“Mean,” “so-called bishop,” “radical left hardline Trump hater.” Such vehemence is not unusual in President Donald Trump’s rhetoric, but he usually reserves his attacks for the political world. However, his attacks were for Mariann Budde, the Episcopal bishop of Washington, D.C., whom the new U.S. president harshly criticized January 22, the day after the National Prayer Service held as part of his inauguration.
Bishop Mariann Budd – Episcopal Bishop Washington, DC
Trump’s outrage
Mariann Budde, 65, drew the president’s anger after a sermon in which she encouraged Donald Trump, “in the name of our God,” to show “mercy” toward “the millions of people who are afraid.” “There are gay, lesbian, and transgender children in Democratic, Republican, and independent families, some who fear for their lives,” she pleaded before the president and his wife Melania, seated in the front row alongside Vice President J.D. Vance and his wife.
And just as Trump had declared a state of emergency along the Mexican border, Budde also urged the president to be compassionate toward immigrants, of whom, she said, “the vast majority (…) are not criminals.”
Bishop Budde speaks at White House protest for Peace in Gaza – December 2023
Visibly annoyed by these remarks, Trump harshly criticized her on his Truth Social platform. “The so-called Bishop who spoke at the National Prayer Service on Tuesday morning was a Radical Left hard-line Trump hater (…),” he wrote, accusing the bishop of dragging “her church into the World of politics in a very ungracious way. She was nasty in tone and not compelling or smart… She and her church owe the public an apology!”
Mariann Edgar Budde, born in 1959 and ordained a priest before being elected bishop of Washington in 2011, is the ninth bishop of the Episcopal diocese of the U.S. capital and the first woman to hold the position in this church, a member of the Anglican Communion. The Anglican Church belongs to the “historical” Protestant tradition, in contrast to evangelical Protestantism.
Established after the American Revolution during the separation from the Church of England, the Episcopal Church stands out for its inclusivity. It was among the first to bless same-sex unions and strongly advocates for LGBT equality.
Previous statements
This is not the first time the Episcopal bishop of Washington has addressed Trump, directly or indirectly. In 2020, after Black Lives Matter protesters were forcefully dispersed by police on the steps of St. John’s Episcopal Church—known as the “Church of the Presidents” in the federal capital—the billionaire posed hours later in front of the building, Bible in hand, drawing the ire of most American religious leaders. Budde said she was “outraged” and “horrified” by this publicity stunt.
Felon US President Donald Trump holds up a Bible outside of St John’s Episcopal church across Lafayette Park in Washington, DC on June 1, 2020. – Felon Trump was due to make a televised address to the nation on Monday after days of anti-racism protests against police brutality that have erupted into violence. (Photo by BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AFP via Getty Images)
As a regular feature of http://www.leesperspective.com I will hi-light Felon President Trump’s dismantling of the American system as we have come to know it.
The Civil Rights Division is the first bite of the Department of Justice apple.
“I’ll cut the apple in two. I’ll pray it isn’t True.” Apple of Sodom, Marilyn Manson
What it feels like in Nazi Trump America – ‘Apple of Sodom’ Marilyn Manson
CORONATION OF THE AMERICAN NAZI REGIME – JANUARY 20, 2025
TRUMP CONVICTED – 5.31.2024
Excerpted from The Washington Post 1.22.2025
“It’s beyond unusual — it’s unprecedented. We’ve never seen this before at this scale with any transfer of power, regardless of the ideology of any incoming president or administration,” said Damon Hewitt,president and executive director of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law. “This should make Americans both angry and deeply worried. This is more than just a changing course of philosophy — this is exactly what most people [in the civil rights community] feared: a Justice Department that was created to protect civil rights literally abdicating its duty and responsibility to protect Americans from all forms of discrimination.”
Felon President Trump dismantles the Justice Department.
The Justice Department has ordered the civil rights division to halt much of its investigative activity dating from the Biden administration and not pursue new indictments, cases or settlements, according to a memo sent to the temporary head of the division that was obtained by The Washington Post.
Trump said on the campaign trail that police at times must be “extraordinarily rough” to stamp out urban mayhem and endorsed more aggressive tactics from police, including the use of stop-and-frisk to search suspects.
