All posts tagged "china"

Trump isn't just retreating from the world — here's how he's helping to end it

Ours would be the normal story of imperial powers rising and falling on Planet Earth — nothing new there, of course — if it weren’t for one thing: the fact that this world, too, is now falling.

Unfortunately, nothing is truly normal about this planet of ours anymore, as the slow-motion equivalent of atomic weaponry goes off in our already distinctly overheating atmosphere. And though he’s seldom thought of that way, President Trump, the — who would once have believed it? — second time around, should be considered an all-too-literal embodiment of some mad human urge to turn this planet into a (once almost unimaginable) disaster zone. He would, in fact, be truly unbelievable, if what’s happening to this planet at this very moment weren’t even more so.

We’re distinctly in a 21st century from hell and yet “our” president continues to act as if this were still the 20th (if not the 19th) century. Under other circumstances, it might seem little short of amusing, but not on this planet, not in 2025, not in a world drying out at a remarkably rapid pace, not on a planet to whose atmosphere we humans have “added about 200 billion more tons of carbon dioxide-equivalent greenhouse gases” just between 2020 and 2024. (And if you’re already sweating, I don’t blame you!)

If you want to know what century Donald Trump is in, check out his recent visit (his second!) to — yes! — Great Britain to meet King Charles III and Queen Camilla. And what a dinner the king and queen threw for him with “some of the wealthiest, most influential, and best connected people in the world all together at one long table inside a nearly-thousand-year-old castle.”

It was so wonderfully 20th, if not 19th, century! Of all places to pay the only visit of his second term in office so far, Trump chose to travel back in time, which is, of course, no small thing, to an era when Great Britain and its royalty mattered globally in order to offer an imperial bow to a planet that functionally no longer exists.

But honestly, you shouldn’t have been surprised. Though you might not have noticed — few have made a point of it — Trump is indeed living in the wrong century. In his brain, I suspect, he’s still in the era when, after the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, this country became the planet’s sole superpower. He’s still in the century in which Elvis was king. He’s still in the time when tariffs (“I am a Tariff Man“) actually mattered.

Oh wait, wasn’t that the 19th century of President William McKinley who, as Trump has claimed, “made our country very rich through tariffs and through talent”?

Admittedly, the president did go to Great Britain accompanied by AI executives, and that certainly made him look reasonably modern, but don’t be fooled, not for a second. Strange as he may be in some deeper sense, he distinctly is Donald J. (Been There, Done That) Trump. And in retrospect (if, of course, there even is a retrospect), I think it will be all too clear that, by identifying with Big Oil, Big Gas, and Big Coal, and turning his back on climate change and the 21st century, while putting tariffs from another age on much of other nations’ economic dealings with the United States, he will have turned this very planet of ours over to the place — China — that’s producing twice as much green power as the rest of the world combined and madly developing the equipment to produce more of it (not to speak of electric vehicles), while already starting to sell its green products around the world. Phew!

Trump, on the other hand, has essentially declared war on green energy and, in doing so, has in his own strange fashion declared war on the American people, modernity, and the future of this country, not to speak of this planet. And yet, all too sadly, doing exactly that got him elected president a second time.

After all, he ran his winning presidential campaign in 2024 on, above all else, a slogan that couldn’t have been blunter about his vision of the future — “drill, baby, drill“ — and he now seems intent on ensuring that the world-record profits of the five big oil companies and the estimated investment by banks of almost $7 trillion in the fossil-fuel industry since the Paris Climate Agreement went into effect in 2016, will indeed remain a, if not the, crucial part of our future, not our past. (Only recently, at the United Nations, he called climate change “the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world,” while praising “clean, beautiful coal.”) And that should be considered his way of turning that very future over to China.

He’s also using tariffs from another age, in his own striking fashion, to reject and cut the U.S. off economically from much of the rest of this planet, while giving China the economic edge it needs to thrive — at least to the degree that anyplace can thrive on a world that’s literally going to hell in a handbasket (even if in relatively slow motion). Long ago, in 2017, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman suggested, however tongue-in-cheekily, that Trump might actually be a Chinese agent. He pointed out then that, in his first weeks in office, the president had already taken his “Make China Great campaign to a new level … by rejecting the science on climate change and tossing out all Obama-era plans to shrink our dependence on coal-fired power.”

Drill Baby Drill

Now, more than eight years later, Trump seems, if anything, intent on doubling down when it comes to rejecting any thought of dealing with climate change, while still focusing remarkable energy (and I use that word advisedly) on helping the oil, natural gas, and coal industries prosper.

Think of the drill-baby-drill president as, in his own way, a satanic force (since the result will be heat of an unparalleled nature). China, on the other hand, continues to put striking amounts of money and (again, excuse the word) energy into the creation of a green-energy economy. Yes, I know that it also continues to produce and use staggering amounts of coal at record rates (though its use of carbon energy is expected to peak soon), but it’s already beginning to sell green-energy equipment — wind turbines, solar panels, and electric cars — globally in a fashion not faintly equaled by any other country.

In that sense, it visibly represents the future (if there is to be any future) on planet Earth, while Trump’s version of America represents an increasingly devastating past. Typically, for instance, while doing his damnedest to get rid of wind power in this country, Trump only recently made a deal with the European Union in which he forced those countries to agree to buy another $750 billion of American natural gas and oil by the end of his second term in office (and while such sales may, in the end, prove something of a fantasy, the point remains).

If the American people had declined Trump the second time around, we might be in a somewhat different situation, but (explain it as you will) no such luck. Whether we realize it or not, we Americans are, it seems, still living somewhere in the 20th century in energy (and perhaps other) terms.

Yet you may not even know it, since he’s so intent on making the free press into the freeze press, both by working hard to restrict what information reporters can get from his world and by suing anyone who writes something that displeases him. Add to that his functional takeover of the Justice Department (which past presidents had given a certain level of independence) and you know that we’re in a new world in a sense that no one who once used that phrase to describe America would recognize.

