Tag: donald trump

Will Trump really attack Venezuela?

It’s ironic that in the same week that President Donald Trump escalated the drug war in the Caribbean by unleashing the CIA against Nicolás Maduro’s regime in Venezuela, the Department of Justice won an indictment against former National Security Adviser John Bolton, the architect of the failed covert strategy to overthrow Maduro during the first Trump administration.

The one thing the two regime change operations have in common is Marco Rubio, who, as a senator, was a vociferous opponent of Maduro. Now, as Secretary of State and National Security Adviser, he’s the new architect of Trump’s Venezuela policy, having managed to cut short Richard Grenell’s attempt to negotiate a diplomatic deal with Maduro. Regime change is on the agenda once again, with gunboats in the Caribbean and the CIA on the ground. What could go wrong?

Donald Trump’s penchant for turning the metaphorical war on drugs into a real one by deploying the U.S. military dates back to his first administration, when he threatened to designate drug cartels as foreign terrorists and proposed launching missiles to blow up drugs labs in Mexico. During the recent presidential campaign, he declared, “The drug cartels are waging war on America—and it’s now time for America to wage war on the cartels.” Apparently, he meant it.

Back in office, he named six Mexican cartels, the Salvadoran gang MS-13, and the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua as foreign terrorist organizations (FTOs) and ordered the Pentagon to draw up plans for military action against them. Early on, White House officials seriously debated military strikes against cartel leaders and infrastructure inside Mexico, but decided that cooperation with the Mexican government would be more fruitful. Nevertheless, the unusual appointment of a veteran Special Forces military officer to head the Western Hemisphere Affairs office of the National Security Council signaled that Trump was still was serious about resorting to military force to wage the war on drugs.

The focus then shifted to Venezuela. The day before the New York Times broke the story about Pentagon planning for action against cartels, Attorney General Pam Bondi announced that the U.S. government was offering a $50 million reward for information leadings to Maduro’s arrest, accusing him of the “use cocaine as a weapon to ‘flood’ the United States.” Trump claimed Maduro was directing Tren de Aragua in “undertaking hostile actions and conducting irregular warfare against the territory of the United States,” a claim that the intelligence community concluded was untrue, despite pressure from Trump political appointees to make the estimate conform to Trump’s claim. The two senior career intelligence officers who oversaw preparation of the estimate were summarily fired.

In August, the Trump administration deployed a naval task force to the Caribbean, including three guided-missile destroyers, an amphibious assault ship, a guided-missile cruiser, and a nuclear-powered attack submarine. The following month, U.S. forces began air strikes on vessels allegedly smuggling narcotics in international waters off the Venezuelan coast. When Democrats and some Republicans questioned the legality of summarily killing civilians who posed no immediate threat, Trump informed Congress that he had determined that the United States was in a state of “armed conflict” with unnamed “drug cartels,” whose drug trafficking constituted an attack on the United States. Therefore, traffickers were “unlawful combatants” subject to being killed on sight. Admiral Alvin Holsey, commander of U.S. Southern Command, resigned on Thursday, reportedly because of concerns over the extrajudicial killing of civilians in the air strikes.

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Trump urged Ukraine’s Zelensky to make concessions to Russia in tense meeting: Sources

US President Donald Trump pushed Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to give up swaths of territory to Russia during a tense meeting on Oct 17 that left Kyiv’s delegation disappointed, according to two people briefed on the discussion.

Mr Trump also declined to provide Tomahawk missiles for Ukraine’s use, and mused about giving security guarantees to both Kyiv and Moscow, comments that the Ukrainian delegation found confusing, added the two sources, who requested anonymity to discuss a private conversation.

After his meeting with Mr Zelensky, Mr Trump publicly called for a ceasefire on the current frontlines, a position that the Ukrainian President then embraced in comments to reporters. A third person said Mr Trump came up with that proposal during the meeting after Mr Zelensky said he would not voluntarily cede any territory to Moscow.

“The meeting ended with (Trump’s) decision to make a ‘deal where we are, on the demarcation line’,” the third source said.

Mr Trump underscored that position in remarks to reporters on Oct 19.

“We think that what they should do is just stop at the lines where they are, the battle lines,” he said on Air Force One. “The rest is very tough to negotiate if you’re going to say, ‘you take this, we take that’.”

