged that, due to their long records as Reaganite hawks, Rubio and national security adviser Michael Waltz 'are under intense internal scrutiny' from 'America First' Russia simps in the West Wing like Stephen Miller and Sergio Gor. A source close to Rubio said the new secretary of state 'knows the knives are out for him' already, with junior diplomat Ric Grenell supposedly wielding the sharpest blade: 'He knows that [Grenell] is gunning for his job and will go to Trump and demand he fires Marco the first time he says anything that contradicts the boss.' None of that proves that the rumors about a MAGA 'minder' watching Rubio are true. But, lord knows, it sure doesn't contradict them either. On that note, I have a question for Secretary Rubio—and for Sen. Tom Cotton and Sen. Lindsey Graham and Ret. Lt. Gen. Keith Kellogg, the White House's envoy for Ukraine and Russia. All are well-known hawks, all have accommodated themselves to Trump and Trumpism, and all have now been enlisted to greater or lesser extents in the grand postliberal project of dismantling the American-led western order. My question is this: What have you gotten in exchange for helping to make America, and the world, safe for autocracy? On Monday, the third anniversary of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, the United Nations adopted a Ukrainian resolution condemning Moscow for its aggression and demanding the return of conquered territory. Only 18 nations voted no. They were the usual 'Axis of Evil' suspects—Russia and North Korea, and … the United States. Later, the U.S. introduced its own resolution calling for an end to the fighting and carefully withholding any judgments about culpability. Several amendments were offered to add language critical of Russia to the text; when those amendments passed, the U.S. delegation chose to abstain rather than vote in favor of its own amended resolution. 'The U.N. doesn't matter,' you might say to all that, fairly enough. In any matter of international relations, 'The U.N. doesn't matter' is a solid response. But I'd turn that logic around: It's because the U.N. doesn't matter that the United States joining Russia in opposing Ukraine's resolution is significant. We didn't need to do it. Peace talks would not have collapsed if America had voted against Moscow, as the White House under both parties has been doing since the 1940s. We did it because Trump wanted to do it. It was an opportunity for moral signaling and the signal he chose to send was that the U.S. no longer deems fascist expansionism as inimical to its interests. Former Dispatch-er Andrew Egger put it well: 'I think UN votes are cosplay and it's in fact notable that this administration would choose to cosplay as one of the baddies.' Precisely because the vote meant so little, one might think Trump would have used it to throw Rubio, Cotton, Graham, Kellogg, and other GOP hawks a bone by supporting Ukraine's resolution. It'd be good politics, if nothing else—most Americans hate Vladimir Putin—but it'd also be a small gesture of thanks to the many Reaganites who work so hard day after day to rationalize his authoritarianism at home and abroad. Formally agreeing that Russia has been naughty was, quite literally, the least the president could have done to soothe the moral consciences of his conservative allies as he turns Ukraine upside down and shakes it until change falls out of its pockets. But in the end, he wouldn't even do that. And so I ask again: What exactly are his hawkish golfing buddies in the Cabinet and in the Senate getting in return for defending him? If courting Trump is designed to gain his trust and steer him toward supporting the Pax Americana, at what point do these people conclude that they've failed utterly and it's time to rouse popular opposition to his sellout to Moscow by aggressively denouncing it? Because the U.S. choosing to vote with Russia against Ukraine kind of feels like that moment. It was Marco Rubio, of all people, who gave an interview defending America's disgrace at the U.N. to Trumpist propaganda outlet Breitbart. Rubio's Reaganite foreign policy views used to have an intense moral component. On Tuesday, the New York Times recalled how, as a senator in 2017, he opened his questioning of Rex Tillerson, Trump's nominee to serve as secretary of State, by confrontationally asking, 'Is Vladimir Putin a war criminal?' When Tillerson dodged, Rubio scolded him: 'I find it discouraging, your inability to cite that which I think is globally accepted.' The senator worried, with reason, that the new president's interest in detente with Moscow (and the new nominee's business relations with Russia) would lead him to whitewash Putin's fascism. That was Rubio 1.0 to the core. To lead the West against the enemies of liberalism, he believed, America needed to speak the truth about them clearly and unapologetically. 