All posts tagged "russia"

We were warned Trump would sell out key allies. A year later, here we go

Exactly one year ago last night, Vice President Kamala Harris confidently walked up to Donald Trump, looked him in his bloodshot eyes, offered her hand, and then proceeded to spend the next 90 minutes dragging him all over the stage of Philadelphia’s National Constitution Center in their one-and-only 2024 presidential debate.

Harris was prepared, disciplined, and clearly demonstrated her keen understanding of both domestic and foreign policy issues. She wasted no time stating her key plans for her administration, and effortlessly illustrated a command of the Constitution. She made it clear that she, not her opponent, who was a convicted felon, had spent an entire professional career upholding our nation’s laws, not violating them.

She even predicted how the debate would go down telling the world that Trump would haul out “the same old, tired playbook,” and warning he would resort to “a bunch of lies, grievances and name-calling.”

While Harris strongly defended a woman’s right to choose, Trump stammered and lied saying, “As far as the abortion ban, no, I’m not in favor of an abortion ban. But it doesn’t matter because this issue has now been taken over by the states.”

Then he weirdly said, “I have been a leader on fertilization.”

With an incredulous look, Harris stared at him and then the camera, and said without speaking, “I have no idea what the hell he is talking about, either.”

This was repeated several more times, as Trump used the shovel Harris casually tossed him to bury himself.

When she wasn’t relentlessly fact-checking and battering the haggard Trump with the facts, she was nonchalantly casting a line and patiently waiting for the two-ton sucker fish to hit it, before setting the hook, and reeling him in.

By the time she was done, the orange, flapping fish was bleeding out all over the stage, and screaming, “They’re eating the dogs! They’re eating the cats!”

Harris also effortlessly dog-walked Trump into the very racist trap that he set weeks earlier when he questioned Harris’s “Blackness.”

“All I can say is, I read where she was not Black, that she put out. And I’ll say that, and then I read that she was Black. And that’s OK. Either one was OK with me. That’s up to her. That’s up to her.”

That’s up to her … How kind.

Harris again looked at the camera, with a “you decide” look.

When the ass-kicking was finally over, Harris had masterfully humiliated Trump. She had proven she had the capacity to be one damn fine president, and knew how to stand up to fascist bullies, not roll out the red carpet for them.

So badly was Trump beaten, he actually flat turned down an offer from Republican state media at Fox TV to host a second debate, saying “there will be no rematch.”

It’s fitting then, that on the one-year anniversary of Harris’s knockout of Trump on that Philadelphia stage, we are getting news of Russia President Vladimir Putin’s incursion into Polish airspace today. High-ranking Polish military officials are decrying an “unprecedented violation” as a “huge number” of Russian drones were shot down by Polish and NATO forces over that country.

This is the first time in the history of NATO that alliance fighters have engaged enemy targets in allied airspace.

Read that again.

As I type this, Poland’s government has invoke Article 4 of the NATO treaty, that states alliance members “will consult together whenever, in the opinion of any of them, the territorial integrity, political independence or security of any of the parties is threatened.”

Without invoking Article 4, there cannot be Article 5, which could entail military action.

From reporting in The New York Times this afternoon:

Since NATO’s founding in 1949, Article 4 has been invoked eight times. Before Wednesday, the last was on Feb. 24, 2022, the day Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

What we know for sure right now is that the world is less safe today than it was yesterday, and certainly one year ago. We still don’t have a clue what Trump has to say about any of it, except what he posted on his social media account:

"What’s with Russia violating Poland’s airspace with drones? Here we go!"

Here we go? Good God.

This is the terrifying stuff of world wars, but of course, Harris was on top of this issue, too, during that debate, because unlike Trump, she read her national security briefings, and could tell our friends from our enemies.

At one point, Harris turned to Trump and said this:

“Why don’t you tell the 800,000 Polish Americans right here in Pennsylvania how quickly you would give up for the sake of favor, and what you think is a friendship with a known dictator (Putin) who would eat you for lunch?”

She wasn’t done:

“If Ukraine loses, Putin would be sitting in Kyiv with his eyes on the rest of Europe, starting with Poland.”

Holy hell …

And let me remind you that Trump promised to end Russia’s war with Ukraine on Day One of his presidency. Of course, anybody who was paying attention, and/or really loves this country, knew that like so much of the heated bilge that pours out of his lying mouth, it was all complete bulls–––.

Instead, just last month he surrendered to Putin on American soil by giving the murdering dictator the red-carpet treatment Harris had predicted.

But if we are really being accurate here, all of this was forecasted on another debate stage in 2016, when Trump was dragged around by another smart, tough, unflappable woman.

When Hillary Clinton went after Trump’s bromance with Putin, the man who would violently attack America only four years later said this:

“He (Putin) said nice things about me. He has no respect for her (Clinton), he has no respect for our president (Obama). I’ll tell you what, we’re in very serious trouble.”

Clinton responded this way:

“Well that's because he'd rather have a puppet as president of the United States.”

Truer words have never been spoken.

Both of these patriotic women were right about everything, and we should all be reminded of that every single day.

D. Earl Stephens is the author of “Toxic Tales: A Caustic Collection of Donald J. Trump’s Very Important Letters” and finished up a 30-year career in journalism as the Managing Editor of Stars and Stripes. You can find all his work here.

Neo-Nazi group with US links may be backed by Russian intelligence

Before a law enforcement crackdown hobbled it in 2021, the Base established itself as one of the most active neo-Nazi accelerationist groups — a term for groups that seek to hasten societal collapse by violent means.

Now the Base has rebuilt, to the extent that last year it earned a spot on the European Union list of sanctioned terrorist groups.

A sudden burst of activity in Ukraine has renewed suspicions that the Base and its leader, Rinaldo Nazzaro, are linked to Russian intelligence and security services.