So, welcome to an American present and future that’s functionally a terrifying version of the past, Trump-style. In fact, get used to it, since over (minimally) the next three years and three months, if you’re living in the United States, we’re going to have quite a ride ahead of us. (And remember, he’s never ruled out a third term in office. To hell with the Constitution!)

Who Knows What’s Ending?

Give us all the credit we deserve. We humans are distinctly strange creatures. We’re creative in so many ways and yet, historically speaking, we seem to have been and continue to be incapable of not making war on one another. And bad as that may have been once upon a time, it’s even worse today, since militaries, even at peace but especially when making war, pour startling amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. (Keep in mind, for instance, that a 2024 study indicated “the U.S. military’s carbon output as of 2022 exceeded that of nearly 140 national governments.”)

And don’t think that Trump is an exception to the rule (any rule) on planet Earth right now when it comes to creating future atmospheric chaos. After all, at this very moment, there are three major wars occurring that have relatively little to do with the United States. There’s Russia’s war on Ukraine, Israel’s war on Gaza and surrounding areas (admittedly, heavily supported by the Trump administration, which is now planning to send another $6.4 billion in weaponry to that country), and a disastrous civil war in Sudan (largely ignored by the rest of the world).

Worse yet, none of them show any signs of ending any time soon. Only recently, of course, India and Pakistan also briefly went to war with each other. And if you want to ensure that this planet grows ever hotter ever faster, there’s hardly a better way to do it than by making war, since such conflicts pour greenhouse gases into the atmosphere at a remarkable rate.

And of course, Trump is cementing his singular power in place in ever more significant ways. They range from deploying at least 35,000 National Guard and other troops to American cities and the border with Mexico to going after seemingly random ships in the Caribbean Sea and blowing them to smithereens, while gathering American naval and air power there in preparation for a possible war on Venezuela — and who knows where else?

In short, in a remarkable fashion, in significantly less than a year of his second term in office, Trump has succeeded in steering what not so long ago was the greatest power on planet Earth to the planetary margins in a big-time, possibly even historically unique fashion. And count on this (but take a breath first): with at least three-plus years to go, he (or do I mean He?) is only beginning. Yes, this is just the start of … well, who really knows what? The only thing you can truly count on is that, whatever it may be, it’s already guaranteed to be a historical disaster of the first order for this country (and, unfortunately, the rest of the planet, too).

It’s hard even to imagine having a president at this very moment who is literally incapable of taking in the most dangerous and devastating thing that may ever have happened on or to planet Earth. I mean, honestly, just try to take that in yourself for a moment.

Think of Donald Trump (though he’d hate it!) as the Surrender President who, in his own striking fashion, is turning the U.S. into a distinctly declinist power on a distinctly declinist planet.

And all of this is indeed and all too literally something new under — yes! — the sun (and nothing but the sun). Welcome, in short (or, given the nature of climate change, do I mean “in long”?), to Donald Trump’s (ever)hot(ter) world. Think of him, in fact, as both the surrender and the hell-on-earth president.

Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project, runs the Type Media Center's TomDispatch.com. His books include: "A Nation Unmade by War" (2018, Dispatch Books), "Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World" (2014, with an introduction by Glenn Greenwald), "Terminator Planet: The First History of Drone Warfare, 2001-2050"(co-authored with Nick Turse), "The United States of Fear" (2011), "The American Way of War: How Bush's Wars Became Obama's" (2010), and "The End of Victory Culture: a History of the Cold War and Beyond" (2007).

This alarming intel shows how TACO Trump will drag us into World War III

The world has often seen great wars ignited not by inevitability, but by weakness, hesitation, and betrayal. Cowards playing with matches.

History shows that one of the biggest risk factors for war is an autocratic leader who fears for his own future. Which is why the kind of pathetic incoherence we saw at the United Nations this week should concern us all.

This week’s news brings some alarming data points:

After four different Danish airports were buzzed by what many assume to be Russian drones (Danes are uncertain), a French airport was hit yesterday and a Norwegian airport was shut down by drones earlier in the week.
The US Navy fired Trident II D5 ballistic missiles from the coast of Florida, lighting up the sky as they were testing devices that could carry thermonuclear bombs deep into Russia.
A massive US Navy presence in the Caribbean and off the coast of Venezuela was just this week joined by F35s and Reaper drones as Trump has blown three Venezuela boats out of the water without congressional authorization.
In an absolutely unprecedented move, Pete “Kegger” Hegseth has ordered all the US military’s flag officers and their staffs to come to Virginia for a meeting with an unknown agenda. This is not normal military procedure; it has the stench of authoritarian consolidation, the kind of maneuver history has shown us precedes purges, coups, and crackdowns.
Russia is experiencing a nationwide fuel shortage (also in Russian-occupied Crimea) as the result of Ukrainian drones taking out refineries and depots across the nation. It’s so bad, the Kremlin has banned fuel exports until the end of the year. The nation’s economy is teetering and Putin is apparently in political trouble.
Taiwan’s deputy foreign minister Wu Chihchung warns, “China is preparing to invade Taiwan.”
Russia’s foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, just said, “NATO and the European Union want to declare, in fact, have already declared a real war on my country and are directly participating in it.”
NATO notified Russia that they may shoot down planes that invade NATO airspace, and Russia replied that “would be war.”

As Russian jets cross NATO skies and intelligence warns of an impending strike, while Trump — desperate for a diversion from the Epstein/Trump sex scandal and a collapsing economy —appears to be trying to provoke a war with Venezuela, the question grows louder: are we watching the sparks of a new global conflict?

And is the dangerous bond between Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump the match that could light the fuse of World War III?

Remember back in July when Trump told NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte (during a visit to the Oval Office) that if Europe would pay for the anti-missile defense systems Ukraine desperately needs he’d see to it that they were shipped over there promptly?