The letter instructs Kathleen Wolfe — designated by the Trump administration as supervisor of the division — to ensure that civil rights attorneys do not file “any new complaints, motions to intervene, agreed-upon remands, amicus briefs, or statements of interest.”
The mainstream media and the political world is blazing with scorn.
Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, who happened to be in Ghana when the fiery conflagration broke out, is being politically burned at the stake for the deadly disaster engulfing Southern California.
A typical headline.
“Stone-faced LA Mayor Karen Bass refuses to answer questions about absence as wildfires rage across her city“-New York Post headline – 1.8.2025
Of course the mainstream media, corporate world and their bought politicians are picking on the softest target. Why?
The mainstream goes hard after LA Mayor Karen Bass
The real culprits are the corporations. They have ruled California for decades and are responsible for the area’s water supply and fire prevention infrastructure.
More properly stated, criminal lack of it.
Don’t expect the billionaire class to be pilloired in the media or raked over the coals in any legislative investigation.
The luckless Mayor will be driven from office and the ruling class will breathe easier. If that’s possible in the toxic air of Los Angeles.
Excerpted from The People’s World 1.14.2025
LOS ANGELES—Remember the movie Chinatown?
That 1974 epic starring Jack Nicholson told how politics and greed, mixed with more than a little violence, led to a fortunate few early in the last century seizing control of the Los Angeles water supply at the time when the city was starting the sudden and phenomenal growth that has made it the nation’s second largest.
“People are gonna be mad when they find out they’re paying for water they’re not gonna get,” an undercover source tells the Nicholson character in one of the movie’s key scenes.
Which pretty much sums up the situation Angelenos—and, indirectly, the rest of us—now face: Despite spending millions of taxpayer dollars over decades to construct one of the world’s most-extensive infrastructure projects to transfer water from naturally rainy Northern California to naturally parched Southern California, there’s not enough available water to fight the monster fires now ravaging L.A.
The lack of the water needed to provide fire hydrants that provide water rather than fail has nothing to do with Mayor Karen Bass, as the new York Times and much of the corporate media claims but has much to do with corporate greed instead.
And climate change only makes things worse, scientists report. It’s fueling the out-of-control winds that have made The City of Angels a flaming hell on earth.
The fires have left federal, state and local Fire Fighters dazed, frustrated, short-staffed and exhausted, at least 23 people dead so far and sent billions of dollars’ worth of homes and businesses literally up in smoke.
The only things missing now that were in the movie are its violence, the ultimate identity of some of the biggest beneficiaries–Corporate farmers and, Greenpeace says, fossil fuel firms—and the downwind impact as dangerous smoke from the monster fires drifts eastward over the continental U.S.
It was a beautiful sunny day in Civic Center as the new Mayor Daniel Lurie was sworn into office and the large crowd feasted on lox and bagels in the City Hall rotunda.
A crowd of over 2600 people including Da Mayor Willie Brown watched Mayor Daniel Lurie be sworn into office. Followed by his inaugural address. Many of whom then entered City Hall for the food and music festivities.
Da MayorWillie Brown, dapper as always.
The crowd looks on at Civic Center Plaza.Service Employees International Union (SEIU) workers whose three months strike against San Francisco Hotels was settled with the intervention of Mayor Lurieshow their appreciation.The Philip and Sala Burton High School Marching Band performed in front of City Hall.Leung’s White Crane and Lion Dance Association entertained the inaugural crowd.Everyone was welcome at Mayor Lurie’s inaugural.The inaugural crowd in the City Hall rotunda.The SFJazz High School All Stars entertained the inaugural crowd in the City Hall rotunda.Mayor George Moscone whose life was tragically cut short by Dan White on November 27, 1978 as he sat in the Mayor’s office. After assassinating Mayor Moscone, the assassin walked to the Board of Supervisors offices where he assassinated Supervisor Harvey Milk.
The crowd waiting to greet Mayor Lurie in his office.
City Attorney David Chiu greets a well wisher in the City Hall South Light Court.Law enforcement was a heavy presence including this trio of bicycle riding SFPD officers
Willie Brown and blogger Lee in front of San Francisco City Hall
Inaugural attendees were invited to complete a ‘My wish for San Francisco’. This is Blogger Lee’s contribution.
