The president of Freedom House writes about how the noxious effects of Trumpism have migrated beyond our borders:
The president’s attacks on the judiciary and the media, his resistance to anticorruption constraints and his unfounded claims of voting fraud by the opposition are tactics familiar to foreign autocrats and populist demagogues who seek to subvert checks on their power.
Such leaders take heart from Trump’s bitter feuding with the United States’ traditional democratic allies and his reluctance to uphold the nation’s collective defense treaties, which have helped guarantee international security for decades. The president has refused to advocate American democratic values overseas, and he seems to encourage the forces that oppose them. His frequent praise for some of the world’s worst dictators reinforces this perception.Freedom House ranks the United States in its "Freedom in the World 2019" report in the same league as Mongolia, Croatia and Belize, and below France, Germany and the UK. MAGA!
The Washington Post is also reporting something sentient humans here and abroad have observed for some time -- that Putin puppet and laughing stock Donald "Rump" Trump is out to wreck the Western Alliance:
As President Trump prepares to deliver his second State of the Union address, the leaders of the United States’ closest allies in Europe are filled with anxiety.
They are unsure of whom to talk to in Washington. They can’t tell whether Trump considers them friends or foes. They dig through his Twitter feed for indications of whether the president intends to wreck the European Union and NATO or merely hobble the continent’s core institutions.
Officials say Trump, by design or indifference, has already badly weakened the foundation of the transatlantic relationship that American presidents have nurtured for seven decades. As Sigmar Gabriel, a former German foreign minister, put it: “He has done damage that the Soviets would have dreamt of.”
European leaders worry that the next two years could bring even more instability, as Trump feels emboldened, and they are filled with fear at the prospect that Trump could be reelected. The situation has left the continent facing a strategic paradox no one has managed to crack.
“We can’t live with Trump,” Gabriel said. “And we can’t live without the United States.” (our emphasis)At this late date, to pretend that all of this is pure coincidence, or that the ignoramus simply has no understanding of how our democratic alliances have functioned for a century, or that he simply enjoys creating chaos, is to ignore what we can see in plain view and are certain investigators are well on their way to proving: that this compromised POS is being leveraged by Russia to act in its best interests rather than those of the United States and its allies. As we've said before, we think some of the "what" will be reported by the Special Counsel and some of the "why" will be in the form of indictments issued through the Southern District of New York's investigation into Rump's organization and financing (including Rump's inaugural committee, which is being subpoenaed for documents as this is written).
Herr Gabriel, we can't live with Trump either.
(Photo: Trump's the only one happy to see Putin -- "Am I doing o.k., boss?")
