Tag: donald trump

‘Largest NEH Grant in History’ Awarded to Jewish Org to Counter ‘Pathology of Antisemitism,’ Teach Talmud

The Trump administration, through the National Endowment for the Humanities, is giving the largest grant in the agency’s history — over $10 million — to the Jewish-American neoconservative Tikvah Fund to counter “the pathology of anti-Semitism” and teach the Talmud.

The Tikvah Fund is an Israel First group dedicated to advancing “Jewish excellence” that is run by CEO Eric Cohen and famed neoconservative Elliott Abrams.

The group made headlines last month for contributing “nearly 400,000 shekels (around $110,000)” to translate Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s book into Hebrew and not reporting it as a political donation, Haaretz reported last month.

“Even though the memoir was used in the Likud campaign and some of the revenues presumably went to Netanyahu as the author, the 400,000 shekels was not reported as a political donation,” Haaretz noted.

From Haaretz, “U.S. Nonprofit Gave Over $100,000 to Publish Netanyahu’s Autobiography. It Wasn’t Reported as a Donation”:

The Tikvah Fund was founded in the 1990s. The roughly $15 million to $20 million it spends on annual operations are partly funded by donations and from returns on assets bequeathed by American Jewish businessman Zalman Bernstein.

The Tikvah Fund is among the funders of the Kohelet Policy Forum, a conservative Israeli think tank that provided the blueprint for the effort to weaken the judiciary, as declared by Justice Minister Yariv Levin on January 4, 2023.

Kohelet founder Moshe Koppel sits on Tikvah’s board. The fund has bankrolled conservative projects for years, some of them involving close associates of Netanyahu. These include the Mida website, founded by Netanyahu confidant Ran Baratz, and the Misgav Institute for National Security and Zionist Strategy, which is chaired by the former head of the National Security Council, Meir Ben-Shabbat. [Emphasis added]

Haaretz noted that Tikvah also hosts an annual conference in Tel Aviv.

“In its 60-year history, NEH had rarely given more than a few hundred thousand dollars to any single project,” the Jewish Telegraphic Agency reports. “On Monday, the NEH announced an even larger, $10.4 million grant for a nationwide ‘Jewish Civilization Project’ aimed at combating antisemitism.”

“Among the prominent alumni of Tikvah’s programs is Jacob Reses, chief of staff to Vice President J.D. Vance,” JTA added.

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Trump proposes revoking licenses of critical American TV networks

US President Donald Trump has floated the idea of “maybe” revoking the broadcast licenses of American television networks that provide negative coverage of him.

The suggestion came a day after ABC indefinitely suspended Jimmy Kimmel’s late-night show, following what it called “offensive and insensitive” comments made by the comedian about the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk.

Kimmel claimed on his program that Trump and his supporters were trying to “score political points” over Kirk’s killing and compared the president’s reaction to his death to “how a four-year-old mourns a goldfish.”

Trump, who was returning from the UK aboard Air Force One on Thursday, told journalists that TV networks “give me only bad publicity or press.”

“I mean, they are getting a license. I would think maybe their license should be taken away,” he said.

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Trump Is Preparing a $6 Billion Arms Package for Israel

The White House informed Congress that it is preparing a massive arms sale to Israel, including attack helicopters and military vehicles. The weapons will be paid for with US military aid. 

According to the Wall Street Journal, the total value of the weapons deal is $6 billion. The sale is $3.8 billion for 30 AH-64 Apache helicopters and $1.9 billion deal for 3,250 infantry assault vehicles. 

Washington will pay for the arms with foreign military financing. The US provides Israel with at least $3.8 billion in military aid annually. Washington boosted assistance to Tel Aviv following the October 7 Hamas attack. In the first year of the Israeli onslaught in Gaza, the US sent Israel nearly $18 billion in aid. The weapons will begin arriving in Israel in two to three years. 

The report of the package follows Israel’s attempt to assassinate Hamas leadership in Qatar. The strikes angered Doha, a major non-NATO US ally. Qatar has also committed to investing $1 trillion in the US economy and gifted Trump a luxury aircraft. 

