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Andy Borowitz | Trump Defends Lawsuits: "No One Knows More About Fraud Than Me"
Andy Borowitz, The New Yorker
Borowitz writes: "Donald J. Trump offered a full-throated defense of his election-related lawsuits on Thursday, arguing, 'No one knows more about fraud than me.'"
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President-elect Joe Biden. (photo: Jim Watson/Getty Images)
Biden Wins, but Now the Hard Part Begins
Ryan Grim and Akela Lacy, The Intercept
Excerpt: "With Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan now squarely in Joe Biden's corner, the former vice president has secured the 270 Electoral College votes he needs to win the presidential election."
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Vice-president-elect Kamala Harris. (photo: Mason Trinca/Getty)
Kamala Harris Becomes First Black Woman, South Asian Elected VP
Kathleen Ronayne, Associated Press
Ronayne writes: "Kamala Harris made history Saturday as the first Black woman elected as vice president of the United States, shattering barriers that have kept men - almost all of them white - entrenched at the highest levels of American politics for more than two centuries."
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Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. (photo: Getty Images)
What Democrats Should Learn From the Spate of Socialist Wins on Election Day
Mindy Isser, In These Times
Isser writes: "While many had hoped that Election Day would result in a sweeping rebuke of Trump and Trumpism, neither a pandemic nor an economic recession were enough to deliver an overwhelming rejection."
It’s not enough to be anti-Trump. Socialists are showing you can win elections by standing for something.
And although it’s looking likely that Biden will eke out a victory, the 2020 election was in many ways a bust for the Democratic Party, which lost seats in the House and most likely did not win a majority in the Senate.
But democratic socialism, popularized by near-presidential nominee Bernie Sanders (I‑Vt.), had a much better night. The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), an organization that boasts nearly 80,000 members nationwide, endorsed 29 candidates and 11 ballot initiatives, winning 20 and 8 respectively. There are now democratic socialist caucuses in 15 statehouses, including Montana. (Disclosure: I am a nationally elected leader of the organization; I sit on the Democratic Socialist Labor Commission.)
DSA’s victories, both in the primaries and the general election, have rolled in as pundits and pollsters decry socialism as polarizing and raise fears that socialist candidates will end up backfiring and getting Republicans elected. Sanders’ supposed lack of electability was one of the most commonly used arguments against him in the primary. His primary opponents and prominent writers like Jonathan Chait claimed that the vast majority of Americans wouldn’t vote for a socialist, and that there was no way he could defeat Trump.
While there’s no real way to know for certain if that’s true, it is clear that centrist Democrats aren’t necessarily shoo-ins themselves. Democrat Jon Ossoff, who lost a congressional special election in 2017, looks like he will also lose this cycle’s Senate race in Georgia. Democrat Sara Gideon, who raised $70 million to run against Republican Senator Susan Collins in Maine, has conceded, and it looks like Democrat Cal Cunningham will also lose his run for Senate in North Carolina. Amy McGrath, who ran as a pro-Trump Democrat, raised nearly $90 million and still lost to Republican Senator Mitch McConnell. The list goes on and on. Even Joe Biden, who seems set to be our next president, often spoke more about beating Trump than any policies he would enact once in office.
Plenty of progressive candidates also lost, but most candidates nationally endorsed by DSA sailed through. And while it’s true that many of them had tough primary battles and less difficult elections on Tuesday, they still won as DSA members. All four members of “The Squad” — a progressive bloc in Congress that includes Democratic Reps. Rashida Tlaib (Mich.), Ilhan Omar (Minn.), Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (N.Y.) and Ayanna Pressley (Mass.) — were reelected to the House. (Tlaib and Ocasio-Cortez are DSA members and endorsed by the organization.) Progressives also added two more DSA-endorsed members to their squad: Democratic Rep.-elect Jamaal Bowman in New York, and Democratic Rep.-elect Cori Bush, the first ever Black Congresswoman in Missouri.