President Volodymyr Zelenskyy tweeted:

“I’m grateful to our team and to the United States, Germany, and Norway for preparing a new decision on Patriots for Ukraine.”

Rutte coordinated with Germany and Norway (and later other NATO countries) to raise the billions necessary to pay for the systems to replenish stocks held by European nations, particularly France, Germany, and Denmark, that those countries are supplying to Ukraine.

The replacements should have arrived in Europe by now, a continent that’s increasingly on edge as Putin keeps flying MiGs over former Soviet client states in the Baltics.

As they supply Ukraine — which is suffering under unprecedented attacks with hundreds of missiles and drones every night — Europe’s own stockpiles that could be used to deter Russian aggression are vanishing.

Between that Oval Office meeting and now, however, Trump had his infamous red-carpet meeting with Putin in Alaska and apparently got different orders from his self-described friend and probable mentor.

As Vivian Salama reports for The Atlantic, there’s been a sudden change in the Trump administration’s position with regard to providing NATO or EU countries with defensive weaponry to replace what they’ve given to Ukraine:

“Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Elbridge Colby said that he didn’t believe in the value of certain foreign military sales, according to two administration officials with knowledge of the discussion.”

Adding to European concerns, news broke last week that a Russian Major General who defected claims Putin is planning a full-on invasion of both Ukraine and parts of the Baltic states — all NATO members — “before Christmas.”

The British newspaper the Daily Express reported, in an article headlined “Russia's 'greyzone' invasion plan to start WW3 before Christmas revealed by defector”:

“Moscow is preparing a ‘greyzone’ attack on Poland before Christmas, a senior Russian military official has revealed.

“The warning, sent through an Eastern European ally during London’s DSEI arms fair last week, has triggered urgent discussions in the UK and US about the risk of a deniable strike aimed at fracturing NATO.”

Poland, Romania, and Estonia have all seen Russian MiGs violate their airspace in the past two weeks, scrambling NATO jets as Poland and Estonia have invoked NATO’s Article 4 process to stand up to potential aggression.

It appears to me (just my opinion) that when Putin met with Trump in Alaska either he ordered Trump to back away from Ukraine and NATO, or simply took the measure of the man and concluded he could launch an invasion of the Baltics with a low probability that the United States under the convicted felon would respond militarily. Trump’s recent blocking of Patriot systems to Europe suggests the former rather than the latter.

Europe is taking this threat seriously. Great Britain this past week dispatched Royal Air Force jets to Poland with backup from Voyager tankers; they join German, French, Swedish, and Danish jets that began patrolling the eastern flank of the Baltic nations after the first Polish incursions.

Donald Tusk, Poland’s Prime Minister, warned that his nation — and, implicitly, the region — is now closer to military conflict “than at any time since the Second World War.” The UK’s OSCE (Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe) Ambassador, Neil Holland, was explicit that these were not accidental incursions into NATO airspace:

“Either Russia has deployed systems it cannot control, or it is provoking us deliberately.”

According to the Express reporting, British intelligence isn’t expecting a full-on invasion of Eastern Europe but, instead — at least initially — the same sort of “deniable” pinpoint attacks Putin has used to precede his later, larger assaults on other nations including Georgia and Ukraine. One UK intelligence official said:

“There’s no suggestion of a full-scale invasion. But a calibrated strike – something deniable, something confusing – is exactly how Russia has operated in the past.”

He added:

“They’re probing NATO. If they can strike Poland and NATO flinches — even slightly — it undermines the whole alliance.”

At the same time, Russia has reportedly launched a full-scale “coordinated information warfare” assault on Finland via the internet and social media. Finland shares a 833-mile border with Russia, which, as the USSR, has invaded that nation twice in modern times, once in 1939 and again in 1941.

Marco Giannangeli, Defence and Diplomatic Editor for Express, pointed out:

“Western officials fear the disinformation campaign is intended to soften the ground for further provocations along the Gulf of Finland.”

Putin’s apparently taking Trump’s TACO (“Trump Always Chickens Out”) label to heart. Tragically, the entire world may soon see the consequence of a blustering, incompetent, race/deportation-obsessed, apparently terrified-of-Putin president who’s surrounded himself with people whose singular quality is not competence but loyalty and a willingness to break tradition and the law on the boss’ behalf.

History will not forgive miscalculation at this scale. With Europe bracing for attack, NATO stockpiles running dry, Trump near provoking war with Venezuela, and Putin — in deep trouble at home — probing for weakness, the world stands at a perilous crossroads.

The only question now is whether this moment will be remembered as the turning point that stopped another world war, or the disaster when Trump and Putin together opened the gates to it.

'No sign of Chinese buying': Trump credited for 'devastating' US farmers' soybeans market

President Donald Trump's tariffs have decimated U.S. farmers' soybean market and there is "no sign of Chinese buying."

The fall harvest has started without any orders from China, the world's biggest buyer, according to a new report published on agriculture.com's Successful Farming.

American farmers are reporting record yields for crops this fall but it's unclear who will buy them. The USDA estimates that American farmers are harvesting 4.3 billion bushels, however there is no indication if or when shipments to China will continue. Most years, China buys more than half of U.S. soybean exports — but not this year.

Brazil, however, has had record demand from China from January to August 2025 for Brazilian soybeans. And in the new report, experts "consider the possible consequences if a trade deal is not reached this fall."

"From the 2017/18 to the 2024/25 crop season, Brazil jumped its soybean production from 4.5 billion bushels to 6.3 billion bushels, according to the National Supply Company (Conab) – Brazil’s food supply and statistics agency."

There is speculation that Chinese buyers importing soybeans could be "accelerating shipments to avoid sourcing from the United States."

The ongoing trade war between China and the U.S. is testing farmers' faith in the Trump administration. During the first trade war in 2018 during Trump's first term, farmers took a hit and during President Joe Biden's term had begun to recover.

Now under Trump's second term, farmers have called for more assistance during the prolonged economic uncertainty.