David Shulman is the author of Tamil: A Biography, among other books. He is Professor Emeritus at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and was awarded the Israel Prize for Religious Studies in 2016. He is a longtime activist with Ta’ayush, the Arab–Jewish Partnership, in the occupied Palestinian territories. (January 2025)
What is striking, and horrific, is the fact that Israel has embraced cruelty and atrocity as a normative mode of waging war.
This winter in Israel-Palestine is a dark one, and not because the days are shorter. We have war crimes, man-made famine, and ethnic cleansing in both Gaza and the West Bank.
Since early October the army has intermittently stopped humanitarian aid—namely food—from entering the northern part of Gaza, which has a population of some 200,000 or more. Much of that population has now been forcibly displaced toward the tent cities farther south, but it seems that tens of thousands of Palestinians are still hanging on in Jabaliya and Beit Lahiya, where the fighting and the bombing continue. Brigadier General Itzik Cohen, who is in command in the Jabaliya arena, has claimed that there are no civilians left in the north of Gaza.
Oddly, many of these nonexistent ordinary people are being killed nearly every day. Here is one egregious example. On October 29, after four soldiers were killed in Beit Lahiya, the army bombed a five-story apartment building; it claimed that a “lookout” had been sighted on the roof. Nearly a hundred people died, at least twenty of them children, and we have no count of the wounded. An obscene question arises:
Was it worth it—for a presumed lookout? But I can’t help asking myself: For this we created a Jewish state?
Judging by reports from the field, the plan seems to be to maintain Israeli control of northern Gaza indefinitely and—if the apocalyptic Messianists have their way—to settle it with Jews, as if nothing has been learned from the bitter experience of the past.
We even have a high-ranking theorist of the current catastrophe in Gaza—retired major general Giora Eiland—who thinks that besieging a city or a country is perfectly legitimate under the rules of war, even if innocents who can’t or won’t get out die of starvation or illness. It seems that his plan for Gaza has now become the government’s plan.
What comes next?
I fear that it will be full-scale war with Iran. Reports from early December describe the situation in Beit Lahiya as unthinkable misery—rotting corpses in the ruins, no food, no water, no place to hide, no let-up in the bombings—while mass starvation has taken hold in the south of Gaza, partly because local criminal gangs commandeer the supply trucks that manage to get through the blockade.
Let’s put aside, for the moment, the hard-hearted rationalizations that are all too prevalent among Israelis, such as “It’s all the fault of Hamas,” or “They started it,” or “Our soldiers’ lives come first,” or “Our enemies want only to destroy us,” or “All Arabs are Hamas.” (This last one is common among Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s supporters and very close to his stated view of the Palestinian Authority.)
Displaced Palestinians inspect their tents destroyed by Israel’s bombardment, adjunct to an UNRWA facility west of Rafah city, Gaza Strip, Tuesday, May 28, 2024. (AP Photo/Jehad Alshrafi)
It’s not as if there was no cruelty in the army’s rules of war before October 7, 2023. But since that date a dark miasma has enveloped the collective conscience of this country.
If you watch the evening news on the mainstream Channel 2, or listen to government ministers and members of the Knesset, or even if you simply pay attention to accidental encounters with passersby, you usually perceive a blank indifference to the huge civilian casualties in Gaza, in Lebanon, and—in particular—among Palestinians in the West Bank.
The government sets the tone; the army, although at odds with Netanyahu, follows suit; the Jewish supremacists marshal biblical texts proving the joys of revenge. For them, and for many others in Israel, tens of thousands of dead Palestinian civilians in Gaza are an acceptable price to pay for a reckless, savage war.
Needless to say, there are also many Israelis who are sickened by this idea and who have the courage to speak out or write against it publicly. But Netanyahu’s autocratic state has made pursuing an endless war a self-fulfilling (in the case of Netanyahu, also self-serving) goal in the complete absence of any rational plan to end it. Eternal war is supposedly justified by the existential danger that this government has itself created, or recreated, after several decades in which Israelis felt reasonably secure, largely because of the peace agreements with Egypt and Jordan.
