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As far back as the El Salvadoran Civil War and the Nicaraguan Contra War of the 1980s, the United States’ efforts to prosecute “drug wars” with Latin American cartels and traffickers have produced mixed results at best.These efforts have been complicated by the tension between sound crime-fighting strategies and geopolitical concerns, such as regime change. This is not because U.S. law enforcement agencies or the military are ignorant of necessary methods or incapable of lawfully taking down drug kingpins or cartels. But the U.S. has certainly proved itself capable of acting illegally, or in morally questionable fashion at best.This was certainly the case in the 1980s when, as the San Jose Mercury News reported, “the CIA helped finance its covert war against Nicaragua’s leftist government through sales of cut-rate cocaine to [a] South Central L.A. drug dealer.” Further back, in the 1960s, the CIA was entangled in Asia’s drug trade and, as the author Patrick Winn showed, got American soldiers in Vietnam hooked on heroin.Now, a former Honduran president convicted for drug trafficking has received a pardon from President Donald Trump, even as the president of Venezuela faces a potential U.S. invasion over accusations of drug trafficking made by Trump himself.Elsewhere, the leader of the Chapitos faction of the Mexican Sinaloa Cartel, Joaquín Guzmán López, who had been accused of flooding the US with illicit fentanyl, this month reached a plea agreement. According to court documents, it occurred when one of the sons of former cartel leader Joaquín Guzmán Loera, alias El Chapo, changed his plea from not guilty to guilty, for “two drug trafficking charges and engaging in a continuing criminal enterprise.” As Parker Asmann writes, it all means “another judicial case … will not go to trial or expose the inner workings of organized crime in Mexico.”Nonetheless, several things are new or different under Trump, at home and in institutions meant to fight crime abroad:No president since Nixon has so weaponized the democratic institutions of government and especially the Department of Justice to routinely come after their legal and/or political opponents. No president since Nixon has used the rhetoric of “law and order” to defund agencies of crime control while providing around $100 billion to ICE for deporting criminal immigrants, only to find immigrants with no criminal records becoming the largest group in ICE detention.No president since Nixon has systematically sabotaged multinational security relations, to the effect of at least 10 Caribbean nations turning against the U.S. over Trump’s neglect of natural disaster relief and his military’s terrorist-like actions causing the unlawful killings of people on boats allegedly smuggling drugs. Nobody reading this commentary needs a recitation of Trump’s campaign of retribution on home soil. But Trump has also systemically defunded and downsized crime prevention and gun control, while decriminalizing behaviors of both criminals and social control agents.Which takes us back to the “war on drugs,” and Trump’s unlawful killings in the name of his supposed attempt to stop dangerous substances coming into the U.S. Of the 95 killings so far in the Caribbean, none seem to have been of actors who posed an imminent threat to anyone’s life, and would therefore have been subject to drug enforcement policies, the laws of war, and U.S. military protocol.For a racketeering president, this is simply his way of “taking care of business.” Trump could care less whether the magnitude of crime is getting worse or better, except in terms of his own criminality or ability to exploit the crimes of others for the acquisition of power and wealth.Selling pardons from the Oval Office was one of Trump’s earliest scams. Now, in addition to the ex-president of Honduras, three other big-time, drugs-related criminals have benefited. On day one of Trump 2.0, he pardoned Silk Road founder Ross Ulbricht — convicted of “creating the largest online black market for illegal drugs and other illicit goods,” as the Washington Post put it. Trump did so because he made deals with the Libertarian Party and the crypto community.Subsequently, the habitually lawless, supposedly “drug-warring” president granted clemency to a longtime Chicago gang leader, Larry Hoover, and a Baltimore drug kingpin, Garnett Gilbert Smith.And yet Trump insists Venezuela represents a drug-fueled threat to Americans and merits severe action. Last week, he told Politico President Nicolás Maduro’s “days are numbered.” Two days later, U.S. forces seized a large oil tanker near the Venezuelan coast, a significant escalation. Attorney General Pam Bondi said the move was warranted because the tanker was being used to transport oil from Iran, in defiance