The Social World

Author: Jacob Heilbrunn

  • Trump, Soros and a weaponized DoJ

    Trump, Soros and a weaponized DoJ

    In 2013, the IRS targeted the Tea Party and other conservative organizations for special scrutiny. Four years later, the federal government reached a settlement and the IRS apologized. Is it about to be déjà vu all over again?

    The Trump administration is embarking upon a major campaign against leading liberal organizations. The first shot came in late August when President Trump demanded that the liberal billionaire George Soros and his son, Alex, be charged under the federal Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act for supporting violent protests across America. The libertarian CATO Institute, a redoubt for decades of free speech advocates, promptly observed that “the call to prosecute may be bluster.”

    Wrong.

    The New York Times reports that a new Justice Department directive suggests targeting Soros and his Open Society Foundations for a gallimaufry of sins, including arson and material support of terrorism. Like his ally Viktor Orbán, who has demonized Soros, a survivor of the Holocaust, as a dangerous international banker who poses a threat to Hungarian sovereignty, Trump appears intent on quashing him by whatever means necessary. Whether he will succeed is another matter.

    Over the past several months, Trump has been systematically targeting what he sees as his internal foes. They include his former national security adviser John Bolton, New York attorney general Letitia James, and former FBI head James Comey. So fixated is Trump with prosecuting James and Comey that he drummed out longtime Republican prosecutor Erik Siebert from his post in Virginia, replacing him with Lindsey Halligan, a confidante with no experience as a prosecutor. Presumably, she has been installed to do Trump’s bidding, which is to ensure that Comey is busted for lying to Congress. The prosecutors in the Virginia office have already indicated that insufficient evidence exists for an actual conviction, but that is a mere detail for Trump. Trump’s approach seems redolent of Stalin’s henchman Lavrenti Beria who declared, “Show me the man and I’ll find you the crime.”

    But even with Trump’s elastic interpretation of legality, it may prove difficult to persuade a grand jury of the malfeasance of Soros or James or Comey. The cases appear to be more than a little rickety. Comey is a drip, but hardly the type to try and bamboozle Congress. It was his moral vanity that prompted him to declare that the FBI was reopening the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails on the eve of Election Day – a move that helped push Trump over the top in 2016.

    How the inexperienced Halligan is supposed to proceed in the face of defiance from her own prosecutors is a pertinent question. For its part, the Open Society Foundations avers that the accusations directed against it are “politically motivated attacks on civil society, meant to silence speech the administration disagrees with and undermine the First Amendment right to free speech.”

    As the Trump administration gins up lawfare, it is also putting the American military in its gunsights, so to speak. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has summoned several hundred generals and admirals to meet at a military base in Quantico, Virginia, where they will be told… what? Speculation ranges from mass firings to a speech from Trump demanding their personal loyalty.

    Trump does not wish to govern America. He wants to rule it. He is upping the ante almost by the day as he targets his real and perceived foes.

    Still, he is encountering opposition, whether it is from Soros or from Senator Ted Cruz who recently likened Federal Communication Commission head Brendan Carr to a mob boss for trying to evict Jimmy Kimmel from the airwaves. The Economist has pronounced that Trump is trying to silence his critics, but “he will fail.” Will he?

  • Trump admonishes the United Nations

    Trump admonishes the United Nations

    Was there a plot against President Trump at the United Nations? Upon his arrival, the escalator apparently stopped working. Next his teleprompter failed. Small wonder that Trump was in less than a concessive mood as he delivered his speech denouncing the UN itself as a colossal failure. The result was the kind of talk he would give to a political rally – except it was to an unreceptive, if not hostile, audience.

    Throughout, Trump made it clear that his estimation of his abilities is very different from his view of the UN. “I’m really good at this stuff,” he declared. “I’ve been right about everything.” As for everyone else: “Your countries are going to hell.”

    Presumably his dire verdict does not apply to close allies such as Javier Milei, the president of Argentina, who is depleting the country’s financial reserves to prop up the peso. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has vowed to lend Argentina up to $30 billion, presumably in the hopes of shoring up Milei’s political fortunes on the eve of midterm legislative elections on October 26. Milei, like Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro, is a favored son.