Not once in the course of the last fourteen months have I heard the well-meaning reporters and commentators on Channel 2 utter a single syllable of sorrow, let alone remorse, at the mounting count of Palestinians killed in Gaza.
The statistics published by the Gaza Health Ministry or the human rights organizations still active there—perhaps inexact or inflated, as the army likes to claim—are almost never noted on the TV and radio news and only minimally reported in the press. Maybe remorse, or even polite regret, is too much to expect from a country at war. Did the British and the Americans show any empathy with the victims (some 25,000) of the Dresden bombings of February 1945? Empathy is usually focused on individuals, not on groups. But still: believe it or not, the Palestinians are our sisters and brothers, and someday, if the Israeli state survives, they will be our partners in making peace. There is no other way forward.
What we are experiencing now in Israel is a profound failure of our shared humanity, a deadly apathy of the soul. Worse still is the taste for killing and inflicting pain that has infected so many, beginning at the top.
The moral apathy in the political realm takes many palpable forms. Each day brings more bad news. November 5 was election day in the US and thus a good time for the prime minister to enact a devious political drama while all eyes were focused elsewhere. For months he had been eager to dismiss his minister of defense, Yoav Gallant, whom he clearly detests. (The feeling is no doubt mutual.) Gallant is by no means a heroic model of wartime ethics, but he is gifted with a virtue otherwise entirely unknown to Netanyahu’s government: he almost never lies. He also put freeing the Israeli hostages in Gaza at the top of his priorities, in accordance with classic Jewish values, again in marked contrast to Netanyahu, who long ago consigned them to their fate.
Dismissing a popular and credible minister of defense during a multifront war when Israel was bracing itself for another Iranian missile attack was an act of lunacy; it did, however, have the desired effect of shoring up Netanyahu’s coalition, the objective that matters most to him.
Gallant has been replaced by Israel Katz, a Netanyahu yes-man with no knowledge of military and defense matters and no experience apart from politics. There is every reason to believe that Gallant’s dismissal is only the first of many to come. Netanyahu will find ways to dismiss the IDF chief of staff, Herzi Halevi, and probably also the head of the Israel Security Agency (Shabak), Ronen Bar, and other senior military figures; he’ll replace them with the incompetent sycophants he likes. He has also singled out the courageous attorney general, Gali Baharav-Miara, whom he sees as his archenemy. All this is meant to divert any implication of responsibility, let alone guilt, for the October 7 Hamas massacre from Netanyahu himself to various easily available alternative targets.
The relatively rational and liberal camp, which may count for half of the electorate, is demoralized, traumatized, heavy with despair.
The failure of the government to bring back the hostages in Gaza, who are dying after over four hundred days in the tunnels, is for most of us a source of unfathomable agony. We stand in front of the president’s house holding up our signs, we sit silently in protest for hours in the city streets, we cry out day after day for a cease-fire that would bring at least some of the hostages home alive, but no one is listening. This is not the Israel we once knew.
The government is not, however, simply corrupt, incompetent, and morally obtuse. It is now planning to enact a law that will decimate the Arab parties in the Knesset on the ridiculous grounds that their candidates supposedly support terror, thereby effectively disenfranchising a fifth of Israel’s population and ensuring a permanent majority for the right. Netanyahu is driven by an idea that has guided him for decades and that still, in Israel’s deepest crisis, obsesses him: the stubborn refusal, at any cost, to allow a Palestinian state to emerge. And now we, too, again have Donald Trump, whose nominee for ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, has already announced that there is no such thing as an Israeli occupation of Palestinian land. Huckabee is in favor of annexation and will, he says, do whatever he can to advance it.
Life for Palestinians in the occupied territories, already unbearable, will become still harder and more dangerous. These days the uncontested rulers of the West Bank are the marauding Israeli settlers in the illegal outposts that are popping up everywhere. Their express goal is a second Nakba—the expulsion of the entire Palestinian population in Area C, some 62 percent of the West Bank, over which Israel has sole control.
