I wrote a few days ago that Ron DeSantis’s long campaign collapse was likely the most ignominious and vertiginous in the presidential primary era, which dates in stages from the 1960s and early 1970s. Some skeptics pointed to Jeb! in 2016 or Rudy Giuliani in 2008. But on a closer inspection neither flameout measures up to Ron’s. As evidenced by his legendary “Please clap” mix of exhortation and lament, Jeb! had an uncanny degree of self-awareness about the impending collapse of his succession plans that would cheat him of the prize. Giuliani had the political press in his hands. But his attempt to corner the 9/11 market was never enough to overcome his heterodoxy on issues like gay rights or serial-philandering in an earlier version of the Republican Party where those things mattered. His strategy of sitting out the early primaries and waiting until Florida, while a nice foreshadowing of Florida’s future as the home of Trumpism, was always correctly identified as a way to post-date the end of his campaign. Even the 9/11 brand was too long in the tooth by 2007. Joe Biden was able to make him a punch line with his famous one-liner.
The truth though is that DeSantis never had a chance. His humiliation was preordained and basically certain. Professional Republicans were at least a bit soured on Trump after the 2022 election, which seemed to make clear what 2018 and 2020 had strongly suggested: that Trump is an electoral loser. For professional Republicans there’s a bit more to it though. They’re completely down with Trump and Trumpism, as the last seven years have shown clearly enough. But they’re always going to have an eye out to move on. Part of what it means to be a political professional is to have a wandering eye for the new political horse, the new candidate, the new rising star, which is the usual path to professional advancement. More generously, it’s why you get into political work in the first place.
A Republican Party ruled by Donald Trump is one in which true advancement and greatness is always stymied and, to the extent it exists, always subject to his whims.
Professional Republicans also tend to be a shade different from MAGA Republican voters in that they tend to be creatures of the blue mega-cities they revile — New York, Los Angeles, Miami. They have college degrees. They share Trump’s politics of resentment but it’s not precisely the same. They’re more than ready to sign on to the Trump agenda and elect Trump’s candidates. But they’re always going to have a roving eye for any hint that it’s time to move on.
It’s much the same for the few dozen billionaires who fund the Republican Party. Many of the big ones ruled out backing Trump again either after the insurrection or the 2022 disappointments. Of course they did. They were against him before they were for in 2016. But they’ll be back when they realize that Trump is still the nominee and still the owner of the Republican Party. Which is to say, now.
None of this means that any of these people are secret Never Trumpers. It just means there are reasons they’ll have a wandering eye if and when Trump looks like he might be fading. They’re the ones who got political reporters thinking that DeSantis might be the next thing. Really the whole 2024 Republican primary cycle was the billionaires and the Republican professional class getting together to see if it might be possible to nudge Trump out of the way. But it became clear before it even began that it was impossible. Most of the last year was just rushing through a novel you’d already watched to the end in its movie version. What else was there to occupy bored reporters but Ron’s long, inevitable fall — punctured by the occasional cringey viral video.
Sad.
As I wrote one year ago …
Even though each [candidate] is there to make the case against Trump (without saying it) they are all like planets orbiting the sun of Donald Trump. Look at each one and try to imagine what their candidacies are even about if Trump didn’t exist. They’re all emanations of him. DeSantis is just the biggest planet orbiting the sun … If the GOP were ready to move on from Trump they would be having a campaign that wasn’t entirely about him. But that is just what they’re doing.
DeSantis’s fall was so dizzying because he was the perfectly packaged billionaire-funded post-Trump candidate, Trump Without The Baggage. But anyone watching him should have seen that even if Trump were beatable, which he probably never was, DeSantis hardly had the juice to accomplish it. He was meant to be a Trump-clone, a carbon copy of Trump who could replace Trump without speaking his name. But he was wooden, packaged and weird. Only a wild blindness born of the folly of the Trump Clone fantasy can explain that. Just one clear-eyed look at the dude made it all crystal clear.