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On the Precipice of Authoritarian Rule

Earlier this month, President Donald Trump threatened to unleash the armed forces on more American cities during a rambling address to top military brass. He told the hundreds of generals and admirals gathered to hear him that some of them would be called upon to take a primary role at a time when his administration has launched occupations of American cities, deployed tens of thousands of troops across the United States, created a framework for targeting domestic enemies, cast his political rivals as subhuman, and asserted his right to wage secret war and summarily execute those he deems terrorists.

Trump used that bizarre speech to take aim at cities he claimed “are run by the radical left Democrats,” including Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, and San Francisco. “We’re going to straighten them out one by one. And this is going to be a major part for some of the people in this room,” he said. “That’s a war too. It’s a war from within.” He then added: “We should use some of these dangerous cities as training grounds for our military.”

Trump has, of course, already deployed the armed forces inside the United States in an unprecedented fashion during the first year of his second term in office. As September began, a federal judge found that his decision to occupy Los Angeles with members of California’s National Guard — under so-called Title 10 or federalized status — against the wishes of California Governor Gavin Newsom was illegal. But just weeks later, Trump followed up by ordering the military occupation of Portland, Oregon, over Governor Tina Kotek’s objections.

“I am directing Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth, to provide all necessary Troops to protect War ravaged Portland and any of our ICE Facilities under siege from attack by Antifa, and other domestic terrorists,” Trump wrote on Truth Social late last month. And he “authoriz[ed] Full Force, if necessary.”

When a different federal judge blocked him from deploying Oregon National Guardsmen to the city, he ordered in Guard members from California and Texas. That judge then promptly blocked his effort to circumvent her order, citing the lack of a legal basis for sending troops into Portland. In response, Trump threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act — an 1807 law that grants the president emergency powers to deploy troops on U.S. soil — to “get around” the court rulings blocking his military occupation efforts. “I think that’s all insurrection, really criminal insurrection,” he claimed, in confused remarks from the Oval Office.

Experts say that his increasing use of the armed forces within the United States represents an extraordinary violation of the Posse Comitatus Act. That bedrock nineteenth-century law banning the use of federal troops to execute domestic law enforcement has long been seen as fundamental to America’s democratic tradition. However, the president’s deployments continue to nudge this country ever closer to becoming a genuine police state. They come amid a raft of other Trump administration authoritarian measures designed to undermine the Constitution and weaken democracy. Those include attacks on birthright citizenship and free speech, as well as the exercise of expansive unilateral powers like deporting people without due process and rolling back energy regulations, citing wartime and emergency powers.

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Trump-Zelensky Was Reportedly a ‘Tough’, ‘Bad’ Meeting That ‘Ended Abruptly’ – US Will NOT Provide Long-Range Tomahawk Missiles to Ukraine at This Point

Not the meeting Zelensky was dreaming of.

For the last few weeks, both Kiev regime leader Volodymyr Zelensky and the Mainstream Media were convinced that US President Donald J. Trump had a change of heart and was now fully supporting Ukraine’s war effort.

And what’s more, the wishful thinkers brushed past the fact that Trump was still not willing to spend another dollar in the conflict, and focused on the latest ‘wunderwaffe’: long-range Tomahawk missiles.

But yesterday (17), as Zelensky was headed to Washington, DC for the Trump meeting, his world came crashing down, as news circulated of the Trump call with Russia’s Vladimir Putin, and the upcoming meeting in Hungary.

The part of the meeting that was open to the press proceeded reasonably well, but reports say that after the press left, it became a tense meeting, in which Trump told Zelensky that he doesn’t intend to provide long-range Tomahawk missiles.

Zelensky was led to hope for commitments around new weapons, but Trump was ‘in a totally different state of mind’.

The US President stated that his priority now is diplomacy, and sending Tomahawk missiles could undermine it.

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Venezuela regime change means invasion, chaos, and heavy losses

Maximum pressure has long been President Donald Trump’s stance towards the government of Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela — he slapped crippling sanctions on the country during his first term — but in recent days the administration has pushed the stakes even higher.

The Caribbean is currently hosting an astonishing quantity of American naval and air assets, including four Arleigh Burke–class destroyers, a guided missile cruiser, an attack submarine, a Marine Amphibious Ready Group, and a flight of F-35 multirole fighters.

These are ostensibly deployed as part of an antinarcotic and drug interdiction operation, but the volume of firepower employed for what is normally a relatively sedate task has created broad suspicion at home and in Venezuela that a military intervention against the Bolivarian Republic is on tap. Maduro recently sent a letter to the United Nations stating that he expected an “armed attack” against his country in “a very short time.”