Look what happened to the ancient village of Zanuta at the southernmost point of the occupied territories. I knew it well in the years before the war, when we accompanied the shepherds there to their grazing grounds in order to protect them from the settlers and soldiers. Today there is a settler outpost of exceptional virulence only some two hundred yards from the village. Like all other villages in the South Hebron Hills and the Jordan Valley, Zanuta was subjected to the settlers’ repeated threat: “We’ll be back in twenty-four hours, and if you’re still here, we’ll kill all of you.” Along with the threat there were recurrent, terrifying invasions of the village by heavily armed settlers. Eventually, in October 2023, after the start of the war, the people of Zanuta could no longer stand the constant attacks; they abandoned their homes. No sooner were they gone than the settlers destroyed all the stone houses and sheepfolds as well as the beautiful school that had been funded by the European Union.
So far the story is familiar; Zanuta’s fate was shared by some twenty-two other Palestinian villages in South Hebron and the Jordan Valley. But the Zanuta shepherds appealed to Israel’s High Court of Justice. In July 2024 the court decreed, first, that these villagers should be allowed to return to their homes and, second, that the army and the police had to ensure their safety there. The second stipulation was a kind of fantasy, utterly remote from reality on the ground; you will be hard put to find even a single army officer or policeman anywhere in the territories who would protect Palestinians from Israeli settlers. Still, the hopeful people of Zanuta returned to their demolished homes. At that point the Civil Administration—that is, the army—told them that they were not allowed to build even a small clay oven, let alone rebuild a room or put up a wall or even a curtain in a ruined house. Any attempt to put one stone on top of another would bring the soldiers back within an hour. At night the Zanuta shepherds with their families were sleeping on the ground under the stars.
They held out for three weeks or so. Settler attacks resumed with full force. The Palestinians fled. Zanuta is no more.
A few days ago I visited the ruins of the village. The devastation is total. One wall of the school is still partially standing. It has an elegiac inscription in Arabic: “We have the right to an education.” I have never seen people so devoted to educating their children as the Palestinians of South Hebron.
In the case of Zanuta the army and the police emptied the High Court ruling of its meaning. For soldiers on the West Bank, now fully aligned with the violent settlers, the High Court is a nebulous and distant entity. As an officer once said to me when I showed him the High Court ruling prohibiting the expulsion of Palestinians from their grazing grounds, “Why do I need the High Court? I have my gun.”
It’s going to be a difficult year for Arab Americans as extremist Donald Trump returns to power with his xenophobic mind set. One place where his racist policies will be on abhorrent display will be those sycophants he places in power to implement his warped governance.
Israel will be given a free reign to continues its murderous assault against the Palestinian children, women and men of Gaza facilitated by outgoing President Joe Biden.
Bibi Netanyahu and the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) are responsible for the wanton slaughter of over 45,000 Palestinians. Killed in retaliation with American supplied weaponry since the Hamas attack on Israel killing over 1200 on October 7, 2023.
A Palestinian youth faces down The Israeli Defense Forces (IDF)
Excerpted from Deutsche Welle 1.1.2025
Trump’s pro-Israel picks for key positions
There are voices like Khalid Turaani’s, an Arab American activist, warning that the situation for people in Gaza and Arabs in the United States would only get worse under Trump.
Turaani cited the selection of former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee as the ambassador to Israel. Huckabee once said, “There’s really no such thing as a Palestinian.”
Protests against Trump’s ban on travelers from Muslim-majority countries took place in airports around the United States
“When he says there’s no such thing as Palestinians, when people don’t exist, then there’s no genocide,” said Turaani. “You cannot kill or genocide a group of people who do not exist. I think throughout history when people commit genocide, they deny that those people existed.”
Israeli Defense Forces on the march 1970. Jerusalem – Postcard purchased by blogger Lee during a 3-month adventure in Israel/Palestine. Much of the time spent living in a hotel in the Old City (Arab section of Jerusalem)
Turaani said he was also concerned about Trump selecting New York congresswoman Elise Stefanik to be the US ambassador to the United Nations.
These are the type people Trump and his xenophobic flunkies seek to humiliate and displace.
A childhood spent in a camp for Palestinian refugees in Syria has made Turaani wary of Stefanik’s stance toward the United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA). Stefanik has repeatedly expressed support for Israel’s decision to defund UNRWA and called on the US to do the same, as Trump did in 2018.