Although the current iteration of DSA has been around since the early 1980s, the organization only became politically relevant during Sanders’ first presidential campaign in 2015, and exploded when Trump was elected. Five years is a very short period of time to have helped elect City Council members, state senators and representatives, and members of Congress all across the country. According to a 2018 Reuters survey, 70% of Americans support a national health care plan — due to Sanders’ popularization of the universal healthcare program and to the organizing and canvassing DSA chapters, along with other organizations like National Nurses United, have done around the legislation.
DSA-backed candidates succeed for a few main reasons: They campaign on actual policies, have a vision of how to govern, and don’t just depend on the fact that they’re not Republicans. These policies include Medicare for All, a Green New Deal and a Jobs Guarantee — programs that would improve the quality of life for working people all over this country. And because policies they support are so popular and inspiring, DSA-backed candidates attract dedicated canvassers and organizers, willing to spend nights and weekends knocking doors and making calls to get them elected.
Now, thanks to DSA members across the country, there is a socialist in Austin City Council and in both the Rhode Island and Montana State Houses. In Pennsylvania, there are three socialists who are almost certainly headed to the legislature in Harrisburg. Socialists in Boulder, Colorado worked alongside the ACLU to win a ballot measure that guarantees no eviction without representation, and DSA members partnered with the labor unions AFSCME and SEIU to pass Preschool for All in Multnomah County, Oregon. And in both Florida and Portland, Maine, ballot initiatives for a $15 minimum wage passed.
While it’s clear that most DSA victories have been in big cities or more liberal states thus far, it’s important that we don’t discount the incredible organizing happening in the South and in rural areas. (Marquita Bradshaw ran a DSA-backed campaign for Senate in Tennessee but lost; Kim Roney, endorsed by her DSA chapter, won a seat on the Asheville City Council.)
And while the Democratic party is loath to give DSA any encouragement, DSA member Tlaib may have helped to secure Biden’s victory in Michigan by helping to massively increase voter turnout from 2016. DSA’s ideology, focused on a society that works for all of us instead of the wealthy few, is far more inspiring to young and working people than someone who is running for office just because they’re not Trump. It might take the Democratic Party time to realize that (or perhaps it never will), but to the average person, political conditions are changing fast — and DSA is playing a critical role in that transformation.
Immigrant children in a detention center. (photo: Ross D. Franklin)
The Origins of an Early School-to-Deportation Pipeline
Ivon Padilla-RodrÃguez, NACLA
Padilla-RodrÃguez writes: "In May 17, 1972, Border Patrol agents in Guadalupe, California detained an undocumented Mexican worker and expeditiously scheduled him for 'departure' from the United States."
Appeals to childhood innocence helped enshrine undocumented kids’ access to education. But this fraught politics of childhood has also inadvertently reinforced criminalization.
His deportation order for May 19 came just one day before a public meeting on the issue of discrimination in the Guadalupe Union School District. It was a case of state-sponsored retaliation. He had been fired from his job of more than two years at a local dairy farm and apprehended by federal immigration authorities for protesting insidious practices in the administration of a program for migrant students and demanding that his two children be provided a safe, non-discriminatory schooling environment.
The implementation in 1965 of the Migrant Education Program (MEP), a federal education policy aimed at ensuring access to quality schooling for the children of migrant workers, had created a little-known data collection technology that stored intelligence that could be used to quickly locate migrant students’ families. Despite its originally good intentions, the MEP ended up producing novel forms of precarity for the growing numbers of undocumented children and parents that ended up in U.S. public schools in the 1970s.
This late-20th century data collection helped to transform schools into early school-to-deportation pipelines. Debates around migrant children revealed that the politics of childhood can be wielded for vastly different ends—ranging from humanitarian to punitive—in a single moment in time, a phenomenon that continues to have reverberations today. Divergent conceptions about migrant minors exposed the extreme malleability of childhood innocence and, ultimately, its racial exclusivity.
Even though the majority of Latin American immigrants to the United States during the 1970s were adult males, children increasingly migrated or were brought north in search of family unity, educational opportunities, work, and safety after 1965. The termination of the guestworker Bracero Program and the passage of the 1965 Hart-Celler Act severely limited the availability of lawful avenues for migration, causing millions of Mexican adults and children to enter the United States without authorization. In fact, it was during the ‘70s and ‘80s that immigration authorities started to immediately incarcerate unaccompanied minors in immigrant detention centers and jails.