    When it came to Europe, Trump had nothing but scorn. “We have an ocean in between. Europe has to step it up. They’re buying oil and gas from Russia while they’re fighting Russia.” True enough. But Europe has been stepping it up. The suspicion in Europe that Trump will concoct excuse after excuse to avoid fracturing his bromance with Russian president Vladimir Putin is not an unjustified one.

    After vowing to reassess the relationship should Putin remain refractory after the Alaska summit meeting in mid-August, Trump has done nothing to up the pressure on Russia. Instead, he has watched passively as Moscow bombards Ukraine and sends drones and fighter jets into NATO’s eastern flank. When all the world is a hopeless jumble, Trump wants to pretend that somewhere over the rainbow the dreams that you dare to dream really do come true.

    Indeed, as he hectored the assembled heads of state, bellowing about his own greatness, Trump’s aim wasn’t to dwell on conflict but to portray himself as the true peacemaker. He, not the UN, is creating a new pacific era – a golden age, if you will. According to Trump, “I ended seven wars and in all cases they were raging with countless of thousands of people being killed.” The claim that he, and he alone, terminated the conflict between Pakistan and India is likely to further sour relations with President Narendra Modi, whom Trump has steadily driven into the arms of a receptive China.

    By the end of his speech, Trump struck a friendlier tone. His teleprompter, after all, had begun to function again. “Let us all work together to build a bright, beautiful planet,” Trump said, “a planet that we all share, a planet of peace in a world that is richer, better, and more beautiful than ever before. That can happen. It will happen.”

    Hmm. For all the enmity his earlier rebarbative remarks may have created, they at least had the virtue of reflecting Trump’s true convictions. As always, Trump is least persuasive, or least believable, when he adopts the saccharine language of more conventional politicians. The more credible Trump at the UN was the one who warned drug cartels that he would “blow you out of existence.” Yeah, baby!

  • What the Tyler Robinson indictment reveals about the Charlie Kirk murder

    What the Tyler Robinson indictment reveals about the Charlie Kirk murder

    Tyler Robinson, who has been charged with seven counts, including aggravated murder, appeared in court on Tuesday.  

    Clad in what appeared to be an anti-suicide vest, the 22-year-old sat in front of a blank wall that mirrored his own silence. But in its lapidary tone, the indictment that the Utah prosecutors have compiled speaks volumes.  

    In all likelihood, the alleged assassin will receive the death penalty. “I do not take this decision lightly, and it is a decision I have made independently as county attorney based solely on the available evidence and circumstances and nature of the crime,” Jeffrey S. Gray said at a press conference. 

    Gray seems to be a model prosecutor. The indictment recounts in careful and restrained detail the acts leading up to the sanguinary deed at Utah Valley University. The shot from the roof. The passage of the bullet after it struck Turning Point USA’s Charlie Kirk. The hasty flight after the shot had been fired. The disposal of clothes and the rifle. The spare wording possesses its own persuasive power, underscoring the shocking nature of the sanguinary deed that took place on that fateful afternoon at UVU.  

    Indeed, to read the indictment is to realize that Robinson has, in essence, indicted himself by sending numerous text messages to his roommate, Lance Twiggs (whom the mainstream media is referring to as his romantic partner). The messages could scarcely be more incriminating. For one thing, he gestures at his motive, declaring about Kirk that “I had enough of his hatred. Some hate can’t be negotiated out.” That he experienced a political evolution seems difficult to deny. Robinson’s mother allegedly told prosecutors that “Over the last year or so, her son had become more political and had started to lean more to the left, becoming more pro-gay and trans-rights oriented.” The bottom line is that in arrogating to himself the right to murder, Robinson apparently became the one consumed by hatred.  

    At the same time, he seems to have been keen to elude the police, if at all possible. Robinson texted that, “If I am able to grab my rifle unseen, I will have left no evidence. Going to attempt to retrieve it again, hopefully they have moved on. I haven’t seen anything about them finding it.” Fortunately, Robinson’s roommate declined to heed his admonition to delete the exchange. Instead, he provided it to the appropriate authorities. 