“The Base’s activities in Ukraine suggest that there is more to this group than meets the eye,” said Steven Rai, author of a report released on Tuesday by the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD).

“While there is no smoking gun that proves state sponsorship of the Base, there are numerous indicators that should at least raise questions as to whether they are being covertly supported by Russia.”

Suspicions of Russian influence have persisted since the group’s founding in 2018 due to the fact that Nazzaro, a former FBI intelligence analyst and onetime U.S. civilian analyst supporting military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, now lives in St. Petersburg.

According to the ISD, Nazzaro has continued “to fundraise and provide strategic direction to the group from Russia.”

Rai said the Base’s use of Russian communications applications such as VKontakte, RuTube, Mail.Ru and the social network Odnoklassniki, along with its use of inauthentic accounts, or bots, to spread its message, raise suspicions about potential Russian state support.

The ISD report also flags the Base’s offer to pay recruits in cryptocurrency to carry out acts of sabotage and violence, “which implies a level of financing that is unusual for neo-Nazi accelerationist groups and raises questions about where the funding originates.”

'Hate camp'

The Base first captured U.S. headlines from 2019 to 2021, as Nazzaro purchased a remote property in eastern Washington state while organizing online recruits to meet for a “hate camp.”

They hoped to practice guerilla warfare, with the long-term goal of establishing a white ethnostate in the U.S. Pacific Northwest.

The group’s decline began in early 2020 with the arrest of U.S. members for harboring an AWOL Canadian service member, building a machine gun to carry out an attack at a pro-gun rally, and plotting to murder an antifascist couple.

News reports and research point to the Base having been active in 18 countries, including the U.S., U.K, Russia, Ukraine, Italy and Sweden.

Rai says Nazzaro’s “profile alone raises questions about whether the Russian government would seek to exploit his access and capabilities by recruiting him as an intelligence asset.”

As reported by The Guardian, in March the Base began posting propaganda on social media announcing a campaign in Ukraine, signaling that the group has shifted its target for a white ethnostate from the Pacific Northwest to the Carpathian mountains near the Hungarian border.

According to The Guardian, the Base made posts on the social media platform Telegram offering to pay volunteers to carry out attacks on “electrical power stations, military and police vehicles, military and police personnel, government buildings, politicians.”

In May, the Base created a new Telegram channel announcing the launch of "Project White Phoenix," described as an effort "to create a white ethnostate in the Carpathian Mountains of Ukraine.” Appealing to Ukrainians, the post announcing the project called for capturing territory "for the future of the all whites in the brewing chaos. Mountains and borders in the region are a force multiplier making guerilla warfare possible and inevitable."

Such efforts in Ukraine align with Russian objectives, Rai notes.

“At a minimum, the Base’s activities may divert Ukraine’s attention away from countering Russian aggression,” the ISD report says.

“More nefariously, the Base could be part of Russia’s hybrid warfare tactics, which employ a mixture of conventional military forces, clandestine operatives and unwitting agents to sow chaos.”

Emails from Raw Story to two addresses associated with the Base went unreturned.

Nazzaro has consistently denied that he is an agent of the Russian state.

"This accusation is a lie," Nazzaro said on Telegram in May. "I have never had contact with Russian security services."

Nazzaro also said financing for the Ukraine campaign "comes from crowdfunding donations not from me personally."

Zakarpattia Oblast has previously been targeted by a Russian influence campaign.

In 2018, three members of the pro-Russian neo-Nazi group Falanga were arrested and charged in connection with an arson attack on a Hungarian cultural center in the city of Uzhorod.

Polish prosecutors ultimately claimed that the attack constituted an act of terrorism intended to “publicly incite hatred between Ukrainians and Hungarians” and cause “disruption of the political system.”

Witnesses implicated Manuel Ochsenreiter, a pro-Russia member of the far-right Alternative for Germany party. Ochsenreiter fled to Moscow, where he died of a heart attack in 2021, aged 45.

Looking for a U.S. leader

While Ukraine appears to be the Base’s current focus, the group has shown a resurgence in the U.S. and Western Europe.

The ISD reports that Europol coordinated arrests of five Base members in six European countries in November 2023, followed by arrests in the Netherlands and Italy in 2024, and in the U.K. earlier this year.

Last summer, Nazzaro posted on his personal Telegram account that he was looking for a U.S leader at a salary of up to $1,200 a month, The Guardian reported.

During the 2024 U.S. presidential election, the Base posted a video on Telegram celebrating an arson attack on a ballot box.

Earlier this year, the Base made an appeal for financial support to pay for a paramilitary training exercise in the U.S. Since the beginning of the year, the group has posted photos of members in the U.S. carrying firearms and wearing tactical gear.

It is unclear if the training exercise took place or if the Base appointed a U.S. leader.

Marines' shocking ties to pro-Russian neo-Nazis exposed after Raw Story sues Trump agency

The U.S. Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS) probed a Marine assigned to Camp Lejeune in North Carolina for ties to a pro-Russia neo-Nazi group in Poland, according to internal military files exclusively obtained by Raw Story.

The Marine was arrested when the FBI disrupted a plot to attack an energy facility on U.S. soil. Authorities found that a co-defendant in the case, also a Marine and a Russian linguist, was in possession of classified material. The links to the pro-Russian group and details of the classified materials investigation are reported here for the first time.

NCIS initially refused to provide records in response to a Raw Story Freedom of Information Act request, citing an exemption to protect privacy. Raw Story sued the federal agency, and the courts found in its favor.

“‘Disclosure of the requested records would likely reveal a great deal about law enforcement policy,’ including how defendants handled investigations related to the mishandling of classified information and how the ‘military is addressing extremism in the ranks,’” Judge Lori AliKhan, a federal judge on the D.C. bench, wrote in 2024.

“‘Thus, disclosure would offer the public visibility into defendants’ ‘performance of [their] statutory duties’ and would further ‘let citizens know ‘what their government is up to.’”

