Tag: donald trump
Trump and MBS Saudi

One Thousand And One Nights Of Trump Grift

For generations, American foreign policy in the Middle East has been crafted with willful ignorance by people who see the region through the lens of Israel and oil. From the CIA coup in Iran in the 1950s to Cheney and Rumsfeld’s Iraq war folly – arguably the event that destabilized the entire planet by creating tens of millions of refugees, leading to rising fascism in Europe and the U.S – our history in the region is one of murder, mayhem, fecklessness and greed. Major and deadly decisions are routinely made without any appreciation of the history or understanding of the many, heterogeneous communities that live there. Ay-rabs, Eye-rack. In the 1990s, a purge of the “Arabists” in the State Department was even underway. It took 9/11 for the DOD and State to bring back a few Arabic speakers.

However, in the last few weeks, it’s started to become clear that the U.S. is taking a strange new tack.

During Trump One, the grift was mostly on in Ukraine and Russia. Paul Manafort, Roger Stone, and Rudy Giuliani reeking of duty-free cologne in first-class seats out of Eastern European airports, hauling suitcases of oligarchy pelf. Now, Trump Two has located far greater pots of gold. The Mother of all Piles, the trillions of dollars controlled by a tiny clan of Gulf oil potentates – wealth, which, it must be said, our gas addiction created.

Ever since Mohammed bin Salman, the millennial de facto ruler of Saudi Arabia, had his henchmen chop off a Washington Post writer’s fingers and then murder him within earshot of Turkish audio surveillance, it has been clear that the men who control trillion-dollar sovereign wealth funds can do whatever the hell they want to any man, woman, child, or beast on planet Earth.

This week, Trump is being feted by that very finger chopper. He is very much in his element, sipping Diet Cokes under “tank size chandeliers” and parking himself on gilded chairs to talk business with the leaders of the three major Gulf oil fiefdoms. In Trump Twos’s pay-to-play, even Israel is out in the cold. Miriam Adelson’s $100 million campaign donation, reportedly handed over to make sure Trump would not object to Israel seizing the West Bank? Sorry, chump change! Trump blew past Jerusalem on his way to sword dances with the sheiks -- causing intense but veiled terror among the Israeli leaders accustomed to carte blanche in the halls of American power.

In the last few weeks, Don Junior has been on a business tour around Europe, and Eric has also preened around the Middle East. The boys are riding on the U.S. Presidency, raking in tens of millions for the family business with hotel projects and condos in Dubai, Jeddah, and Qatar, where one project’s motto is “Challenge Everything Stop at Nothing.” The bros are not the first presidential relatives to cash in on Dad’s position, but they are the first to openly rake in money that directly benefits the Man in the White House.

Besides the projects, they are road-testing Dad’s meme coin and the family crypto bank, World Liberty Financial. WLF, created just weeks before the election, is an untraceable intake valve for influence buying. And WLF is now humming away, having reportedly sucked in $2 billion from the emirs of Abu Dhabi and the crypto firm Binance, which has been linked to money laundering for terrorism and sex traffickers. Few MAGAs understand what WLF does, and neither do most elected officials, who have been asleep at the wheel while the now even less regulated crypto industry runs amok.

The speed with which the Trump family is enriching itself in Trump Two is dizzying. At this point, metaphors, like satire, are increasingly out of reach for your poor Freakshow scribe. A swarming of termites, hogs at the trough, Coney Island hot dog eating contest? “Virtually every detail of Mr. Witkoff’s announcement, made during a conference panel with Mr. Trump’s second-eldest son, contained a conflict of interest,” wrote the New York Times reporter dispatched to cover Zach Witkoff’s and Eric Trump’s press conference in Dubai. “There’s nothing like it,” said Douglas Brinkley, historian and author of books about U.S. presidents, of the Trump Two family financial windfalls.

And that was before the Qatari royal family offered Trump a Boeing 747-8 refitted as a flying palace, a gift that, according to the President, only a “stupid” person would turn down. In the Middle East, gifting is a common form of corruption known as baksheesh. Most U.S. ethics experts consider it illegal.