His concerns have probably not been assuaged by the formation of a new Joint Task Force last week (again ostensibly for anti-narcotics operations) in SOUTHCOM under the II Marine Expeditionary Force, precisely the kind of unit that would be deployed in a Venezuelan military intervention, still less by the recent New York Times report that Trump has authorized lethal covert operations by American intelligence agents within his borders.

The administration has made its interest in removing Maduro quite clear: it views him as the head of a narcoterrorist organization that is responsible for exporting crime, drugs, and illegal immigrants to the United States. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has declared that Maduro is not the legitimate president of the country, due to his government’s obvious falsification of results in the 2024 election, and the Justice Department doubled the bounty for his capture to $50 million.

But while Maduro is, without a doubt, a usurper of the presidential office and a tyrannical dictator, he is no less the president and head of state of Venezuela. Ideological harangues about the sanctity of democracy will no more remove him from power or render his government moot than American disapproval of the Chinese Communist Party could affect the democratization of Red China, something both sides are well aware of. Removing Maduro will require more than sanctions, threats, or pressure: it will require war, and that possibility looks increasingly likely with each passing day.

While ending Maduro’s dictatorship would certainly be a boon to the Venezuelan people, the intervention comes with a number of costs and risks American policymakers should bear in mind and carefully weigh against the potential benefits of intervention. There is no free lunch in geopolitics.

The most obvious costs are those of the initial invasion. The American invasion of Panama in 1989, to overthrow the government of General Manuel Noriega, was carried out by a force of some 27,000 U.S. troops, 23 of which were killed and hundreds more wounded. Venezuela is vastly larger than Panama, and while its military is very poorly equipped, it likewise dwarfs the forces that were available to Noriega. The Center for Strategic and International Studies estimates an invasion of Venezuela would require nearly 50,000 troops, some of which will not return home. Any American government should be extremely conscientious about the causes on which it spends the lives of American soldiers.

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Bipartisan senators to force vote blocking ‘unauthorized war’ in Venezuela

A group of bipartisan senators will force a vote on a War Powers Resolution to block the use of force by American troops within or against Venezuela after President Trump raised the possibility of attacks against Nicolás Maduro’s regime.

The measure is being led by Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.), a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee. Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) are co-sponsors. 

Trump said Wednesday he had authorized the CIA to carry out covert operations inside Venezuela, saying he was focused on “land” operations and raising the specter the president is looking to remove Maduro from power.  

“The American people do not want to be dragged into endless war with Venezuela without public debate or a vote. We ought to defend what the Constitution demands: deliberation before war,” Paul said in a statement. 

The effort marks the second time senators have sought to block Trump’s buildup of force in the Caribbean Sea. A vote on a War Powers Resolution last week failed 48-51, although it garnered support from Paul and one other Republican, Sen. Lisa Murkowski (Alaska).

“Americans don’t want to send their sons and daughters into more wars—especially wars that carry a serious risk of significant destabilization and massive new waves of migration in our hemisphere,” Kaine said in a statement. 

“If my colleagues disagree and think a war with Venezuela is a good idea, they need to meet their constitutional obligations by making their case to the American people and passing an Authorization for Use of Military Force. I urge every senator to join us in stopping this Administration from dragging our country into an unauthorized and escalating military conflict.”

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Auto Loan Delinquencies Surge 50% As Cracks Deepen Across U.S. Credit Markets

A month after bankruptcies of subprime auto lender Tricolor and auto-parts supplier First Brands, new cracks emerged in U.S. credit markets. This week, Zions and Western Alliance disclosed they were victims of loan fraud tied to funds investing in distressed commercial real estate. The revelations come amid broader credit trouble, and shifting our focus back to autos, there’s new data this morning about credit products tied to the riskiest consumers that have seen a 50% surge in delinquencies. 

Bloomberg cites data from the credit-scoring company, VantageScore, which reveals that delinquencies among the low-tier consumers have surged 50% since 2010. Fueling the delinquencies is a perfect storm of record-high car prices, elevated interest rates, longer loan terms, and monthly payments that average nearly as much as rent for some folks. 

Since 2019, new vehicle prices have jumped over 25% to $50,000, while average monthly payments reached $767, with 20% of borrowers paying over $1,000 per month. Loan rates now exceed 9%, worsening the affordability crisis.

Notably, prime and near-prime borrowers are now defaulting faster than subprime consumers, as lenders tightened standards for the lowest-credit segment, according to the report. The average auto loan balance has risen 57% since 2010, and many borrowers are “upside-down”, owing more than their cars are worth.