    The charging document is unlikely to quell the furor surrounding Robinson and the Trump administration. Instead, it may well prompt the administration to heighten its calls for a crackdown on what President Trump and his allies are depicting as a broader left-wing conspiracy, one comprised of terrorist networks intent on subverting America. In this regard, the bullet that was fired at UVU is ricocheting in ways that the assassin probably could not have predicted. 

    The next court hearing for Robinson will take place on September 29. Perhaps he will have shed his impassivity by then. But his text messages have already revealed more than enough about what appear to be his sordid plans for mayhem and murder. 

  • Charlie Kirk believed in free speech. He died for it

    Charlie Kirk believed in free speech. He died for it

    Charlie Kirk was shot on stage this afternoon, speaking at a campus event at Utah Valley University. The Turning Point USA co-founder was announced dead by the President of the United States. “The Great, and even Legendary, Charlie Kirk, is dead. No one understood or had the Heart of the Youth in the United States of America better than Charlie,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “He was loved and admired by ALL, especially me, and now, he is no longer with us. Melania and my Sympathies go out to his beautiful wife Erika, and family. Charlie, we love you!”

    While the President and millions of others pray for the Kirks, others aren’t hesitating to share horrible sentiments. The 31-year-old Kirk was speaking at Utah Valley University, near Provo, a serene town in the foothills of Utah’s majestic mountains, when a gunman murdered him. Yet an early MSNBC pundit decided to suggest that the person who shot Charlie Kirk in the neck (the shooter, at time of writing, is still at large) might have been a “supporter shooting their gun off in celebration.” What? 

    This is a growing trend, in the wake of senseless violence: water it down. Or even defend it. A flurry of commentators on the left are not hesitant to express Schadenfreude over this act of pure violence, like they did when Luigi Mangione shot Brian Thompson, the healthcare CEO, in cold blood. Kirk, they say, was a conservative activist, and that crime meant he deserved comeuppance for his various transgressions, including his support of gun rights. 

    Their malignant comments do not deserve repetition. If you must read their horrible takes, you can find them easily on BlueSky, by simply searching “top posts.”  

    Those who are feverishly reveling in the shooting, or at least tut-tutting about it, should think again. This was a soulless act, which has taken a young father’s life. To find any small glimmer of joy in that is to erode one’s own soul. If that happens to enough of us, the soul of the nation rots, too. 

    We should also pause before turning this unspeaking tragedy into a political talking point. Seizing on the shooting as a pretext for a wide crackdown on civil liberties, or to broadly lump together “these lunatics leftists,” as Laura Loomer put it, is also guaranteed to injure further an already injured nation. The spiral of loathing and delegitimization of other human beings must come to an end. No one wants to discover what happens if we go any further down this cesspit. 

    The last time America experienced a spate of political assassinations was during the 1960s, when the murder of President Kennedy was followed by those of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy. These were atrocities that were supposed to be confined to history. But something is going terribly wrong again, which is clear in this particularly ominous killing of Kirk. It is once again not just the man, but the idea, that these killers are looking to take out. American campuses have not been immune to violence. But this was, more than likely, an act of political violence, one that could easily spread to think-tanks, journalists and academics: to anyone who speaks out. Debate is supposed to be the essence of the college experience, and the American experience. Today, it was cut short with a bullet. 

    As it happens, Kirk himself could not have appeared more vulnerable. He was wearing a white T-shirt while holding forth with several hundred students. Now his mission has come to an abrupt terminus. Kirk wanted to revive America, but now it is even less certain if the country can avoid a lurch into a fresh orgy of violence.

  • Trump treads a fine line on Qatar and Israel

    Oops. The White House is claiming that President Trump directed the ubiquitous Steve Witkoff to warn Qatar that Israel was going to strike Hamas headquarters in Doha. But Qatari officials denied that they received any such warning.

    “What happened today is state terrorism and an attempt to destabilize regional security and stability, and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is leading the region to an irreversible level,” Prime Minister Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani stated in a televised address. “These missiles were used to attack the negotiating delegation of the other party. By what moral standards is this acceptable?”

