Rearranging the Chairs to Fire Mueller

Are We Headed Toward a Permanent Republican Majority?

In November after the election, when Donald Trump tweeted that he would have won the popular vote “if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally”, it seemed like more nonsense from a narcissist who insists he has won everything no matter what foolishness it takes to make the case.

But three days after his inauguration, there it was again. He met with congressional leaders and spent the first 10 minutes to make the same claim, that had 3 to 5 million illegal immigrants not cast ballots (all for Hillary Clinton, apparently), he would have taken the popular vote as well. The claim had become an embedded belief. Four days on, he promised a “major investigation” into voting irregularities designed to prove himself right.

Trump was spurred along by one Gregg Phillips, a “conservative activist” out of Texas, who claimed he had proof of the illegal votes, to be revealed “as soon as we get done with the checks”. Like the investigators Trump sent to Hawaii to forage in birth records to prove Barack Obama was born in Kenya who “cannot believe what they’re finding”, nothing further was heard of the Phillips vote count, just as nothing was heard from the imaginary people sent to Hawaii.

But Trump intends to nevertheless use the U.S. government to prove the fantasy that he had created. In May, he signed an executive order announcing the formation of the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity to “enhance the American people’s confidence in the integrity of the voting processes” by weeding out “improper” or “fraudulent” registration and voting.

“This issue is very important to me because throughout the campaign, and even after, people would come up to me and express their concerns about voter inconsistencies and irregularities, which they saw, in some cases having to do with very large numbers of people in certain states.

What’s wrong with that? Other than Trump’s lie about “people coming up to him” about “very large numbers of people”? What’s very wrong is that multiple probes have found fraudulent voting to be next to non-existent.

While chaired by Vice President Pence, the one picked to do the work on the commission is Kris Kobach, who as Kansas secretary of state was the driving force behind the strictest voting laws in the country, per The New York Times.

But the biggest concern is that Trump’s purge fits in nicely with the sweeping and multi-pronged Republican grand plan to keep off the voting rolls groups such as blacks, Latinos and students who tend to vote Democratic.

The Brennan Center for Justice at New York University keeps track of those restrictions and reports that bills have been filed in at least 27 state legislatures to increase document requirements for registering and to stiffen rules for voting. Almost all these states have combinations of Republican governors and control of legislatures. At least 16 states want to revise voter ID laws beyond those they’ve already changed. Fourteen states had new registration and voting restrictions in effect for last year’s election. All this atop Republican control of gerrymandering, brought about by their electoral triumphs in 2010 that coincided with the decennial census and handed them control over the redistricting that population shifts call for.

Herding as many as possible people with disapproved voting habits into as few districts as possible is one way to win the most congressional seats. The other strategy has been to enact rules to make voting difficult or costly for those groups. Make workers pay the cost of taking time off to get voter-IDs. Demand as identification birth certificates or passports as identification; a goodly percentage of blacks and Latinos don’t have these. That people have already proven their identity years ago in order to register doesn’t count. End registration on Sundays, long a tradition for blacks after church services. Disallow students from voting in their college towns, forcing them to return to their parental homes, or, more likely, not vote. End registration on the same day as voting, causing low-paid workers to take time off twice — or more likely, not vote. Close polling places in districts with high Democratic voter counts to discourage voting by making for long waits on long lines. Trim weeks off early voting.

We just described North Carolina, where all of these techniques were enacted after the Supreme Court found that federal oversight of certain states, mostly southern, was no longer necessary because after all these years since the Voting Rights Act was passed in the 1960s, they could be trusted.

But hindrance goes only so far. Now, the Trump commission will look for ways to disenfranchise undesirable groups altogether by voiding their registrations. The mission is to box out Democrats for good.

vote casting call

At the end of June out went a letter from Kobach’s commission to all 50 states calling for them to submit to Washington “publicly available voter roll data”. In accordance with each state’s laws, that could include full names of registered voters, their party registration, felony conviction records, a requested decade of each individual’s voting history, dates of birth, and the last four digits of their Social Security numbers. What a fine idea, gathering all the nation’s voter data into a single repository. One virtue of the state system is that the data is split 50 ways. Promising easy access, the commission’s plan for consolidation will find enthusiastic support in the Kremlin.