Uum Kulthum. Icon in the Arab world and inspiration for Palestinian people. During his stay in Jerusalem blogger Lee listened to Uum Kulthum while drinking tea in the Old City cafes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Umm_Kulthum
Germany’s Alternative for Deutschland (AfD) boss Alice Weidel has caught herself a big fish, Elon Musk, as she seeks to become the nation’s Chancellor.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice_Weidel
The world’s richest manElon Musk is swimming happily in stormy German political waters.Insulting the President of the country. Elon Musk has added German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier to the list of politicians he has insulted in Europe. He also announced a plan to speak to the leader of the country’s far-right AfD.
Continuing his extremist trolling and interference in German affairs while he blankets the planet on his @X platform
Injecting himself into the German electoral process campaigning for the far right Alternative for Deutschland (AfD) as the February 23, 2025 election nears.
Plans: online Musk-AfD boss Alice Weidel meeting
The spokesman for the leader of the AfD, Alice Weidel, said concrete plans were underway for an online meeting between her and Elon Musk.
A deceptively cheery anodyne New Year’s greeting from AfD boss Alice Weidel
That came after Musk himself suggested a meeting between the two via X’s Spaces chat feature. “Wait until Alice and I do an X Spaces conversation. They will lose their minds,” he posted.
Germany’s Vice Chancellor Robert Habeck on Tuesday hit out at Musk and his attempts to influence the German elections.
“Elon Musk is equipped with billions and unbridled communication power,” Habeck wrote on X. “His call for the AfD is systematic: He wants to weaken Europe. Power must be limited: no business model must destroy our democracy. Europe must now use its power consistently.”
Elon #Musk ist ausgestattet mit Milliarden u. ungebändigter Kommunikationsmacht. Sein Aufruf für die AfD hat System: Er will Europa schwächen.
Es braucht Begrenzung von Macht: Kein Geschäftsmodell darf unsere Demokratie zerstören.#Europa muss seine Macht nun konsequent nutzen. pic.twitter.com/4lLN0HHADZ
Concerns are also growing in the UK as Musk takes an increasingly close interest in Britain’s political scene, aligning himself with hard-right lawmaker Nigel Farage.
Musk has busied himself with taking aim at the UK’s center-left Labour government, launching a series of blistering comments against British Prime Minister Keir Starmer.
AfD boss campaigns on the slogan “Time for Deutschland.” For whose Germany is it time??
Yet the somnolent American public, save for the usual Leftie suspects, is silent.
Perhaps the American public, as usual asleep at the political wheel, is in such a funk after the election it is bowing to the world’s richest man. A staunch make no bones about it reactionary Musk seeks to ingratiate himself into the Project 2025 vibe of the lying convicted felon Donald Trump. As he prepares for his second destruction derby against the foundations of America.
One can look to Europe and quickly realize Elon Musk is not getting the free ride he seeks in Germanyas he advocates for far-right Alternative for Deutschland (AfD) in the upcoming February 23, 2025 national election.
The chairman of the DJV journalists’ association, Mika Beuster, warned editorial offices not to allow themselves to be instrumentalized in the run-up to the general election but to handle guest contributions with care.
“German media must not allow themselves to be misused as mouthpieces for autocrats and their friends,” he said
Musk wrote that the far-right populist party was “the last spark of hope for the country,” which he claimed was teetering on the brink of “economic and cultural collapse,” and that only it could revive the German economy and prevent a loss of identity through a “controlled immigration policy.“
“To those who condemn the AfD as extremist, I say: don’t let the label attached to it put you off,” Musk wrote. “The portrayal of the AfD as right-wing extremist is clearly false, considering that Alice Weidel, the party’s leader, has a same-sex partner from Sri Lanka! Does that sound like Hitler to you? Please!”
In the article, published in German, Musk also praised the AfD’s approach to regulation, taxes, and market deregulation.
Although it was published as an op-ed by designated Welt editor-in-chief Jan Philipp Burgard, the decision to print it was met with protests by Welt editorial staff and led to the resignation of a senior editor at Welt am Sonntag.