    Trump himself has been a study in inconsistency on the Israeli effort to target the Hamas leadership. On the one hand, he declared on social media that “unilaterally bombing inside Qatar, a Sovereign Nation and close Ally of the United States, that is working very hard and bravely taking risks with us to broker Peace, does not advance Israel or America’s goals.” On the other, he averred that “eliminating Hamas, who have profited off the misery of those living in Gaza, is a worthy goal.”

    The reason Trump is trying to spit the difference is, of course, that he wants to placate an aggrieved Qatar without openly denouncing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Trump’s caution may also be ascribed to the fact that there is no evidence that the attack was successful. Hamas is claiming that none of its senior leaders were killed. If so, the move was worse than a crime, to borrow Talleyrand’s famous phrase. It was a blunder.

    Trump has indicated to Al Thani that there will be no second strike, thereby ensuring that Hamas can operate with impunity. White House spokesman Karoline Leavitt says that Trump told Al Thani, “such a thing will not happen again on their soil.” Meanwhile, the fate of the hostages held by Hamas looks even more tenuous.

    Writing in the Washington Post, David Ignatius pointed out that “By undermining diplomatic options for ending the conflict, Israel has narrowed its path forward. Its only choice now might be military reoccupation of most of Gaza – something that Israeli officials say they badly want to avoid.” Some members of Netanyahu’s cabinet may be jonesing to occupy Gaza and extrude its inhabitants into Egypt. But whether Netanyahu himself wants to pursue that path is an open question. He may have reckoned that he could score a big success by blasting the leadership of Hamas into oblivion, then claim a grand victory over the terrorists who have been menacing Israel.

    Instead, he has created a chorus of international obloquy, as France, Germany and Great Britain, among others, denounce the Israeli move. In Trump’s own MAGA base dissatisfaction with Israel is mounting. At the recent National Conservatism conference in Washington, for example, American Conservative editor Curt Mills created something of a furor with his criticisms of the close ties between Israel and America. Mills asked, “Why are these our wars? Why are Israel’s endless problems America’s liabilities? Why are we in the national conservative bloc, broadly speaking, why do we laugh out of the room this argument when it’s advanced by Volodymyr Zelenskyy but are slavish hypocrites for Benjamin Netanyahu? Why should we accept America First – asterisk Israel? And the answer is, we shouldn’t.”

    With his attack on Doha, Netanyahu has ensured that the debate over Israel and America will only intensify. Quo vadis, Donald Trump?

  • Trump’s command economy

    Trump’s command economy

    Donald Trump never made a secret of the fact that he wanted to be a commanding president but it wasn’t clear that it included a command economy. In the past few months, though, Trump has been steadily meddling with it, ranging from his insistence on a 15 percent cut of the profits from his threats against computer chip manufacturers Nvidia and AMD to his threats against the independence of the Federal Reserve – including his peremptory demand that Fed Governor Lisa Cook resign, which she has vowed to resist. Others are not as resistant. It appears that Trump has successfully extorted a cool $10 billion from Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan whom he has previously derided as in cahoots with China.

    Trump is depicting his move as a grand bargain that will benefit both sides. Intel buys itself not into his good graces, but also derives the benefit of Trump’s unique financial acumen. “I said,” Trump said, “I think it would be good having the United States as your partner.”

    Actually, it wouldn’t. Trump seems to think of the American economy in terms of a buddy movie in which he partners up with bigtime corporate CEOs. But the more Trump distorts the free market economy, the greater the risk that he will capsize it. The American economy has flourished because it has promoted entrepreneurialism backed by the rule of law. How can Trump credibly attack New York’s socialist candidate for mayor, Zohran Mamdani, at a moment when he himself is instituting, as far as possible, much more radical changes to steer the economy?

    In jettisoning conservative precepts about the economy – free trade bad, tariffs good and so on – he seems to want to emulate strongmen abroad, including China’s Xi-Jin Ping. He is intruding into corporate boardroom and acting as though he possessed a patent on economic wisdom. History says otherwise. In the past century various communist regimes imploded under the weight of dysfunctional command economies. With its hybrid capitalist system, China has avoided that fate. But it is by no means clear that Beijing offers a superior model to western capitalism. Quite the contrary. It suffers from a bloated real estate market, an aging population and willful economic decisions imposed by the communist party. Indeed, the American Enterprise Institute’s Desmond Lachman suggests that the Chinese economic miracle has reached its terminus, in part because of its oppressive crackdown on the tech sector. Like Japan, Lachman believes that China may be about to experience “a lost decade of painfully slow economic growth.” Hmm. Is that really the path that America wants to follow?