The request provoked an uproar. July 4th patriotic fervor may have had something to do with it, but by the day after, 44 states had refused to comply in whole or part. Some imposed conditions; others demanded payment of fees. Some states’ laws prohibit release of information. Kobach’s own state prohibits the release of the Social Security data he has requested. Most states have laws that prohibit giving out voter birth dates without the voter’s permission.

Trump chastised the disobedient states on Twitter, questioning whether they were hiding something. Standing their ground as independent states and objecting to federal intrusion was not hiding something. States have jurisdiction over the voting process (witness gerrymandering) per the Constitution. The Justice Department can step in if fraud, corruption or other crimes are suspected and the locality refuses to investigate. None of that applies to the commission. Kentucky’s secretary of state, Alison Lundergan Grimes, a Democrat, said the premise for the commission — that voter fraud is pervasive and needs to be combatted — was the real fraud.

But Kobach is a zealot on the subject, which is why he got the job. He claimed widespread fraud in his home state of Kansas, but without proof. His dogged sleuthing to ferret out fraudulent voters there produced nine convictions out of 1.8 million registered in his state. Only one was an illegal immigrant. Most had voted in two states (which voter-ID would not have prevented, incidentally). The Kansas City Star — they called Kobach “the Javert of voter fraud” — pointed out that his quest for those nine was paired with registration restrictions that denied more than 18,000 Kansans their constitutional right to vote.

perception

The reality is that Republicans have done a masterful job building a case that there is voter fraud abroad in the land when in fact it is imperceptible to the vanishing point.

Research shows voter fraud is minuscule, with an incident rate no higher than 0.0025%, according to a study by the Brennan Center for Justice. In 2016 there were just four documented cases of voter fraud out of 135 million votes cast. That’s even less – 0.000002%.
His own lawyers contradicted Donald Trump’s allegations of illegal votes. In legal filings they maintained that the 2016 contest was “not tainted” as they sought to block recounts in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

The investigative journalism organization News21, associated with the University of Arizona, found only 2,068 incidents of alleged election fraud in the hundreds of millions of ballots cast in all U.S. elections between 2000 and 2012. A 2014 study by Loyola Law School in Los Angeles unearthed only 31 instances of voter impersonation among the more than 1 billion ballots cast in all U.S. elections since 2000.

Republicans muddy this picture by dwelling on the 2.8 million people who are registered to vote in more than one state, and the 1.8 million still on the voter rolls who are dead. People move, but who among them would cast their vote in one state, then drive or fly to the other to vote again? Apparently no one, considering the statistics just cited. And who are the people who comb the obituaries or somehow identify in the registration rolls those who are dead, and then go to the polls to impersonate them? Again, just about no one. And in state or national elections how many thousands would have to band together — undetected! — in order to have any effect on an election’s outcome?

Having created the perception of fraud, Republicans now argue that the perception of fraud is a far bigger problem than fraud itself. Americans no longer trust the electoral process. Something must be done. Registration laws must be tightened and voter rolls purged.

pincer movement

Virtually unreported is another prong on the attack against voting rights. On the same day as the letter asking for the voter rolls, out to all states from the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department went a demand that each must “conduct a general program that makes a reasonable effort to remove the names of ineligible voters from the statewide voter registration list” and submit an explanation of how they are going to go about their purge. That it is Justice making the demand suggests that the department will sue states that are laggard or don’t comply.

Florida tried a purge in 2000 when Jeb Bush was governor. A private company was paid to “cleanse” voter rolls. The result was full of mistakes. A 2012 repeat with governor Rick Scott as governor resulted in many legitimate voters being falsely flagged because they had the same names as people in the federal database. Scott scuttled the program and apologized.

The same is expected of the Justice and Kobach actions. Kobach has said he wants to match voter information against federal databases of foreign residents and undocumented immigrants to spot people who voted illegally. The Brennan Center says the federal databases are “notoriously flawed” and state records are likely to have their own inaccuracies. With fragmentary information and commonality of names, the system will mismatch, and wrong people in the many thousands will be flagged for removal.

But we won’t be told that. We will only hear the disturbingly high counts and why we must of course pass stricter laws to limit who can vote.