‘Insider threat’

NCIS began investigating the case in April 2020, following a Newsweek story exposing Lance Cpl. Liam Collins as a member of Iron March, a global neo-Nazi online forum.

The investigation uncovered messages exchanged between Collins and two self-identified members of the Polish group, Falanga, discussing potentially coordinating paramilitary activity.

By the time the NCIS began investigating Collins’ links to Falanga, he had organized a neo-Nazi paramilitary group that was illegally manufacturing guns and stealing military gear from Camp Lejeune, while plotting an attack on critical infrastructure designed to spark a race war, according to federal prosecutors.

In October 2020, while Collins was under investigation for his links to the Polish neo-Nazi group, he was arrested on firearms charges, along with Cpl. Jordan Duncan, a Marine and Russian linguist assigned to the 2nd Radio Battalion of the II Marine Expeditionary Force. The two Marines had met at Camp Lejeune in late 2018.

When the FBI raided Duncan’s home in Boise, ID, they seized his laptop and an external hard drive. Authorities discovered classified material on the devices, and the NCIS and FBI opened a new investigation for potential violation of a federal law regulating the handling of national defense information.

As the NCIS and FBI reviewed the classified material as part of an “insider threat” investigation, the case widened to include a new charge of conspiracy to damage an energy facility, and three co-defendants, including another Marine and a New Jersey Army National Guard member.

In August 2021, while Duncan was in jail awaiting trial, investigators determined that the files discovered on his devices included a secret “capabilities brief” for the 2nd Radio Battalion, according to another set of investigative files exclusively obtained by Raw Story.

The files included other documents labeled “FOUO,” or “For Official Use Only,” a designation that denotes sensitive material exempt from public release, though not classified. The documents included “Standard Operating Procedures and tactics” specific to the battalion that a special security officer determined “would be detrimental to the Signals Intelligence and Electronic Warfare community as a whole if obtained by an adversary,” according to the investigation.

The investigation revealed that the FOUO materials were commingled with “a large library of improvised explosive device schematics, chemical weapons schematics” and other manuals on Duncan’s hard drive.

“It appears that Mr. Duncan’s hard drive was kind of a source for the entire group,” NCIS Agent Christopher Little testified during a detention hearing for one of Duncan’s codefendants in August 2021. “There was multiple documents from that hard drive on multiple other group members’ devices.”

‘Fresh and ready’

Before Collins met Duncan or started assembling his paramilitary group, he communicated with two self-identified members of Falanga, the neo-Nazi group with roots in the Polish skinhead scene, according to a data set of leaked Iron March chats reviewed by Raw Story.

When Collins began communicating with Falanga members in June 2016, he was a rising senior in New Jersey still more than a year out from entering Marine Corps bootcamp at Parris Island, SC.

Collins told other users on the forum his mother was Polish, that he was proud his “great-grandparents were Nazi collaborators,” and that he didn’t dispute Jews who claimed “Poland helped with the Holocaust.” In fact, it was a point of pride.

“I have a deep interest in creating a sort of ‘alliance’ with you and any members of Falanga that might be able to talk to me,” Collins wrote to a self-identified Falanga member with the username “Phalanx22” in August 2016.

“Like being able to relay information and propaganda between Poland and the United States. I will be serving in the military soon, so I want to come out fresh and ready to train my Polish brothers how to defend their blood and soil.”

Falanga made no secret of its anti-American stance.

The group was founded because of its leader’s perception of “liberalism, capitalism and USA/NATO as the greatest enemies,” a member with the username “Bombenhagel” told Collins.

Collins’ comments in the Iron March chats do not reveal his position on Russia, but he disparaged NATO — a bulwark of the US military alliance with Poland — for its role in the Balkans war of the 1990s.

“Opportunists like NATO wanted a reason to build more bases in Eastern Europe after the Cold War,” Collins wrote, “so they stopped Serb and Croats from genociding every last Muslim in the Balkans.”

Addressing an Iron March user in Canada, Collins said he was forming a “paramilitary.” In April 2017, Collins told “Bombenhagel” his group would be “purchasing a lot of land soon for training, so if Falanga ever organizes a trip to the U.S., you are welcome to come train with us.”

“Bombenhagel” thanked Collins for the invitation. It’s unclear if Falanga members ever traveled to the U.S. to train.

The last documented exchange between Collins and Falanga on Iron March took place in May 2017, but an NCIS investigative report noted that Collins expressed concern about the security of the forum, while suggesting they continue to communicate through a different platform. It is unclear how long the relationship between Collins and Falanga lasted.

In early 2018, three Falanga members were detained by the Polish Internal Security Agency on suspicion of carrying out an arson attack against a Hungarian cultural center in Ukraine.

The three were convicted, according to Przemyslaw Witkowski, a Polish scholar who researches the far right and pro-Russia influences at Civitas University in Warsaw, and who described the attack in the book Russia and the Far-Right: Insights from Ten European Countries as “the most infamous act of terror committed by Polish citizens in the last 20 years.”

Polish prosecutors argued that the purpose of the crime was to “publicly incite national hatred between Ukrainians and Hungarians” and to cause “disruption of the political system in Ukraine.”

The clear beneficiary was Russia, which in 2014 had annexed Crimea from Ukraine, and was backing separatists in the Donbas.

Three years later, Russia launched a full-scale invasion that continues to exact a bloody toll.

Witness testimony in the trial for the 2018 terror attack implicated Manuel Ochsenreiter, a German journalist active with the far-right Alternative for Germany party, according to Witkowski. Ochsenreiter reportedly denied involvement but relocated to Moscow, where in 2021 he died suddenly of a heart attack, aged 45.

‘Exchange of information’

Falanga members have addressed the Duma in Moscow, visited Russian-backed separatists in the Donbas, and interviewed Aleksander Dugin, a Russian intellectual close to Russian President Vladimir Putin, Witkowski noted.