'Vladimir Putin is not interested in a better working relationship with the United States,' he told an audience in 2018, per the Times. 'He believes that the only way to make Russia stronger is to make America weaker.' Rubio 2.0 has become the same mealy-mouthed apologist wary of antagonizing Russia that he suspected Tillerson of being in 2017. In speaking to Breitbart on Monday following the U.N. vote, he couldn't bring himself to utter words blaming Moscow for the war; the furthest he'd go was to say that 'everyone knows [who's responsible], and you can go back and read newspaper articles over the last three years and figure out what happened.' Not only is clarity no longer a diplomatic priority for him, in fact, it's an obstacle. 'We didn't feel it was conducive, frankly, to have something out there at the UN that's antagonistic to either side,' he told Breitbart. You can imagine the sweat droplets beading on his forehead as he said that, hoping it was anti-anti-fascist enough to satisfy Ric Grenell. Needless to say, Rubio was lying. Donald Trump had no problem being 'antagonistic' toward Volodymyr Zelensky when he called him a dictator last week, a criticism from which he's conspicuously exempted Putin. And sparing Russia from blame for the war is hard to square with Trump's typical impulse to demonstrate 'strength' and 'toughness' in all things. Russia is the aggressor; Russia alone can end the conflict unilaterally by laying down its arms; it stands to reason that Russia, not Ukraine, should be the target of 'tough' American pressure tactics aimed at forcing a ceasefire. Why hasn't it been? Marco Rubio has spent nearly a decade trying to earn back Donald Trump's trust, successfully enough to have landed in his Cabinet. But not only has he failed to convert Trump to hawkishness, he himself has been converted into a spin doctor muttering apologias for the very sort of amoral authoritarian power politics that he despised as a senator. 'Cabinet 2.0 is likely to function as a coterie of glorified press secretaries tasked with defending the actually meaningful decisions that are made in the West Wing,' I wrote a week after the election. Isn't that exactly what's happened? He's not the only hawk who's been made to seem ridiculous, though. Kellogg, the president's nominal envoy for Russia and Ukraine, was cut out of talks between the U.S. and Russia in Saudi Arabia and instead dispatched to meet Zelensky in Kyiv, at what some officials derisively describe as 'the kids' table' in peace-brokering. The White House ended up canceling a planned press conference between the two men, likely fearing that Kellogg would undermine Trump's pro-Russian position due to his Ukraine sympathies. Tom Cotton? He discovered last week how little years of loyal service matter to Trump's supporters when a postliberal foreign policy priority is on the line. Cotton is reportedly troubled by the nomination of Elbridge Colby, who wants the U.S. to pivot away from Russia and the Middle East and toward China, for a top position at the Pentagon. But Colby is a favorite of 'America First' demagogues like Charlie Kirk, who began accusing Cotton publicly of trying to sabotage Colby's important work of 'stopping the Bush/Cheney cabal at DOD.' In a party in which high officials now answer to people named 'Catturd,' that was too much heat for the senator. In response to the criticism, he agreed to meet with Colby and will, I assume, talk himself into supporting his nomination the same way he talked himself into supporting Tulsi Gabbard's. As for ol' Lindsey Graham, his supposed influence over Trump's Ukraine policy now seems to consist mainly of tweeting statements of support for Kyiv that matter not a bit to anyone and in no way reflect the sentiments of his good friend Donald. It's one thing to sell one's soul, it's another to sell one's soul for nothing. To watch hawkish Republicans be sidelined by the White House or, worse, reduce themselves to mouthing anti-NATO bromides about 'provocations' like some '70s-era commissar is to reflect on the Reaganite effort to convert Trump and wonder: Who, exactly, ended up assimilating whom? Did these guys get anything policy-wise from their decade of kissing Trump's ass? 'If not for the influence of hawks,' they might respond, 'Trump wouldn't have supported Ukraine as much as he did in his first term.' Fair enough, I guess, if you don't count the attempted shakedown that got the president impeached in 2019. Trump was surrounded by hawks like Mike Pence and Mike Pompeo in his first administration, and his Ukraine policy was bound to reflect that. But that was a product of circumstance: There was no 'bench' of postliberal ideologues on the right at the time for him to draw from, and the slavish loyalty that defined the right-wing base hadn't yet fully infected the Republican professional class. Circumstances change. Trump now has the people he wants and his Ukraine policy has begun to reflect that. He doesn't need to listen to hawks anymore, so he isn't. What he's doing instead is remaking the world order in a way that seems almost scientifically engineered to mortify the likes of Marco Rubio, Tom Cotton, and Lindsey Graham. And he dropped plenty of hints during the campaign that he was headed in that direction. Why did these chumps continue to support him after he did so? 