“We’re seeing the cost of cars and the cost related to car ownership increase enormously,” VantageScore chief economist Rikard Bandebo said in an interview. “In the past five years, it has increased even faster.”

Bandebo continued, “That’s a double… You’ve been hit by the increased cost of the car and then the financing cost of the car.”

“Consumers now are in a more precarious position than they’ve been since the last recession,” Bandebo said. “We’ve seen this growing trend over the last several years of more and more consumers struggling to make ends meet, and it’s looking like that trend is going to continue into next year.”

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Democrats Fear the Loss of Their Municipal Monopolies

President Trump’s deployment of federal forces threatens Democrats’ municipal monopolies on political power. This is why they so strenuously object to federal assistance in cities’ law enforcement. Without overwhelming city vote totals, Democrats’ political control in states across America would collapse.

President Trump has repeatedly injected federal resources into city law enforcement – Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., Memphis, and now Portland and Chicago – where he has deemed crime to be out of local authorities’ ability or will to control it. At each intervention, national Democrat leaders have loudly protested – even in Washington, where Mayor Bowser acknowledged crime was down.

Apart from playing to their national base, Democrats’ protests rest on the reality that their power depends on maintaining their monopoly grip on cities’ huge vote totals. Of America’stop 20 cities, Democrats control 18; of the top 40, Democrats control 32; of the top 100, Democrats control 66. Notably, America’s 33rd largest city, Fresno, California, is the largest to have a Republican mayor in a Blue state.

For Democrats, control of cities’ huge populations means control of the states in which these are located. As examples: New York City makes up 44.3% of New York state’s population; Chicago is 21.6% of Illinois’ population; Albuquerque is 26.5% of New Mexico’s; Portland is 15.3% of Oregon’s. And these are just single-city examples; in some states, control of several big cities (e.g., Minneapolis and St. Paul are 12.8% of Minnesota’s population; Denver and Colorado Springs are 20% of Colorado’s population) make for similarly overwhelming percentages.

Why this is so important for Democrats nationally can be seen from 2024’s presidential election results. Between the coasts, Democrats were barely competitive, losing over 70% of the electoral votes cast outside California, Washington, New York, and Massachusetts.

Even winning the less than 30% the electoral votes Democrats won between America’s coasts required them to win states like Illinois, Minnesota, Colorado, and New Mexico – states where Democrat-controlled city populations were significantly larger percentages of their populations than the popular vote percentage that separated Kamala Harris from Donald Trump in them. Even New York, a Democrat bastion (the last Republican presidential victory there was Ronald Reagan’s in 1984) is a dramatic example: While New York City is 44.3% of New York state’s population, Harris beat Trump by only 12.6 percentage points there: She did so by winning 67.7% of New York City votes – almost 1 million more than Trump and almost her entire margin of victory in New York state.

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WE VOTED FOR THIS: BlueSky Leftists Lose Their Minds After Trump White House Invades Their Safe Space and Savagely Trolls Them with This EPIC Video

Team Trump set the internet on fire on Friday after invading the Left’s top social media safe space and sending them into hysterics by posting an amazing video.

As TGP readers know, over-the-hill leftists have decided to mark Saturday as a day of protests across America against President Trump, whom they see as a dictator. The protest, known as “No Kings Day,” is being funded by radical billionaires like George Soros.

The White House decided that on the eve of “No Kings Day,” they would join BlueSky and serve up a little reminder of everything the left is needlessly protesting.

“What’s up, Bluesky? We thought you might’ve missed some of our greatest hits, so we put this together for you,” the White House team wrote.

“Can’t wait to spend more quality time together! ❤️”

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US Will Not Adhere to Global Carbon Tax on Shipping: Trump

The United States will vote “no” to a global carbon tax proposed by the International Maritime Organization (IMO) on Oct. 17, President Donald Trump said on Truth Social.

“I am outraged that the International Maritime Organization is voting in London this week to pass a global Carbon Tax,” he said in the post on Oct. 16, urging others to reject the proposal.

“The United States will NOT stand for this Global Green New Scam Tax on Shipping, and will not adhere to it in any way, shape, or form.

“We will not tolerate increased prices on American Consumers OR the creation of a Green New Scam Bureaucracy to spend YOUR money on their Green dreams.”

The net-zero framework proposal that was put before the U.N. agency specializing in regulating marine transport would require ships to comply with a global fuel standard for large oceangoing vessels, 5,000 tons or larger, to force the shipping industry’s greenhouse gas emissions down to net zero by 2050.

The president’s opposition to the tax proposal follows a statement his administration made on Aug. 12.

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