At the time, the educational enrollments of undocumented children, which was estimated to be at least 40,000 in California and anywhere between 20,000 to 120,000 in Texas, inspired deeply contradictory responses from U.S. citizens, local child welfare advocates, and liberal policymakers.
In 1966, for example, a private U.S. citizen wrote to the California Department of Education to denounce the MEP because he alleged it represented a “multi-million dollar fraudulent scheme” imposed on U.S. taxpayers for the benefit of “Mexican aliens.” He attached significant culpability for this “fraud” to undocumented Mexican youth, whom he claimed belonged to a criminal organization called the “M.A.F.I.A.,” which stood for “Mexican-American Fraud in America.” This kind of xenophobia was rooted in the longstanding racialization of the invading “wetback,” which extended to minors and didn’t even spare infants.
When directed at children, this anti-immigrant vitriol denied minors the privilege of childhood innocence and instead portrayed them as menacing and inherently criminal. They were treated not as defenseless kids but as young people more akin to adults. Depicted in this way, migrant youth become seen as capable of committing fraud to gain entry to the nation and as serious threats to its society and social safety net.
Unlike the immigration opponents behind such fraud claims, the grassroots advocates and teachers who conceived of the MEP viewed migrant youth with and without U.S. citizenship in entirely different terms. Migrant education advocates sentimentalized childhood as inherently innocent. They believed adults had a moral responsibility to shelter defenseless kids from the adult worlds of work and punishment by ensuring migrant children could safely remain in schools—an early version of sorts of the #SchoolsNotPrisons movement.
Good Intentions Take a Nefarious Turn
The well-intentioned teachers and child welfare advocates who rejected the criminalization of migrant youth wrapped their advocacy in a race-neutral politics of childhood and successfully lobbied Congress to include the MEP in Lyndon B. Johnson’s War on Poverty. They cited migrants’ status as “the most educationally deprived group of children in our nation” and the need to restore their sense of an “active childhood.”
What grassroots education advocates did not anticipate, however, was that the MEP’s introduction of a unique computerized data collection technology in primary and secondary education would be refashioned for nefarious purposes. This federal data bank, known as the Migrant Student Record Transfer System (MSRTS), stored personal data about migrant youth and their parents, including birthplaces, home addresses, migration patterns, and medical and academic histories, on a central computer with no clear or enforceable procedures to protect migrants’ privacy.
MSRTS data collection was weaponized to surveil migrant children and their undocumented parents, whom education authorities saw in racial stereotypes that marked them as violent. A 1973 U.S. Commission on Civil Rights report revealed that some California schools, for example, refused migrant children forks at lunch and explained this policy by asking, “How can you expect children to use forks if they use tortillas at home? And they’d just use them to stab one another.” These fears helped justify school administrators’ advice for counselors to “share [their] complaints with police and welfare agencies.” In fact, internal policy memos of the California Department of Education’s legal office allowed for the transfer of MSRTS files, specifically, to law enforcement.
Deploying the Politics of Childhood Innocence
When noncitizen parents and their children challenged the injurious practices of the MEP, they found themselves threatened with detention and deportation, like the father in Guadalupe. Depositions for educational litigation also revealed administrators’ commitment to calling the Border Patrol when school files revealed a child’s undocumented legal status.
In the ‘70s and ‘80s, undocumented children in California and Texas challenged their unconstitutional school expulsions and schools’ transformation into deportation pipelines in state and federal courts. This legal advocacy culminated in the 1975 Maria v. Riles case, which invalidated California’s mandatory reporting laws, and the 1982 Supreme Court decision in Plyler v. Doe, which struck down the Texas law that expelled undocumented youth from schools.
The lawyers in Plyler developed arguments rooted in the politics of childhood to build a sympathetic defense against undocumented pupils’ educational deprivation and public schools’ transformation into sites of immigration enforcement. According to attorney correspondence, the trial strategy relied on the portrayal of “a warm picture of innocent human beings.” The plaintiffs’ young ages and the prevailing conception of childhood as fundamentally innocent, their lawyers hoped, would convince the Supreme Court that the undocumented children were “without fault” for their family’s irregular immigration status and their supposed abuse of U.S. social institutions.