Additionally, the assassination attempt prevented Trump from initiating talks to end the war in Gaza and free the Israeli hostages. The strike occurred as the Hamas leadership was meeting to discuss a proposal sent by Trump. Qatar said the attempted assassination ended any chances of reaching a hostage agreement. 

The White House has pushed Congressional leadership to endorse the sale even after the Israeli strike in Qatar. 

Israel is in the process of ethnically cleansing Palestinians from Gaza. The onslaught has primarily been conducted by Israel using American weapons. A large number of civilians have been killed by Israeli forces. Additionally, an Israeli siege of Gaza has created a famine, and hundreds of Palestinians have starved to death.

Since taking office, Trump has approved multiple arms sales to Israel, including a sale of $3 billion in bombs.

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The Return of Drug War Imperialism

The Trump administration is escalating U.S. drug wars in Latin America as a cover for imperialism.

While the administration directs a military buildup in the Caribbean, killing people who it claims are drug smugglers, it is preparing to intervene in Latin American countries for the purpose of opening their markets to U.S. businesses. The administration’s priority is gaining access to Latin American resources, a main focus of its foreign policy, just as the highest-level officials have indicated.

“Increasingly, on geopolitical issue after geopolitical issue, it is access to raw material and industrial capacity that is at the core both of the decisions that we’re making and the areas that we’re prioritizing,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio said in June.

Drug War Imperialism

One of the major contributions of the United States to imperial history is drug war imperialism. Developed as part of the so-called “war on drugs,” which the Nixon administration began in the 1970s and the Reagan administration expanded in the 1980s, drug war imperialism has been one of the primary means by which the United States has intervened in Latin America.

During the late 1980s, the United States set the standard for drug war imperialism in Panama. After discrediting Manuel Noriega with drug charges, officials in Washington organized a military intervention to remove the Panamanian ruler from power.

Under the direction of the George H. W. Bush administration, the U.S. military invaded Panama, captured Noriega, and brought him to the United States, where he was tried, convicted, and imprisoned on drug charges. U.S. officials framed the operation as part of the war on drugs, but their primary concern was bringing to power a friendly government that acted on behalf of U.S. interests. U.S. officials valued Panama for its location and for the Panama Canal, a critical node for U.S. trade.

In the following decades, the United States exercised other forms of drug war imperialism in Latin America. In 2000, the administration of Bill Clinton implemented Plan Colombia, a program of U.S. military support for the Colombian government. U.S. officials framed Plan Colombia as a counter-narcotics program, but their objective was to empower the Colombian military in its war against leftist revolutionaries, especially the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC).

In 2007, the administration of George W. Bush pushed forward a similar program in Mexico. With the Mérida Initiative, the Bush administration empowered the Mexican government to intensify its war against drug cartels. U.S. officials saw the program as way to forge closer relations with the Mexican military and confront the country’s drug traffickers, who were making it difficult for U.S. businesses to operate in the country.

Multiple administrations faced strong criticisms over the programs, especially as drug-related violence increased in Colombia and Mexico. A Colombian truth commission estimated that 450,000 people were killed in Colombia from 1985 to 2018, with 80 percent of the deaths being civilians. There have been hundreds of thousands of drug-related deaths in Mexico, with the numbers still increasing by tens of thousands every year.

Although most U.S. officials insisted that criminal organizations in Latin America bore primary responsibility for drug-related violence, some began to question the U.S. approach. They wondered whether U.S.-backed drug wars were ignoring root causes of the drug problem, such as the U.S. demand for drugs.

“As Americans we should be ashamed of ourselves that we have done almost nothing to get our arms around drug demand,” Secretary of Homeland Security John Kelly said in 2017. “And we point fingers at people to the south and tell them they need to do more about drug production and drug trafficking.”

In recent years, some critics have even cast the drug wars as a failure. Decades of U.S.-backed military operations, they have noted, have brought terrible violence to Latin America while failing to stop the flow of drugs to the United States.