DeSantis’s reputation in Congress was as someone who made zero friends during his short tenure. That wasn’t a good sign. He won his first term as governor by running as a toadyish devotee of President Trump, even down to goofy commercials about teaching his toddler about Trump’s border wall. But remember that lack of dignity is an asset under Trump’s wings.
DeSantis’s 60% reelection win was a triumph. But on closer inspection Republicans outspent Democrats by something like 10 to 1. Democrats knew they were going to lose and only half contested the race. Also important, Florida is a big state where 30-second ads are the coin of the realm, not retail politics. This kept some of DeSantis’s weakness as a presidential candidate out of view. Once DeSantis hit the campaign trail reporters and the peanut gallery of social media saw a guy who was awkward and weird. That first impression stuck because it was accurate. He was done for. Every new outing became a test to see whether he was as socially awkward and uncomfortable around people as everyone said. As it always, always is, trying super hard to be loose and natural was like trying to look dignified climbing a greasy pole, a one-way trip to ever mounting dignity loss.
But even DeSantis’s now legendary discomfort in his own skin isn’t the whole of it. It was all reporters had to talk about because DeSantis never attempted to make a case against the person he was nominally running against. The same of course can be said about every other candidate in the race. Chris Christie was the exception that proved the rule, and his unwillingness to really take his campaign to Trump told the story as clearly as anything. The idea of the entire 2024 campaign – billionaire funded and operative run – was that a Trump clone could somehow be swapped in for Trump without anyone noticing. They imagined Trump would see the writing on the wall and just walk away. DeSantis was like a lab-designed version of what’s been the establishment GOP holy grail for half a dozen years, the fabled Trump Without The Baggage. To paraphrase what they said about Austin Powers, Republicans craved this fabled creature, Democrats feared him. But Trump is the baggage. All the “rough edges” and degenerate values are what feeds his supporters’ devotion. Trump is The Baggage. It’s worth repeating since after almost eight years, so few seem to understand this.
The fall of DeSantis — barely making it to even the first contest before bowing out — confirms this and reminds us of it. The only way such a terrible candidate could have been hosed down with money and treated as the next big thing was that so many people — in the billionaire class, among Republican professionals and especially in the political press — somehow still don’t realize this. tpm
UAE has funded political assassinations in Yemen, BBC finds
The United Arab Emirates (UAE) has funded politically motivated assassinations in Yemen, a BBC investigation has found, exacerbating a conflict involving the Yemeni government and warring factions which has recently returned to the international spotlight following attacks on ships in the Red Sea.
Counter-terrorism training provided by American mercenaries to Emirati officers in Yemen has been used to train locals who can work under a lower profile - sparking a major uptick in political assassinations, a whistleblower told BBC Arabic Investigations.
The BBC has also found that despite the American mercenaries' stated aim to eliminate the jihadist groups al-Qaeda and Islamic State (IS) in southern Yemen, in fact the UAE has gone on to recruit former al-Qaeda members for a security force it has created on the ground in Yemen to fight the Houthi rebel movement and other armed factions.
The UAE government has denied the allegations in our investigation - that it had assassinated those without links to terrorism - saying they were "false and without merit".
The killing spree in Yemen - more than 100 assassinations in a three-year period - is just one element of an ongoing bitter internecine conflict pitting several international powers against each other in the Middle East's poorest country.
The deadly atmosphere has discouraged the permanent return of Yemen's internationally recognised government. This, it could be argued, has indirectly helped to embolden the Iran-backed Houthis - currently in the news for attacking ships and disrupting trade in the Red Sea. In recent days, Washington has announced that it will now re-designate the group as "global terrorists".
I have been reporting on the conflict in my native Yemen since it began in 2014. The fighting led to the government losing control of the country's north to the Houthis - who over the years have become savvier and better equipped.
