monitoring Trump and relevant contemporary events

According to NYT, Trump became angry watching the protestors storm the US embassy in Iraq.

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@Walter Hinteler,
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It is appalling that Trump thinks a legitimate military response is to commit war crimes by levelling Iran’s historic monuments.

Copying a page from the book of ISIS.

I'll just point out, in case anyone doesn't know this, Wesley Clark was actually quoting someone else:

...In Trump’s formulation, it is simply impossible for Democrats to win fairly. He has warned that if he is turned out of office through impeachment, the result will be a violent revolt by his supporters — and he is most definitely not saying they’re the ones who would be in the wrong

Therefore, some will conclude, not only would a Democratic victory not need to be respected, it will be the final evidence that ordinary political action — voting, protesting, lobbying — is pointless. Furthermore, they will have convinced themselves, and Trump will have convinced them, that the results of a Democratic victory will be not merely four years of policies they don’t like, but an utter cataclysm. It will be the end of America as they know it, and for some the only appropriate response will be violence...

Senate GOP In No Hurry To Hear From Bolton For Impeachment Trial

Republican senators held back on Monday from saying whether they would be willing to subpoena former National Security Adviser John Bolton, instead alternately advocating for making that decision after the upcoming impeachment trial’s opening phases

or accusing House Democrats of presenting an incomplete case against President Trump.

As they returned to Washington Monday evening, many Republicans spoke to the press for the first time since Bolton announced Monday morning he’d be willing to testify if subpoenaed by the Senate. Multiple senators shifted to blame House Democrats for allegedly failing to include the former national security adviser’s testimony in their case.

“I don’t want to do their work,” Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC) told reporters on Capitol Hill. “It’s not that I don’t want to hear form him, I want to hear from him when the House is willing to do their work.”

Paul Waldman on the rise of gun rights extremists and what they might get up to given a Trump electoral loss.

More than 2,000 foreign killers, paedophiles and rapists are waved into the UK without criminal records checks as police arrest TWO every day

Iranians have reported being harassed by US border officials amid diplomatic tensions following last week's US assassination of Iranian General Qasem Soleimani.

Several travellers of Iranian heritage told BBC News they faced inappropriate questions about their views.

One group said they were stopped for hours at the Canadian-US border at the weekend.

Democratic US lawmakers condemned the alleged incidents.

Around 60 Iranians and Iranian-Americans said they were stopped for up to seven-and-a-half hours on Sunday while trying to cross into the US at the Peace Arch Border Crossing near Blaine, Washington.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations (Cair), the largest Muslim advocacy group in the US, said the travellers had experienced "harassment" from US border officials.

Sepehr Ebrahimzadeh, a Seattle-based engineer, told BBC Persian he had waited about six hours to cross the border at Blaine, and was repeatedly questioned during that time.

A Canadian citizen with a US green card, he said he was trying to enter the US by land from British Columbia, Canada.

Mr Ebrahimzadeh said US Border Patrol guards had questioned him about his birthplace, his high school years in Iran, his own military service and his father's, and about other relatives and his employment history.

He said he saw other Iranians next to him who had to wait hours and were questioned about their social media accounts.

Cair said that some travellers were only allowed to proceed after 10 hours of questioning, while others were denied entry altogether.

Some, the advocacy group said, had their passports withheld while they were asked about their political views and allegiances.

University of Pennsylvania professor John Qazvinian said he was taken to a room and questioned "about the situation in Iran" upon landing at JFK's New York City airport on Sunday.

International crises often lead, at least initially, to surging support for a country’s leadership. And that’s clearly happening now. Just weeks ago the nation’s leader faced public discontent so intense that his grip on power seemed at risk. Now the assassination of Qassim Suleimani has transformed the situation, generating a wave of patriotism that has greatly bolstered the people in charge.

Unfortunately, this patriotic rallying around the flag is happening not in America, where many are (with good reason) deeply suspicious of Donald Trump’s motives, but in Iran.