This line of reasoning worked. Justice William J. Brennan’s Equal Protection analysis relied on the notion that undocumented youth were “innocent children” who could not “affect their parents’ conduct nor their own status.” Even though this presumption of childhood innocence has had the effect of preserving noncitizen children’s right to an education into the present day, it also helped to cement the idea that undocumented parents’ conduct was criminal. The “warm” portrayal of “innocent” school children succeeded in institutionalizing children’s role as rights-bearers at the expense of their adult parents.
The weaponization of childhood innocence to indict migrant parents’ brave and difficult decision-making has had far-reaching consequences. The 2018 “zero-tolerance policy” that separated children from their families by prosecuting parents for illegal entry was rooted in the notion that parents’ conduct was undeniably criminal.
To this day, migrant children’s access to the politics of childhood innocence is far from guaranteed. Plyler’s endorsement of undocumented young people’s innocence did not eradicate school-to-deportation pipelines, nor did it shield asylum-seeking children from immediate criminalization in immigrant detention, which reached unprecedented levels of apprehensions and violence in recent years.
The history of the school-to-deportation pipeline lays bare the double-edged sword that is the politics of childhood innocence. But understanding this history does more than expose xenophobes’ attitudes about border-crossing minors. It also suggests that contemporary immigration policies that rely on injuries to child or family welfare are not aberrations, but part of a much longer history of child migration. Rhetoric about childhood innocence requires close scrutiny, because its consequences can be just as insidious as that of the explicit criminalization of migrant childhood, and yet far more likely to fly under the radar.
The aftermath of an airstrike in Yemen. (photo: Khaled Abdullah/Reuters)
Donald Trump in the Middle East: A Story of Big Winners and Bigger Losers
Oscar Rickett, Middle East Eye
Rickett writes: "On Sunday 21 May 2017, four months after he was inaugurated as US president, Donald Trump entered a darkened room at the Global Centre for Combatting Extremist Ideology in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia."
The outgoing president's erratic behaviour and penchant for dictators leaves the region in a worse state than when he first came to power
There, Trump, with his wife Melania looking on, stood alongside his host King Salman and Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, placed his hands on a glowing orb mounted atop a pedestal, then looked out at the assembled media.
The photo of this moment, tweeted by the Saudi embassy in the United States, captured the global imagination. Here was the new leader of what was still the world’s most powerful country, in a chamber full of computers, surrounded by darkness and accompanied by two strongmen of the Middle East, appearing to draw some kind of ungodly power from a mysterious spheroid.
Opening this centre for “combatting extremist ideology”, the new president heralded a “clear declaration that Muslim-majority countries must take the lead in combating radicalisation, and I want to express our gratitude to King Salman for this strong demonstration of leadership”.
There were two Trump fixations lurking behind this statement: a belief that, as he put it in March 2016, “Islam hates us”; and a conviction that it was high time that America’s allies did the work they had previously outsourced to the US.
Domestically, the Islamophobic nature of his administration had been confirmed in Trump’s first week of office, with the signing of Executive Order 13769, commonly known as the “Muslim ban”, which suspended entry to the US from a slew of Muslim-majority countries. Before becoming president, Trump said in November 2015 that he would “certainly implement” a database to track Muslims in the US, and had expressed agreement with a supporter at a 2015 rally in New Hampshire who told him, “We have a problem in this country; it’s called Muslims.”
In Riyadh, it turned out the glowing orb was just a translucent globe – nothing more than a prop. But this was Trump’s first foreign trip - and everything was laden with symbolism.
Beginning in Saudi Arabia, he later went on to Israel, where he descended the plane to a red carpet and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who clasped him by the arm and repeated the line: “Welcome my good friend.” Trump later visited the Western Wall, becoming the first sitting US president to do so. He told a press conference that it was time Iran stopped their “deadly funding” of “terrorists and militias”.