of sanctions. The AG released video showing U.S. forces descending from helicopters and searching the vessel.Meanwhile, footage of the murder of two helpless survivors of a boat strike in the Caribbean was only one of more than a dozen such videos that Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has not boastfully shown to the world. Instead, Hegseth declared the Pentagon won’t release the video because it is “top secret” and would be in violation of “longstanding Department of War policy.”Had these interdictions of allegedly cocaine-carrying boats been part of a real drug war, and not a pretext for a possible invasion of Venezuela, cargoes would have been seized and traffickers arrested — as a means of leveraging them to go after kingpins and cartels.On Tuesday evening, Trump announced a blockade of all “sanctioned oil tankers” into Venezuela, alleging the country was using oil to fund drug trafficking and other crimes. But as Trump said, this is really about ramping up pressure on Maduro and his nation’s economy, “until such time as they return to the United States all of the Oil, Land, and other Assets that they previously stole from us.” Or in the alternative, regime change occurs, with the departure of Maduro and his alleged “foreign terrorist organization” as Trump labeled the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela. CBS's 60 Minutes, on the ground in Caracas to interview President Maduro but seeing the session cancelled for “security reasons,” decided to interview people in the streets instead. The general consensus was that Venezuelans are concerned about an invasion and see three likely outcomes: Maduro packs his bags, is arrested, or is killed.One poignant statement came from a man “wearing a hat with the insignia of a civilian-military organization,” who said Trump’s accusations about drugs made no sense, because the nation’s economy was based on oil exports. He told CBS, “The country of Venezuela doesn’t need to rely on drugs because we are a petroleum country. We have never cultivated a drug trade here.”Gregg Barak is an emeritus professor of criminology and criminal justice at Eastern Michigan University and the author of several award-winning books on the crimes of the powerful, including Criminology on Trump (2022) and its 2024 sequel, Indicting the 45th President: Boss Trump, the GOP, and What We Can Do About the Threat to American Democracy. The third book in this Trump trilogy, Regime Change, Authoritarian Treason, and the Outlaw-in-Chief: President Donald Trump’s Struggle to Kill U.S. Democracy & Realign American Global Power, will be published after the 2026 midterm elections.

WASHINGTON — Turns out, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth aren’t very good actors.Congress doesn’t agree on much, but when it comes to Venezuela and U.S. military strikes on purported drug smugglers, on Tuesday Congress was basically all questions, even after receiving classified briefings from the two members of the Trump cabinet.Only after President Donald Trump took to Truth Social in the evening, to announce "a total and complete" blockade of oil tankers entering and leaving Venezuela, did Congress finally get the clarity lawmakers had demanded. Now members of Congress say they know the real goal of U.S. intervention in Venezuela — and lawmakers on both sides of the Capitol are vowing to hold President Trump accountable. ‘More questions than answers’ Rubio and Hegseth, along with a phalanx of aides and security, traversed the U.S. Capitol, trying to sell Congress on President Trump’s war footing in the waters off Venezuela. “This briefing left me with more questions than answers,” Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) told reporters after a classified briefing. It was the same on the other side of the Capitol, where lawmakers complained the two powerful secretaries provided “no real answers about whether or not what we’re about to enter into is a war in Venezuela,” Rep. Gregory W. Meeks (D-NY), the ranking member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, told reporters after his own chamber’s briefing. “If this is about regime change, it seems to me that the administration should say that’s what it is, and should come to Congress to ask for that authorization, which has not taken place.” It wasn’t just Democrats who were left confused as to what the Trump administration is trying to accomplish with regards to Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. “Most Americans want to know what’s gonna happen next. I want to know what’s gonna happen next. Is it the policy to take Maduro down? It should be,” Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) told reporters. “If it’s not, and if he goes, what’s gonna happen next? I’d like a better answer as to what happens when Maduro