The Tribune

With CHARLIE HARPER

IT seems like with every passing day, we get more evidence from the media that America just doesn’t seem to know what to do with Donald Trump. But there’s also plenty of evidence that outside the Washington Beltway, there is much more consequential stuff for people to worry about.

The former president gave a rambling, lengthy interview to Bret Baier of Fox News earlier this week, in which Trump did not appear to be at his best. Even his hair seemed unusually frizzy, but not as much as the 45th president himself seemed to be almost discombobulated.

Baier, quietly regarded as probably the most responsible journalist at Fox, did a reasonable job of challenging Trump as he continued to cling to his familiar litany of narcissistic falsehoods. In this, Baier took basically the same tack as had CNN’s newest star, Kaitlan Collins, in a town hall-style meeting with Trump last month.

Inside the media cocoon in New York and Washington, there was much indignation and outrage about Trump’s vigorous assertions that he won in 2020, appointed “great people” to his cabinet and could end the Ukraine War in “24 hours”. It’s all Headline News.

But only if you actually pay attention.

Outside the narrow, but admittedly heavily populated northeastern American corridor from Washington to New York, there is clearly a different perspective.

There, in the vast remainder of the US, things are different. While the daily newspapers in many areas continue to cover Trump’s adventures in fantasyland, the “man and woman in the street” couldn’t care less.

In a vigorous discussion the other day with a group of politicians and civic leaders over 300 miles away from the DC-NY axis, it was clear that none of the Beltway diversions commanded any serious attention.

Local issues overwhelmingly predominate. It might be a school board election. It might be alarming pollution in a local lake. Perhaps it is a decision by the local authorities that impacts sectors of the local business community. If there are any complaints about politics or politicians, they concern their inability to gain access to state or even federal funding for necessary local projects.

Individuals are concerned about their own lives and families. How will they cope with consumer prices that have not yet subsided in the wake of the COVID-spurred recession/inflation cycle – and may not do so anytime soon? Mortgage rates remain uncomfortably high. It’s increasingly difficult to figure out how to afford new car payments. Wages are clearly not keeping pace with price increases.

There is a genuine and entirely understandable unease in the country.

And yet the Republican Party seems unable to leverage that unease into a clear, coherent message could resonate with voters next November.

Well, that’s not entirely true. Several of the dozen or so GOP announced presidential candidates are trying to craft a convincing message. But at least at the moment, none really registers in the cavalcade of polls that relentlessly confirm Trump’s position at the top of the GOP field and Ron DeSantis’ spot well behind but clearly running in second place.

The ever pugnacious Trump recently told a crowd of his supporters at his golf club in New Jersey that Biden, “together with a band of his closest thugs, misfits and Marxists, tried to destroy American democracy”.

He added: “If the communists get away with this, it won’t stop with me.”

Trump again sounded the Marxist theme days later during a telephone rally with Iowa voters. The comments came after numerous campaign emails and social posts in recent months in which Trump has claimed that Biden’s America could soon become a “third world Marxist regime” or a “tyrannical” Marxist nation.

As for the Florida governor, “DeSantis is an opportunistic, ferret-eyed weasel who appears to have no moral compass whatsoever,” one pundit noted recently. “And his wife? A former Fox TV newsreader of surpassing ambition and little evident empathy. What a team! For all those who thought Trump was the worst possible outcome in 2024: Watch out. DeSantis and his wife might be even more dangerous.”

A plausible outcome for the Republicans at this point is that the MAGA base finally, at long last, tires of their hero under the accumulating weight of his brazen falsehoods and indictments. And that DeSantis demonstrates conclusively that he is not ready for prime-time.

What then? Keep your eye on South Carolina senator Tim Scott, the only black member of the US Senate and someone who is quietly picking up endorsements from his colleagues in the American upper legislative chamber. There is still a long way to go until next November.

As NATO prepares for Ukraine membership, Putin doubles down on their Nazi past

Amid all this domestic political chaos, for those relatively few paying close attention to the situation, the American position in the world also demands an anxious response from its citizens.

First, there’s still the war in Ukraine and the Western response. As the NATO allies prepare for a consequential July summit meeting in Lithuania, it’s clear that the alliance is planning for Ukraine’s membership after the war with Russia is settled somehow.

NATO defence ministers agreed last week on ways to move Ukraine closer to the military alliance, the alliance’s leader said, but Kyiv will not be offered full membership at the Vilnius summit meeting.

“All allies agree that Ukraine will eventually become a member of NATO,” the alliance’s secretary general, Jens Stoltenberg, said at a news conference in Brussels.

And as if to underscore the American commitment, the US State Department reminded us again just yesterday that the US has provided more than $40 billion in military assistance “since Russia launched its premeditated, unprovoked, and brutal war against Ukraine on February 24, 2022”.

At the same time, Russian president Vladimir Putin seems to be trying to emulate the startling outrageousness of Trump’s name-calling in his efforts to rally domestic support. While Trump calls Biden and his team Marxists, Putin is attacking his opponents from the opposite end of the political spectrum.

Putin has been painting Ukrainians as Nazis for years, but he is amping up the volume now. The Kremlin is portraying the current war as a continuation of Russia’s fight against evil in what is known in Russia as the Great Patriotic War.

In this effort, Putin is counting on lingering Russian pride in the World War II victory over Nazi Germany to carry over into support for his current military misadventure. (He may be rewarded for doing this. The Russian contribution to the Allied victory over the Nazis was stupendous.)

Many scholars and pundits have pushed back on Putin’s calumny. While Ukraine has some residual far-right groups, they say, “none of this justifies the Russian aggression and the gross mischaracterization of Ukraine.”

But it’s also widely acknowledged that during World War II as Ukraine found itself caught in the remarkably undesirable position between the forces of Joseph Stalin and Adolph Hitler, many Ukrainians opted for the German, who, after all, had not already pillaged and enslaved them for 25 years as had Stalin’s USSR.

Kissinger’s three great threats to mankind

Here’s a bit of possible trivia: Henry Kissinger is still alive at 100, and he is speaking out in a long interview with The Economist magazine on the US in the world. As always, he’s worth heeding.

On Russia: “Putin told (Kissinger) he didn’t object to Ukraine in ‘economic arrangement with Europe’ but NATO membership was something different.” Kissinger feels that the West made “a huge mistake by dangling Ukraine NATO membership in 2008 and then really not doing anything concrete either to accomplish that or to fortify Ukraine.” Putin’s response was ‘entirely predictable,” the former Secretary of State said.

On China: “Both sides (China and the US) have convinced themselves that the other represents a strategic danger. Each feels the other seeks to supplant its domination. And Taiwan complicates this.” Kissinger said the “situation with an ascendent China reminds me of the situation with Germany rising in the years before World War I”.

He also said “I have never met with any Chinese or Russian leader who said anything good about the other. There has never been a natural alliance between those two.”

Kissinger sees three great threats to mankind now: The US – China rivalry; the war in Ukraine, and Artificial Intelligence. “Our machines may refuse to allow us to shut them off.’