Witkowski told Raw Story he finds it unlikely that Falanga would be able to maintain such high-level contacts without some kind of approval from Russian intelligence services.

“For sure there is an exchange of information in this environment,” Witkowski said.

The secret “capabilities brief” and other sensitive U.S. military information Duncan obtained through his assignment to the 2nd Radio Battalion in the II Marine Expeditionary Force would likely be of interest to Collins’ counterparts in Falanga, Witkowski said.

He noted that Falanga members have demonstrated an interest in infiltrating the Polish police, national guard and army.

Duncan is now serving a seven-year sentence in Pennsylvania, for illegally manufacturing a short-barrel rifle. His lawyer declined to comment.

Collins, who is serving a 10-year sentence in South Carolina for aiding and abetting the interstate transportation of unregistered firearms, could not be reached for comment.

Emails to Bartosz Bekier, the leader of Falanga, went unreturned.

NCIS told Raw Story the investigation yielded no evidence that any military information on Duncan’s devices was transferred to Falanga or wound up in Russian hands.

“NCIS has determined, in coordination with the FBI and [the U.S. Department of Justice], that there were no indications that classified information was provided to other groups or to foreign entities,” said Meredith March, an NCIS spokesperson.

March added that NCIS was “unable to provide information that may be contained in the FBI’s investigative files.”

The FBI National Press Office and FBI joint terrorism task forces in Wilmington, NC and Boise, ID, declined to comment.

The NCIS “insider threat” investigation on Duncan for potential violations of the federal law on communicating, transmitting or retaining national defense information was closed in November 2021. Federal prosecutors agreed to refrain from mention of the classified materials on Duncan’s devices, to avoid prejudicing a jury if he were to go to trial on firearms charges. Duncan pled guilty to the gun charge shortly before his trial was scheduled to begin.

While the National Security Division Counterterrorism Section prosecuted Duncan, alongside federal prosecutors in the Eastern District of North Carolina, the Department of Justice opted to not charge him for mishandling classified materials.

A spokesperson for the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of North Carolina, where Camp Lejeune is located, declined to comment. The Department of Justice did not respond to a request for comment.

The Trump Achilles heel that threatens to damn world democracy

Could Trump’s weakness and the GOP’s cowardice mean the end of democracy around the world? Could his part in the Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell scandal be the proverbial horseshoe nail that brings down majority rule and representative government worldwide?

The world’s first modern major confrontation between authoritarianism (in this case, a kingdom) and democracy was the American Revolution in 1776. Outside of tribal societies, democracy had been largely dormant all over the world for the previous two thousand years, but we installed an early version of liberal democracy here in 1789.

Our first president, George Washington, not only fought the fascist forces of King George III, but he was also a fanatic proponent of democracy itself, to the point that he refused to serve a third term in office so as not to set a “king-like” precedent.

But 80 years later, America faced her second major confrontation with fascists who wanted to end our democracy and replace it with a strongman autocracy.

By the 1860s there were only a handful of democratic nations in the world when the second major war between democracy and fascism happened. The southern US states — taken over by morbidly rich plantation owners who ended democracy in the South by the mid-1850s — attacked the United States itself in an effort to end our democratic system.

But we had a fierce democracy advocate for president in Abraham Lincoln so, after almost 700,000 people died in the Civil War, we managed to preserve democracy in America and thus for much of the rest of the world.

Eighty years after that, America faced her third major war against fascist forces, this time the attack coming from Germany, Italy, Spain, and Japan. While America “only” lost an estimated 413,000 men and women in WWII, the blood price the world paid was far more massive as an estimated 75 to 80 million people perished in that conflict.

And here we are, exactly 80 years after the end of that war against fascism, and America again faces the test: will we defend and preserve democracy for ourselves and the world, or will we let the new Axis that’s forming this week in China take over the planet as Trump reshapes America into a police state and realigns us with the world’s fascist nations?

For the first time — in the fourth of these 80-year cycles of assaults against democracy — America has a president who openly and explicitly disdains the idea, embracing instead the world’s most notorious autocrats and their neofascist forms of government.

And, even if he was inclined to defend democracy, Trump is terribly weak and unpopular, which only adds to the danger that this time we could see a worldwide revolution against the form of government our Founders and Framers were willing to die to establish.

On Wednesday, as 10 of the victims of Trump’s “closest friend” Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell were telling their stories in front of the Capitol, Trump ordered a deafening fly-over by military jets, ostensibly to “honor” a Polish pilot. Many saw it as the president’s way of saying, “This is how much power I command; you’d better be quiet about me.”

Trump’s also threatening Congressional Republicans, with a White House source saying that anybody signing onto Ro Khanna and Tom Massey’s discharge petition (calling for the full release of the Epstein files and related info) were committing a “hostile act.”

House Speaker “Little Mike” Johnson piled on, telling the victims as he lied to their faces that he was committed to “transparency” and “justice” and then leaving the meeting to whip against the vote to release those very documents.

Putin’s clearly reading the tea leaves: he’s launched these past few days the largest, most massive, and most deadly air raids against Ukraine of the entire three-year war. Over 500 drones and two dozen ballistic missiles hit the democratic nation overnight Tuesday, most focusing on its energy grid.

Lev Parnas, once close to Trump, says this is the new Trump/Putin strategy: destroy Ukraine’s power grid and then, when winter sets in and people are freezing to death, Trump will swoop in and “negotiate peace” that screws Ukraine and gives Putin whatever he wants.

Meanwhile, China’s President Xi Jinping said on Wednesday — using code words that every diplomat in the world heard with ringing clarity — that he’s going to take Taiwan.

Xi stood with the presidents or rulers of Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Cambodia, Congo, Cuba, India, Indonesia, Iran, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Laos, Malaysia, Maldives, Mongolia, Myanmar, Nepal, Pakistan, Russia, Serbia, Slovakia, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Vietnam, and Zimbabwe. That’s a significant Axis to take on the Alliance of NATO and other democratic nations.

