Tomás Ó Flatharta

Looking at Things from the Left

Posts Tagged ‘trump

Musk vs Maga on Immgration

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A war between vipers in the USA.

During Christmas 2024, writes Simon Hannah, the internet was a blaze with a fierce row on the far right in the USA. 

This useful story comes from the British website, Anti-Capitalist Resistance.

Link :
Musk V Maga on Immigration

Key grassroots leaders of the recently triumphant MAGA movement went to war with Elon Musk on the question of immigration, in a spectacular argument that pointed to political divisions within their movement.

Tensions were already rising as Musk fanboys had started to promote their favourite capitalist as a co-president or ‘the real VP’ which angered the rampant egotism of Donald Trump who does not tolerate any competition. Musk made clear at a recent rally that Musk could never be president. Why? Because “He wasn’t born here”.  Musk, a South African who is now naturalised as a US citizen would always ultimately be an outsider for the MAGA people. 

This was the kindling for the wider explosion. Just before Christmas Day, Trump appointed US-Indian venture capitalist Siram Krishnan to be policy lead on AI. This was met with anger from some of the MAGA faithful – Krishnan had previously been a Democrat supporter so was seen as a suspect, but also crucially – not American. Well not fully ‘American’ in the way that they care about i.e. white. 

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Elon Musk, Nigel Farage, and the Gruesome Twosome of the British Tory Party

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On the western and eastern sides of the Atlantic Ocean a ferocious viper war has erupted.

US President-elect Donald Trump’s favourite attack-dog Elon Musk is trying to remote-control British politics.

Reform leader Nigel Farage’s typically British stiff upper-lip response is described below : it is like the Fawlty Towers episode when Basil Fawlty failed to produce a Waldorf Salad for a tyrannical American diner who had paid the bungling guest-house owner a generous bribe :

Financial Times, January 6 2025

Before long Trump will dispose of Musk, just as Russian strongman Putin bumped off Mr Prigozhin.

Musk might, at some point, jangle some of his loose change in the direction of far-right Irish political operators. The nearest Irish equivalent to Musk’s suggested Nigel Farage – Tommy Robinson marriage is a direct link between the beggar-gombeens of the Dublin Dáil and the convicted kick boxer/rapist Conor McGregor. The Independent Ireland (II) party had to dump a McGregor associate, Phil Sutcliffe, from its candidate list after Nikita Hand won a court victory over the kick-boxing rapist.

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With Vance, Trump is doubling down on Maga

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An article from the Financial Times journalist Edward Luce, which should be a wake-up call.

Donald Trump’s running mate opposes abortion and aid to Ukraine and says he would not have certified results of 2020 vote.

With Vance, Trump is doubling down on Maga

Ohio senator is an intelligent and forceful exponent of the Maga movement — and maybe also its future

If there were any doubts that Donald Trump would go full “America First” he banished them on Monday with his vice-presidential pick. JD Vance is the most high-profile Trumpian cheerleader among senior Republicans.

Trump could have held his nose and chosen Nikki Haley, the former South Carolina governor, who gave him the biggest run for his money in the Republican primaries. Haley is a relative moderate on abortion. Selecting her, or a like-minded figure, would have signalled that he wanted to broaden his appeal to wavering suburban female Republicans.

Vance, by contrast, is an unapologetic Christian conservative. If Joe Biden can find a silver lining in the gathering storm clouds, Vance would be it. Biden’s vice-president, Kamala Harris, is an effective campaigner on a woman’s right to choose. 

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The USA hurtles toward political crisis – Assassination attempt emboldens Trump, further immobilizes Democrats

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We start with an old joke on the Irish left : Which is the Evil of Two Lessers?

Ashley Smith reviews a political crisis in the USA :

Article sources :


USA hurtles towards political crisis – Assassination attempt emboldens Trump, further immobilizes Democrats – ESSF


The U.S. hurtles toward political crisis – Assassination attempt emboldens Trump, further immobilizes Democrats – Tempest

Double Evil : Donald Trump and Joe Biden

Ashley Smith analyzes the impact of the attempted assassination of Donald Trump on the deepening political crisis in the U.S. and the ever growing weakness of the Joe Biden campaign.

The United States was already headed for one of the most acute political crises in recent memory. Then former president and convicted felon Donald Trump was nearly assassinated at a rally in Pennsylvania. Having survived, Trump has consolidated his base and cornered the Democrats by blaming them for the attack.