goes.” For his part, Secretary Rubio told the congressional press corps the briefings were on the “counter-drug mission” that is “killing Americans, poisoning Americans.” For his part, Secretary Hegseth tried to tamp down criticism as he promised to let members of the House and Senate Armed Services Committees view a controversial video of a second missile strike on alleged drug smugglers in the Caribbean Sea, on Sept. 2. “This is the 22nd bipartisan briefing on a highly successful mission to counter designated terrorist organizations, cartels, bringing weapons — weapons meaning drugs — to the American people and poisoning the American people for far too long,” Hegseth told reporters. But last night, when President Trump announced a blockade of Venezuelan oil — arguing the South American nation is “completely surrounded by the largest Armada ever assembled in the History of South America” — lawmakers got the clarity they’d been seeking. And many weren’t happy. ‘Unquestionably an act of war’ While Congress is demanding answers to more questions, many members also feel lied to, if not duped. “Trump is threatening a naval blockade of Venezuelan oil, an act of War,” Rep. Nydia Velazquez (D-NY) wrote on X. “We have seen this playbook before. This is not about drugs or making America safer; it’s about regime change.“Americans do not want war with Venezuela. Congress must act now and stop this.” While the administration likened targeting alleged drug smugglers to going after pirates of old — thus evoking all the lenient maritime laws regarding marauders on the high seas — Democrats say the gig is up.They’re demanding the administration halt intervention unless Congress explicitly grants the president war powers. “A naval blockade is unquestionably an act of war,” Rep. Joaquin Castro (D-TX) wrote. “A war that the Congress never authorized and the American people do not want. “On Thursday, the House will vote on Rep. Jim McGovern (D-MA), Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY), and my resolution directing the President to end hostilities with Venezuela.“Every member of the House of Representatives will have the opportunity to decide if they support sending Americans into yet another regime change war.”

Researcher in Kerala rainforest sounds alarm after being told frogs had died after being handled by humansA group of endangered “galaxy frogs” are missing, presumed dead, after trespassing photographers reportedly destroyed their microhabitats for photos.Melanobatrachus indicus, each the size of a fingertip, is the only species in its family, and lives under logs in the lush rainforest in Kerala, India. Their miraculous spots do not indicate poison, as people sometimes assume, but are thought to be used as a mode of communication, according to Rajkumar K P, a Zoological Society of London fellow and researcher. Continue reading...

President Donald Trump announced Tuesday that he will give a primetime address to the nation on Wednesday night and speculation started rolling in over what he has planned to announce. Trump did not reveal the topic for the address or if it would be broadcast from the Oval Office, posting the following on his Truth Social platform: "My Fellow Americans: I will be giving an ADDRESS TO THE NATION tomorrow night, LIVE FROM THE WHITE HOUSE, at 9 P.M. EST.," he wrote on Truth Social Tuesday afternoon. "I look forward to 'seeing' you then. It has been a great year for our Country, and THE BEST IS YET TO COME!"Although it's not immediately clear what he has planned to say, people suggested several topics could be discussed: 1. Trump could announce escalating military action. As the U.S. steps up pressure on Venezuela and recent lethal boat strikes have come under question over legality, some anticipated that Trump could announce a full military escalation against the country. And despite the administration's reluctance to release the Sept. 2 attack and video in question, some have suggested the move could be to distract from the looming Epstein files deadline this week. "Will you be invading a new country to distract from Epstein files?" User Cameron wrote on X in response to the White House's announcement.2. Trump could disclose more changes to his immigration policies.Trump's unpopular immigration policy has come under fire over aggressive ICE tactics, separating families and harsh deportations. In recent weeks, the president and his administration have pushed to remove visas that critics have called discriminatory moves to push out people from countries he — and his immigration policy architect Stephen Miller — don't like. 3. Trump could tout the economy, despite a less-than-stellar jobs report.A new jobs report dropped Tuesday, showing that the U.S. economy has hit a rough patch. Unemployment reached 4.6% in November, the highest it