In 2015, the US and the UK supported a coalition of mostly Arab states led by Saudi Arabia - with the UAE as a key partner - to fight back. The coalition invaded Yemen with the aim of reinstating the exiled Yemeni government and fighting terrorism. The UAE was given charge of security in the south, and became the US's key ally on counter-terrorism in the region - al-Qaeda had long been a presence in the south and was now gaining territory.
But instead of this establishing greater stability, during my frequent reporting trips at that time I witnessed a wave of mysterious targeted killings, in Yemeni government-controlled southern areas, of Yemeni citizens unconnected to terror groups.
Under international law, any killing of civilians without due process would be counted as extra-judicial.
The majority of those assassinated were members of Islah - the Yemeni branch of the Muslim Brotherhood. It is a popular international Sunni Islamist movement which has never been classified by the US as a terror organisation, but is banned in several Arab countries - including the UAE where its political activism and support for elections is seen by the country's royal family as a threat to their rule.
Leaked drone footage of the first assassination mission gave me a starting point from which to investigate these mysterious killings. It was dated December 2015 and was traced to members of a private US security company called Spear Operations Group.
I finally met one of the men behind the operation shown in the footage in a restaurant in London in 2020. Isaac Gilmore, a former US Navy Seal who later became chief operating officer of Spear, was one of several Americans who say they were hired to carry out assassinations in Yemen by the UAE.
He refused to talk about anyone who was on the "kill list" provided to Spear by the UAE - other than the target of their first mission: Ansaf Mayo, a Yemeni MP who is the leader of Islah in the southern port city of Aden, the government's temporary capital since 2015.
I confronted Mr Gilmore over the fact that Islah had never been classified as a terrorist organisation by the US authorities.
"Modern conflicts are unfortunately very opaque," he said. "We see this in Yemen - one person's civil leader and cleric, is another person's terrorist leader."
Mr Gilmore, and another Spear employee in Yemen at the time - Dale Comstock - told me that the mission they conducted ended in 2016. But the assassinations in southern Yemen continued. In fact they became more frequent, according to investigators from the human rights group Reprieve.
They investigated 160 killings carried out in Yemen between 2015 and 2018. They said the majority happened from 2016 and only 23 of the 160 people killed had links to terrorism. All the killings had been carried out using the same tactics that Spear had employed - the detonation of an improvised explosive device (IED) as a distraction, followed by a targeted shooting.
The most recent political assassination in Yemen, according to Yemeni human rights lawyer Huda al-Sarari, happened just last month - of an imam killed in Lahj by the same method.
Mr Gilmore, Mr Comstock, and two other mercenaries from Spear who asked not to be named, said that Spear had been involved in training Emirati officers in the UAE military base in Aden. A journalist who asked to remain anonymous also told us he had seen footage of such training.
The mercenaries would not go into detail about what it had entailed, but a senior Yemeni military officer from Aden, who worked directly with the UAE himself, gave me more details.
As the mercenaries' profile had made them conspicuous in Aden and vulnerable to exposure, their brief had been changed to training Emirati officers, "who in turn trained local Yemenis to do the targeting", the Yemeni military officer told me.
Through the course of the investigation, we also spoke to more than a dozen other Yemeni sources who said this had been the case. They included two men who said they had carried out assassinations which were not terror-related, after being trained to do so by Emirati soldiers - and one man who said he had been offered release from a UAE prison in exchange for the assassination of a senior Yemeni political figure, a mission he did not accept.
Getting Yemenis to conduct the assassinations meant it was harder for the killings to be traced back to the UAE.
By 2017, the UAE had helped build a paramilitary force, part of the Emirati-funded Southern Transitional Council (STC), a security organisation that runs a network of armed groups across southern Yemen.
The force operated in southern Yemen independently of the Yemeni government, and would only take orders from the UAE. The fighters were not just trained to fight on active front lines. One particular unit, the elite Counter Terrorism Unit, was trained to conduct assassinations, our whistleblower told us.
