Trump's American Empire

Over the past two days, President-elect Donald J. Trump has made clear that he has designs for American territorial expansion, declaring that the United States has both security concerns and commercial interests that can best be addressed by bringing the Panama Canal and Greenland under American control or outright ownership.

Mr. Trump’s tone has had none of the trolling jocularity that surrounded his repeated suggestions in recent weeks that Canada should become America’s “51st state,” including his social media references to the country’s beleaguered prime minister as “Governor Justin Trudeau.”

Instead, while naming a new ambassador to Denmark — which controls Greenland’s foreign and defense affairs — Mr. Trump made clear on Sunday that his first-term offer to buy the landmass could, in the coming term, become a deal the Danes cannot refuse.

He appears to covet Greenland both for its strategic location at a time when the melting of Arctic ice is opening new commercial and naval competition and for its reserves of rare earth minerals needed for advanced technology.

“For purposes of National Security and Freedom throughout the World,” Mr. Trump wrote on social media, “the United States of America feels that the ownership and control of Greenland is an absolute necessity.”

On Saturday evening, he had accused Panama of price-gouging American ships traversing the canal, and suggested that unless that changed, he would abandon the Jimmy Carter-era treaty that returned all control of the canal zone to Panama.

“The fees being charged by Panama are ridiculous,” he wrote, just ahead of an increase in the charges scheduled for Jan. 1. “This complete ‘rip-off’ of our country will immediately stop.”

He went on to express worry that the canal could fall into the “wrong hands,” an apparent reference to China, the second-largest user of the canal. A Hong Kong-based firm controls two ports near the canal, but China has no control over the canal itself.

Not surprisingly, the government of Greenland immediately rejected Mr. Trump’s demands, as it did in 2019, when he first floated the idea. “Greenland is ours,” Prime Minister Mute B. Egede said in a statement. “We are not for sale and will never be for sale. We must not lose our long struggle for freedom.”

Read the rest here.

Report: Biden's decline started much earlier and staff hid it

The Wall Street Journal published a bombshell report Thursday, based on interviews with nearly 50 people knowledgeable of the operations of the Biden White House. The story details the extent to which the president’s age has posed an issue throughout his presidency, including from the very start, and the lengths to which aides went to conceal it.

President Biden, now 82, was 78 years old when he took office, and the Journal reports that administration officials began to notice signs of his age “in just the first few months of his term,” as he would grow “tired if meetings went long and would make mistakes.”

Those who met with the president were reportedly told that “exchanges should be short and focused.” Meetings were strategically scheduled and, sometimes, if Biden “was having an off day,” they were simply canceled. A former aide recalled a national security official saying, regarding one rescheduled meeting, “He has good days and bad days, and today was a bad day so we’re going to address this tomorrow.”

The Journal reported that lawmakers, Cabinet members, and the public all seemed to have less face time with the president than in previous administrations and that senior advisers were “often put into roles that some administration officials and lawmakers thought Biden should occupy.” Namely, administration officials like Jake Sullivan, Steve Ricchetti, and Lael Brainard frequently functioned as intermediaries for the president.

Read the rest here. 

Report: Number of civilians killed in Gaza ‘inflated to vilify Israel’

The number of civilians killed in the Gaza conflict has been inflated to portray Israel as deliberately targeting innocent people, a report claims.

Researchers accuse the Gaza ministry of health of overstating casualty data by including natural deaths, failing to differentiate between civilian and combat casualties and over-reporting the numbers of women and children killed.

The study by the Henry Jackson Society, a think tank, claims the figures have been manipulated by the Hamas-run authorities in Gaza for propaganda purposes, with international media outlets happy to repeat them uncritically.

Read the rest here.

How many Orthodox in America?

Ummm... not likely.

The woke left and religion

We don’t tolerate prejudice at work. Why, pray, do we allow it in church?

HT: Dr. Tighe

All culture warriors are inherently authoritarians. Anyone who thinks they have a right to coercively dictate how other people should live their lives, what they can or cannot say or believe &c, is dangerous and should not be allowed anywhere near political power.

Argentina: One year of Javier Milei

Argentina’s Milei marks one year in office. Here’s how his shock measures are reshaping the economy

Argentina's Mr Market Javier Milei wants to make austerity great again

Javier Milei's Argentina in 6 Charts

On a happier note...

Did you feel the ground shake Sunday night? Did New York suddenly tilt from the Bronx down to Queens?

For decades, Yankees fans scoffed at Mets fans, mocking them just for loving their little team in Flushing. The big, corporate Yankees sucked up most of the oxygen in New York, and if there was any left over, only then were the scrappy Mets allowed to breathe in the exhaust.

That all changed overnight, just as Steve Cohen, the newish multibillionaire owner of the Mets franchise, promised it would. The Mets took Juan Soto from the Yankees.

Soto played only one season in the Bronx, but he helped the team get to the World Series for the first time in 15 years. And then he did what no superstar, top-flight free agent had ever done in the past: He spurned the Yankees to join the Mets for more money. He accepted the Mets’ staggering offer of $765 million for a 15-year contract.

It definitely stunned the Yankees and their devoted supporters, who have absolutely no experience in losing out, at least when it comes to money.