The gilded plane, though, seems to have woke the gag reflex of some leading MAGAs: Ben Shapiro, Loomer, and a few Republican Senators are making disgusted noises, and the commentariat from

Jennifer Rubin to Rick Wilson predicts that this gift could be the grift that breaks the camel’s back. But will it?

Could it be that a nearly half-billion dollar offering from an Arab potentate is what it takes to cure the so-far incurable Obama Derangement Syndrome, the racist Brown people are coming to get my stuff mind-virus behind the MAGA fever that turns Trump into a hallucination of white Jesus? There seems to be something about the plane, more than the crypto grift and Trump sons raking it in under their dad’s name, that might even get some action from a third branch of government in Washington.

But, so far, no hint of outrage ruffles the alabaster brow of the nation’s top law enforcement official, Attorney General Pam Bondi. In Trumpworld, there’s no PR stain that a blonde with a conspicuous crucifix can’t wash away.

Pam was a Tallahassee nobody when she first tangled with Trump, taking a $25,000 donation that she personally solicited in 2013 and then backing off a Trump University civil fraud case her office had filed.

Bondi went on to bigger fry. Besides representing Trump in his first impeachment, and eventually parroting the election Big Lie repeatedly in the media, she signed on as a lobbyist for Qatar with the Trump-connected Ballard firm, pulling down $115,000 a month. That job was public knowledge months ago, but it didn’t bother Republican Senators as they rubber stamped her along with one after another of the wackos, conspiracy theorists, and extremist flotsam and jetsam Trump nominated in nose-thumbing gestures to his civil society enemies. Now, though, it’s treated like big news. Hmmm…

Nina Burleigh is a a journalist, author, documentary producer and adjunct professor at New York University's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. She has written eight books including her recently published novel, Zero Visibility Possible.

Reprinted with permission from COURIER's American Freakshow.

Qatari government

Trump's 'Palace In The Sky' Is A Constitutional Affront -- But Who Will Stop It?

Having brought Congress completely to heel in the political sphere, Donald Trump is now seeking to write them out of the Constitution. Both of his biggest moves of the past week entail the evisceration of a constitutional role the Framers very plainly and expressly wanted Congress to play.

That is the case for the flirtation with suspension of habeas corpus, which only Congress can do. And it’s even more manifest in Trump’s plan to accept a $400 million (or is it $625 million?) jumbo jet “palace in the sky” from the Qatari government.

On the suspension issue, Stephen Miller’s pompous primer on suspension of habeas corpus, coupled with the announcement that “we’re actively looking at [it],” was risible and unsettling in equal measure. The constitutional command he was mangling is directed to Congress, not the Executive—which is why it is in Article I along with other definitions of congressional power.

The recognition that only Congress can suspend is essentially universal, consistently reaffirmed in Court opinions from early in the 19th century, which themselves apply the previously ensconced practice from England. (Lincoln’s wartime suspension during the Civil War is not to the contrary: Congress was out of session; it later ratified the suspension; and many scholars still contend that Lincoln violated the Constitution.)

Moreover, Miller ham-handedly slices off the limiting half of the Clause in the second half—that suspension can occur only when “the public Safety may require it.” Whatever national crisis Trump is attempting to manufacture about the presence of immigrants in the country, the public safety does not require that courts not consider the due process rights of detainees.

Miller’s ensuing suggestion that the decision not to suspend is contingent on “whether the courts do the right thing” is a thuggish non sequitur. Whether courts remain available to entertain writs of habeas corpus cannot turn on the content of their decisions. This is no more than another “heads I win, tails you lose” suggestion from a lawless Administration.

Miller’s Suspension Clause rhetoric is of a piece with his assurance to Trump that the Supreme Court had ruled unanimously for him in its Alien Enemies Act opinion—when the opposite was the case. All nine justices agreed that the Administration has to provide due process to detainees. If the Administration continues to let Miller, a non-lawyer and faintly reptilian figure, announce its legal analyses, it’s going to suffer further embarrassment in the courts when actual lawyers have to disavow Miller’s legal twaddle.