has been since September 2021, according to NBC News.Trump could use the speech on Wednesday night to tout the economy, following Vice President JD Vance's speech in Allentown, Pennsylvania, on Tuesday, where he also rated the economy an "A+++.""The Trump-Vance economy is hurting Pennsylvanians. Rising prices and a national economy with a net job loss over the last two months. Unless he will address the struggles of everyday Pennsylvanians and changes they are making, this is just a taxpayer funded campaign event," Eugene DePasquale, chair of the Pennsylvania Democrats, wrote on X.4. Trump could reveal his 2026 policy focus. White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told Fox News on Tuesday that the president could share a preview of policies to expect in the new year, what he has perceived as successes — and possibly a Christmas celebration. "He will be addressing the country about all of his historic accomplishments over the past year and maybe teasing some policy that will be coming in the new year as well as we head into this Christmas season," Leavitt said. 5. Trump could drop a wildcard — or reveal nothing new at all.Multiple people anticipated that the address announcement would not shed much information on anything surprising. Some suggested it could be a way for the president to get people's attention. Others signaled he could announce his resignation, launch another business, or an entirely new topic he hasn't mentioned before. It's all yet to come. "My humble advice: don’t read much into it," journalist Olga Nesterova wrote on Bluesky.

On Nov. 26, 2025, in a quiet northern suburb of Hong Kong, an aggressive fire broke out in the middle of the day. The fire was unusual in its intensity and duration, consuming seven of eight high-rise towers in a residential complex. Despite the quick response of well-equipped fire trucks, the blaze spread quickly and burned for more than 43 hours. Although the death toll is not final, at least 160 people suffered the most horrific deaths imaginable, with dozens so charred they may never be identified.The ferocity of the fire has been blamed on a private contractor’s use of highly flammable materials including polystyrene foam boards placed over windows, along with substandard scaffolding netting that failed to meet fire-retardant codes. The buildings were undergoing renovations when the fire hit, and numerous fire alarms also failed to warn.A tragedy like this gives pause, in part because it should have been prevented. Fire analysts say that more rigorous inspections, including thorough sample testing of materials used on higher floors, not just of easily accessible ground level floors, would have identified the use of non-compliant, cheaper materials before the blaze started.Although the Chinese government will never admit any fault for the inadequate inspections and has instead jailed people for asking, it’s already clear that standard building inspections would have prevented the loss of life. Lapsed and loose inspections, and possible corruption, meant officials did not detect that flammable materials were used where they should not have been, or that fire safety systems were not functioning, despite residents alerting officials of these problems a year prior to the fire. It’s also the kind of tragedy lying in wait in the US, ready to strike after Donald Trump's all-out war on safety standards and regulations meant to protect the public.Americans in dangerSince his re-election, Trump has rewarded corporate donors by dismantling costly regulations they dislike. In the process, time-honored regulations and safety standards that quietly protected life have been gutted, setting us up for a Hong Kong-esque tragedy of our own. Federal government regulations designed to protect health and lives include, in the broadest sense, workplace safety, transportation safety, food and drug safety, and environmental protection. Under Trump 2.0, each of these categories of protection have either been gutted outright, or are now so attenuated due to funding cuts they barely function. Each federal agency with regulatory authority, including OSHA, the FDA, the EPA, and DOT, among others, has been significantly weakened with reduced investigations into wrongdoing and corruption, and fewer cases for failing to comply with safety and environmental standards. Trump has also imposed across the board budget cuts for regulatory enforcement, including inspector staffing across a wide spectrum of industries.None of these changes will continue in a vacuum; other than ignoring climate change which is already wreaking havoc, we won’t know what other unenforced regulation will lead to tragedy until it strikes.Under Trump’s profits-first-people-last strategy, the EPA has launched the largest deregulatory action in U.S. history. Trump