The whistleblower sent a document with 11 names of former al-Qaeda members now working in the STC, some of whose identities we were able to verify ourselves.
During our investigation we also came across the name Nasser al-Shiba. Once a high-ranking al-Qaeda operative, he was jailed for terrorism but later released. A Yemeni government minister we spoke to told us al-Shiba was a known suspect in the attack on the US warship USS Cole, which killed 17 American sailors in October 2000. Multiple sources told us that he is now the commander of one of the STC military units.
Lawyer Huda al-Sarari has been investigating human rights abuses committed by these UAE-backed forces on the ground. As a result of her work, she would frequently receive death threats. But it was her 18-year-old son Mohsen who paid the ultimate price.
He was shot in the chest in March 2019 while on a trip to a local petrol station, and died a month later. When Huda returned to work after his death, she says she received messages warning her to stop. "Was one son not enough? Do you want us to kill the other?" they said.
A subsequent investigation by Aden's public prosecutor found that Mohsen was killed by a member of the UAE-backed Counter Terrorism Unit, but the authorities have never pursued a prosecution.
Members of the prosecutor's office - who we cannot name for safety reasons - told us that the widespread assassinations have created a climate of fear that means even they are too afraid to pursue justice in cases involving forces backed by the UAE.
Reprieve has received a leaked UAE document that shows Spear was still being paid in 2020, though it is not clear in what capacity.
We asked Spear's founder, Abraham Golan, whether his mercenaries had trained Emiratis in assassination techniques, but he didn't respond.
We put the allegations in our investigation to the UAE government.
It said it was untrue that it had targeted individuals with no links to terrorism, and that it supported counter-terrorism operations in Yemen at the invitation of the government of Yemen and its international allies.
"The UAE has acted in compliance with applicable international law during these operations," it said.
We asked the US Department of Defense and the State Department to talk to us about Spear Operations Group, but they declined. And the US government's intelligence agency said in a statement: "The idea that the CIA signed off on such an operation is false."
Nawal al-Maghafi
The world should learn from Poland’s tragedy: restoring democracy is even harder than creating it
Timothy Garton Ash
After eight years of populist chaos, Donald Tusk must rebuild trust in the state and resist the urge to simply turn the tables
volution or revolution?” The question being asked in Poland today captures the dilemma of trying to restore liberal democracy after eight years of populist state capture. Must one, for instance, break the letter of a specific law in order to restore the rule of law as an overall condition? The Polish experience will tell us something important about the future of democracy inside EU member states. It also prefigures a challenge the United States could face at the end of a second Donald Trump presidency.
The last few weeks in Polish politics have been dramatic, angry and sometimes bizarre. Two former ministers of the previously ruling Law and Justice (PiS) government, convicted of the falsification of documents while in public office, take refuge in the palace of the president, their party comrade Andrzej Duda. While Duda is away at another meeting, the police arrest them in the palace and carry them off to prison. The president says they are “political prisoners”, talks of “rule of law terror”, and even makes a comparison with Bereza Kartuska, a notorious concentration camp in 1930s Poland. PiS launches a protest demo in the snow, deploying the iconography of the Solidarity movement that led Poland to freedom in the 1980s. PiS leader Jarosław Kaczyński says the arrested politicians are heroes who should be awarded the country’s highest honours. Poland’s genuinely tragic and inspiring past is recycled as grotesque parody.
The supposedly “public service” television station, TVP, which for eight years blasted out the most vile, mendacious, abusive propaganda for the ruling party, is taken over by the new government. Former staff are shut out, the station is declared bankrupt as a commercial enterprise but swiftly resumes broadcasting. Its new-style news programmes are incomparably more impartial (I’ve been watching them), but even a legal scholar highly critical of PiS characterises the steps taken to achieve this good result as “revolutionary moves”.