These world leaders know what appears obvious to most Americans: if Trump were innocent of participating in Epstein’s and Maxwell’s crimes he’d have made all the records public. The sustained ferocity of his coverup not only appears to demonstrate guilt, but also reflects the weakness he’s brought to the office with his long history of criminal and grifting behavior.

And that weakness may well be exactly what will motivate those fascist leaders to move soon to end the pesky democracies around the planet and, finally after 249 years, again make the world safe for autocrats.

So, what do we do?

In 1937, President Franklin D. Roosevelt said, in his “Quarantine Speech” calling for the democratic nations of the world to essentially quarantine the fascist nations:

“Without a declaration of war and without warning or justification of any kind, civilians, including vast numbers of women and children, are being ruthlessly murdered with bombs from the air. In times of so-called peace, ships are being attacked and sunk by submarines without cause or notice. Nations are fomenting and taking sides in civil warfare in nations that have never done them any harm. Nations claiming freedom for themselves deny it to others.

“Innocent peoples, innocent nations, are being cruelly sacrificed to a greed for power and supremacy which is devoid of all sense of justice and humane considerations.”

We are there again. Roosevelt wasn’t able to stop the inexorable metastasis of fascism across the planet that erupts every four generations, and now, 80 years later, Trump is unlikely to succeed at preventing another world war where FDR failed.

Nonetheless, we all need to do everything we can to restore decency and democracy to America — including exposing Trump’s crimes, so he can no longer be threatened or blackmailed by Putin, et al — and stand against this new Axis of Tyrants. There really is no other option.

Trump mocked as ultimate 'pick me girl' as snubs leave him reeling

President Donald J. Trump is reportedly reeling after he wasn't invited to a meeting and military parade with Russia, China, North Korea and India — and it's a tough moment for the ultimate "pick me girl," an analyst wrote Friday.

"The leaders of Russia, China, and North Korea are not good men," Tom Nichols wrote for The Atlantic. "They preside over brutal autocracies replete with secret police and prison camps. But they are, nevertheless, serious men, and they know an unserious man when they see one. For nearly a decade, they have taken Donald Trump’s measure, and they have clearly reached a conclusion: The president of the United States is not worthy of their respect."

America has been sidelined by these leaders amid Trump's tariff fallout, Nichols wrote, and in the wake of Trump's snub from Putin following an unsuccessful meeting in Alaska aimed to stop Russian attacks on Ukraine.

The military parade Wednesday in Beijing "is the most recent evidence that the world’s authoritarians consider Trump a lightweight," Nichols reported. "Russian President Vladimir Putin, Chinese President Xi Jinping, and North Korea’s maximum nepo baby, Kim Jong Un, gathered to celebrate the 80th anniversary of Japan’s surrender in World War II. (Putin’s Belarusian satrap, Alexander Lukashenko, was also on hand.)"

The leaders' move added insult to injury — and an act of defiance from the authoritarian leaders — after Trump's ill-advised meeting in August.

"When the Kremlin’s dictator shows up with no interest in negotiation, speaks first at a press conference, and then caps the day by declining a carefully planned lunch and flying home, that’s a humiliation, not an exchange of views," Nichols writes.

The administration and Pentagon appear to struggle with complex foreign relationships under Pete Hegseth's leadership, and though it was long believed that Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) would be "the adult in the room," he has "instead become a man in a Velcro suit," carrying out jobs and tasks stuck onto him by the president, according to the writer.

He added that the cracks in America's foreign diplomacy are starting to show.

"It has no coherent foreign policy, no team of senior professionals managing its national defense and diplomacy, and a president who has little interest in the world beyond what it can offer him," Nichols reported.

Trump has repeatedly expressed admiration for leaders like Xi, Putin, and Kim Jong Un and had a "little kid high school reaction" to not joining the group in China this week, Nichols wrote.

Modi was seen driving in Putin's limousine, a move signifying the two leaders coming together following Trump's tariffs, the New York Times reports.

The Trump administration slapped India with its highest tariff rate of 50%; a 25% baseline tariff, and an additional 25% secondary tariff as a penalty for its continued purchasing of Russian oil. Trump was reportedly “completely upset” with India over its refusal to halt its purchasing of Russian oil.

After the meeting, Trump posted on Truth Social that the relationship between India and Russia had frayed.

"Looks like we’ve lost India and Russia to deepest, darkest, China. May they have a long and prosperous future together!" Trump wrote.

Be assured, Trump is doomed — and here's how

The neofascist takeover of America — of our cities, universities, media, law firms, museums, civil service, and public prosecutors who tried to hold Trump and Trump’s vigilantes accountable to the law — worsens by the day.

As I’ve traveled across the country peddling my book, trying to explain how this catastrophe happened and what we can do about it, I’ve found many Americans in shock and outrage.

“How could it have happened so fast?” they ask. I explain that it actually occurred slowly and incrementally over many years until our entire political-economic system became so fragile that a sociopathic demagogue could bring much of it down.

Some people I speak with are still in denial and disbelief. “It’s not as bad as the press makes it out to be,” they say. I tell them that it is — even worse.

Others are in despair — heartbroken and immobilized. “Nothing can be done,” they say. I tell them that hopelessness plays into the hands of Trump and his lackeys who want us to think that the game is over and they’ve won. But we can’t let them. The stakes are too high. Hopelessness is a self-fulfilling prophesy.

Rest assured. The seeds of Trump’s destruction have already been sown. He will overreach. If the Supreme Court rules in favor of birthright citizenship, for example, and Trump announces he’s not bound by the Supreme Court, the uproar will be deafening.