“This is really crushing,” said Jeremy Senderowicz, a lawyer and lifelong Yankees fan from Yonkers. “The Yankees usually get the player they are going after. I naïvely thought it would happen again.”

Oh, the indignity of losing out to the Mets, who, like that younger sibling bursting into adolescence, finally won at playground one-on-one. Was it a fluke? Or did this portend a new reality?

Read the rest here.

Coincidence?

Lara Trump is standing down as head of the political arm of the Trump Organization, commonly known as the Republican National Committee, amidst calls for her to be appointed to fill the US Senate seat being vacated by Marco Rubio. Simultaniously, team Trump is floating the name of the man responsible for filling that vacancy as the next Secretary of Defense (after Pete Hegseth either withdraws or is rejected by the Senate).

Vigil for the Feast of St. Nicholas

NY Post: Young men converting to Orthodoxy in droves

Not sure what to make of this. Always good news when people are converting of course. But the article sounds like it is heavily based on anecdotal evidence. FWIW, I've also noticed an uptick in converts.

HT: Dr. Tighe

Ross Douthat and David French on the Hunter Biden Pardon

Patrick Healy, the deputy Opinion editor, hosted an online conversation with the Times Opinion columnists Ross Douthat and David French about President Biden’s decision to issue a broad pardon to his son Hunter Biden.

Patrick Healy: Ross and David, you both have written extensively about the rule of law and presidential power. You both have a good sense of what American voters care about. And you both are fathers. So I’m curious what struck you most about President Biden’s statement that he was pardoning his son Hunter Biden.

David French: As a father, I think it would be very, very hard to watch your son go to prison — especially if you have the power to set him free. I can’t imagine the pain of watching Hunter’s long battle with substance abuse and then watching his conviction in court. But in his role as president, Biden’s primary responsibility is to the country and the Constitution, not his family.

As president, this pardon represents a profound failure. Biden was dishonest — he told us that he wouldn’t pardon Hunter — and this use of the pardon power reeks of the kind of royal privilege that is antithetical to America’s republican values.

Healy: Biden’s decision to rule out the pardon while running for re-election was an enormous misjudgment. At the same time, David — Hunter Biden didn’t harm anyone, and pardons go to people with connections all the time now. I want to understand your umbrage on behalf of “the country and the Constitution” a bit better.

French: When Biden issued the pardon, my first thought was “here we go again.” It’s exactly this kind of self-dealing and favoritism that has created such cynicism in this country, and the fact that pardon abuse is almost routine at this point isn’t a defense of Biden. It’s an indictment of a political class that helped lay the groundwork for Donald Trump — a much worse figure, by the way, but one that did not arise in an otherwise-healthy moment in American democracy.

Ross Douthat: I think it’s important to stress that Biden always kept Hunter close, within the larger aura of his own power, in ways that likely helped his son trade on his dad’s name even as his own life was completely out of control. This pardon is a continuation or completion of that closeness: It’s a moral failure, as David says, a dereliction, but one that’s of a piece with the president’s larger inability to create a sustained separation between his own position and his troubled son’s lifestyle and business dealings and place in the family’s inner circle. A clearer separation would have been better not just for the president and the country, but also for Hunter himself — even if he’s benefiting from it now, at the last.

Healy: Ross, Hunter Biden should absolutely be held accountable for his actions — that’s something that 12-step programs make clear to addicts, in fact: Their addiction is no excuse for breaking the law, for instance. But it seems like you are conflating Biden’s legitimate powers as president with how you think he should have regarded his son in office.

Douthat: I’m not saying that Biden’s pardon of Hunter is categorically worse than prior presidents’ use of the power to help out cronies and donors and the like. But most people regarded, say, Bill Clinton’s pardon of Marc Rich as scandalous even though it fell within the ambit of legitimate presidential powers, and this case is scandalous as well. Whether it’s more corrupt to help a relative than a party donor or donor’s spouse is an interesting subject for debate about the nature of political ethics, but I don’t think we need to resolve that question. We can just say that (1) past presidents have used the pardon power in legal but disreputable ways and (2) pardoning your son is also quite disreputable even if it is constitutional as well.

Read the rest here.

Something that struck me as I was reading this, was the realization that Hunter's troubles may not be over. If the GOP (soon to be in full control of the government) decides to hold more hearings on his activities he cannot refuse to testify. Having been granted a full pardon, he no longer can invoke the 5th amendment. Which means he can be grilled under oath about pretty much any subject since 2014 with no recourse. That could get very ugly, very fast.

South Korea Declares Martial law

Preview of coming attractions.

South Korean president declares martial law, accusing opposition of anti-state activity

Biden Pardons His Son

Yes, Trump has abused the power of the pardon, and is all but certain to do so again once he regains office. But that is neither here nor there. Biden's intervention on behalf of his son, after explicitly promising not to, was an outrageous act of personal and official corruption. The scandalous perversion of this constitutional prerogative by two successive presidents from different parties further suggests we may be entering a period where the traditional norms and guardrails that have kept presidents from flagrantly misusing their powers might be crumbling. Making matters worse, Mr. Trump has already made it crystal clear he intends to use that power to shield his allies and followers from criminal prosecution, including those who at Trump's instigation attacked the Capitol on January 6th, 2021. How will Democrats be able to criticize such abuses when their own leader is as guilty?