Kobach somehow knows that illegal registration of immigrants is “pervasive” across the nation. Which is to say he has decided before the fact what the results of his commission will be. So has the White House. In announcing the commission’s formation, Sarah Huckabee Sanders said the group would produce a report for Mr. Trump next year on “system vulnerabilities that lead to improper registrations and voting”. That says it has already been decided that these conditions exist. After all, that is the purpose of the commission: To come up with statistics that point to a serious problem to justify an extensive “cleansing” from the voter rolls of people who — well that’s a surprise! — turn out to be from groups that tend to vote Democratic.

Who to Believe After Trump’s Meeting With Putin

He had many times complimented Vladimir Putin, calling him a “true leader”, and had dismissed the conclusions of the entire U.S. intelligence community that it was the Russians who had hacked into last year’s election. So there was
intense focus on whether he would challenge the Russian leader in their first face-to-face encounter.

He did, said Secretary of State Rex Tillerson. Not really, said Sergey Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister. The circumstances leading to this meeting puts us in the awkward position of believing Lavrov.

We’ll get to that, but first comes recognition that, if you think the U.S. should improve its relations with Russia, if your view is the realpolitik that Russia is a major country that poses threats to Europe and planetary existential danger should conflict arise, a country led by a ruthless and corrupt autocrat who opponents have tendency to die (the going count is 40) but whose cooperation would be useful in Syria and against North Korea, that it’s better to deal with Putin than pick a fight, then the meeting went well.

Trump had predicted that the two would get along well, and the “body language” confirmed that, with Putin very “deferential and polite” according to a Russian-speaking American. The tangible outcome of the meeting, the rest being words, was a ceasefire for southwest Syria long in the works by Tillerson and Lavrov in an effort to carve out a safe zone.

Trump claimed sanctions were not discussed with Putin, that Ukrainian and Syrian problem{s must be solved first. It is difficult to imagine that across two hours Vladimir Putin did not bring up the economy-constricting sanctions that are his primary problem with the West. And of course Trump lied; sanctions were discussed. Tillerson let that slip.

Spoken of vaguely after the meeting, the president tweeted on arriving home that “Putin & I discussed forming an impenetrable Cyber Security unit so that election hacking…will be guarded”. Trump’s knowledge of cyber tech — he has twice claimed the only way to identify a hacker is to catch him in the act — extends no further than the tweet you just read. What he imagines a cyber security unit to be and how it would be impenetrable need some explaining. Putin must have been joyful. Anything conducted jointly would for the Russians, savvy as they are about cyber espionage, be a backdoor into our electoral processes, our military, our power grid, our nuclear arsenal. The notion of joint cyber security with the Russians brought howls from his own party. Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) said, “It’s not the dumbest idea I’ve ever heard, but it’s pretty close.” Trump pretended he didn’t really mean it: “The fact that President Putin and I discussed a Cyber Security unit doesn’t mean I think it can happen. It can’t”.

Which brings us to Russian interference in our election. The two had “a very robust and lengthy exchange on the subject”, Tillerson reported. “The president pressed President Putin on more than one occasion regarding Russian involvement”. Putin “vehemently denied” any meddling on the part of his government. Trump accepted that. The theme quickly shifted to moving on, that it’s “too important to not find a way to move forward”, said Tillerson.

He was the only American official in the room other than Trump during the two-and-a-half hour meeting. Unusually, no national security adviser and no note takers. That made possible the president and the secretary reporting the meeting as they chose. So we need look to what Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov had to say:

President Trump said that the campaign is already taking on a rather strange and bizarre character because during the many months that these accusations have been aired there hasn’t been a single fact. President Trump has said he’s heard clear declarations from Mr. Putin that…the Russian leadership and Russian government has not interfered in the election and he accepts the things that Mr. Putin has said”.

Of course, it is possible to accept what the other party says without concurring. But mere acceptance is not what happened, said a reporter on the PBS NewsHour. From Hamburg. the program had lined up Ryan Chilcote, calling him a special correspondent, who said he has spoken Russian for 28 years and had gone through the Russian’s entire recap of the meeting with six other native speakers. Lavrov quoted Trump as the one who asserted in the meeting that he hadn’t heard a single fact in the months of allegations of Russian meddling in the elections. While Lavrov wasn’t quite clear what “fact” was lacking, we have it from Chilcote that Trump agreed with Putin’s claim that there was no Russian interference.