These moments turned out to be significant. They are worth consideration now that Trump will be replaced as president by Joe Biden, his Democrat opponent.
Trump and the ties that bind
At the time of writing, this transition looks unlikely to be smooth. Congress is set to be controlled by the Democrats, while the Senate will likely be held by the Republicans. The next US administration may not find itself with much room for manoeuvre. Trump - and Trumpism - has not been given the shellacking many liberals hoped for. Both the man and the ideology are here to stay, with the deep divisions the US faces domestically impacting on its flailing performance abroad.
The foreign policy positions taken by the White House during the last four years may not easily be undone. It is also worth noting that Biden, the embodiment of a Democratic establishment that saw the systemic change offered by Bernie Sanders as just as dangerous as Trump, may have no real desire to undo them.
Those positions have been most steadfast when it comes to Saudi Arabia and Israel. During Trump’s time in office, these two allies - already lavishly assisted by Washington - have received more diplomatic and political support from the US than any other states. This backing has existed alongside the personal championing of Netanyahu and Mohammed bin Salman, the self-proclaimed modernising crown prince of Saudi Arabia, who has been directly linked to a number of human rights abuses, including the killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi.
That championing is reciprocated, and if there is anything that has defined a seemingly erratic American foreign policy under this president, then it is Trump’s mercantile fondness for strongmen he can do business with; leaders and nations whose ravenous self-interest makes cutting a deal possible.
More significantly, the president has been akin to a puppet or useful idiot for a series of foreign policy advisers, whose views were previously deemed extreme even by Washington’s standards, a leader often led by whoever is talking loudly in his ear. Trump would tire of these advisers after a while (or they would tire of him). Then they would leave the White House to write a book about what an idiot their boss was, usually laundering their reputation in the process.
Hostility towards Iran, aggressive championing of Israel, a selective interest in democracy, and a fondness for absolute rulers you could do business with have always been features of US foreign policy. But as with so many things during the Trump presidency, those features were distorted into their most severe form, with the usual victims – Palestinians, leftists, democracy advocates, Muslims – in a far worse position at the end of his term than they were four years ago.
Trump's road to the White House
For decades before he became president, Trump was a famous man who liked the sound of his own voice. This was compounded by the nature of his celebrity, which meant he was often asked about whether he was going to run for president, as well as his views on this or that policy.
It is probably fair to say that before he became US president in 2017, this son of a New York real estate millionaire, who spent as much time in front of the camera as he could, had never given much thought to the question of peace in the Middle East.
But it’s also true that here was a man with a set of very distinct feelings and prejudices, who viewed life as a struggle for dominance and who valued the art of the deal above all else.
When it came to the world at large, a common theme Trump returned to during his decades as a real estate celebrity and reality TV star was that countries which enjoyed some form of US military protection were not paying their way, that they were leeches and that American political leaders were being taken for suckers.
It’s a theme that continued into his campaign to become president and which has been present particularly in his stance towards Nato, whose fellow members he believes are subsidised by the US.
In September 1987, Trump took out full-page adverts - branded “an open letter from Donald J Trump” - in several major American newspapers. “Make Japan, Saudi Arabia, and others pay for the protection we extend as allies,” said the advert, which cost Trump $94,801. In TV interviews, he added Kuwait to the list. Trump urged the US to “tax these wealthy nations”, relieving itself of the “cost of defending those who can easily afford to pay us for the defence of their freedom”.
Trump is known to be over-sensitive. The open letter concluded: “Let’s not let our great country be laughed at anymore.”
Saudi Arabia: Money matters
By the time Donald J Trump hit the presidential campaign trail in 2015, his stance on Saudi Arabia appeared to have changed. While countries like Germany and other members of the North Atlantic alliance were still deemed freeloaders, the Gulf kingdom was a well from which to drink deeply. “Saudi Arabia - and I get along great with all of them,” he said at one of his rallies in 2015. “They buy apartments from me. They spend $40 million, $50 million. Am I supposed to dislike them? I like them very much.”