"Some relief might come from federal government payments to producers, as happened during the first round of trade war, but in many cases, that assistance may not be enough to prevent an uptick in financial stress," according to the report.

Chinese buyers are expected to continue shifting soybean purchases to other South American countries, including Argentina, Paraguay and Bolivia. These countries are planning to expand planting acreage for their crops and focusing on planting soon for the 2025 and 2026 crop in the Southern Hemisphere.

Critics are pointing to Trump's trade policies as a major disruption to the U.S. agriculture industry.

"Until Trump's first term, the US was by far the world's largest exporter of soybeans. Now Brazil dominates," David Frum, writer at The Atlantic, wrote via X.

"Has Iowa thanked Trump/Vance for devastating their soybeans market?" Former U.S. Representative Barbara Comstock (R-VA) wrote on X.

Trump's TikTok dealings should've set this GOP toady roaring. His silence speaks volumes

You're not going to believe this, but it appears the cat’s got Josh Hawley’s tongue.

The junior senator from Missouri — known for his unwavering ability to detect Communist infiltration in American tech companies from eight area codes away — has suddenly gone quiet.

Interesting timing, too.

Because on Friday, President Donald Trump announced progress on a deal with Chinese President Xi Jinping to block any U.S. sale or ban of TikTok in exchange for vague “national security commitments” that sound suspiciously like business as usual.

That would be the same TikTok that Hawley has passionately demanded be banned, or at least completely removed from Chinese involvement.

“TikTok — and its parent company ByteDance — are threats to American national security,” Hawley wrote in 2023, to then Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen. He’s repeated that theme dozens if not hundreds of times as a senator.

So, you can imagine Hawley’s indignation when the Washington Post reported this:

“A ByteDance spokesperson in a statement Friday thanked Trump and Xi and said the company would work 'to ensure TikTok remains available to American users through TikTok U.S.'”

Shockingly, you could hear a pin drop. Hawley — arguably second to none among U.S. politicians in garnering attention and air time on every subject imaginable — has gone dark. No tweets, no press releases, no rushing to Fox News, no nothing.

So in the spirit of filling the void, let’s revisit what Josh Hawley has been screaming from the mountaintops for several years about TikTok — before it became a Trump-friendly enterprise. Here are just a few of his greatest hits:

“TikTok is digital fentanyl that’s addicting our kids and stealing their data!”
— Hawley, 2023
“TikTok is a surveillance tool for the Chinese Communist Party.”
— Hawley, 2022
“Every time you use TikTok, you're giving your information to Beijing.”
— Hawley, 2021
“We are literally subsidizing the destruction of our children’s mental health.”
— Hawley, 2023
“This is mind control by a foreign adversary — and Democrats won’t act.”
— Hawley, 2024

But now that Trump has personally intervened to compromise on TikTok’s Chinese ownership, Hawley apparently no longer thinks it’s all that big a deal, after all.

Just because he authored the No TikTok on Government Devices Act, which was successfully signed into law, and a broader No TikTok on United States Devices Act, doesn’t mean Hawley cannot mind “some TikTok.”

This is the same senator who once told Fox News that Democrats were “kneeling before Chairman Xi” for not banning the app. So what is that Trump’s doing?

Let’s put it this way. If President Joe Biden had done this, Hawley would have demanded a vote by this afternoon on Articles of Impeachment. He would have hosted a special tonight on Fox News.

Now, maybe not so much.

It turns out, according to the Post, sources are saying the deal Trump is working on with Xi would be hugely beneficial to Trump BFF Larry Ellison, “the billionaire co-founder of Oracle, a tech giant that will own a stake in the U.S. spin-off and provide it cloud-computing and technical services.”

Just can’t get wait to see Hawley teeing off in the Senate about this one.

In 2020, an Esquire writer aptly said, “The most dangerous place to stand in Washington D.C. is any place between Senator Josh Hawley and a live microphone.”

That was before we had a dictator.

Ray Hartmann writes on Substack at Ray Hartmann's Soapbox.

The Trump Achilles heel that threatens to damn world democracy

Could Trump’s weakness and the GOP’s cowardice mean the end of democracy around the world? Could his part in the Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell scandal be the proverbial horseshoe nail that brings down majority rule and representative government worldwide?

The world’s first modern major confrontation between authoritarianism (in this case, a kingdom) and democracy was the American Revolution in 1776. Outside of tribal societies, democracy had been largely dormant all over the world for the previous two thousand years, but we installed an early version of liberal democracy here in 1789.

Our first president, George Washington, not only fought the fascist forces of King George III, but he was also a fanatic proponent of democracy itself, to the point that he refused to serve a third term in office so as not to set a “king-like” precedent.

But 80 years later, America faced her second major confrontation with fascists who wanted to end our democracy and replace it with a strongman autocracy.

By the 1860s there were only a handful of democratic nations in the world when the second major war between democracy and fascism happened. The southern US states — taken over by morbidly rich plantation owners who ended democracy in the South by the mid-1850s — attacked the United States itself in an effort to end our democratic system.

But we had a fierce democracy advocate for president in Abraham Lincoln so, after almost 700,000 people died in the Civil War, we managed to preserve democracy in America and thus for much of the rest of the world.

Eighty years after that, America faced her third major war against fascist forces, this time the attack coming from Germany, Italy, Spain, and Japan. While America “only” lost an estimated 413,000 men and women in WWII, the blood price the world paid was far more massive as an estimated 75 to 80 million people perished in that conflict.

And here we are, exactly 80 years after the end of that war against fascism, and America again faces the test: will we defend and preserve democracy for ourselves and the world, or will we let the new Axis that’s forming this week in China take over the planet as Trump reshapes America into a police state and realigns us with the world’s fascist nations?

For the first time — in the fourth of these 80-year cycles of assaults against democracy — America has a president who openly and explicitly disdains the idea, embracing instead the world’s most notorious autocrats and their neofascist forms of government.