    Trump should think again. He has become intoxicated by his own rhetoric, issuing ukases on everything from greening Washington, DC with new sprinkler systems to intervening in the nation’s economy.

    As Trump ponders further excellent adventures in tampering with the free market, he would do well to remember that the Hippocratic Oath also applies to the economy – first do no harm.

  • Trump on best behavior in meetings with Zelensky and European leaders

    Trump on best behavior in meetings with Zelensky and European leaders

    It was back to black for Volodymyr Zelensky. After the Trump White House asked whether he was going to wear a suit for his Oval Office meeting, the Ukrainian President showed up in a dark military-style jacket, pleasing his hosts to no end. Even Brian Glenn, boyfriend of Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene and reporter for Real America’s Voice, who had dissed Zelensky in February, commended him on his habiliments, declaring “you look fabulous in that suit.” Zelensky was pleased. So was Trump. 

    In fact, Trump was on his best behavior. After ranting earlier in the morning that he didn’t need all the experts to tell him what to think and that Ukraine should essentially prostrate itself before Russia, he avoided any verbal fisticuffs with Zelensky or talk about exiting NATO. Instead, Trump breathed optimism about where the negotiations, which he hopes will secure him a coveted Nobel Peace Prize, were headed. “I think it’s going to be when, not if,” Trump said about a trilateral meeting between him, Putin and Zelensky.  

    He may not have rolled out a red carpet for Zelensky when he arrived in Washington, as he did for Putin in Alaska, but he treated him with unwonted respect. According to Trump, “I have a feeling you and President Putin are going to work something out. Ultimately, this is a decision that can only be made by President Zelensky and by the people of Ukraine working also together in agreement with President Putin. And I just think that very good things are going to come of it.” 

    If the meeting with European leaders that took place later in the afternoon was anything to go by, Trump’s eupeptic push for a peace deal is not meeting with overt resistance. Quite the contrary. Zelensky indicated that territorial concessions would be discussed should he meet Putin. It was clever of Zelensky to put the onus back on Putin rather than rejecting out-of-hand the prospect of land swaps. “If we played this well, we could end this, and we have to end it,” NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte said. Indeed, he called Trump’s offer of security guarantees for Ukraine a “breakthrough.” 

    What those guarantees would look like remains unclear. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, who appears to have established a good working relationship with Trump, indicated that it was imperative to provide “Article 5-like guarantees” to Ukraine. What this will amount to is an open question – Germany announced today that it was already overstretched with its stationing of a Bundeswehr brigade in Lithuania and that it is unlikely to put any boots on the ground in Ukraine. 

    But the biggest obstacle to a peace deal, of course, is whether Putin even wants one. “President Putin wants to find an answer, too” Trump said. Does he? So far, as he launches fresh fusillades of missiles and drones at Ukraine, the Russian tyrant appears to believe that he has more to benefit from continuing rather than halting the war that he, and he alone, launched in February 2022. For all the bonhomie that existed between him and Trump in Alaska, it may be replaced by a more adversarial relationship in coming weeks should Putin maintain his obduracy about reaching an actual deal. 

  • Putin awards Order of Lenin to CIA chief’s son

    Putin awards Order of Lenin to CIA chief’s son

    John Reed, a young Harvard graduate and journalist, thought highly of the Bolshevik revolution and chronicled it in his book Ten Days That Shook the World. He is one of three Americans buried along the Kremlin Wall. Will Russian President Vladimir Putin extend a similar honor to Michael Alexander Gloss, the son of Juliane Gallina, a deputy director for digital innovation at the CIA?

    Earlier this week, Putin handed President Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff something from Russia with love – the Order of Lenin. Putin apparently intended for it to be passed on to Gallina whose 21-year-old son died fighting with Russian forces against Ukraine in 2024. The Order was created in 1930 by the Central Executive Committee of the Soviet Union.