But the Qatari 757 deal is even more blatant. The plane would replace Air Force One during the pendency of Trump’s tenure and then be given to his presidential foundation created after his presidency—presumably for his use.

There is, however, a small constitutional snag.

Article I, Section 9, Clause 8 of the Constitution—the Foreign Emoluments Clause—says that no person holding an office of the United States shall, without the consent of Congress, accept any present “of any kind whatever” from any foreign state.

Trump's first term was a serial violation of the domestic and foreign Emoluments Clauses, as influence seekers of all stripes clamored to support his Washington, D.C., hotel and other businesses. But the business profits he pocketed from people seeking his goodwill in the first term are chump change next to the gaudily lavish, gold-plated (and possibly bugged) Qatari luxury jet.

There is no serious argument that Trump’s acceptance of the plane does not violate the Emoluments Clause. Trump has tried to trot out an argument that it's really a gift to the government and not to him. But if it's partly for his personal enjoyment—and very clearly if it winds up with his foundation and not the government after his tenure—the law is quite clear that it falls within the Clause.

As usual, Trump is his own worst enemy in clarifying just what’s going on. Speaking to reporters on Monday, Trump noted, “I think it’s a great gesture from Qatar. I appreciate it very much. I would never be one to turn down that kind of an offer.”
He also justified the decision by saying he would have to be a “stupid person” not to take the plane, and he analogized the decision to agreeing to a gimme putt in golf. And we further know that Trump toured the jet in February. If Trump is the one to solicit and accept the offer, then it is not a gift to the federal government.

There is apparently an opinion blessing the deal from Attorney General Pam Bondi, who herself garnered six-figure fees from Qatar for lobbying on their behalf starting in 2019. We haven’t seen the analysis yet, but since Bondi sees it as her job to fight for Trump the person—as opposed to the office—you can bet that it’s at most as good an argument as can be made for a client, but a total loser.

The argument that Trump can be expected to rely on in the coming cluster of lawsuits from NGOs and state attorneys general is that the various plaintiffs lack standing. That was the central issue in most of the Emoluments Clause litigation during Trump 1.0. The courts were divided on the question, and eventually the Supreme Court dismissed the various cases as moot because Trump had left office.

In fact, properly understood, the standing issue only reinforces the unconstitutionality of what Trump is doing. It's true that it's hard to conceptualize the injury of the constitutional violation in terms of a pocketbook loss to, say, an individual state attorney general. It requires ingenuity and a court that takes a somewhat elastic view of standing.

That's precisely because the constitutional injury entailed by Trump’s acceptance of the palace in the sky is social, absorbed by all of us. It’s precisely for that reason that the Framers specified that Congress, the representatives of the people, must determine whether a particular gift may be accepted.

After all, not all gifts to officials are objectionable. Most famously, Congress in 1791 passed a resolution allowing Ben Franklin to keep a gold snuff box given to him by Louis XVI. On the other hand, Congress never exercised its authority to approve President Lincoln’s request in the middle of the Civil War to keep an elephant tusk from the King of Siam (along with an elephant, which Lincoln politely declined).

Consider the example of the Statue of Liberty, which Trump defenders are wont to proffer in his defense for keeping the plane—but which actually cuts sharply in the other direction.

The statue was a gift from the French people to the American people, not to a particular official. Moreover, Congress ratified its receipt.

But suppose Trump decided to transfer the Statue of Liberty to the Rose Garden, to gaze on and continually remind him of the grander purpose of his presidency. The injury of its removal from Liberty Island—and make no mistake, it would be an injury—would be to all of us, equally. And it would not really be a pocketbook injury, of the sort that confers standing in the federal courts, but an injury to our shared civic sense.

In the same way, Trump's acceptance in the people’s name of this gaudy showpiece would pose severe problems to the nation, even if no individual could demonstrate a particular monetary loss.