And, even if he was inclined to defend democracy, Trump is terribly weak and unpopular, which only adds to the danger that this time we could see a worldwide revolution against the form of government our Founders and Framers were willing to die to establish.

On Wednesday, as 10 of the victims of Trump’s “closest friend” Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell were telling their stories in front of the Capitol, Trump ordered a deafening fly-over by military jets, ostensibly to “honor” a Polish pilot. Many saw it as the president’s way of saying, “This is how much power I command; you’d better be quiet about me.”

Trump’s also threatening Congressional Republicans, with a White House source saying that anybody signing onto Ro Khanna and Tom Massey’s discharge petition (calling for the full release of the Epstein files and related info) were committing a “hostile act.”

House Speaker “Little Mike” Johnson piled on, telling the victims as he lied to their faces that he was committed to “transparency” and “justice” and then leaving the meeting to whip against the vote to release those very documents.

Putin’s clearly reading the tea leaves: he’s launched these past few days the largest, most massive, and most deadly air raids against Ukraine of the entire three-year war. Over 500 drones and two dozen ballistic missiles hit the democratic nation overnight Tuesday, most focusing on its energy grid.

Lev Parnas, once close to Trump, says this is the new Trump/Putin strategy: destroy Ukraine’s power grid and then, when winter sets in and people are freezing to death, Trump will swoop in and “negotiate peace” that screws Ukraine and gives Putin whatever he wants.

Meanwhile, China’s President Xi Jinping said on Wednesday — using code words that every diplomat in the world heard with ringing clarity — that he’s going to take Taiwan.

Xi stood with the presidents or rulers of Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Cambodia, Congo, Cuba, India, Indonesia, Iran, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Laos, Malaysia, Maldives, Mongolia, Myanmar, Nepal, Pakistan, Russia, Serbia, Slovakia, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Vietnam, and Zimbabwe. That’s a significant Axis to take on the Alliance of NATO and other democratic nations.

These world leaders know what appears obvious to most Americans: if Trump were innocent of participating in Epstein’s and Maxwell’s crimes he’d have made all the records public. The sustained ferocity of his coverup not only appears to demonstrate guilt, but also reflects the weakness he’s brought to the office with his long history of criminal and grifting behavior.

And that weakness may well be exactly what will motivate those fascist leaders to move soon to end the pesky democracies around the planet and, finally after 249 years, again make the world safe for autocrats.

So, what do we do?

In 1937, President Franklin D. Roosevelt said, in his “Quarantine Speech” calling for the democratic nations of the world to essentially quarantine the fascist nations:

“Without a declaration of war and without warning or justification of any kind, civilians, including vast numbers of women and children, are being ruthlessly murdered with bombs from the air. In times of so-called peace, ships are being attacked and sunk by submarines without cause or notice. Nations are fomenting and taking sides in civil warfare in nations that have never done them any harm. Nations claiming freedom for themselves deny it to others.

“Innocent peoples, innocent nations, are being cruelly sacrificed to a greed for power and supremacy which is devoid of all sense of justice and humane considerations.”

We are there again. Roosevelt wasn’t able to stop the inexorable metastasis of fascism across the planet that erupts every four generations, and now, 80 years later, Trump is unlikely to succeed at preventing another world war where FDR failed.

Nonetheless, we all need to do everything we can to restore decency and democracy to America — including exposing Trump’s crimes, so he can no longer be threatened or blackmailed by Putin, et al — and stand against this new Axis of Tyrants. There really is no other option.

Trump mocked as ultimate 'pick me girl' as snubs leave him reeling

President Donald J. Trump is reportedly reeling after he wasn't invited to a meeting and military parade with Russia, China, North Korea and India — and it's a tough moment for the ultimate "pick me girl," an analyst wrote Friday.

"The leaders of Russia, China, and North Korea are not good men," Tom Nichols wrote for The Atlantic. "They preside over brutal autocracies replete with secret police and prison camps. But they are, nevertheless, serious men, and they know an unserious man when they see one. For nearly a decade, they have taken Donald Trump’s measure, and they have clearly reached a conclusion: The president of the United States is not worthy of their respect."

America has been sidelined by these leaders amid Trump's tariff fallout, Nichols wrote, and in the wake of Trump's snub from Putin following an unsuccessful meeting in Alaska aimed to stop Russian attacks on Ukraine.

The military parade Wednesday in Beijing "is the most recent evidence that the world’s authoritarians consider Trump a lightweight," Nichols reported. "Russian President Vladimir Putin, Chinese President Xi Jinping, and North Korea’s maximum nepo baby, Kim Jong Un, gathered to celebrate the 80th anniversary of Japan’s surrender in World War II. (Putin’s Belarusian satrap, Alexander Lukashenko, was also on hand.)"

The leaders' move added insult to injury — and an act of defiance from the authoritarian leaders — after Trump's ill-advised meeting in August.

"When the Kremlin’s dictator shows up with no interest in negotiation, speaks first at a press conference, and then caps the day by declining a carefully planned lunch and flying home, that’s a humiliation, not an exchange of views," Nichols writes.

The administration and Pentagon appear to struggle with complex foreign relationships under Pete Hegseth's leadership, and though it was long believed that Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) would be "the adult in the room," he has "instead become a man in a Velcro suit," carrying out jobs and tasks stuck onto him by the president, according to the writer.

He added that the cracks in America's foreign diplomacy are starting to show.

"It has no coherent foreign policy, no team of senior professionals managing its national defense and diplomacy, and a president who has little interest in the world beyond what it can offer him," Nichols reported.

Trump has repeatedly expressed admiration for leaders like Xi, Putin, and Kim Jong Un and had a "little kid high school reaction" to not joining the group in China this week, Nichols wrote.

Modi was seen driving in Putin's limousine, a move signifying the two leaders coming together following Trump's tariffs, the New York Times reports.