    Among its previous recipients number Erich Honecker, the head of the German Democratic Republic, Enver Hoxha, the president of Albania, Ho Chi Minh, the Vietnamese revolutionary, and Kim Philby, the British double agent. The award also makes an appearance in the James Bond film A View to Kill, when 007 receives it from General Anatoli Gogol for offing the lunatic Max Zorin.

    Into this august company now appears Gloss. If a recent Guardian dispatch is anything to go by, Gloss seems to have been a deluded youthful fellow traveler who viewed American as an evil empire and became mesmerized by the prospect of battling for what he saw as the righteous and good powers. Gloss, who attended high school in Virginia, was radicalized as a youth, espousing the causes of both Palestinians and Russians. A self-described proponent of a “multi-polar world,” he enlisted in the Russian army in September 2023. How avid he was for actual frontline combat is an open question. He may simply have enlisted in order to ensure that he received a Russian passport, but he was soon drafted and found himself fighting in an assault unit against Ukraine, an unenviable prospect for anyone other than a true diehard, as it were. Given the Russian way of war, his quick demise was all-but-inevitable.

    For former KGB agent Putin, who relishes tweaking his adversaries in general and the CIA in particular – recall that he mocked Tucker Carlson for failing to measure up for entry into the CIA during their interview – the opportunity to mock Witkoff was one he could not resist. As Trump seeks a summit meeting with Putin, he would do well to mull over the Kremlin chief’s latest move. The very fact that the Kremlin continues to bestow something called the Order of Lenin indicates that less has changed in Russia than Trump might like to acknowledge.

    Consistent with his diplomatic dexterity, Putin is now putting forth a murky peace plan that would allow him to seize control over all of Eastern Ukraine, while avoiding any commitments other than to cease fighting for the nonce. Putin is also suggesting that Russia can pass legislation declaring that it will not launch an attack on either Ukraine or Europe – a pledge that he might violate before the ink on it was even dry. Lenin would approve.

  • Is Putin taking Trump for a ride?

    Is Putin taking Trump for a ride?

    Already the Kremlin is setting the terms of the forthcoming summit between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin. Steve Witkoff, Trump’s emissary, set the meeting in motion with his mission to Moscow on Wednesday, which Trump called “highly productive.” But productive of what?

    Putin’s foreign-policy adviser Yuri Ushakov stated today that it was the White House, not the Kremlin, that wanted the meeting. He went on to dismiss Trump’s proposal that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky could take part in a tripartite negotiation, noting that “for this to happen, certain conditions must be created. Unfortunately, such conditions are far away yet.” Those conditions remain the complete surrender of Ukraine. 

    The Kremlin, in other words, has a strategic plan. Trump, as the columnist Christoph von Marschall observes in the Berlin Tagesspiegel, does not. Instead, he is being successfully manipulated by Putin. The dangerous bromance is back.

    Trump’s fondness for Putin and antipathy toward Ukraine is longstanding. Trump was vexed by Ukraine during his first presidency, and he continues to be in his second. He became enraged by Zelensky during his first term, when he asked the Ukrainian for a favor that had a disfavorable outcome, namely impeachment proceedings. After Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, Trump hailed Putin as a genius and dumped on Zelensky. In his second term, Trump has continued to badger Zelensky and laud Putin, only to exhibit tepid signs of irritation with Putin after he balked at the US’s peace efforts and upped his heinous bombings of Ukrainian cities, launching a very real version of fire and fury. Suddenly Trump, who was warned by Melania that Putin was making a patsy of him, observed that maybe he was being “tapped along.”

    After proclaiming that he could end the war in a mere 24 hours, Trump wants to deliver the appearance, if not the substance, of an end to the conflict. Putin has shrewdly refrained from attacking Trump personally or condemning the president’s secondary sanctions on Russia. Putin’s track record in beguiling Trump, who appears to admire the Russian dictator, is a good one. In Helsinki, in July 2018, Trump publicly vouched for Putin’s bona fides, saying that he was sure the Russian had not interfered in the presidential election.

