Europe Just Learned Donald Trump Can't Be Trusted
Donald Trump's failures in diplomacy, warfare, and intelligence simultaneously make the world more dangerous and leave us shockingly unprepared.
Edwin Eisendrath hosts It’s the Democracy, Stupid on Lincoln Square and WCPT820 AM/Heartland Signal. He’s the former CEO of the Chicago Sun-Times, a long-time management consultant, a former Chicago Alderman, HUD Regional Administrator and teacher in Chicago’s public schools. Subscribe to his Substack.
Russia appears on the verge of an important victory in Donbas in eastern Ukraine, but the cost is enormous.
Crimea, that large diamond-shaped peninsula into the Black Sea that for a time was the southernmost part of Ukraine before being annexed by Russia, is under siege. Ukraine has successfully destroyed most of the infrastructure that would carry fuel to the region. Russia is desperate to hold Crimea; Russians living in Crimea are desperate to leave. Meanwhile, Ukraine’s capability to damage energy infrastructure in Russia itself has grown. Their attacks have been so successful that Russia may have to limit energy exports to meet domestic demand — a huge economic loss for Putin.
Hardliners in Russia are urging the use of tactical nuclear weapons. There are reports, whether true or Russian war propaganda, that some are arguing to target London.
Sergei Lavrov, Russia’s brilliant and dangerous foreign minister wants to know if the agreement Trump and Putin made in Anchorage died in Evian at the recent G7 meeting. Whether he is actually worried that Donald Trump is switching sides, or whether he is simply reminding Trump that he’s watching, is unknown.
There are also reports that Europe is making contingency plans because they no longer believe they can count on the United States if Russia expands the war to pressure them to abandon Ukraine.
Ukraine, Russia, and Europe have all learned one shared lesson in this terrible war: Donald Trump cannot be trusted.
Under Trump, the United States no longer provides credible, clear, and strategic international leadership. As a result, the possibility of an expanded war in Europe grows every day. Should that happen, it would be a catastrophe far greater than anything since the Second World War.
And if calamity comes are we prepared?
No, we are not.
A Letter From Finland
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By confusing the ability to coerce with the hard work of diplomacy, in the course of a single year and a half, Donald Trump has squandered the global political capital that presidents of both parties have accumulated on our behalf.
America is more isolated than it has been in more than a century. He has alienated our allies, and pushed our trading partners into new alliances not with us but with China. His foreign policy negotiators — J.D. Vance, Steve Witkoff, Jared Kushner, and Marco Rubio — have not a single success to point to anywhere in the world. The Board of Peace that was supposed to rebuild Gaza? A failure. Russia and Ukraine? Trump doesn’t even know what side to be on. Venezuela? What even was that? Our trade imbalance? Barely changed in a year. What we stand for in the world? JD Vance traveled to Europe to tell them they aren’t white enough.
As utterly inept Trump is at foreign policy, he is even worse as Commander in Chief. He boasts of ending wars. But he started them — in Venezuela, in Iran, and against small boats in the Caribbean and Pacific. And even despite having the most powerful military on the planet, he has not won any of these wars. His Defense Secretary, Peacock Pete Hegseth, seems to delight in blowing things up and hectoring reporters. Yet when it comes to strategic successes, he has delivered not one.
How are we safer after spending hundreds of billions of dollars, losing 13 American lives, and injuring hundreds of others in Iran? Trump cannot say. No one can say. Because we are not safer.
Foreign policy and war tactics both rely on intelligence. Here, too, Trump has put Americans at risk. This time, however, we are at risk not simply because of incompetence, but because Trump has perverted America’s intelligence capabilities, firing capable leaders, installing dupes, and turning the entire apparatus inward to target his domestic challengers.
Russia Helped Iran Target U.S. Forces. Trump Doesn't Care.
Brian Daitzman is the Editor of The Intellectualist. Subscribe to his Substack.
Instead of warning us about Iran’s capabilities to withstand our initial aerial assault, our intelligence assets were busy looking for ways to indict the Southern Poverty Law Center. Instead of assessing Russia’s intentions and capabilities to expand the Ukraine war, they are looking into Gavin Newsom’s wife. Trump’s first appointment as Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, personally oversaw a domestic operation to seize voting records in Georgia. His new Acting DNI, Bill Pulte, has zero experience with intelligence, but he does have a track record of abusing government power to go after the President’s enemies list. He has been on the job just one week and is already firing staffers he thinks aren’t compliant.
Leaders around the world see these failures and this incompetence and they know — they know our biggest threat is to ourselves.
On cue, as I write this the National Mall in our nation’s capitol, fencing has been erected to strictly control movement of Americans. Armed troops are patrolling. Loudspeakers are warning visitors not to loiter.
The threat is real indeed. And it is here.
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There is a conspiracy in America and it isn’t the deep state. It’s the shallow, stupid, greedy state.
I think we're meant to be unprepared. Trump is old and dying and wants to destroy everything if he has to go.