The Trump administration slapped India with its highest tariff rate of 50%; a 25% baseline tariff, and an additional 25% secondary tariff as a penalty for its continued purchasing of Russian oil. Trump was reportedly “completely upset” with India over its refusal to halt its purchasing of Russian oil.

After the meeting, Trump posted on Truth Social that the relationship between India and Russia had frayed.

"Looks like we’ve lost India and Russia to deepest, darkest, China. May they have a long and prosperous future together!" Trump wrote.

Trump has pushed us to the brink of recession, fascism, and World War III

The headlines this week are wild: Trump is threatening nutso tariffs against America’s traditional trading partners (although none for Russia, of course), demanding that our allies proclaim their willingness to go to war with China, and — along with his billionaire buddies — looting our government while immiserating small business and the American middle class.

As a result, America stands today at an extraordinarily dangerous crossroads economically, politically, and geopolitically. We’re talking a second Republican Great Depression, fascism, and the very real possibility of a third world war.

As the Trump administration abandons manufacturing and building out America’s infrastructure in favor of financial speculation and deregulation, we’re hollowing out the very foundations of real wealth. Simultaneously, the GOP is doubling down on policies that have repeatedly crashed our economy, stripped support from working families, and handed more money and political power to the morbidly rich.

Now, with economic stagnation looming and international tensions escalating, Trump’s erratic and belligerent approach threatens not just recession but war. If Democrats and people who love America and democracy don’t find their voice — and fast — we may be sleepwalking not only into a massive economic disaster, but into a global conflict that could define the rest of this century or even bring about the end of western civilization.

There are a few basic principles that undergird this argument. I’ll walk through them here, building the case brick by brick, and ending with the most important task before us.

First, let’s get back to basics. There are only two primary ways to grow a nation’s wealth: by extracting resources from the earth or by manufacturing goods, adding value to those resources. Everything else — lawns getting mowed, nails getting done, stocks getting traded — may move money around or improve quality of life, but don’t grow the actual wealth of a nation.

For example, I wash your car and you mow my lawn. We exchange $20 bills. It’s nice, it’s neighborly, but it didn’t grow our nation’s economy at all.

Now, suppose you go into the ground and mine and refine iron ore, and I use some of it to make an ax. You’ve turned rocks into raw material. I’ve turned that into a tool that can build homes, cut timber, or create more tools.

That is real wealth creation. That ax becomes part of the wealth of our country; that’s what Adam Smith meant in The Wealth of Nations when he pointed out that economies grow when labor transforms nature into value, as I explained in detail on the Hartmann Report.

A third, indirect way to grow national wealth is through government investment in the infrastructure that supports those two main drivers. Roads, bridges, rail, and ports move goods. Broadband and schools cultivate talent. Green energy projects power the nation. Free college, health care, paid sick leave, and maternity leave make for a healthier, more well-educated, and thus more productive workforce. Strong regulation prevents scammers, monopolists, and fraudsters from distorting or hijacking markets.

Without these supports — especially when the bulk of national income is being siphoned off by the morbidly rich — productivity slows, innovation stalls, and economies become brittle. History is replete with examples of this type of collapse from ancient Rome to Europe stumbling into World Wars I and II.

The Democratic Party has largely understood this since the industrial revolution, as did the first Republican president, Abraham Lincoln, who oversaw construction of the transcontinental railroad and funded over 70 free “Land Grant” colleges like MSU across the nation.

From FDR through Truman, Kennedy, Johnson, Carter, Clinton, Obama, and Biden, Democratic presidents have consistently invested in the physical and human infrastructure that powers wealth creation. Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, the GI Bill, the WPA and CCC, the Clean Air and Water Acts, and most recently, the Inflation Reduction Act and CHIPS Act all fit this pattern.

Even Dwight Eisenhower, a Republican, got it, although he was his party’s modern exception. He built the Interstate Highway System and warned Americans against the possibility that the military-industrial complex could corrupt Congress. His vision was of a balanced, productive America, not one dominated by war profiteers and Wall Street gamblers.

But the Republican Party since the 1920s (with the exception of Eisenhower) has marched in the opposite direction. From Coolidge and Hoover to Reagan and Trump, they’ve pushed a different story: that government is the problem and taxes are theft. Reagan kicked off the insanity with his massive tax cuts and neoliberal rhetoric. He didn’t just demonize government; in 1983, he legalized stock buybacks, something previously considered felony criminal stock manipulation. This move transformed American corporations from engines of productivity into tools for enriching shareholders and executives.

This launched a massive shift in our economy. Financialization began to replace manufacturing as the central engine of growth. Instead of making things, our largest corporations became obsessed with gaming markets, flipping debt, and enriching insiders. Wall Street and monopolies (also allowed by changes Reagan made in our law) overtook and then devastated Main Street, and the real wealth of the nation thus started to stagnate.

At the same time, Republicans attacked the very institutions that supported productivity. They gutted unions, fought to privatize Social Security and Medicare with their “Advantage” scam, deregulated the banking and energy sectors, and worked tirelessly to cripple the regulatory state. When Obama created the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to prevent another financial crisis, for example, Republicans moved swiftly to kneecap it. Under Trump, they’ve largely succeeded.

Now Trump is back, and he’s doubling down on Reaganomics with a vengeance. He’s illegally refusing to release funds from Biden’s infrastructure and manufacturing initiatives. He’s gutting environmental and workplace protections. And he’s promoting speculative financial schemes like Bitcoin, an unregulated, easily manipulated asset class that benefits insiders like his children and wealthy friends.

Ten of the last 11 recessions occurred under Republican presidents. That’s not a coincidence. The Financial Times recently pointed out that today’s America under GOP leadership now resembles a country suffering from “Dutch disease,” a term coined when the Netherlands’ economy was distorted by a single natural resource boom.

Instead of natural gas, our export is debt and the dollar itself. Our economy has become addicted to issuing Treasury bonds while cutting taxes for the morbidly rich.