    Putin’s aspiration is one that the elite around him has long shared – to be treated as co-equal superpower with America, much as the Soviet Union was during the Cold War, when each side had its sphere of influence and Moscow was free to carve up Central and Eastern Europe. For Trump, who views NATO as more of an encumbrance than an asset, the chance to cut a deal with Putin is an alluring one. But he also cannot completely ignore hawks inside his administration, such as General Keith Kellogg, Trump’s special envoy for Ukraine, as well as a contingent of Senate Republicans, led by Mitch McConnell and Lindsey Graham, who view Putin with alarm. Hence Trump’s Ukraine tergiversations over the past several months.

    For now, Trump is breathing optimism about his upcoming meeting, proclaiming in his press conference yesterday that there is a “very good chance that we could be ending…the end of that road.” Zelensky, by contrast, is sounding a more sober note: “The key is to ensure they don’t deceive anyone in the details – neither us nor the United States.” Here’s hoping.

  • Will Trump take a stand against the Muslim Brotherhood?

    Will Trump take a stand against the Muslim Brotherhood?

    Senator Ted Cruz isn’t giving up. Cruz, who believes that the Muslim Brotherhood serves as the “key foundation stone for radical Sunni terrorism,” has just reintroduced – together with five Republican senators and bipartisan support in the House of Representatives – the Muslim Brotherhood Terrorist Designation Act, which he first proposed in 2015. Cruz is no stranger to controversy when it comes to Islam: in March 2016, following a terrorist attack in Brussels, he said that it was imperative to “patrol and secure Muslim neighborhoods” in America before they became radicalized.

    Now he is reupping his call to focus on the Muslim Brotherhood. Founded in Egypt in 1928, it is a dangerously militant Islamic organization with affiliates around the globe. While the US State Department has designated some branches of the Brotherhood as terrorist organizations, it has not targeted the main group. Has the moment arrived to take a stand?

    A growing chorus of voices is arguing that it has. According to Andrew McCarthy in National Review, “Ted Cruz understands the threat and is distinguishing himself by charting a very different policy direction. It will serve him well. And it would serve the country well.” Writing in the Middle East Forum, Jim Hanson agreed: “The Muslim Brotherhood represents a danger to the civilized world and designating it a Foreign Terrorist Organization will help curb its influence. An indication that this is a correct move can be seen in the actions of Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Jordan. These countries all know the Brotherhood well; each has designated the Brotherhood as a terror group.” 

    These apprehensions about the Muslim Brotherhood are not the sole province of American conservatives. As early as 1948, King Farouk of Egypt banned the group. Today, alarm about the Brotherhood exists in France, where President Emanuel Macron is seeking to address the threat of Islamic radicalism. In May, a state-commissioned report on the Muslim Brotherhood was leaked, and its conclusions caused a furor. It stated that “political Islam” posed a mounting danger to the democratic values of the French republic. “The reality of this threat,” the report declared, “even if it is long-term and does not involve violent action, highlights the risk of damage to the fabric of society and republican institutions.”

    Critics of Cruz’s motion contend that it will boomerang, stirring up more hostility toward America in the Islamic world and stoking broader fears about Islam. Dov Zakheim, the former undersecretary of defense in the George W. Bush administration, observes that the claim that singling out the Brotherhood would promote Islamophobia is misplaced – the Brotherhood is already banned by a welter of countries, including Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Jordan and the United Arab Emirates.

    The pressure is building in Congress. In early June, Congresswoman Nancy Mace introduced the Muslim Brotherhood Is A Terrorist Organization Act. “The Muslim Brotherhood doesn’t just support terrorism, it inspires it,” said Mace. “President Trump was right when he said the Muslim Brotherhood is a threat to global security, and it’s long past time we call them what they are: terrorists.”

    Will Trump act to try and counter a pernicious ideology that has brought destruction to so many lives? The President has a history of taking bold action in the Middle East, from the assassination of Iranian major general Qasem Soleimani to bombing Iranian nuclear facilities to meeting with interim Syrian president Ahmed al-Sharaa. He has a variety of choices, from issuing an executive order banning the Brotherhood to imposing Treasury sanctions. With bipartisan backing in Congress, it seems more likely than ever that Trump will seek to target the Muslim Brotherhood for destruction.