dismantled EPA regulations protecting air, water, and soil, relaxed emissions standards for power plants, increased toxic vehicle emissions, weakened water protections, limited scientific research into the risks, and rolled back greenhouse gas reporting and soot standards, all to boost industry profits at the expense of citizens who live and work in those communities.Trump also shuttered 11 OSHA offices in states reporting unusually high workplace fatalities, most of them Republican-controlled. Louisiana, for example, ranks the sixth-most dangerous state for workers in the U.S. It is also home to more than 200 chemical plants and refineries dotting an 85-mile stretch of the Mississippi River dubbed “Cancer Alley,” because of the high rates of cancer and birth defects linked to petrochemicals. Former OSHA Director David Michaels said that with these closures, “enormous oil and petrochemical facilities with significant safety and health hazards will be inspected even less frequently than they are now.” According to DOGE, the government will save $109,346 from the closures.Blame gameIf Hong Kong-type tragedy strikes, Trump will first block information about it, Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt will call it fake news, and Fox won’t report it. Then, after the tragedy dominates mainstream media headlines, the whole administration will pivot to blaming Joe Biden. But the danger is real, it is now, and it is not about politics. Americans have lived for generations with barely-there inspections, leading to Cancer Alleys, occupational disease, dangerous products, collapsing infrastructure, etc. But now Trump has expelled almost all regulatory watchdogs in service to his corporate donors. Because less regulation means higher profits, corporate America is rewarding Trump handsomely in what amounts to quid pro quo. In a functioning democracy, this would amount to criminal recklessness. In a rule-of-law republic, the resulting tragedies, when they strike, would lead to charges of foreseeable homicide. Sabrina Haake is a columnist and 25+ year federal trial attorney specializing in 1st and 14th A defense. Her Substack, The Haake Take, is free.

I don’t know enough maritime law to tell you exactly why it’s wrong for America to be dropping troops onto tankers to seize them — just to say that, no matter what legalistic excuse the administration cooks up, it looks exactly like being a pirate. (It’s worth remembering that the US Navy was founded largely to take on piracy, and thanks to the Barbary corsairs, the early Americans had a lot to say about the subject. George Washington, for instance: Pirates are “enemies to mankind.”)But I can tell you this. In the ever-shrinking mind of our current president, the reason why it’s good to seize a tanker is because it carries oil, and oil is the source of all strength, his contemporary equivalent to pieces of his eight. It’s “a large tanker, very large,” Mr. Trump explained, continuing (inevitably) to describe it as “the largest one ever seized actually.” When asked what would happen to the cargo, he said, “I assume we’re going to keep the oil.”Oil is, and always has been, at the center of our concerns with Venezuela, which has the world’s largest proven reserves (though much of it is in the incredibly dirty and hard-to-recover form of tarsands). At the moment it’s a major supplier to China, and it claims sovereignty over a major oil field in Guyana which has attracted big investment from Exxon and Chevron. So if you wonder why we’ve been attacking “drug boats” from Venezuela on the grounds that they’re carrying fentanyl, which Venezuela does not produce, that may give you some sense. Indeed the pressure has been so intense that the Maduro government in Caracas apparently offered to essentially turn over its oil and mineral resources to America in October negotiations. We’ve apparently decided we’d rather just take them.This kind of coercion on behalf of the hydrocarbon industry is becoming old hat for the Trump administration. It’s used tariff policy, for instance, to force country after country to agree to buy huge quantities of American liquefied natural gas. As CNBC reported last spring regarding one deal with the EU:“They’re going to have to buy our energy from us, because they need it,” Trump told reporters at the White House. “We can knock off $350 billion in one week,” the president said. The European Union faces a 20 percent tariff rate if it does not reach a deal with Trump.