In essence, this approach to Saudi Arabia changed little once Trump became president. On that first foreign trip as US leader, he and his family delighted at being ferried around in gold golf carts, and attending a $75m party thrown in his honour, complete with a throne for him to sit on. For a man whose main residence in Manhattan is a palace of brass and chintz, situated in a tower bearing his own name, Trump was at home in the Gulf.
With his son-in-law and adviser Jared Kushner hitting it off with Mohammed bin Salman, who was made crown prince in June 2017 and became the kingdom’s de facto leader, Trump doubled down on an alliance that had been slowly weakening since the turn of the 21st century.
Barack Obama, Trump’s predecessor, had told the Saudis to stop amplifying “external threats” and signed the nuclear deal with Iran. Trump pulled out of the deal in May 2018.
Influenced by a string of virulently anti-Iranian advisers from Michael Flynn to Jim Mattis (who reportedly referred to the “idiot raghead mullahs” ruling the Islamic Republic) to Mike Pompeo to John Bolton, who had made regime change in Iran his life’s work, Trump amplified the threat from Tehran, imposing crippling sanctions, sending troops to the Persian Gulf and, in January 2020, ordering the killing of top Iranian general Qassem Soleimani.
The assassination of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi in October 2018, which the CIA eventually linked back to bin Salman, provoked bi-partisan outrage in Washington. Trump was called on to take action against the errant crown prince: none was taken. “I saved his ass,” the president said of MBS in January 2020, according to Bob Woodward. “I was able to get Congress to leave him alone. I was able to get them to stop.”
While Trump, and particularly Kushner, clearly liked MBS personally, the real reason for their support was money, and the president’s mercantile view of the world. The Saudi crown prince promised investment and he promised more money for American weapons.
In March 2018, five months before Khashoggi’s murder, bin Salman sat next to Trump in the Oval Office while the president held up a chart that read, “12.5 billion in finalised sales to Saudi Arabia,” illustrated by pictures of US arms bought by the kingdom.
At a press conference in Japan in June 2019, eight months after the assassination of the Saudi journalist, Trump referred to bin Salman as “a great friend of mine”, a man who had “done things in the last five years in terms of opening up Saudi Arabia… especially for women”. What was happening in the Gulf kingdom was, Trump said, “like a revolution in a very positive way”. Asked more than once about Khashoggi, Trump dodged the question.
A couple of months earlier, in April 2019, Trump had vetoed a bipartisan resolution to end American military involvement in Saudi Arabia’s war in Yemen.
Israel: Moving ever further to the right
The president’s support for Israel’s right-wing, led by Netanyahu, has, if anything, been more extreme than that for Saudi Arabia. On the campaign trail in March 2016, Trump told CNN that he was “very pro-Israel”, boasting about the donations he had made to the country and the awards he had received there.
His business interests in Israel prior to becoming president seemed to amount to not much more than a planned Trump Tower and a brand of vodka that was somewhat popular with the ultra-Orthodox community at Passover but deemed undrinkable by almost everyone else.
As for the Palestinians, Trump said that he would “love to be neutral”, but that it was hard because they were inflicting too much terror. “They have to stop with the terror because what they’re doing with the missiles and with the stabbings and with all of the other things they do, it’s horrible and it’s got to end,” he said in March 2016, repeating a view that is hardly uncommon among many Americans, namely that Palestinians are defined by their “terrorism”.
It’s worth noting that at this early stage, there were plenty of American commentators who deemed even this kind of rhetoric not sufficiently pro-Israel, with one CNN pundit noting Trump’s “unusually objective language on Israel” and pointing out that at that time, the Republican candidate had “initially dodged a question on the possibility of moving the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem”.
The wind was only blowing in one direction though. Sheldon Adelson, a strident Zionist whose longstanding dream was to see the embassy move to Jerusalem, eventually put tens of millions of dollars into Trump’s 2016 campaign (he put even more into the 2020 one). It was clear that the Republican nominee would most likely take a strongly pro-Israeli position should he become president.
Always a man comforted by the presence of familiar faces, Trump’s Middle East policy was defined by his son-in-law Jared Kushner and by two former Trump Organisation employees: the bankruptcy lawyer David Friedman and the real estate lawyer Jason Greenblatt.