“Drugs have kept flowing, and Americans and Latin Americans have kept dying,” Shannon O’Neil, who chaired a congressionally-mandated drug policy commission, told Congress in 2020. “Something is not working.”

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President Trump Goes Scorched Earth on Ilhan Omar, Accuses Her of Committing Immigration Fraud by Marrying Her Brother

On Thursday evening, President Trump went scorched earth on Muslima Democrat Rep. Ilhan Omar and accused her of potentially committing immigration fraud by marrying her own brother.

“Ilhan Omar’s Country of Somalia is plagued by a lack of central Government control, persistent Poverty, Hunger, Resurgent Terrorism, Piracy, decades of Civil War, Corruption, and pervasive Violence. 70% of the population lives in extreme Poverty, and widespread Food Insecurity. Somalia is consistently ranked among the World’s Most Corrupt Countries, including Bribery, Embezzlement, and a Dysfunctional Government. All of this, and Ilhan Omar tells us how to run America! P.S. Wasn’t she the one that married her brother in order to gain Citizenship??? What SCUM we have in our Country, telling us what to do, and how to do it. Thank you for your attention to this matter. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!” President Trump said.

Earlier Thursday, President Trump responded to the Justice Department’s announcement it charged eight people with wire fraud for their roles in Minnesota’s Housing Stabilization program.

Here are the defendants:

  • Defendant Moktar Hassan Aden, age 30
  • Defendant Mustafa Dayib Ali, age 29
  • Defendant Khalid Ahmed Dayib, age 26
  • Defendant Abdifitah Mohamud Mohamed, age 27
  • Defendant Christopher Adesoji Falade, age 62
  • Defendant Emmanuel Oluwademilade Falade, age 32
  • Defendant Asad Ahmed Adow, age 26
  • Defendant Anwar Ahmed Adow, age 25

“Does Ilhan Omar know these people? Are they from her wonderfully managed Home Country of Somalia?” Trump said on Truth Social.

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Trump’s Ukraine Envoy Says the US Could ‘Kick Russia’s Ass’

Keith Kellogg, President Trump’s special envoy for Ukraine, had strong words for Russia at a conference held in Ukraine, saying that the US could “kick Russia’s ass,” Remix News has reported.

Kellogg made the comments in the context of a conversation he had in the Oval Office about Russia’s military might. “They were talking about the primacy of the Russian military and how they were, you know, pretty good. And I said to the people in the room, we’d kick their ass,” Kellogg said at the YES Annual Meeting in Kyiv on September 12.

“What I mean by that is don’t take their statements at face value. They’re not as good as Putin says they are, and for that, I give great credit to the Ukrainian military because they’ve knocked them down a couple notches,” Kellogg added. He brushed off the fact that Russia was a nuclear-armed power, pointing to the fact that the US and its allies also have nuclear weapons.

The US envoy also claimed that Ukraine would win the war despite the fact that Russia continues to make gains in eastern Ukraine and has the clear advantage when it comes to manpower and weapons supplies. “Ukraine will not lose this war. Ukrainians have a moral superiority over Russia, that’s obvious,” he said.

Kellogg said that both he and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Dan Caine recently advised President Trump that Russia is not winning the war.

“If Putin thinks Russia is winning, his definition of winning and my definition of winning are absolutely two different things,” Kellogg said. “If he was winning, he’d be in Kyiv. If he’s winning, he’d be west of the Dnipro River. If he was winning, he’d be on Odessa. If he was winning, he would have changed the government. Russia is, in fact, losing this war.”

Kellogg called Russia a “junior partner” of China and claimed that if Beijing cut off Moscow, the “war would end tomorrow.” The Trump administration has failed to get either India or China to reduce its trade relationship with Russia despite the threats of tariffs and sanctions.

Kellogg’s comments come as a peace deal between Russia and Ukraine seems increasingly unlikely as the two sides remain far apart on the terms for an agreement. In his role as a special US envoy, Kellogg has repeatedly met with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and has pledged continued US support for the proxy war.