(Justin Mikulka has a pointed take on why this strategy won’t work for the LNG industry, and new data emerged this week showing just how badly it is going to penalize Americans who depend on propane for heating, since they’re now competing with so many other places for our supply of natural gas).And of course in another sense we’ve been pirating the atmosphere for more than a century, filling up what is a common property with our emissions — America got rich burning fossil fuels, and the main result for other countries will be an ever higher temperature.But for the moment let’s just think about the flow of oil, because it’s been behind, in large part, so much of the geopolitical tension of the last hundred years. Japan’s quest for oil played some real role in the attacks on Pearl Harbor; Germany invaded the USSR in no small part to secure the oil fields of the Caucasus. The Suez crisis hinged on the transport of oil to Europe. OPEC seized on our thirst for oil as a powerful weapon in the 1980s, and America’s determination to keep oil flowing has determined much of our global stance in the postwar years — I’ll never forget a sign I saw at an early demonstration against the war in Iraq: “How did our oil end up under their sand?”The point here is that conflict like this is probably inevitable as long as the world depends on an energy source that is available only in a few places. Control of those places becomes too important — you end up with oligarchs, and with people who want to topple them.So how nice to imagine a world where location doesn’t matter — where instead we depend on energy from the sun and the wind, available everywhere. In the crudest terms, it’s going to be difficult to fight a war over sunshine. No one will ever seize a tanker to get at its supply of solar energy. Which is good news for everyone except those profiting from the current paradigm — Trumpism represents its dying twitches, but obviously those twitches can do great damage.Yes, we need sun and wind power to take a bite out of the climate crisis. But we also need it to take a bite out of the authoritarianism crisis. Our job is to make this transition happen faster; every new solar panel erodes just a little bit the logic of oil imperialism. The push for clean energy is the push for peace.

Events, reports and analysis have converged to underscore Donald Trump’s unique view of how the world should spin.Beyond the fallout of defending U.S. strikes on suspected drug boats, increasing threats of an undeclared war on Venezuela, the excesses of a mass deportation campaign spiraling out of control , unending tariffs, and flailing attempts to force Ukraine into a bad deal with Russia, we got a new National Security Strategy document that lays out Trump’s values as if they are ours.Together, they reflect the clear vision of an autocratic, power-minded Trump who wants to dictate to Americans and the rest of the world that they should forego human rights and democracy, recognize a U.S. hemispheric dominance, and kowtow to us because of our national wealth, not our ideals.As the New York Times concluded in an analysis of the strategic document, “The world as seen from the White House is a place where America can use its vast powers to make money” at the expense of support for dictators and caring about those without wealth.“Gone is the long-familiar picture of the United States as a global force for freedom, replaced by a country that is focused on reducing migration while avoiding passing judgment on authoritarians, instead seeing them as sources of cash,” the Times analysis said.When combined with fresh debate about killings of shipwreck crewmen on those drug boats and calling immigrants from a growing list of nations “garbage,” we have a remarkable emergent picture of an arrogant, self-interested despot who sees the world as serving him with no questions allowed.A game for the wealthyOf course, Trump the Disrupter has little world-view patience for programs that feed the hungry or address global AIDS, which is why he has canceled those positive U.S. contributions. He has declined to stand by longtime friends, instead seeking to kindle close ties even with longtime foes whose power he respects.You can’t even get into the power-as-money version of international affairs if you’re not wealthy already, either personally or as a nation. And so, the world’s poorest nations are automatically now being shunted into a travel ban to the U.S. and their publicly debased citizens barred from U.S. visas or immigration. Just this week, Trump ordered Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and Secretary of State Mario Rubio to move from 19 barred countries to more than 30.The Saudi Crown Prince is feted at the White House without mention of his role in ordering the murder of a Washington Post journalist or the role Saudis played in 9/11 attacks — there is a tantalizing trillion dollars’ worth of investment in the U.S. at hand. Pressure on Ukraine to fold before Russian aggression continues to assure a U.S. hand in mining operations to “pay back” the U.S. for military and humanitarian aid to defend democracy and international sovereignty,Even