Or the economy will bite him in the butt. As prices continue to rise and job growth continues to slow — due to Trump’s bonkers import taxes (tariffs), his attempt to take over the Fed, and his attacks on immigrants — America will fall into the dread trap of “stagflation”: stagnation and inflation. After months of this, his base is likely to turn on him — remember, many voted for him because he promised to bring prices down — and he and his Republican lackeys in Congress will be toast in the 2026 midterms.

Or his brazen corruption will do him in (he’s personally raking in hundreds of millions from crypto, for example). Or Putin will do him in (if Ukraine falls to Russia or an emboldened Russia strikes Lithuania). Or the Jeffrey Epstein scandal.

He no longer has any truth-tellers to advise him — he has purged all of them. And a president who’s flying blind, without anyone around him to tell him he’s about to crash, will inevitably crash. Many innocent people will likely suffer “collateral” damage. But at least the nation will see him for who he is and consign him to the dustbin of history.

None of this argues for complacency. We must continue to fight — demonstrate, phone your representatives and senators, boycott corporations and organizations that are caving in to tyranny, protect the vulnerable, make good trouble.

But please do not fall into denial or despair, and don’t let anyone else.

Robert Reich is an emeritus professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/

Only one thing can stop Trump turning the US into Russia

Governor Gavin Newsom is doing exactly what he had to do with his redistricting plan in California: attempting to stop Donald Trump rigging the 2026 midterms election in Republicans’ favor.

When you have a president bent on maximizing his autocratic power and positioning his party to dominate federal elections and create virtual one-party rule, no response is too extreme.

Newsom didn’t choose to create five Democratic-leaning House districts out of territory currently held by Republican lawmakers. He threatened it as a tactic to get Trump and his obeisant Texas governor and lawmakers to back off their gerrymandering scheme to rig the election.

Since Texas went through with the redistricting, Newsom had the choice of allowing Trump’s attempt to steal the House to go unchallenged or to counterattack and re-level the playing field.

That Trump would attempt to rig the 2026 midterms should shock no one.

This is the guy who lied that the 2020 presidential election was stolen — who coerced governors, state legislatures, and election officials to change votes, who created fraudulent elector slates to cast fraudulent electoral votes, who tried to get Vice President Mike Pence to subvert the electoral certification process, and who incited a violent mob to attack the Capitol in an attempt to halt the presidential certification of Joe Biden.

It is also no coincidence that three of Trump’s most admired political pals – Vladimir Putin, Victor Orbán, and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan — enjoy virtual one-party rule, their parties having long-established strangleholds on election results and governmental power. Thinly veiled autocracies today, the erstwhile democracies of Russia, Hungary, and Turkey have been crushed.

This is exactly what Trump and his Project 2025 chums have in mind for the US.

Trump is attempting to kneecap the Democratic Party’s chances in all future elections through gerrymandering and voter suppression. Measures such as eliminating mail-in voting, disallowing voting machines, reducing the number of polling places, eliminating election-day registration, and requiring proof of citizenship are all aimed at suppressing the vote of minorities who traditionally support Democrats.

Trump’s successful ploy to add five Republican districts in Texas is part of a grander scheme to reshape America’s governance system and render the two-party democratic system defunct.

In virtual one-party systems, the ruling party controls all branches of government, Trump’s obvious goal.

In one-party rule autocracies, opposition parties and shows of public dissent are often suppressed through legal, political, or violent means. Power is centralized within the ruling party and its authoritarian leader, with no democratic system of checks and balances to restrain it. Constitutions are reinterpreted or rewritten to help the ruling party and its authoritarian leader remain in power indefinitely.

This is the direction the US is headed. We have an overreaching, power-grasping president and a rubber-stamp Republican Congress that obediently does his bidding. Atop the judicial system is a pliant Supreme Court filled with Trump appointees. Federal judges who rule against Trump’s unconstitutional executive orders are maligned and served with lawsuits.

Authoritarian bullying is rampant. Trump punishes universities and states that refuse to bend a knee to his demands. He calls out the national guard to militarize Democratic-controlled cities and launches sham investigations of Trump’s critics conducted by the servile heads of the DOJ and FBI. Trump signs executive orders that violate states’ and the federal legislature’s rights. These anti-democratic acts are just the beginning.

Trump may steal the 2026 House election by other red states following Texas’s gerrymandering lead coupled with repressive voting laws that disenfranchise traditional Democratic voters. Republicans’ one-party rule would then be given two more years to entrench itself in the manner of Putin’s, Orban’s, and Erdogan’s parties. Democracy as we have known it would no longer exist.

With his redistricting plan, Newsom is pushing back. Other Democratic states may follow suit. But Trump’s election scheme has created a chillingly dark day for American democracy. Thanks to Trump, the winning party in 2026 must out-manipulate the other, since winning fairly is no longer an option.

Democrats must win the House by hook or by crook in 2026 to save America from becoming an autocratic, one-party rule country. Every anti-democratic act that Trump commits provides more striking evidence of the intent.

Governor Newsom did not stand by and let Trump’s dirty election tricks go unchallenged. If other Democratic leaders and the vast majority of voters follow suit, Trump’s second attempt to destroy American democracy will be his last.

Tom Tyner is a freelance editorialist, satirist, political analyst, blogger, author and retired English instructor

This Trump surrender was the worst yet

Lindsay Graham says he believes Donald Trump is ready to “crush” the Russian economy if that country’s leader, Vladimir Putin, doesn’t agree to peace talks with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.

“Trump believes that if Putin doesn’t do his part, that he’s going to have to crush his economy,” the US senator told reporters in South Carolina last week. “Because you’ve got to mean what you say.”

This is an amazing thing to say.

Just three days prior, Trump met with Putin in Alaska for three hours. Beforehand, he said there would be “severe consequences” if Putin didn’t agree to a ceasefire in the war in Ukraine. Trump said he “solved six wars in six months,” implying that this one would be no different.

Then he choked.