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Trump Is Embracing ‘Daddy State’ Economics

The question of whether President Donald Trump has turned the United States toward a new “state capitalism”—one in which the government is not just economic referee but active player—has been answered. His second term brings policies that go well beyond traditional Republican pro-market orthodoxies, such as tax cuts and deregulation, and into direct involvement with production and capital. Yet this doctrine is less a coherent grand strategy than a set of ad hoc deals, sometimes pro-market and sometimes interventionist.

Some Trump policies—tax cuts, deregulating, talk of budget-deficit reductions—retain a traditional Republican tone. On the other hand, this administration’s protectionism and tariffs would have been inconceivable a decade ago. Republicans would also traditionally label the government’s acquisition of a 10 percent stake in Intel as socialism if proposed by anyone other than Trump. And other policies have the feel of mafia tactics made possible by the exercise of leverage, like letting Nvidia and AMD sell their chips to China in exchange for a 15 percent cut back to the U.S. government.

Trump also departs markedly from the past GOP playbook in his lack of recognition that the market allocates resources much better than politicians and bureaucrats do. He treats the market as a stage for negotiation to reorganize the world’s economies. Old-guard Republicans were globalists, whereas Trump built his appeal on “America First” nationalism and protectionism.

Earlier Republicans valued predictable rules, but as Cambridge legal scholar Antara Haldar noted in a Project Syndicate symposium this month assessing the direction of “Trumponomics,” the president “is willing to break any rule, norm, or promise…in the name of striking ad hoc corporate-style ‘deals.'” Where conservative-minded leaders of the past obscured the state’s role, Trump “flaunts it.”

Yet Haldar correctly argues that Trump’s approach differs from other forms of heavy-handed state control. It is neither the Chinese model nor that of the developmental state. It is “erratic, transactional, and short-sighted” and a rejection of the “quietly overbearing ‘Nanny State’…in favor of a commanding, patriarchal ‘Daddy State.'”

Princeton University historian Harold James, another participant in the symposium, sees Trump as a break from the past due to his revival of state-directed “industrial policy.” This started under former President Joe Biden’s administration, but there is no doubt that Trump’s pursuit of a manufacturing revival and reshoring of global supply chains, along with his tariffs and equity stakes in private companies and his overall aim to rebuild U.S. strategic capacity, fall well into that category.

Unfortunately, as James argues, Trump’s brand of industrial policy encourages “hyper-activist corporate lobbying, with large and well-connected enterprises getting the best ‘deals.'” In my opinion, all industrial policies end up this way, not just Trump’s.

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The Trump Administration Misses Key Deadlines for Imposing Restrictions on Gain-of-Function Research

Biosafety hawks were initially optimistic that the incoming second Trump administration would at last place binding constraints on so-called “dangerous gain-of-function” research, in which pathogens are manipulated in laboratories to be more virulent or transmissible in humans.

The administration’s picks for top health policy jobs—most notably National Institutes of Health (NIH) Director Jay Bhattacharya and Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.—are both gain-of-function critics who have asserted that this type of research created SARS-COV-2 in Wuhan, China.

In May, the White House issued an executive order creating a broader definition for dangerous gain-of-function research and promising that new restrictions on it would be issued within a few months.

“The conduct of this research does not protect us from pandemics. There’s always a danger that in doing this research, it might leak out by accident even and cause a pandemic,” said Bhattacharya at the Oval Office press conference when the order was signed. With the order, “the public can say ‘no, don’t take this risk.'”

But the deadlines for the new restrictions called for in that order have since come and gone without any new policy being released. Meanwhile, there are indications that the NIH is continuing to fund risky virological research.

Gain-of-function critics who were optimistic that this research would finally be put back in the box are now concerned that the Trump administration will fail to implement meaningful restrictions.

“There was a promise to deliver these policies. It’s very disappointing to see that not emerge,” Bryce Nickels, a professor of genetics at Rutgers University, tells Reason. Nickels briefly served as a contractor advising the NIH on new gain-of-function policy before being let go in August.