In a healthy economy, windfalls get invested in productivity: roads, R&D, education, healthcare for working people. In today’s GOP-run economy, however, they’re getting funneled into yachts, stock buybacks, and political influence. Economists call this the “voracity effect”; a dynamic where powerful groups extract so much from the economy that they ultimately destabilize and then crash it. It’s economic cancer.

Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill,” a $4 trillion giveaway to the wealthy, exemplified this perfectly. It wasn’t tax reform: it was looting.

But the biggest potential crisis is that this isn’t just bad economics: it’s dangerous geopolitics.

History shows that when working people lose access to opportunity and stability, populism and extremism rise. They demand scapegoats and embrace demagogues. In early 20th-century Europe, economic collapse and inequality paved the way for authoritarian regimes. The result was two world wars.

We’re now staring into the jaws of what political scientists call the Thucydides Trap: when a rising power (China) threatens a dominant one (the U.S.), and conflict becomes almost inevitable. Combine that with economic unrest, and it’s a recipe for disaster.

Trump is already stoking this fire.

According to the Financial Times, his administration is pressuring Japan and Australia to pledge support for a potential war over Taiwan. His undersecretary of defense, Elbridge Colby, is demanding troop commitments while simultaneously throwing U.S. alliances into chaos.

Worse, Trump is floating bizarre geoeconomic weapons: charging allied nations for access to U.S. financial markets, forcing them to buy long-term Treasury bonds, and tying military protection to economic tribute. He killed our main source of soft power, USAID, and has silenced the Voice of America.

This isn’t diplomacy: it’s shakedown politics dressed up as strategy. As the Financial Times reported, it’s part of Trump’s wider attempt to abandon cooperation in favor of coercion.

These are the hallmarks of an empire in decline, and that amplifies the danger of both domestic fascist takeover and a third world war.

When a nation abandons real wealth creation, concentrates power in a corrupt elite, abandons its public infrastructure, and pursues reckless foreign policy, the mass of people become outraged.

They rarely understand who did this to them — giving autocrats like Putin, Hitler, Orbán, and Trump the opportunity to assign blame to minorities and attack their political enemies — but they do know they’ve been screwed.

As public sentiment boils over and billionaire-owned media like Fox “News” and billionaire social media owners like Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk use invisible, secret algorithms to increase their own profits by promoting and amplifying raw hate and rage, the outcomes, as we’ve seen throughout history, are predictable:

Minority and political scapegoats are blamed.
Borders are militarized.
Political violence explodes.
Journalism gives way to propaganda.
Financial crashes trigger democratic backsliding in the name of “emergency measures.”
War looms.

This is the road Trump and his toadies in the GOP have put us on.

Trump is poisoning our economy while destabilizing international diplomacy. He just fired 1,200 career professionals from the State Department, crippling our ability to engage in diplomacy and maintain peace.

He’s wrecking the low-wage workforce and our food supplies through immigration crackdowns and ICE raids.

He’s slowing growth and destroying small businesses with tariffs and erratic trade policies.

All while planning to expand ICE into an unaccountable, masked, nationwide secret-police-style paramilitary force that is already being used to suppress dissent and attack Democratic politicians, while it continues to terrorize immigrant communities.

Democrats and people of conscience must do more than hope the courts will stop this; the courts will not save us. We must speak out with moral clarity, economic fluency, and relentless courage.

We must call this what it is: a full-scale assault on our economy, our democracy, and the world order that’s prevented a third world war for nearly 80 years.

We must make it clear that Biden’s investments were beginning to rebuild our productive base, and Trump is trying to salt the earth.

And we must act. Talk to your neighbors. Write letters. Post on social media. Show up to town halls. Demand that your representatives speak the truth.

If we don’t, the noise machine on the right will define the narrative. If we wait, it may be too late. July 17th will be another huge opportunity; please show up.

The 2026 midterms aren’t just another election, and neither are the hundreds of state and local off-year and special elections that’ll be happening this year. They may be our last chance to change course.

We could lose more than our democracy. We could lose the very idea of America and, with it, the peaceful world we’ve anchored since 1945.

Tag, we’re it.

'Lay off the links!' Critics roast 'TACO' Trump over flailing trade blitz

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent went back and forth with CNN's Dana Bash on Monday over whether President Donald Trump made the "90 deals in 90 days" he promised.

Trump had paused his tariffs for 90 days, during which he was supposed to negotiate with China, the United Kingdom, Canada, and other countries. But with just a couple of days to go, "The majority of those deals did not materialize, except for a handful of exceptions," CNN reported.

Critics on social media expressed dismay at the lack of progress, although they didn't seem surprised.

Political commentator Cyrus Janssen posted to X, "If you want to understand how big Trump's tariff war has failed, just look at what's now being reported. In April, Trump proudly boasted that 'everybody wants to make a deal' and it was possible for 90 deals in 90 days. The reality? Over 100 countries didn't even bother to contact Trump and discuss, now Trump and his team are threatening tariffs again. Seriously, are we going to go through all this nonsense again just to see Trump serve TACOs and reverse his tariffs like he did with China in less than 30 days?"

@Andie00471 wrote, "By my count we have an absurd deal with the UK, actual tariffs on Canada & Mexico, concepts of a plan with China, a few auto specific tariffs and JACK S--- with the rest of the world. The TACO King may want to lay off the links and do some actual negotiating because the clock is ticking."

TACO refers to the unflattering moniker, "Trump Always Chickens Out" on trade deals.

Financier @SpencerHakimian wrote, "BESSENT: 100 COUNTRIES WILL GET 10% RECIPROCAL TARIFF. So basically, you guys accomplished absolutely nothing in your 90 day negotiation window and now we all have to pay a 10% tax for your stupidity?"

Self-professed RINO @MikeBates wrote, "In April Trump claimed his phone was burning up with calls about tariffs: 'Every country is calling and being very solicitous, very, very nice.' Trump’s Treasury secretary Bessent today: 'Many of these countries never even contacted us.' So who’s lying?"