the show-off re-signing of a truce between the Democratic Republic of Congo (among the 19 banned countries) and Rwanda at the newly renamed Donald J. Trump Institute for Peace building was a joke: The fighting renewed the next day, though the signed deal made sure to guarantee U.S. access to rare earth minerals.How surprised will any of us be if there is a U.S. attack on Venezuela in which oil reserves turn out to be the prize?The entire arbitrariness of the Trump tariffs is based on a Trump-decided scale of which country needs the worst lashing over U.S. advantages. The would-be campaign to level various economic imbalances is based on expressions of personalized fealty to Trump, and, of course, is paid by U.S. taxpayers as a super sales tax, not by the “penalized” countries.Hitting EuropeThe harshest criticisms in the annual strategic statement are for a Europe that is becoming more non-White through immigration policies that Trump rejects wholesale. Europe is facing “civilization erasure” and becoming “unrecognizable” because of immigration.The report identifies the specific American strategic recommendation to help Europe “to correct its current trajectory” over the next decades. “We want Europe to remain European, to regain its civilizational self-confidence” and pledged U.S. outward support for political parties opposed to immigration.It’s a direct call to White nationalism of the sort that Trump denies but clearly pursues in this country.How else to explain a U.S. campaign that arrests and deports the undocumented with such armed force and fervor that shuns adherence to legal rulings, court-ordered procedures and plain humanity involved in splitting families? How else to justify racial profiling and the labeling of whole immigrant groups as “garbage.” How else to explain why it is necessary to demand emergency review by the U.S. Supreme Court of Constitutional “birthright” status for millions of children born in the United States or its territories?The Trump strategy never addresses what is supposed to happen to the world’s impoverished or to those without a million bucks or five million bucks to buy U.S. entry through a Trump “gold card.” Trump’s acceptance of a made-up FIFA World Peace Prize from a soccer organization with a history of corruption as if it is the Nobel Peace Prize is as ludicrous as it is symbolic that all international transactions have to include personal aggrandizement.This is a document that offers as international justification the kind of Trump chest-beating and abasement of The Other that Trump shares with his most loyal base of voters, a view of “America First” as America Only.When paired with the policy-as-profit views and its unquestioning support for absolute power in the hemisphere and in the world, it is a document that serves as outline for personal grift for the Trump family and its inner circle. It presents U.S. foreign policy as a loaded deck that must reward the wealthiest and the personal supporters of an autocratic Trump.

Many of us have long suspected or even predicted that Donald Trump would betray America, gut our democracy in favor of a police state, and align us with Russia. You know, the country that the Financial Times reported this week tried to launch multiple terrorist attacks against the United States and Europe over the past year.We’re now there.It’s the most under-reported story of the year, perhaps of the century: under Trump, the United States is abandoning advocacy of democracy (shutting down Voice of America, etc), abandoning our democratic allies in Europe, and for the past year has abandoned Ukraine to the tender mercies of the Butcher of Moscow.At the same time, Trump’s building ties to Middle Eastern dictatorships, adopting Russia’s explicit worldview, trashing civil and human rights at home, and now handing to China our most valuable military-potential technology.In other words, we’ve been betrayed by Donald Trump and the people around him in ways that would have made Benedict Arnold blush.A few weeks ago, Trump presented Ukraine with a so-called “peace deal” that was apparently written, in first draft, by Moscow. This week, he told that nation they have “until Christmas” to hand over more than 20 percent of their country to Putin and surrender their own military abilities forever, leaving them vulnerable to Russia’s next attack.Trump’s brain trust just produced a new National Security Strategy (NSS) for the United States that largely abandons Canada and Europe while embracing a racist, neofascist worldview straight out of Putin’s rhetoric.As the National Security Desk writes:“It abandons allies, misidentifies threats, emboldens aggressors, erodes deterrence, and even drives allies to consider nuclear proliferation.”Alexander Vindman, the former Director of European Affairs for the United