Trump: America's nervous breakdown

Delegations from Russia and the USA met in Saudi Arabia yesterday to negotiate a peace settlement in Ukraine, without Ukraine or Europe being involved. The first things to say is that these are not peace negotiations. Vladimir Putin can and could have had that at any time in the last three years. All he needed to do was withdraw his troops and stop firing missiles. He doesn’t need negotiations for that. No, these are talks about how two vultures will pick the bones of a defeated Ukraine clean. It is absolutely shameful of Trump and the party that is in thrall to him. Yesterday was, to borrow a well known phrase, one that will live in infamy.

Elon Musk: Character Limit

Having read Character Limit, How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter, I think I understand Musk a little better than before.  He's a bit of an idiot, albeit a fortunate and now a very wealthy one. His fortune came from his share of the $1.5 billion sale of Pay-Pal to Ebay and then from his investments in Tesla and SpaceX. When Tesla's value had ballooned to over $1 Trillion by the end of 2021, making him a billionaire many times over, he was looking for other things to do, and since he was spending hours and hours every day on Twitter he started to buy shares in the company. Musk claimed he was worried about de facto bias in the 'Twitter algorithm.'

Vance insults Europe

JD Vance's speech at the Munich Security Conference yesterday was a deliberate insult to Europe. It did the opposite of what you might have supposed and left Europeans feeling less secure. It was the latest sign that the United States isn’t going to defend us if push ever comes to shove. He accused European countries, naming Britain specifically, of suppressing free speech and failing to properly control immigration. The US Vice President said the continent's greatest threat was not from Russia and China, but "from within." And by that, he meant the elected governments, most of which are not far-right. Considering what’s happening now in America, it was very rich indeed.

With one bound Vlad was free

We are watching the equivalent of the 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop pact that saw Russia and Germany secretly dividing up Poland between themselves, ready for the start of hostilities. The only difference now is that it’s Ukraine being picked apart, Russia once again taking territory in the East of a sovereign European nation, while Trump and the USA get $500 billion in Ukrainian resources in the West, mainly rare earth metals. Ukraine have to denounce NATO membership forever so they are ripe for Putin to launch another land grab in a few years. This is after Trump spoke with Putin yesterday morning and told reporters later that Putin “wanted peace.” 

An EU pipedream and a looming crisis in the USA

I am sympathetic towards Best for Britain, a campaigning group that seeks closer ties with the EU and even membership in the long term, although those aims aren't made explicit on their website to avoid scaring the horses and upsetting Reform voters. They have commissioned a report by Frontier Economics that suggests we would see a boost to the UK economy of between 1% and 2.2% from what  The Times say (HERE) is: "... alignment with Brussels’ regulations while staying within the prime minister’s stated red lines for the UK’s relationship reset with Europe." They claim it would enable the UK to recover between a quarter and a half of Brexit’s economic hit to GDP, which the OBR has calculated at -4% by 2030.

Brexit, going round in circles

Lord Frost hasn’t had the good grace to disappear as most of the other people who were centrally involved in the greatest foreign policy mistake since the Suez debacle have. At least Anthony Eden, or Lord Avon as he became, resigned after Suez and went off to raise cattle in Wiltshire and was rarely seen in public. He didn’t go round insisting to all and sundry that he was right after all. Frost on the other hand is frequently to be found lurking in the pages of The Telegraph offering his opinion on Brexit to supplement the £361 per day allowance he gets for dozing on the red leather benches in the upper chamber and enjoying the subsidised haute cuisine in parliament’s many dining rooms. Political failures nearly always fall upwards don’t they?

Musk's 'Wrecking Crew'

Trump has come in like a deranged whirlwind, smashing into everything that ever Made America Great in the first place. It is becoming like a terrifying but unmissable Hollywood soap opera. We are watching a once mighty nation being dismantled brick by brick from the inside.  Trump Brazenly Defies Laws in Escalating Executive Power Grab, is the headline in the New York Times yesterday,which sums it up well. Not only is he breaking multiple laws, he is doing so like a dictator would, bypassing the legislature altogether and scrapping entire departments set up by Congress. Among the rising chaos we earn that not even his closes aides knew he was going to suggest the USA occupies Gaza after the Palestinian population have been forcibly removed, a war crime in itself.

Trump chaos turns to outrage

Every day we get a new gob-smacking surprise from America under Trump, each more incredible and outrageous than the one before. This morning, the BBC reported that Trump wants to take over Gaza and own it 'long-term' with the Palestinians 'resettled' in Jordan and Egypt, as if it's just a piece of real estate and the population simply a problem that needs to be cleaned up. Needless to say, neither Jordan nor Egypt have been consulted and immediately rejected the idea, as has Saudi Arabia. Marco Rubio will have his work cut out in the Middle East when he isn't busy in Canada, Denmark, Panama, Mexico and Brussels shovelling up the mess that Trump's stream-of-consciousness utterances leave behind. There is no way the USA will occupy Gaza.

Trump is establishing a dictatorship

After Musk's Nazi salute and his surprise video appearance at an AfD rally in East Germany, he is getting down to the nitty-gritty of slashing US government spending even though his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has no legal standing, he is still just a private citizen with no official position and he almost certainly isn’t being paid.  The man who was supposed to be the joint head of DOGE, Vivek Ramaswamy, has been pushed out and Musk now rules supreme and unchallenged. There are reports that some of his employees from Twitter are now installed at the top of the US Office of Personnel Management (OPM), the HR function for the entire federal government. 

Farage, Trump and Brexit five years on

Yesterday was the fifth anniversary of the UK formally exiting the EU. Five years in which almost everything has gone downhill. Trade has fallen, businesses are drowning in red tape, living standards have stagnated and access to the health service is worse than it has been probably in my lifetime. Of course Covid didn’t help but while we seem to have recovered from that reasonably well, Brexit is set to be a drag on the economy for decades, perhaps permanently, unless we rejoin. A lot of people have covered the anniversary already so there isn’t a lot to add.