Watch the clip below via CNN.

'Technically world war': UK's ex-foreign secretary gives ominous Trump warning

A third world war could soon “technically” come to pass if Donald Trump’s presence in the White House encourages China to attack Taiwan, a former UK Foreign Secretary said.

“To me, there is a very dangerous scenario in which [Russian President Vladimir] Putin gets something he can describe as a win in Ukraine and China thinks that they will have a crack at Taiwan while Trump is still president, because they don't think in a month of Sundays he would actually send American troops to defend Taiwan,” Jeremy Hunt said.

“If that happened, it would potentially be technically a world war, because you could have conflict in Europe and in Asia at the same time, with a whole set of alliances behind Ukraine and Taiwan and another set of alliances behind China and Russia.”

Trump has long opposed US aid to Ukraine in its fight against Russian invaders. Amid widespread speculation about the US president’s apparent closeness to Putin, Trump has also failed to deliver on campaign trail promises to swiftly end the war.

Trump's commitment to Taiwan, long close to the U.S., has long been questioned. U.S. intelligence reportedly believes Chinese president Xi Jinping has told generals to be ready to invade the self-governing island by 2027.

Hunt was speaking to the One Decision podcast, hosted by Kate McCann, a reporter, and Sir Richard Dearlove, a former head of the British intelligence service MI6.

Hunt, a Conservative, was foreign secretary from July 2018 to July 2019, while Trump was first in the White House. From October 2022 to July 2024, Hunt was chancellor of the exchequer. Though his party is now out of power, he remains an MP.

On One Decision, Dearlove described Trump’s “achievement” in “bully[ing] the Europeans, particularly Germany” to “up their defense spending” in the face of Russia’s growing threat.

Though Hunt agreed with Dearlove that Trump was “a problem solver” on issues such as immigration, he said he “profoundly disagree[d] with [Trump on] Ukraine.”

Describing a liking for playing “fantasy politics,” about what he would do were he still in office, Hunt said: “It's very clear that Trump doesn't want to defend Europe, and doesn't doesn't believe it's his job to defend Europe, but we know that we cannot defend ourselves because we're totally dependent on the US military presence in Europe and Ukraine is completely dependent on US military support.

“So therefore the most important thing is to play for time, because what would be catastrophic is an immediate American withdrawal of support. We could perhaps cope if they withdrew it in five or 10 years time, while we ramp up our own defensive capabilities.

“But the most important thing is, therefore, not to do anything that provokes an immediate withdrawal. And I just wonder if that's the reason why, when Trump started his 'Liberation Day' trade war, the EU was uncharacteristically emollient to America compared to China, which immediately slapped on retaliatory tariffs.”

Hunt also described a “cloak and dagger meeting” he had while foreign secretary with the late Oleg Gordievski, who he called “probably the greatest spy of the Cold War.”

“He was briefly KGB station chief in London,” Hunt said, “and he was spying for us during that period, and I went to meet him, and the thing he said to me which really stuck in my mind, was this thing that the only thing that Putin respects is strength.

“So I think from our point of view, we absolutely do need to show that we're serious about our military capabilities, and we don't tempt him to think, ‘Maybe I could make a play for Estonia while NATO is in chaos.’”

Hunt also described consultations with Henry Kissinger, in which the late US Secretary of State and National Security Adviser warned of a scenario very like the one Hunt said could lead to “technical” world war.

“Kissinger said to me that when Ukraine was invaded, some very senior people in the Communist Party leadership in China thought the West was trying to provoke an invasion of Taiwan,” Hunt said, “… because they thought we wanted to sanction China like we were sanctioning Russia.”

That, Hunt said, was “absolute nonsense.”

“But Russia is the worst for conspiracy theories. I mean, Putin, I think there is a side to him that thinks that … the West is out to get him, and attack is the best form of defense. And so I think you have to balance ramping up your strength with enough dialogue to make sure you don't have misunderstandings that lead to war.”

GOP senator admits he has 'minimal evidence' to support right-wing conspiracy

Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) was forced to admit Friday on "The Benny Show" that he had little evidence to support a right-wing theory that the Chinese government conspired to interfere in the 2020 election — and then blamed Joe Biden for a cover-up.

To introduce the topic, MAGA podcaster Benny Johnson said Congress had "credible whistleblowers" showing the Chinese government was trying to "put fake IDs into the system here, in this country in order to rig the mail-in balloting process, which makes a ton of sense to us knowing how loose those systems and securities were."

He continued, "The border patrol were able to nab 20,000 fake ballots that were printed for Chinese nationals trying to smuggle across our border...and now we have Chinese students voting illegally in the 2024 election — they're being charged. So, this really does stand to reason — can you explain, like, the evidence that you have right now for this scheme?"

"Well, in terms of the evidence I have, it's pretty minimal," Ron Johnson admitted. He then pivoted to attack Biden.

"You've had four years of the Biden administration being able to cover this stuff up. If they found evidence themselves they probably destroyed it," Ron Johnson claimed. "You got people not talking, getting the story straight. So, it's always difficult to prove criminal activity beyond a reasonable doubt because criminals cover up their activity.

"So, this is not easy to do. What you can do is, you can find threads and you gotta pull on those threads to see if there's more documentation, more evidence. But, again, just don't expect some bombshell revelation that provides you all the information, all the receipts, all the evidence you need to convict people. That's not how these investigations work."

Earlier this month, the Justice Department announced it filed a criminal complaint charging one University of Michigan student, Haoxiang Gao, who was "a citizen and national of the People’s Republic of China, with false claims to register or vote and voting by aliens."

The news release also took a swipe at Biden.

Gao surrendered his passport, the release said, "but on January 19, 2025—the day before the new administration took office in Washington—Gao jumped bond and fled the country on a flight bound for Shanghai, China."

Watch The Benny Show clip below.