Trump will now position himself as a strong man and survivor over a debilitated Biden campaign. He has an inside track to victory in the election with a clear advantage despite being widely despised.

Even before the attempted assassination of Trump, President Joe Biden’s catastrophic debate performance had thrown his candidacy into doubt with the bourgeois press, the Democrat’s capitalist donors, and centrist politicians, all calling for him to pass the baton to another nominee.

 GOP Capitalizes on Assassination Attempt

The attempt against Trump has drowned out all other issues. The image of him bloodied, defiant with fist raised, and chanting “fight, fight, fight” has been plastered across the media and will no doubt end up on t-shirts at this week’s GOP Convention in Milwaukee.

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Biden in the Bardo – Jeffrey St. Clair, Counterpunch

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Jeffrey St. Clair writes a fact-stuffed polemic in the online magazine Counterpunch, which is relentless – like witnessing the last hours of an exhausted punch-drunk emperor surrounded by grovelling flunkies.

Till now, I did not know the concept Bardo :

Bardo “is an intermediate, transitional, or liminal state between

death and rebirth. The concept arose soon after Gautama Buddha‘s death, with a number of

earlier Buddhist schools accepting the existence of such an intermediate state, while other schools rejected it”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bardo

Thanks to Joan McKiernan for the link.

While we can not be sure which mechanism will be used to remove Joe Biden from his White House job, we can be sure his days as a power-wielding President are over. Expect a shit show next week; Democrats praising new President Kamala Harris; Trump’s coronation at his republican party gets little media attention : and plenty of gruesome gaffes from old man Donald are likely to surface.

July 12 mass media reports showing the world Joe Biden’s mistakes are only the tip of the iceberg :
Biden makes ‘VP Trump’ gaffe amid calls to end campaign

Here is the Jeffrey St. Clair article :


Biden in the Bardo

by Jeffrey St. Clair

Seymour Hersh said Biden isn’t all there. Thomas Friedman and Jane Fonda were reduced to tears. Rob Reiner, who watched the debate with Fonda in LA in the company of Doug Emhoff, the husband of Biden’s VP Kamala Harris, screamed at the TV: “We’ve lost.” One of the party’s top money-bundlers told Politico: “Our only hope is that he bows out, we have a brokered convention or he dies. Otherwise, we are fucking dead.” These were just some of the shock reactions to Joe Biden’s somnambulant performance in his debate against Trump last week in Atlanta. 

Biden’s decrepit appearance, death-rattle voice and baffling answers shouldn’t have been a surprise. He’s 81-years-old and he’s been descending into senescence for years. But most people, including many of his most ardent supporters, hadn’t seen this diminished version of Biden before on extended display. 

Biden doesn’t make many prolonged public appearances anymore. He hasn’t given a full-press conference in nearly a year. He’s been kept on a tight public leash by his staff, restricted to short interactions with the White House press gaggle or prepared remarks fed to him by a teleprompter. Even then he’s seemed halting, confused, and mentally frail.

Carl Bernstein – the Watergate Journalist – describes Biden’s “horror shows”

During an interview with CNN, Carl Bernstein said multiple sources told him there have been at least 15 occasions in the last year and a half “where the president has appeared like he did at that horror show (his debate performance).”

Bernstein said that in the last six months, sources have told him there has been a marked rate in Biden’s cognitive decline.  He says that some of his sources have taken their concerns to Ron Klain in the last year, worried that the President is losing his train of thought and didn’t have the capacity to pick up where he left off.  Bernstein described a fundraiser at the Four Seasons restaurant in New York in June of 2023, where the President became “Very stiff…almost like a kind of rigor mortis.” 

Biden’s staff and family are charged with protecting him. The media isn’t. Most other courtier reporters surely knew what Bernstein had heard. Yet, they’ve largely been complicit in covering up Biden’s accelerating cognitive decline, presumably because of their deep hatred of Trump, whose faculties, such as they are, also seem to be in an advanced state of decay.

As Jill Abramson, former executive editor of the New York Times, wrote in Semafor: “It’s clear the best news reporters in Washington have failed in the first duty of journalism: to hold power accountable. It is our duty to poke through White House smoke screens and find out the truth. The Biden White House clearly succeeded in a massive cover-up of the degree of the President’s feebleness and his serious physical decline, which may be simply the result of old age. Shame on the White House press corps for not to have pierced the veil of secrecy surrounding the President.”

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