One thinks back to Tillerson’s exact wording. He has said, “The president opened the meeting with president Putin by raising the concerns of the American people regarding Russian interference in the 2016 election”. The American people, not Donald Trump.

Back in the U.S. Trump tweeted:

Which opinion was that? The next day, Reince Priebus had to fabricate an opinion. On Fox News Sunday, asked by Chris Wallace, “Is that true? Did the president say what Lavrov says he said?” Priebus answered, “No that’s not true. The president absolutely did not believe the denial of President Putin”. So now we’re told that Trump knows the Russians did it, which he has never acknowledged, except for now accusing Putin. Priebus wasn’t in the meeting. He was simply told what to say, which contradicts everything the president has ever said. We instead have the more persuasive Chilcote translation of Trump bonding with Putin that neither had seen any evidence of Russian meddling.

The opinion Mr. Trump had to be referring to in his tweet would be what he expressed in Poland the day before he met with Putin. For months he has dismissed the conclusions of the intelligence community that the Russians had done the hacking. He was still at it in this exchange in Poland with MSNBC’s Hallie Jackson.:

Jackson: Will you once and for all, yes or no, definitively say that Russia interfered in the 2016 election?

Trump: Well I think it was Russia and I think it could have been other people and other countries but I won’t be specific. I think a lot of people, it could’ve been a lot of people interfered. Nobody really knows, nobody really know for sure.

Jackson: …Your intelligence agencies have been far more specific. They say it was Russia. Why won’t you agree with them and say it was.?

Trump: Let me just start off by saying, I heard it was 17 agencies. I said boy that’s a lot. Do we even have that many intelligence agencies, right? Let’s check it. And we did some very heavy research. It turned out to be three or four. It wasn’t 17, and many of your compatriots had to change their reporting and they had to apologize and they had to correct. Now, with that being said, mistakes have been made. I agree. I think it was Russia, but I think it was probably other people and or countries and I see nothing wrong with that statement. Nobody really knows.

Heavy researched? Easily Googled. There are 17 agencies because they specialize — energy, world economies, military, etc. The 17 saw the evidence from those that deal with Russia, espionage, cyber (CIA, FBI, NSA) and agreed with the assessment. Trump still doesn’t know how this works and wants his base to think it is all a conspiracy.

So that’s really the net of it. Having said it was Russia only once in order to say Obama “did nothing about it”, Trump reverted, just before the meeting with Putin, to his longtime fuzz that “it was probably other people and or countries” and “nobody really knows”. And in the meeting the translators say he sided with Russia that there was no evidence of Russian interference, while disparaging and disbelieving the American intelligence agencies that say with certainty that Russia tried to sway the election.

The president finds intolerable anything he views as trying to delegitimize his election. He dismissed Hillary Clinton’s three million vote lead claiming that he “won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally”. He is obsessed with the intelligence agencies’ assessment that not only did the Russians tamper with our elections — in 21 states per congressional testimony by Homeland Security — but that they sought to undermine Clinton and help Trump win. No less than his own Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats told the House Intelligence Committee of his obsession with the Russian probe. Trump’s narcissism insists that he only wins outright. He seems to have blocked from his mind any other possibility, which requires him to think Russia did not intervene and he went to Putin to seek agreement.

At Fox, there was expectedly a different take. Tucker Carlson brought in lifelong Russophile Stephen Cohen, professor emeritus of Russian studies at New York and Princeton universities, who came to this conclusion:

This will be astonishing to be said, I know, but I think maybe today we witnessed President Trump emerging as an American statesman”.

That Wasn’t a Gas Attack by Syria, Says Investigative Reporter

The April 4th bombing of the rebel-held Syrian town of Khan Sheikhoun used a special, but conventional, weapon and not one armed with sarin gas, contrary to what President Trump and the media assumed. In an emotional response to images of dead children, Trump ignored contrary intelligence reports when he
The force of departing missiles rocks destroyer U.S.S. Porter.
had the U.S. Navy unleash 59 Tomahawk cruise missiles at the air base from which the attack planes flew.