In his role as an NIH contractor, Nickels reviewed draft policies on gain-of-function research that the May executive order called for. He said that there was no practical reason why the White House shouldn’t have been able to meet its deadline to issue the new policy.

The White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), which is responsible for issuing the new gain-of-function regulations called for in the May executive order, did not respond to Reason‘s request for comment.

While arguments about COVID-19’s origins have polarized discussions about gain-of-function research, fears that it could cause a pandemic via a laboratory accident were once mainstream.

The past three presidential administrations issued policies imposing some restrictions on it. That included the 2014 “pause” on gain-of-function research involving MERS, SARS, and influenza viruses issued by the Obama administration.

This was followed by the implementation of a 2017 framework in the first Trump administration that allowed funding for gain-of-function research to start again, provided that the riskiest experiments received risk-benefit vetting by a department-level panel within HHS.

Finally, in 2024, the Biden administration issued a new framework on “dual-use research of concern” that was supposed to clarify when experiments involving enhanced pathogens of pandemic potential should receive that HHS-level review.

Critics have long argued that these policies failed to actually restrict the most dangerous gain-of-function experiments.

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Trump Says He Is Trying to Get Bagram Air Base Back from the Taliban

President Donald Trump said he was working to reestablish America’s largest military base in Afghanistan. While Trump negotiated an agreement with the Taliban to end the Afghan War, he has argued that President Joe Biden made a mistake by withdrawing from the Bagram Air Base. 

While discussing Biden’s withdrawal from Afghanistan, Trump explained that the US made a mistake by withdrawing from the Bagram Air Base, and he had planned to keep the facility. However, Trump signed an agreement with the Taliban to end the Afghan War and withdraw from the country. 

Trump says he is now working to establish the military facility. “We gave it to them for nothing. We’re trying to get it back, by the way. That could be a little breaking news, we’re trying to get it back because they need things from us,” The President said Thursday.

While Trump did not elaborate on what he may offer the Taliban, the US maintains crippling economic sanctions on Afghanistan, and the country faces intense poverty. 

The President went on to say that the base will give the US a military position near China’s nuclear weapons facility. “We want that base back but one of the reasons we want the base is, as you know, it’s an hour away from where China makes its nuclear weapons,” he added.

It’s unclear how the Taliban will respond to Trump’s proposal to reoccupy part of Afghanistan. Last week, Washington made a prisoner exchange deal with the Taliban that is part of a larger effort to normalize US-Afghan relations. 

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President Trump Rebukes Colombia Over Drug Trafficking Cooperation

The United States has placed Colombia on its list of countries that “fail to co-operate” in fighting drug trafficking — the first time since 1997 — blaming President Gustavo Petro’s government for record cocaine output, according to the Financial Times.

In a statement to Congress, Donald Trump said Colombia’s “coca cultivation and cocaine production have reached record highs” and that the government “failed to meet even its own vastly reduced coca eradication goals.” He argued Bogotá had undermined “years of mutually beneficial co-operation between our two countries against narco-terrorists.”

Colombia, the world’s top cocaine producer, had 253,000 hectares of coca under cultivation in 2023, yielding more than 2,600 tonnes, according to UN figures.

Petro, a former guerrilla who has floated legalising cocaine, denounced the US move: “Decades of our police, soldiers and civilians [dying] . . . in order to stop drugs reaching North American society,” he said, insisting “Everything we do really isn’t about the Colombian people — even if they get affected. It’s about stopping North American society from smearing its noses.”

The Financial Times writes that while criticising Petro’s approach, Trump praised Colombia’s security forces, who he said “continue to show skill and courage in confronting terrorist and criminal groups.” Washington also issued a waiver allowing continued programs that “advance US interests,” potentially preserving military co-operation.

The move reflects rising tensions. For years, Colombia was Washington’s closest anti-narcotics ally, receiving more than $10bn in US military aid under Plan Colombia (2000–2016). But Petro has shifted focus from eradication campaigns to intercepting drug shipments at sea, while violence and production have grown under his “Total Peace” policy.

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