His demands melted into the air. He was all smiles, all handshakes, all deference verging on reverence. The leader of the world’s most powerful military emerged from his meeting with a cut-rate tyrant as if he’d been dogwalked. It was so bad even a Fox reporter had to admit it looked like “Putin came in and steamrolled, got right into what he wanted to say and got his photo next to the president and then left.”

The Washington Post’s George Will, who is not a liberal, also saw the plain truth.

“The former KGB agent currently indicted for war crimes felt no need to negotiate with the man-child,” Will said (my stress). “The president’s thunderous demands — a 50-day deadline, a 10-day deadline, 'severe consequences,' a ceasefire before negotiations — all were just noise."

So yes. Senator Graham is right. You’ve got to mean what you say. Trump doesn’t. Indeed, he never does. That’s why he choked.

Because of that, he and other Trump allies have spent their time in the days after that disastrous “summit” trying to rewrite history in order to protect the president from the consequences of his own weakness.

Graham now says Trump is ready to “crush” the Russian economy, as if Trump really were the big strong man he portrays himself to be, rather than the milksop who actually called Putin “the boss” and later phoned him during a meeting with European leaders, as if getting permission.

But Graham isn’t alone.

“The president has this uncanny ability to bend people to his sensible way of thinking,” US envoy Steve Witkoff told Sean Hannity last night.

“He does it each and every time,” he said. “I've never seen anything quite like it and I've been around some master dealmakers. He is the legend as far as I'm concerned. His policy prescriptions are so pragmatic and so sensible and in a distorted world, he’s recalibrating it all. It’s simply remarkable. And every single leader that I have met in my travels, they say the same things I do. Every single one of them.”

Witkoff is the envoy who Anne Applebaum said was “an amateur out of his depth” who “misunderstood his last meeting with Putin in Moscow if he thought that the Alaska summit was going to be successful.”

On Fox, noted international relations expert Montana Congressman Ryan Zinke said: “President Trump has done an unbelievable job against long odds,” before speculating, oddly, that “it'll end up probably with a land bridge between the Crimean peninsula and Russia.”

He also said that Trump “hasn’t changed where his mission focus is. It’s peace.”

Peace through surrender.

Isn’t that the most striking thing? The US is unrivaled in its military and diplomatic might. We could end this war, now. As Applebaum said, “arm Ukraine, expand sanctions, stop the lethal drone swarms, break the Russian economy, and win the war. Then there will be peace.”

But Trump chooses weakness.

He chooses to look strong, not be strong.

And no matter what his Republican allies in the Congress do to cover up that fact, they themselves cannot make him. They, too, are weak.

Graham said the clock is ticking and that Trump must “impose steep tariffs on countries that are fueling Russia’s invasion of Ukraine by buying its oil, gas, uranium, and other exports,” according to the AP, and such threats might push Putin to the negotiating table.

“If we don’t have this thing moving in the right direction by the time we get back, then I think that plan B needs to kick in,” Graham told the AP.

Plan B would be Congress acting without Trump.

Which means there is no plan B.

The Republicans are weak, because they surrendered their power, first to the rightwing media apparatus, then to Trump, who surrendered his power to Putin, who dominates the rightwing media apparatus.

And has for a decade.

We can speculate about the dirt Putin has on Trump, but fact is, he could mortally wound the president by turning the world’s biggest firehose of disinformation away from his “woke” enemies and toward him. Trump’s base is already confused by his refusal to release “the Epstein files.” Russian propaganda could be deployed to savagely widen the already broad gap between him and the MAGA faithful.

More likely, though, the Kremlin could sow doubt about Trump’s alleged strength. He’s all talk, no walk. We saw it. Russian state media brags about it. Echoes are now bouncing around mainstream media.

While Graham was shielding Trump from his weakness, the UK’s biggest conservative paper ran this hed and dek: “European rearmament is pushing Trump into irrelevance on Ukraine. This vain, vacillating, gullible US president no longer commands the West.”

The importance of the rightwing media apparatus to the Republicans is evident in their efforts at damage control. Trump showed his whole ass. Now it’s up to allies to persuade his supporters that they did not see what they saw or if they did, it was the most amazing thing ever.

They have a lot of work to do. The Economist reported that Americans have a -14 approval rating of his handling of foreign policy. The public knows next to nothing about global affairs, but we know what fear looks like. After meeting Putin, Trump looked scared. And I think he looked scared, because Putin reminded him of something important.

He who can destroy a thing controls it.

So Trump chooses weakness.

And the rest of his party follows.

'There is no chance of winning!' Trump makes grim declaration about Russia's Ukraine war

President Donald Trump fired off at former President Joe Biden Thursday for his handling of the Russo-Ukraine War, alleging that Biden “would not let Ukraine fight back, only defend,” despite history saying otherwise.

“Crooked and grossly incompetent Joe Biden would not let Ukraine fight back, only defend,” Trump wrote in an online post on his social media platform Truth Social. “How did that work out? Regardless, this is a war that would have never happened if I were president — zero chance. Interesting times ahead!”

Trump’s allegation, however, flies in the face of years’ worth of Biden’s policy on Ukraine.

While the Biden administration was initially hesitant to send Ukraine offensive weapons, those hesitations were soon caved on as Biden walked back previous positions in sending the Eastern European nation increasingly-powerful weapons like tanks, F-16 fighter jets and long-range missiles.

Biden’s willingness to provide Ukraine with offensive weapons was so pronounced that even some of Trump’s most loyal allies began to criticize the administration for its provocation, such as Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-AL).

“If they don’t quit what they’re doing, they’re going to force us into a third world war,” Tuberville said back in 2023 to Alabama Daily News, speaking on Biden approving increasingly-powerful offensive weapons to be shipped to Ukraine.

Nevertheless, Trump insisted that Biden had only permitted Ukraine to act defensively against Russia, and in an unclear comparison, likened the Biden policy on Ukraine to illegal immigration in the United States.