Those are some of the findings of veteran American investigative reporter Seymour Hersh, writing in the German publication Die Welt. He says that intelligence was already in hand that the Syrians were targeting a meeting of leaders of two jihadist groups in the town — one of them the al Qaeda offshoot, al-Nusra — for which the Russians had unusually provided a laser-guided bomb to the Syrians. In turn the Syrians had chosen its best pilot and wingman to deliver it, flying their Syrian SU-24 bomber. Some American military and intelligence officials were alarmed by the president ‘s determination to ignore the evidence, says Hersh. “None of this makes any sense”, he quotes one officer saying to colleagues when he heard the decision to bomb the Sheyrat airbase. “We KNOW that there was no chemical attack … the Russians are furious”.

The president called Syria’s attack “horrible, horrible”, a “terrible affront to humanity” and said that “When you kill innocent children, innocent babies — babies, little babies… that crosses many, many lines, beyond a red line”. He blamed Obama for his “weakness and irresolution” in failing to deal with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s previous chemical assaults on his people, evidently unaware that Obama had in 2013 agreed with Vladimir Putin for the Russians to oversee removal of all chemical weapons from Syria.

That it was a gas attack was unhesitatingly accepted by the media. Russia insisted there had been no chemical attack but The New York Times headline assured us, “White House Accuses Russia of Cover-Up in Syria Chemical Attack”. They were no exception.

Like Bush looking for reasons to attack Iraq immediately after 9/11, President Trump told his defense department to prepare retaliatory options with no consideration of what intel we might have. On April 6, two days after the attack, he met with his national security team at his Mar-a-Lago club not to decide whether something should be done, but to decide what to do in retaliation. Other than the videos of the dead and dying, their provenance uncertain only two days after the bombing, there was no intelligence proving that it had been a chemical bomb, and no interest in first probing for evidence. Over the previous 48 hours, Hersh reports, intense briefings and advice from his national security team could not sway the president to wait until more could be learned. Hersh had been given transcripts of real-time communications that followed the Syrian attack. He writes:

“I learned of the total disconnect between the president and many of his military advisers and intelligence officials, as well as officers on the ground in the region who had an entirely different understanding of the nature of Syria’s attack on Khan Sheikhoun”

But the president had made up his mind that it was a gas attack by the Assad military. “Everyone close to him knows his proclivity for acting precipitously when he does not know the facts,” a source said to Hersh. “He was told we did not have evidence of Syrian involvement and yet Trump says: ‘Do it'”.

Hersh describes the source for most of his report as “a senior adviser to the American intelligence community, who has served in senior positions in the Defense Department and Central Intelligence Agency”. It is Hersh’s talent to find people deep on the inside who will talk and Hersh quotes “the adviser” throughout his account. If his name is not familiar, it was Seymour Hersh who uncovered the My Lai massacre in the Vietnam War. It was Sy Hersh who, along with CBS’s “60 Minutes”, exposed the mistreatment and torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. And it was Hersh who wrote four years after the takedown of Osama bin Laden that Pakistan had known of his whereabouts and of the SEAL raid in advance, but the U.S. government concocted an elaborate cover story with the Pakistanis to yield maximum political payoff for Barack Obama in the run-up to the 2012 election. That was a story that Americans didn’t want to hear. Much as American media evidently shunned this story — hence publication in Germany — his Obama exposé had to find ink in the U.K.

in theater

Qatar, a peninsula protruding into the Persian Gulf across from Iran, is host to the largest U.S. military base in the Middle East. The U.S. military’s
The U.S. command and control center near Doha, Qatar.
Central Command and some 11,000 American troops are stationed there, southwest of capital city Doha. Unaware of our significant presence in Qatar and taken in by Saudi Arabia during his recent visit there, Donald Trump caused a major rift by siding with four Middle East nations that have locked out Qatar — air traffic, travel, commerce — for its support of Islamist groups.