Different courts, some with clearly party-political judges illegally appointed by the PiS government, flatly contradict each other. At moments this feels like what the Bolshevik revolutionary Leon Trotsky called “dual power”. The name-calling gets ever louder, but the new coalition government headed by Donald Tusk, a former prime minister (from 2007 to 2014) and president of the European Council (from 2014 to 2019), continues to purge PiS’s strongholds of embedded state power with what this formidable politician has called “an iron broom”.
Three different threads intertwine in this drama. Most obviously, there’s the difficulty of restoring the institutions of a liberal democracy, built from scratch on the ruins of a Soviet-type system after 1989 and then subject to systematic demolition after 2015, when PiS came to power, but with the country remaining a member of the European Union. Like Viktor Orbán in Hungary, Kaczyński made great efforts to keep the facade of a democratic, pluralist, rule-of-law state, conforming with EU standards. As another legal scholar puts it, you have so-called judges delivering so-called verdicts on the basis of so-called laws. A Potemkin constitutionalism, if you will.
As a result, the restoration of liberal democracy is both more and less difficult than was its original creation after the end of communism in 1989. It’s less difficult externally, because instead of still being in the Kremlin-dominated Warsaw Pact and Comecon, Poland is in Nato and the EU. The EU is not just applauding the efforts of the new government but rewarding it with what may soon be upwards of €100bn in EU funds, withheld from the previous government because of its violations of the rule of law.
It’s more difficult internally, because this is not, as in 1989, an externally imposed one-party dictatorship which almost all Poles – including many of the former communist power-holders – agree must be transformed through a peaceful revolution. Rather, it’s an entirely homemade mess, shrouded for the most part in laws approved by a democratically elected parliamentary majority.
Second, it’s a case of hyperpolarisation, fake news and hysteria strongly reminiscent of today’s United States. Like Maga Republicans and leftwing Democrats, supporters of Kaczyński and Tusk live in different realities, each denouncing the other for violating the rule of law and betraying the nation. A stable liberal democracy depends on a basic social consensus around the legitimacy of key institutions such as parliament, presidency, independent courts and free media. How do you recreate a well-functioning liberal democracy when that minimal social consensus doesn’t exist?
Last, but by no means least, there’s the role of individuals. Kaczyński and Tusk have played leading parts in Polish politics for a quarter of a century, and they hate each other’s guts. Kaczyński, a prime example of the paranoid style in politics, strode up to the parliamentary lectern moments after the Tusk government was sworn in, and denounced the new prime minister as a “German agent”.
As fateful in the current crisis is the country’s president. Duda is weak, vain, easily swayed, and usually ends up doing Kaczyński’s bidding. His own former doctoral supervisor calls him “wobbly”. According to the much-respected first head of Poland’s supreme court, Adam Strzembosz, the president who now plaintively calls on the EU to stop the new government’s violations of the constitution has himself violated the constitution no fewer than 13 times. Instead of playing the vital role of a neutral head of state during a difficult political transition, he has become even more partisan, offering convicted criminals refuge in the presidential palace and bleating fatuous hyperbole.
The new government says it wants a quick cleaning of the Augean stables, before focusing on Poland’s future. That’s easier said than done, especially given Duda’s significant powers of veto and delay. In as much as PiS has a political strategy, it’s probably to make hysterical chaos last as long as possible, in the hope that voters will come back to them in April’s local elections or June’s European ones. There are few signs of this yet; in fact, opinion polls suggest the opposite. But it can’t be ruled out.
Beyond that, the biggest challenge for Tusk and his coalition partners will be to resist the temptation of simply turning the tables, installing their own partisan loyalists instead of the other lot. In short, Poland needs to build back better. By the end of this parliamentary term, in 2027, the public service broadcaster should be more solidly impartial, the courts more fully independent, the president more unquestionably above parties, state-owned enterprises more thoroughly non partisan, the public administration and security services more truly independent – not just than they were under PiS, but than they were under earlier Polish governments, including Tusk’s own previous ones, before the populists came to power. Here’s the real test, the true labour of Hercules.