'If not for the influence of hawks,' they might contend, 'Trump wouldn't support Israel as staunchly.' But that's nonsense: Israel is a priority for all but the most Tucker-ish elements of the Republican base; Reaganites, evangelicals, and nationalists keen to protect the Judeo-Christian tribe from Muslim usurpers all have their reasons for supporting the Jewish state. I'll concede that Trump might have been less antagonistic toward Iran without Republican hawks advising him—but then, he might end up being less antagonistic than they'd like him to be regardless. 'If not for the influence of hawks,' they might insist, 'Trump wouldn't be as tough on China.' That's also nonsense. Trump, the great protectionist, was treating China as the job-stealing global villain-in-chief from his early days as a candidate in 2015, and if he hadn't been, the COVID-19 pandemic would have pointed him in that direction by now without any help from hawks. Ultimately, in fact, I think China will prove to be a better example of how little influence hawks have over the president rather than how much. When Beijing finally makes its move on Taiwan or South Korea or Japan, it's farcical to believe that a guy who's busy right now selling out Europe to Russia will decline to sell out further-flung liberal allies to a much more menacing military power. Trump will make some sort of 'great, big, beautiful deal' with the Chinese that concedes their hegemony over the Far East. And demoralized hawks like Rubio, Cotton, and Graham will dutifully do interviews with Breitbart polishing that turd to a mirror shine. The real reason Republicans in Washington have made peace with an American-led authoritarian project to demolish the liberal order is simple, I think. In the end, you're either Marco Rubio or you're Nikki Haley. There are no other options. On Monday, after the U.S. had disgraced itself at the U.N., Trump's former U.N. ambassador tweeted her disappointment. 'America has always been a pillar of freedom and democracy,' Haley wrote. 'We have to have the moral clarity to know the difference between good and evil and right and wrong. We can't blur those lines. We must choose a side, and it should never be the side of dictators.' No one cared. I didn't care, Trumpists didn't care, leftists didn't care. Haley's message was correct, but insofar as it evoked any emotion, that emotion was contempt from all sides. The populist right hates her for her Reaganite outlook; the rest of us hate her for having sold out that outlook by endorsing Trump knowing full well that he would govern as he has. Would you rather be her or Marco Rubio? They're both politically irrelevant. They've both shed every ounce of honor they possess in the course of reconciling themselves to Trump. They're both doomed to live out their lives in a country which, day by day, they recognize less and despise more. But they took different paths at a fork in the road: Haley chose to gamble her political future by challenging Trump in last year's primary whereas Rubio chose to remain a loyal ally of the president's. He took what I call the 'money pit' approach to Trumpism. Eventually, you've spent so much of your dignity in defending what the right has become that the only thing to do is to keep on spending in the name of protecting your 'investment.' It's the sunk-cost fallacy, except for morals. Haley's choice led her to political oblivion; Rubio's choice led him to the illusion of relevance. He rides around now in limousines and meets with VIPs and gives important statements to Breitbart—provided his 'minder' signs off, of course—and maybe, occasionally, he influences the president's thinking a tiny bit at the margins. Just not enough to convince him not to join the Axis of Evil or jackhammer the Pax Americana. Would you rather have oblivion or the illusion of relevance? Would you rather be Mike Pence or a senator for life in a safe seat, like Cotton and Graham? Would you rather host a podcast or get to be the bagman in a world-historic attempt to extort a country fighting for its survival, like Marco Rubio? Would you rather be forgotten or remembered as a villain? Some men yearn to be remembered and will do what's needed to ensure that they are, rather than join the rest of us in obscurity. That's Rubio, Cotton, and Graham. Good news, fellas: You will be remembered. I'll do my part to make sure of it. Correction, February 25: An earlier version of this article contained an incorrect reference to how Iran voted on the Ukrainian U.N. resolution. Iran abstained.