States National Security Council (NSC), wrote:“The prevailing sentiment among European observers was that this document represented not only the closing chapter of decades’ worth of cooperation between the United States and Europe, but also that Washington may soon actively sabotage the political and economic systems of the European Union through the promotion of ‘patriotic parties’ and far-right figures. Amidst an ongoing impasse over a potential peace agreement in Ukraine, representatives of the Russian government claims that the document is ‘consistent with our vision.’”David Rothkopf, a former senior national security/trade official in the Clinton administration, was equally blunt in an article published by the New Republic:“Indeed, the document, released by the White House on Thursday, reads as if it were dictated by the Kremlin, much as our recent ‘peace proposal’ for Ukraine turned out to have been. Or, perhaps more accurately, it reads like the product of a collaboration between Vladimir Putin and Stephen Miller, the deputy White House chief of staff for nativist hate.”Russia expert Olga Lautman called it “Russia’s return on investment for interfering in the 2016 election,” and it sure looks like she’s right. An earlier article by her titled “America’s Foreign Policy Now Aligns With Russia” noted:“The NSS does not merely ‘shift priorities.’ It flips seventy-five years of American policy on its head and declares political war on Europe’s democratic institutions while elevating the far-right parties in Europe that Russia has been cultivating for more than a decade. Trump’s team packaged this as a vision for a ‘new’ transatlantic relationship, but the core message is unmistakable, and that is to weaken NATO, fracture Europe, isolate Ukraine, and empower nationalist movements that are openly friendly to Moscow, with every paragraph carrying the same cold, transactional, subservient logic that has defined Trump’s relationship with Russia for decades.”Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman, rarely one to engage in hyperbole, wrote of this document in an article titled “Is This the End of the Free World?”:“The language is astonishing. Europe, the document warns, faces ‘the stark prospect of civilizational erasure.’ Why? Because ‘it is more than plausible that within a few decades at the latest, certain NATO members will become majority non-European.’ I don’t know why they bothered with the euphemism: ‘non-European’ clearly means ‘nonwhite.’“But there’s hope, the document declares, thanks to ‘the growing influence of patriotic European parties,’ by which it clearly means parties like Germany’s neo-Nazi AfD.”Meanwhile, Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea are working together to destroy Ukraine, the gateway to Europe, and fielding armies of bots to fill social media and other venues with pro-Trump and anti-democracy rhetoric.And the world’s richest man and recipient in billions in American government contracts, Elon Musk, the architect of the destruction of America’s soft power via USAID, this week called for the abolition of the European Union itself.Finally, to the shock of the western world, Trump “cut a deal” to let Nvidia sell some of their most advanced chips to China after our military and intelligence experts have explicitly warned of the danger that this could accelerate that country’s move toward seizing Taiwan and threatening us with World War III.Add to that Trump’s bellicose and murderous actions against Venezuela that could lead to us engaging in warfare in our own hemisphere, and you have the formula to tie up our military while bringing about the final end of American influence in the larger world, exactly as Putin and Xi want.NATO chief Mark Rutte yesterday urged the West to prepare for war “like our grandparents endured,” adding:“Conflict is at our door. Russia has brought war back to Europe. And we must be prepared.”Trump could use such a war — as has been done before by presidents Wilson and Roosevelt — to gut civil rights in America and imprison the people he sees as his “threats” or political enemies.And try to call off or steal the elections of 2026.These developments, combined with the naked brutality of ICE that was revealed by this week’s report from Amnesty International, are shocking. American democracy is being gutted from within, our foreign policy is realigning away from Europe and toward Russia and China, all while dictators and corporate oligarchs openly bribe Trump and members of his family.Where is our media? Where is the GOP? Democratic politicians are speaking out, as are some commentators, but elected Republicans and the majority of the corporate media are “business as usual.”This is a five-alarm fire for democracy, both here and around the world.Pass it along and help wake up our country.