Friedman, who became the US ambassador to Israel, was a supporter and donor to illegal settlements on occupied Palestinian land. The son of a conservative rabbi, he had helped raise about $2m in tax-deductible donations each year from supporters of the settlement movement – including the Kushner family - through an organisation called American Friends of Beit El Institutions.
Greenblatt, who had worked for Trump since 1997, was catapulted into the role of special representative for international negotiations, becoming one of the chief architects of Trump’s Middle East peace plan - the so-called “deal of the century” – which was rejected unanimously by the Palestinians. An advocate for illegal West Bank settlements, in November 2016 Greenblatt declared that they were “not an obstacle to peace”, and that he preferred them to be referred to as “neighbourhoods”.
With Kushner also a family friend of Netanyahu’s, the odds were stacked heavily against the Palestinians: a 2017 Trump administration document stated that “Israel is not the cause of the region’s problems” and that “jihadist terrorist organisations” were the only thing standing in the way of peace.
In October 2019, Trump broadened his regular attacks on Somalia-born congresswoman Ilhan Omar, an “America-hating socialist”, into a general broadside at the Somali community in Minnesota, telling a rally that he would “give local communities a greater say in refugee policy and put in place enhanced vetting and responsible immigration controls”. In March 2019, a gunman who cited Trump as “a symbol of renewed white identity and common purpose” killed 51 people at mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand.
The 2017 national security document was followed by a slew of moves in support of Netanyahu and Israel’s nationalist right-wing. In February of that year, the US dropped its longstanding commitment to a two-state solution after Trump met with Netanyahu. In December 2017, Washington announced that it would move its embassy in Israel to Jerusalem.
When the move came in May 2018, Adelson, who had offered to fund it, wept tears of joy: on that same day, more than 60 Palestinians were killed by Israeli forces in a single day (some later died from their injuries) as they protested their right to return to ancestral homes.
This was four months after the Trump White House announced that it was cutting half its planned funding to UNRWA, the UN agency for Palestinian refugees. Before the year was out, the rest of the funding had been cut as well, as the US declared the agency an “irredeemably flawed operation”.
The Middle East at its worst
When it was released in January 2020, Trump’s Middle East peace plan was even worse than his many detractors had feared.
It accepted Israeli calls to annex the Jordan Valley and Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank. It called for Jerusalem to become Israel’s undivided capital. It said that a Palestinian state could only happen when the Palestinian leadership wholly accepted Israel's new borders, disarmed completely, removed Hamas from power in Gaza and agreed to Israeli security oversight across all of its territories until a point in the future deemed ripe for withdrawal. There was much more, none of it good for the Palestinians, who unanimously rejected the deal.
This plan for peace was then followed by normalisation agreements between Israel and the UAE, then between Israel and Bahrain. Sudan, crippled by US sanctions for years, has had its revolution rewarded by having a gun stuck to its head: sign a normalisation deal with Israel or else stay on the US terrorist list. It chose the former, to much crowing from Trump and Kushner.
Other Arab nations may well follow: Kushner was quick to celebrate how he and his father-in-law broke down the decades-long solidarity between those nations when it came to Palestine. Once, there was no peace with Israel without some justice for Palestine.
That accord has been bludgeoned to the ground by a new regional order headed by Netanyahu and the Gulf kingdoms of Saudi Arabia and the UAE, from where Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed wields considerable influence over both Trump and Mohammed bin Salman.
In Egypt, President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, another strongman, has been dubbed a “killer” by Trump.
This is a word used by the president both literally and as a mark of business acumen: tough dealmakers are, in the president’s language, “killers”. Sisi fits the bill for both and has also been referred to by Trump as his “favourite dictator”.
More recently, the US president suggested that Egypt could “blow up” the Ethiopian-built Nile Renaissance dam that is causing enormous tensions between the two large African US allies. While Obama ended up tacitly removing support for Egypt's Hosni Mubarak, Trump has actively championed Sisi, whose appalling record on human rights has gone virtually unacknowledged.
Elsewhere in the Middle East and North Africa, it was interesting for those of us who covered the real estate mogul’s campaign first for the Republican nomination, then for president, to take note of what he did once he was in office.