Out of the air operations center at Udeid Air Base fly our AWACs — Boeing aircraft stuffed with radar and electronic gear that provide command and control of air traffic throughout Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, and 17 other nations. Americans and Russians, with Russians acting for Syria as well, routinely file flight and attack plans with the AWACs to prevent collisions and incidents, a practice known as “deconfliction” that so far has worked to perfection despite warplanes moving through the airspace at near or greater than supersonic speed.

Details of the Syrian flight-plan to and from Khan Sheikhoun had been logged by the Russians with the deconfliction crew aboard the AWACs directly, in English, days ahead. Hersh was told that the Russians even passed a warning directly to the CIA that if we had any infiltrated operatives in the area, they should leave or at least avoid the jihadist groups’ meeting.

The Russians had operated a drone above the site for days to mark the building’s comings and goings, said Hersh’s contact, who was able to give a detailed description of the target where the meeting was to be held, even to the extent of the shops on the ground floor of the two-story building. Because the rebel factions control the town of 48,000 by doling out essentials such as “food, water, cooking oil, propane gas”, Hersh’s adviser told him that these, as well as fertilizers and insecticides for growing crops in the farming region and “chlorine-based decontaminants for cleansing the bodies of the dead before burial”, were stored in the basement.

After the bombing, treating victims at their clinic 60 miles to the north, Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders) reported that “eight patients showed symptoms — including constricted pupils, muscle spasms and involuntary defecation — which are consistent with exposure to a neurotoxic agent such as sarin gas or similar compounds”. Hersh says “the organophosphates used in many fertilizers…can cause neurotoxic effects similar to those of sarin”. Other hospitals reported that patients “smelled of bleach, suggesting that they had been exposed to chlorine.”

A sarin bomb releases gas. It has no explosive power, which argues for normal munitions dispersing the fertilizer and chlorine. The American military produced what is called a Bomb Damage Assessment that dismissed any notion of a sarin attack by theorizing that the heat and explosive power of the 500-pound Russian bomb they knew about may have set off secondary explosions that released the fertilizer and the disinfectants to form a deadly cloud over the town.

Could the Russians have been duped by the Syrians fabricating the story about the meeting? Apart from what sense would it make for Assad to lie to his Russia patrons on whom he relies for winning his war, the Russians would have known of the loading of a sarin bomb. They fly out of Sheyrat as well. “Military grade sarin includes additives designed to increase toxicity and lethality”, says Hersh’s confidant, and the Russians would have seen everyone involved with the transport, loading and arming of a sarin bomb in conspicuous Hazmat clothing to protect against a leak.

For the media that said the Russians were in on the sarin attack and had fed us disinformation — a phony story about a jihadist meeting. That was effectively the U.S. position, immediately accusing Russia of a cover-up of the Syrian action. But none of the media knew of deconfliction reports about the mission that the Russians had supplied to U.S. Central Command, nor of the elaborate coordination that goes on in theater, far from Washington. And there is this photo, taken by the Syrian
This photograph by the Syrian opposition (Edlib Media Center) shows the aftermath of a strike against the town of Khan Sheikhoun. A large building was hit, but it’s unclear were the strike took place exactly.


opposition says its caption, purportedly of the town of Khan Sheikhoun after the raid, showing damage that sarin bombs do not cause.

trying again?

On Monday, June 26th, Press Secretary Sean Spicer issued an unusual statement at night saying that the “United States has identified potential preparations for another chemical weapons attack by the Assad regime”, activity that resembled the preparations that preceded the April attack. The White House threatened that if “Mr. Assad conducts another mass murder attack using chemical weapons, he and his military will pay a heavy price.”

Just as preparation for sarin attacks resemble each other, it should be evident that so would preparations for conventional weapon attacks.

Hersh’s story had run on Sunday, the day before the White House communiqué. Just two days after the White House edict, Trump’s national security team announced that the warning to Assad had succeeded in stopping the chemical weapons attack. No mention was made of any signal coming from the Syrians or the Russians. Defense Secretary James Mattis simply said “They didn’t do it”, which he repeated three times. The media bought it. The story went away immediately. We were to accept that no raid in two days should be taken as certainty that Assad had obeyed the U.S.