DeSantis was like a lab-designed version of what’s been the establishment GOP holy grail for half a dozen years, the fabled Trump Without The Baggage. To paraphrase what they said about Austin Powers, Republicans craved this fabled creature, Democrats feared him. But Trump is the baggage. All the “rough edges” and degenerate values are what feeds his supporters’ devotion. Trump is The Baggage. It’s worth repeating since after almost eight years, so few seem to understand this.
CLIVE, Iowa, Oct 16 (Reuters) - Donald Trump promised on Monday that if elected president again he will bar immigrants who support Hamas from entering the U.S. and send officers to pro-Hamas protests to arrest and deport immigrants who publicly support the Palestinian militant group.
On a campaign stop in Iowa, Trump was responding to the Hamas killing of at least 1,300 Israelis that triggered a war in which Palestinian health officials say Israel has killed more than 2,800 Palestinians in Gaza.
Trump, president from 2017-2021, said that if elected to a second White House term he will ban entry to the U.S. of anybody who does not believe in Israel's right to exist, and revoke the visas of foreign students who are "antisemitic."
He also vowed to step up travel bans from "terror-plagued countries." He did not explain how he would enforce his demands, including the one requiring immigrants to support Israel's right to exist under what he called "strong ideological screening."
Many of Trump's immigration policies were challenged in court during his presidency and his newest pledges could also face challenges.
A ban he imposed on immigrants from some Muslim-majority nations was struck down in lower courts but ultimately upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court. Biden ended that ban when he took office.
Trump said on Monday he would ban immigrants from Libya, Somalia, Syria and Yemen "or anywhere else that threatens our security". Trump also read a poem that he used to liken immigrants to deadly snakes.
Jaime Harrison, chair of the Democratic National Committee, described Trump's pledges as Islamophobic, extreme and designed to exploit "fear and anxiety."
Iowa is one of the earliest states to hold a Republican presidential nominating contest. A tough approach to immigrants was a cornerstone of Trump's first term as president.
He is the frontrunner to win his party's White House nomination and take on Democratic President Joe Biden in the November 2024 election.
Promising to drastically tighten U.S. immigration laws, Trump said: "If you want to abolish the state of Israel, you're disqualified, if you support Hamas or the ideology behind Hamas, you're disqualified, and if you're a communist, Marxist, or fascist, you are disqualified."
Most of Trump's Republican rivals have condemned Hamas and offered full-throated support for an expected Israeli invasion of Gaza, but none has laid out such a tough series of proposals to keep people out of and expel Hamas sympathizers from the U.S.
The United States along with several other countries have designated Hamas a terrorist organization.
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, one of Trump's Republican rivals for the presidential nomination, said on Monday he favored the deportation of foreign students who support Hamas and would bar Gaza refugees from the U.S. if elected president.
Trump last week accused Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of being unprepared for the Hamas attacks and called Hezbollah - the Iran-backed Lebanese militant group - "very smart."
His Iowa remarks appeared to be an effort in part to blunt that criticism.
"We will aggressively deport resident aliens with jihadist sympathies," Trump said. reuters
They want to go back to the non rules based system of might is right so China can take Taiwan, and Russia Ukraine.
I will definitely allow that China and Russia want to restore their former pieces you mentioned, but not in context with your reasoning.
David Folkenflik@davidfolkenflik
1h
LATimes confirms 115 journalists laid off, or about 23 percent; newsroom will be at approx 385.
NOTE: Taken in combination with last year's layoffs, the Los Angeles Times has laid off about one third of its newsroom in less than a year.
I wonder if he’ll expel me.
Turkey Backs Sweden’s NATO Bid
The vote in the Turkish Parliament puts the Nordic nation closer to joining the military alliance, easing months of friction that have impeded efforts by the West to isolate Russia over its war in Ukraine.