Friedrich Merz, the center-right candidate for chancellor in Germany’s February 23 legislative election, lashed out at Musk, calling the article unprecedented interference that was “intrusive and pretentious.”
The chairman of the center-left Social Democrats (SPD), Lars Klingbeil, accused Musk of wanting to “plunge Germany into chaos” and compared him to Russian President Vladimir Putin.
“Both want to influence our elections and specifically support the AfD’s enemies of democracy,” Klingbeil said.
Few if any of the learned WSJ editorial page audience are admitting that Trump is nothing more than a preening facsimile, akin to such extremist political parties as German the Alternative for Deutschland(AfD).
STOP THE AfD – photo Lee Heidhues
Elon Musk’s favorite German political party.The extremist far right organization currently polling at 19 percent in national polls. Prior to the February 23, 2025 election. Which was called following the collapse of the coalition government in Berlin. None of the German political parties will join in a coalition with the AfD.
It is beyond reprehensible that this Guy is going to be President, again. Look at Brazil where his soul buddy Jair Bolsonaro, who tried his own January 6th insurrection.
He’s been barred by Brazil’s judiciary from seeking the presidency for eight years for his abuse of power. Good luck with that in allegedly democratic America. Where the Republicans, the Courts and, yes, the Democrats bow down before this not so closet racist fascist.
Elon Musk, the world’s richest man and a close adviser to President-elect Donald J. Trump, on Friday December 20th endorsed Germany’s far-right party, a group with ties to neo-Nazis whose youth wing has been classified as “confirmed extremist” by German domestic intelligence.
“Only the AfD can save Germany,” Mr. Musk posted to X, referring to the anti-immigrant party, the Alternative for Germany, by its German initials.
In doing so, he is wading into German politics at a moment of acute turmoil, and at the very same time that he has wielded his influence in Washington to help blow up a bipartisan spending deal that was meant to avoid a government shutdown over Christmas. The German government recently collapsed, resulting in early elections, which are planned for next year.
German politicians criticize Elon Musk backing for far-right AfD
Anton Hofreiter from the Green Party called the AfD “traitors bought by billionaires” and “a band of fascists who have not only been bought by [Russian President Vladimir] Putin but are now being supported by a multi-billionaire-turned-right-wing-extremist.”
Asked about Musk’s comments, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz said: “Freedom of expression also applies to multi-billionaires, but it also means that you’re allowed to say things which aren’t correct, and aren’t good political advice.”
Other German lawmakers from across the political spectrum criticized both Musk’s post and Weidel’s response, slamming “interference” and insisting that no other party will form a government with “fascists bought by billionaires.”
It’s a scary thought that Donald Trump will hold the fate of the planet in his hands, again.
Donald Trump’s the ultimate transactional guy. His understanding of global events only goes so far as his bank account. If there’s nothing in it for him his attitude is “I don’t care.”
I guess Trump never wanted to built a resort or casino in Damascus.
Trump may mouth the words “America First.” The reality In Trump’s world is, “Me, First.”
Excerpted from Associated Press 12.7.2024
WASHINGTON (AP) — President-elect Donald Trump said Saturday that the U.S. military should stay out of the fast-escalating conflict in Syria, where a dramatic rebel offensive reached the capital and threatened the rule of Syria’s Russian- and Iranian-allied president. “THIS IS NOT OUR FIGHT,” Trump declared on social media.
In his post, Trump said Bashar Al Assad did not deserve U.S. support to stay in power.
As world leaders watched the stunning rebel advance, with its potential to alter the balance of power in the Middle East, President Joe Biden’s national security adviser separately stressed that the Biden administration had no intention of intervening.
Trump says US should stay out of fighting in Syria as opposition forces occupy Damascus and Bashar Al Assad flees the country
“The United States is not going to … militarily dive into the middle of a Syrian civil war,” Jake Sullivan told an audience in California.
Sullivan said the U.S. would keep acting as necessary to keep the Islamic State — a violently anti-Western extremist group not known to be involved in the offensive but with sleeper cells in Syria’s deserts — from exploiting openings presented by the fighting.
Lee's Perspective 