Or should we think that the White House got wind of Hersh’s story of just days before, now realizing that they had been ignorant in their haste of the pre-announced mission of the April attack and unaware of its special nature using a Russian guided bomb. Mindful now that murmurings of new preparations might be another conventional weapons assault in the works, were they worried that there might have been no sarin bomb attack on April 4th? Best to go silent in a hurry and hope that a story in a German publication would escape notice.

One can argue, what’s the difference? Either way, horrible deaths by chemical substances were caused. What makes for difference is the impetuous decision making by this president, decisions which have no interest in first assessing what our intelligence assets work to gather around the world. He had earlier decided while eating dinner to give the go-ahead to the raid in Yemen that cost the death of one SEAL, the wounding of others, and the loss of an attack helicopter. Much more serious incidents surely lie ahead. Will this president continue to ignore the pleadings of his staff because he thinks his instincts are more reliable than facts? He has said so: “I’m a very instinctual person, but my instinct turns out to be right”.

Published just one day before the White House threat against Assad,
Hersh’s article ends with his adviser saying to him “The issue is, what if there’s another false flag sarin attack credited to hated Syria? Trump has upped the ante and painted himself into a corner with his decision to bomb. And do not think these guys are not planning the next faked attack. Trump will have no choice but to bomb again, and harder. He’s incapable of saying he made a mistake.”

The World Thinks Less of Us, Says Survey, and Trump Is a Factor

The world’s opinion of the United States has plunged, according to a survey by Pew Research. Donald Trump has made a troubling contribution to our worsening reputation after only five month in office, the survey says, and this was before the recent misogynistic tweets against television host Mika Brzezinski — which continue two days after universal condemnation, even by the few Congress members who had principles enough to speak out.

The survey spanning 37 nations comes up with a median rating of just 22% confidence that Trump will do the right thing in international affairs. Republicans and a smattering of Democrats thought Barack Obama’s foreign policy performance was disastrous, but the world rates confidence in him at 64%. Only Israel and Russia rate Trump higher than Obama.

The world’s view of the United States as a country seems closely linked to Obama — also registering at 64% and dropping to 49% now.
A chart at the Pew site compares Trump to Obama, which seems to us
rather too pointed for that reputable organization, but Trump seems to be at the center of all questions asked. Perhaps of note is that Sweden’s drop — Obama to Trump — is the greatest — 83% — which we’ll guess is caused by Trump’s claim of a non-existent terror attack there in February. Germany is not far behind. Its opinion went from 86% at the end of Obama’s term to 11% now.

Of the major leaders, Angela Merkel enjoys the highest confidence rating, with 42% believing she will do the right thing involving world affairs compared to Xi Jinping (28%) and Vladimir Putin (27%) . At 22%, Trump is rated below Putin. (You may have seen photos — meant to be jokes but perhaps not really — of Trump and Merkel together captioned, “The leader of the free world and Donald Trump”). It’s the “no confidence” rating that produces the widest split: 31% for Merkel to 74% for Trump.

All of these figures are the median, which Pew prefers to averages, presumably because averages weight the scores. When all countries are listed in their high-to-low rating order, the median is the member of any sorted list that occupies the midpoint in the list.

It is Trump’s policies that bring the opinion of the U.S. low. Here is a chart
from Pew that shows the median of the 37 countries’ reaction to Trump’s promises to his America First base. And these ratings were from before Trump withdrew America from the Paris climate change accord.

Mexico’s “favorable view of the U.S.” has hit a wall, understandably going from 66% to 30%. In supposed NATO ally Turkey, 79% have an unfavorable view, and along with Jordan 82% are against the spread of “U.S. ideas and customs”.

Still, 58% of the three dozen countries have a favorable view of the American people. The Far East, which Trump abandoned with his cancellation of the Trans Pacific Partnership, particularly like us. It is the Middle East, save for Israel, that dislikes us — Turkey most of all at more than two-thirds.
Trump is particularly disliked for his traits, although viewed as a strong leader.

The solution is simple. To win them over, we should simply entertain the world. In answer to the statement, “I like American music, movies and television” even Sweden pulls out of its scold: along with Canadians, 88% of Swedes say “yes”. All of Europe agrees, with ratings in the 70s and the Netherlands at 82. Elsewhere the vote ranges from 80% with few lows. The lowest is India at 26%. It has Bollywood to entertain itself.