In other words, Trump’s latest attempt to bully another country has backfired — just like all his previous attempts.

From his first days in office, Trump has acted on the apparent belief that he could easily intimidate foreign governments — that they would quickly fold and allow themselves to be humiliated. That is, he imagined that he faced a world of Lindsey Grahams, willing to abandon all dignity at the first hint of a challenge.

But this strategy keeps failing; the regimes he threatens are strengthened rather than weakened, and Trump is the one who ends up making humiliating concessions.

Remember, for example, when Trump promised “fire and fury” unless North Korea halted its nuclear weapons program? He claimed triumph after a 2018 summit meeting with Kim Jong-un, North Korea’s leader. But Kim made no real concessions, and North Korea recently announced that it might resume tests of nuclear weapons and long-range missiles.

Or consider the trade war with China, which was supposed to bring the Chinese to their knees. A deal has supposedly been reached, although details remain scarce; what’s clear is that it falls far short of U.S. aims, and that Chinese officials are jubilant about their success in facing Trump down.

Why does Trump’s international strategy, which might be described as winning through intimidation, keep failing? And why does he keep pursuing it anyway?

One answer, I suspect, is that like all too many Americans, Trump has a hard time grasping the fact that other countries are real — that is, that we’re not the only country whose citizens would rather pay a heavy price, in money and even in blood, than make what they see as humiliating concessions.

Ask yourself, how would Americans have reacted if a foreign power had assassinated Dick Cheney, claiming that he had the blood of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis on his hands? Don’t answer that Suleimani was worse. That’s beside the point. The point is that we don’t accept the right of foreign governments to kill our officials. Why imagine that other countries are different?

Of course, we have many people in the diplomatic corps with a deep knowledge of other nations and their motivations, who understand the limits of intimidation. But anyone with that kind of understanding has been excluded from Trump’s inner circle.

Now, it’s true that for many years America did have a special leadership position, one that sometimes involved playing a role in reshaping other countries’ political systems. But here’s where Trump’s second error comes in: He has never shown any sign of understanding why America used to be special.

Part of the explanation, of course, was raw economic and military power: America used to be just much bigger than everyone else. That is, however, no longer true. For example, by some key measures China’s economy is significantly bigger than that of the United States.

Even more important, however, was the fact that America was something more than a big country throwing its weight around. We always stood for something larger.

That doesn’t mean that we were always a force for good; America did many terrible things during its reign as global hegemon. But we clearly stood for global rule of law, for a system that imposed common rules on everyone, ourselves included. The United States may have been the dominant partner in alliances like NATO and bodies like the World Trade Organization, but we always tried to behave as no more than first among equals.

Oh, and because we were committed to enforcing rules, we were also relatively trustworthy; an alliance with America was meaningful, because we weren’t the kind of country that would betray an ally for the sake of short-term political convenience.

Trump, however, has turned his back on everything that used to make America great. Under his leadership, we’ve become nothing more than a big, self-interested bully — a bully with delusions of grandeur, who isn’t nearly as tough as he thinks. We abruptly abandon allies like the Kurds; we honor war criminals; we slap punitive tariffs on friendly nations like Canada for no good reason. And, of course, after more than 15,000 lies, nothing our leader and his minions say can be trusted.

Trump officials seem taken aback by the uniformly negative consequences of the Suleimani killing: The Iranian regime is empowered, Iraq has turned hostile and nobody has stepped up in our support. But that’s what happens when you betray all your friends and squander all your credibility.

“The only ones mourning the loss of Soleimani are our Democrat leadership and Democrat Presidential candidates.”

I'm not buying this reporting from the Times. The danger for reporters in repeating what their contacts in the administration tell them is that they are often going to get played. Here, the notion that Trump was simply worried about how he might be perceived (after Benghazi) or how he might divert attention from impeachment related coverage had to be quelled. In the place of that "narrative", another had to be crafted to make it seem as if he actually gave a damn about ambassadorial staffs anywhere (after ripping the foreign service staff in the Ukraine to shreds).