Back in 2016, the foreign policy community was fixated with Trump’s perceived isolationism. At rally after rally, he claimed to have opposed the Iraq war - in fact, he only did so explicitly a year after the invasion – and talked of bringing US troops home.
While it has to be acknowledged that Trump has certainly gone some way to making good on these promises by withdrawing thousands of troops from Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria, thousands more remain out in the field.
Civilian deaths have skyrocketed. The US drone strikes which escalated under Obama further escalated under Trump. In March 2019, the Republican president revoked a policy, introduced by his predecessor, requiring that intelligence officials publish the number of civilians killed in drone strikes outside of war zones.
During the past four years, Washington has ceded geopolitical control in parts of Syria to Russia. Iran’s influence in Iraq has grown at its expense. But Trump’s position has been far from isolationist, however erratic it has been.
US troops remain in north-eastern Syria, where there is a longstanding military engagement with the Islamic State (IS) group, whose leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi was killed by the US in October 2019, a big win for Trump. Washington is unlikely to give up its base at al-Tanf in the Homs governorate any time soon, however useless it may be.
US sanctions against Syria appear to be hurting its population much more than its ruler, Bashar al-Assad, and his cronies. The removal of US military support from its Kurdish allies, long anticipated in the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria, also known as Rojava, has nevertheless been a huge betrayal, even if American involvement was always seen by most citizens there as self-interested and likely to expire.
In April 2017, Trump responded to a chemical weapons attack by the Syrian government with an air strike, which he ordered just after he sat down to dinner with Chinese President Xi Jinping at his mansion in Mar-a-Lago, Florida. The US president reportedly ordered the attack after his daughter Ivanka showed him pictures of Syrian children affected by the chemical raid, a scene Steve Bannon described as “disgusting”.
Trump was responding emotionally, perhaps, but it was also a show of strength before a meeting with Xi: China has since taken the place of the Soviet Union in a new Cold War cooked up by the White House.
Donald Trump’s time as president ends with many of America’s worst tendencies as global hegemon severely exacerbated and a few of its better ones more or less abandoned. Trump went at the question of Israel and Palestine with the scattershot enthusiasm of the showy dealmaker he is, eventually resulting in the darkest of Palestinian nightmares.
Uninterested in working but interested in being flattered and pampered, scornful of sincerely held beliefs but in thrall to power and money, Trump showed the world what America is at its worst: a place of desperate injustice, ruled by a wealthy few.
In bringing the US close to war with Iran, humiliating the Palestinians, having no coherent plan in Syria or Iraq and in championing murderous autocrats in the Gulf and North Africa, this US president and his administration has left the region in dreadful straits.
'Many of the successful measures focused on improving equitable access to parks.' (photo: Emily Lord/Forest Society)
Environmental Ballot Measures Get Widespread Approval by American Voters
Yale Environment 360
Excerpt: "American voters approved ballot measures worth nearly $3.7 billion this election in support of parks, climate resilience, and land conservation, according to an analysis by the nonprofit Trust for Public Land."
Many of the successful measures focused on improving equitable access to parks, as well as countering the disproportionate impact of climate change on low-income communities and communities of color.
“During the current pandemic we have seen that our parks and public lands are more important than ever for people to safely get outside for their physical and mental health,” Will Abberger, director of conservation finance at the Trust for Public Land, said in a statement.
Altogether, 49 conservation-focused measures were on the ballot across 19 states this year, E&E News reported. Those approved include a “climate sales tax” in Denver, Colorado, estimated to generate $800 million over 20 years for climate projects targeted at low-income and minority communities; a $735 million school bond in Oakland, California to fund green schoolyards; the lifting of a cap on how much money the Michigan Natural Resources Trust Fund can receive from royalties from oil, gas, and mining to create and protect public lands; and statewide measures in Montana to legalize and tax recreational marijuana, the proceeds of which will go toward land conservation.
“The ballot measures approved by voters will provide more equitable access to parks, protect air and water quality, help address climate change, and protect critical wildlife habitat in communities across the country,” said Abberger.
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