These examples illustrate that the appropriateness of a particular gift is a nuanced, contextual, political question. The Framers were extremely concerned about the prospect that gifts could be used corruptly to buy and sell influence. But they declined to constitutionalize a categorical rule against gifts, instead opting for greater flexibility and political accountability by insisting on an overall political judgment by the body best positioned to deliver it.

That judgment, by the way, is pouring in—and it’s largely negative. Many people on the right and left are expressing grave reservations about Trump’s excitement. Conservative commentator Ben Shapiro wrote that “[t]aking sacks of goodies from people who support Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood, Al Jazeera, all the rest—that's not America First.” No less staunch a Trumpista than Laura Loomer called the Qatari officials “jihadists in suits” and disparaged the idea as “a stain on the administration.”

The chorus of critics now includes a number of elected Republicans. On Tuesday, the Senate Majority Leader, John Thune of South Dakota, said of the jet, “I can assure you there will be plenty of scrutiny of whatever that arrangement might look like.” Republican Senator Ted Cruz, a strong Trump ally, expressed national security concerns. “I also think the plane poses significant espionage and surveillance problems.”

All of this suggests that political pushback may eventually doom Trump’s cherished idea. If so, that's the sort of national judgment that the Constitution contemplates.
It goes without saying—anywhere but in Trump World—that the last person to decide whether a gift should be kept is the putative recipient. That means that, questions of standing aside, Trump’s plain constitutional responsibility is, as with Franklin and Lincoln, to serve up to Congress the question of whether he gets to keep his gold-plated palace in the sky.

And if he fails to do that, the plain reading of the Constitution is that he may not keep the plane. To do so would be to accept a present without the consent of Congress.
It’s not an anomaly but a matter of constitutional design that the charter establishes a limit that falls to the political branches to enforce. This being America in the twenty-first century, there surely will be lawsuits attempting to get at the constitutional problem.

But the fundamental dereliction is by our political leaders: If Congress fails to take up the question of whether Trump can keep the plane, it’s a fundamental disregard of its constitutional duties; likewise, if Trump tries to keep his latest and greatest toy without submitting it to Congress, he is flouting the Constitution, whatever Pam Bondi may say. The question, as always with Trump, is not what’s right or lawful or even decent, but whether anybody can stop him.

Harry Litman is a former United States Attorney and the executive producer and host of theTalking Feds podcast. He has taught law at UCLA, Berkeley, and Georgetown and served as a deputy assistant attorney general in the Clinton Administration. Please consider subscribing toTalking Feds on Substack.

Reprinted with permission from Substack.

Big Donors To Trump Military Parade Promised 'A VIP Experience'

Big Donors To Trump Military Parade Promised 'A VIP Experience'

President Donald Trump is promising a “dedicated VIP experience” to his donors at multiple events he is organizing with the military in June, the Wall Street Journal reported Thursday.

Donors who contribute to America250 — a group formed to back Trump’s vision for an expansive celebration of the nation’s 250th anniversary next year — are being promised exclusive entry to three major events.

The Journal report cited a fundraising proposal shared with donors, according to which these events include a military parade coinciding with Trump’s birthday in June.

A “military readiness” showcase he plans to lead at Fort Bragg featuring thousands of service members will be included in the celebration. A Fourth of July event in Washington is also being promised, per the report.

According to the fundraising proposal, Trump is set to attend a military parade along Constitution Avenue in Washington, D.C. The event is expected to feature tanks, flyovers, and historical military re-enactments.

The president is slated to view the spectacle from an “official review stand." He is reportedly scheduled to give a speech during the celebration.

The parade is planned for June 14, which also happens to be Trump's birthday.

In April, the Associated Press first reported that a military parade on Trump's birthday was under consideration. The AP report noted that organizing a parade of that scale would likely require tens of millions of dollars.

The proposal was strongly criticized on social media at the time.

Author Stephen King wrote on the social platform X: "I understand Trump is planning a military parade to celebrate his birthday, just like his pal and fellow dictator Kim Jong Un. Cost to taxpayers: About $91 million. Way to make Donald's ego great(er) again."

Reprinted with permission from Alternet.

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