Yahoo
23-02-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
OPINION: The Party Of Reagan Becomes The Party of Putin
WASHINGTON — On the wall overlooking the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office is a portrait of the 40th president, Ronald Reagan. If it could move, it would likely turn its back in shame at the words and actions this week by the 47th president. 'Absolutely obscene,' said Tom Nichols, a self-described Reaganite and former Naval War College professor, about Trump's capitulation to Russian dictator Vladimir Putin. 'He ought to take that picture down.' Reagan labeled the Soviet Union 'the evil empire' for its human rights abuses and expansionist foreign policy. Trump regularly praises Putin as a 'strong' leader. Reagan pushed for freedom for Eastern Europe from Soviet hegemony. Trump victim-blames Ukraine, saying the former Soviet republic brought Putin's invasion on itself. Reagan in 1987 stood in Berlin, at the Brandenburg Gate between East and West and, in a speech in a speech that marked the beginning of the end of the Soviet Union, demanded of its final leader: 'Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.' Trump in 2025, when pressed on whether Putin was mainly responsible for the destruction in Ukraine, answered: 'I get tired of listening to that, I'll tell you what.' In just a single week, Trump has repeated Putin's talking points that Ukraine, not Russia, was somehow responsible for Russia' now three-year-long invasion of its neighbor. He called Ukraine's democratically elected president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, a 'dictator' while offering kind words for Putin, who has had political opponents and critics murdered. He pushed Ukraine to pay protection money, in the form of handing over mineral rights, if he wants American help going forward. And he has demanded that Ukraine offer several concessions to bring about the end of the war, including giving up territory Putin has seized, while asking nothing of Russia. Trump justified that approach by arguing that the Russians 'have the cards' because they seized Ukrainian land, openly rewarding Putin for his aggression. And while during his first term Trump's pro-Putin tendencies were tempered by others in his administration — including national security adviser John Bolton and his own vice president, Mike Pence — those voices are gone now. Trump's new national security adviser, Mike Waltz, had as a member of Congress stated that Putin was to blame for the Ukraine war the same way that Al Qaeda was to blame for the Sept. 11, 2021, terrorist attack. Asked this week, Waltz literally 'both-sided' the question. 'There has been ongoing fighting on both sides,' he said in a White House press briefing, and went on to defend Trump for calling Zelenskyy a dictator in the same way Republicans have been defending Trump on indefensible words and deeds for going on a decade. 'Look, President Trump is obviously very frustrated right now with President Zelenskyy,' Waltz said, as if describing a cranky toddler who would be fine after a snack and a short nap. Of course, as appalling as Trump's siding with a murderous dictator is, it should not come as a surprise. Trump's fascination with autocrats generally and Putin in particular has been well documented for more than a decade. In 2013, he posted on social media that his hosting of a beauty pageant in Russia might win him Putin's approval. 'Do you think Putin will be going to The Miss Universe Pageant in November in Moscow — if so, will he become my new best friend?' he wrote. That was followed by years of attempts to build a Trump Tower in Moscow — an effort that continued straight through his first run for president in 2016, it came out later. Trump asked for Russian help to defeat Democrat Hillary Clinton that year, and then knowingly used the hacked and stolen emails that Russian spies released during the final month of the presidential campaign. Then, as both special counsel Robert Mueller and the Senate Intelligence Committee investigated Russia's role in his victory, Trump eagerly bought into a conspiracy theory concocted by Russian operatives that — contrary to the U.S. intelligence assessment that Russia helped Trump win in 2016 — it was actually Ukraine that had tried to help Clinton win. Trump sent his personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, to Ukraine to collect evidence — an effort that ultimately led to Trump's attempt to extort Zelenskyy into announcing an investigation into the Democrat he most feared in the 2020 election, Joe Biden, using U.S. military aid as leverage. Trump was ultimately impeached for that act, but the Republican-led Senate declined to remove him from office. Trump's personal antagonism toward Zelenskyy, perhaps stemming from that episode, seems to have continued unabated. Three years ago, when Putin first invaded, Trump called it 'genius' and 'savvy.' This week, in both a social media post and then in prepared remarks delivered to a Miami audience, Trump insulted Zelenskyy as 'a modestly successful comedian' who needed to hurry and end the war or face losing his country. To Nichols, the author of six books about the Soviet Union, Trump is playing with fire. Nichols sees Putin as far more dangerous than any of the Soviet leaders, all of whom had to contend with competing power centers in the Politburo bureaucracy. 'Putin is a thug and an experienced intelligence agent and he knows how to manipulate Trump,' Nichols said. Be that as it may, Trump seems to have the party formerly of Reagan fully behind him as he abandons Ukraine. At the Conservative Political Action Conference this week — the annual gathering where, in 1974, Reagan gave the keynote speech — House speaker Mike Johnson was asked whether Congress would approve any more U.S. aid to Ukraine, as lawmakers had done under former President Joe Biden. 'There is no appetite for that. What do you think?' Johnson said with a laugh, encouraging the crowd to boo in response. 'Uh, no.' 'I guess I'm no longer surprised. It's not so much a party's ideological transformation as it is the abandonment of good character and values of any kind as an attribute of statesmanship,' said Mark Salter, a longtime senior aide to former U.S. Sen. John McCain, who famously said in his 2008 presidential run that when he looked into Putin's eyes, all he could see were the letters 'K-G-B.' 'The GOP is no longer the party of Reagan because so few of its office holders possess a sense of honor that Reagan would recognize as such. It's a moral rot causing the ideological decay,' Salter added. The next logical step could well be for Trump to start sending U.S. military assistance to Russia instead, using his same stated rationale of ending the war quickly. If that sounds outlandishly, over-the-top impossible, so did much of what Americans saw over the past week — right up until it happened. Trump Says He May Take Control Of The U.S. Postal Service. Here's What To Know. 'Very, Very Bad': Ex-Government Economist Makes Bleakest Trump Prediction Voters Are Souring On One Of Donald Trump's Biggest Strengths