“It is very hard, if not impossible, to win a war without attacking an invaders country,” Trump wrote. “It’s like a great team in sports that has a fantastic defense, but is not allowed to play offense. There is no chance of winning! It is like that with Ukraine and Russia.”

This groveling surrender to Trump might be the worst of all

Let’s start here today: Our legacy media is dead.

For some, this pronouncement is long overdue, and might be best labeled “old news.” For people like me, who spent their professional life in a newsroom as part of a team that turned around timely content called “real news” to their readers, while also calling power into account, this declaration officially wipes out everything I once believed in and held dear.

Watching our old, tired legacy media like The New York Times and The Washington Post cover this Russia charade, mislabeled a “summit,” and Trump's meeting with European leaders in Washington this week has completely knocked me over the edge. I’ll let you tell me how badly the gushing toothies on TV are botching this up, because I quit watching their 24/7 screeching with any regularity years ago.

We have reached the point where these incompetents can’t even get the nut of the story right. It’s no longer news that the nuclear-powered narcissist, Donald Trump, is posturing to get every spotlight turned in his direction no matter how big or small a story. Yet the media comes running with their hair on fire every time he beckons.

However … It IS news — URGENT NEWS — when European prime ministers and presidents drop everything they are doing and fly into the United States with their hair on fire to oppose the actions of its unstable, authoritarian leader, and back the man who is fighting for his life and his country’s democracy, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.

It’s news because THAT HAS NEVER HAPPENED BEFORE.

Yet, in their breathless play-by-play coverage you never saw it reported that way. Instead, here is what we got all day Monday and into Tuesday as these incompetent morons, who dare to call themselves “journalists” were led around by their noses, which are always in the general vicinity of Trump’s two-ton ass:

"Trump just said this!"
"Now Trump said that!"
“Trump is doing this!”
“And now Trump is doing that!”
"What will Trump do next????”

There was literally no fact-checking, nor important context. They just repeated his endless bullshit that was all designed to go absolutely nowhere, because the most important person in these negotiations wasn’t even on location. And why should he have been? Russian President Vladimir Putin had already emasculated the President of the United States after getting red-carpet treatment in Alaska on Friday, and had gone home to Russia to resume bombing the bejesus out of Ukraine.

So Trump did what he does best, and spoke on behalf of Putin, while arguing against everybody else.

It was appalling.

But there was our legacy media, who somehow thought reporting all that bullshit in real time was some sort of journalistic feat, when in reality they just come off like a bunch of drunken parrots.

Things are no better than they were on Thursday, when it comes to Russia’s inhumane, illegal attack on Ukraine, they are miles worse. Because God only knows what the two most dangerous leaders in the world talked about while the cameras were mercifully shut off during their dangerous, private meetings the past five days.

I can guess it sounded something like this:

PUTIN: “Never forget who put you in office, Donald.”
TRUMP: “No worries there, sir. I got everybody, but mostly the idiots in the media, eating out of my hand.”

Here is the vitally important context I didn’t read ONCE in all the legacy media’s atrocious coverage of this sh–– show the past 24 hours:

“Putin, who Trump actually asked for help in the 2016 campaign …”

“Putin, who Trump has repeatedly fawned over, even calling the murderous dictator among other things ‘a genius' …’”

“Putin, who Trump surrendered to in Helsinki in 2018, when pressed if there was Russia interference into the 2016 election, when his own Republican Party had determined there was …”

“Putin, who after winning the 2007 Time Magazine Man of the Year Award, received a letter from Trump that gushed: “As you probably have heard, I’m a big fan of yours!”

“Putin, who allowed Trump to host his Miss Universe beauty pageant in Moscow in 2013, and received yet another note from Trump which read: “Will you become my new best friend?”

I could go on and on here, but you get the point, even if the dangerous dummies in our legacy media don’t: Any relationship Trump has with his BFF Putin is at best suspect, but most likely is completely compromised.

Shouldn’t readers and viewers be aware of this right off the top and reminded of it repeatedly?

And what of the 50-plus times Trump said on the 2024 campaign trail that he would end Russia's attack on Ukraine during his first 24 hours in office. I read scores of stories in the legacy media Monday, and this was never reported even ONCE. Further, he was not asked about this even ONCE in those weird sit-downs with the press in that grotesque, golden room, where his tie drags on the floor and he does that weird accordion thing with his hands.

They aren't even bothering to try to hold this lying SOB accountable anymore.

And what about that lying? Because it is all this blabbering loudmouth does.

In just the last 10 days he’s told preposterous lies about Russia, the 2020 election, Jeffrey Epstein, jobs, crime, inflation, Project 2025, Joe Biden, Barack Obama, and mail-in voting.

Add this to the tens of thousands of times he has lied in his professional life about all things big and small, and you’d think he would have lost ALL benefit of the doubt 10 years ago.

Instead, our legacy media still hangs on his every word.

It is ABSURD.

They don’t even make lying a small feature of the story, when in fact all his lying IS THE DAMN STORY.

There is not one report or story about about Trump that should make it past the third paragraph without this being inserted for context:

“Trump, who has a long history of lying about <insert subject> …”

WHY isn’t this being done?

Here is the thing that should keep us all awake at night: If Trump, a convicted felon, can wipe out the truth — and he is well on his way — he can wipe out everything this country was founded on, and begin working to wipe us out, and everything we once stood for.

This is exactly what Putin, and every other fascist leader on earth wants.

It can never stop being headline news that Trump is the most notorious liar in the history of the United States.

It should have never become headline news that our legacy media decided to quit reporting that.

But here we are, and neither one should ever be trusted again.

(D. Earl Stephens is the author of “Toxic Tales: A Caustic Collection of Donald J. Trump’s Very Important Letters” and finished up a 30-year career in journalism as the Managing Editor of Stars and Stripes. You can find all his work here.)