What Do Trump Voters Know About the Future He Has Planned for Them?
By Jamelle Bouie, Opinion Columnist – November 9, 2024
People watch as election results come in, Times Square, New York, Nov. 5, 2024.Credit…Tanyth Berkeley for The New York Times
On Tuesday, Donald Trump became the first Republican in 20 years to win the national popular vote and the Electoral College.
The people — or at least, a bare majority of the voting people — spoke, and they said to “make America great again.”
What they bought, however, isn’t necessarily what they’ll get.
The voters who put Trump in the White House a second time expect lower prices — cheaper gas, cheaper groceries and cheaper homes.
But nothing in the former president’s policy portfolio would deliver any of the above. His tariffs would probably raise prices of consumer goods, and his deportation plans would almost certainly raise the costs of food and housing construction. Taken together, the two policies could cause a recession, putting millions of Americans — millions of his voters — out of work.
And then there is the rest of the agenda. Do Trump voters know that they voted for a Food and Drug Administration that might try to restrict birth control and effectively ban abortion? Do they know that they voted for a Justice Department that would effectively stop enforcement of civil and voting rights laws? Do they know they voted for a National Labor Relations Board that would side with employers or an Environmental Protection Agency that would turn a blind eye to pollution and environmental degradation? Do they know they voted to gut or repeal the Affordable Care Act? Do they know that they voted for cuts to Medicaid, and possible cuts Medicare and Social Security if Trump cuts taxes down to the bone?
Do they know that they voted for a Supreme Court that would side with the powerful at every opportunity against their needs and interests?
I’m going to guess that they don’t know. But they’ll find out soon enough.
What I Wrote
I wrote about the stakes of the 2024 presidential election. We’ll see if I was right; I hope I had it wrong.
Should the United States take this path on Election Day, then we can expect the America we have to fade into the past, to be supplanted by an American Republic that is far more exclusive — and far more resistant to change. A majority of Americans may not want it, and they may not even expect it, but they’ll be on the way to living in a United States that treats the rights revolution of the 1960s and ’70s, to say nothing of the New Deal, as a legal and political mistake.
Biden in Ukraine sprint as Trump victory throws US support in question
Shaun Tandon and Leon Bruneau – November 7, 2024
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky meets with Donald Trump on September 27, 2024 in New York (Handout)Handout/UKRAINIAN PRESIDENTIAL PRESS SERVICE/AFP
Donald Trump’s election victory spells immediate doubt for Ukraine in its fight against Russia, with President Joe Biden’s administration expected to sprint in its final days to ensure — insofar as possible — long-term US support.
Trump, who won an overwhelming victory in Tuesday’s election, has in the past voiced admiration for Russian President Vladimir Putin and scoffed at the $175 billion in US assistance committed for Ukraine since Moscow’s 2022 invasion.
The 78-year-old tycoon has repeatedly boasted that he can end the war in 24 hours, without explaining how.
His aides have mused about conditioning aid to Kyiv to force concessions, with Vice President-elect J.D. Vance once bluntly saying he did not care what happened to Ukraine, seeing the country as strategically insignificant compared with the global US rivalry with China.
With 10 weeks to go until Trump takes over, the Biden administration is looking to push out the more than $9 billion of remaining funding appropriated by Congress for weapons and other security assistance to Ukraine, officials said.
The Biden team is also looking for structural ways to put European allies in greater charge of assistance to Ukraine before Trump returns, diplomats said.
In a pre-emptive “Trump-proofing” measure, NATO — the transatlantic alliance that has been criticized by the president-elect — has already agreed to take over from the United States in coordinating aid to Ukraine.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has also moved quickly with Trump in hopes of preserving ties with Kyiv’s top backer.
Zelensky called him Wednesday, offering flattery on his “tremendous victory” and voicing hope for “strong and unwavering US leadership” to bring a “just peace.”
– Not so simple –
Brian Taylor, a Russia expert at Syracuse University, said that if Trump seeks a direct role in Ukraine-Russia talks, he will “quickly find out that the details and the nuances are not so simple as simply telling everyone to stop shooting at each other.”
Even a deal to freeze the grinding conflict raises questions on where to draw battle-lines, with Ukraine’s military fighting in regions which Russia says it has annexed.
At the same time, Taylor doubted that Europe could immediately replace US military assistance.
“I’m not sure Europe has the stomach or the institutional capacity to just step up and fill that role instantly, although maybe it will develop that capacity over time,” he said.
Olga Khakova, of the Atlantic Council, said that Biden could lift restrictions on use of Western weapons on Russian soil, a long-running demand of Kyiv, and boost Ukraine’s air defenses to protect its energy infrastructure.
Boosting Ukraine could also appeal to Trump by giving him a stronger negotiating hand, she said.
“Much is still unknown, but this offers a unique opportunity to negotiate from a position of strength and decisiveness and boldness,” Khakova said.
– Bringing both to table –
Leon Aron, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, said Trump could ultimately be disappointed by Putin’s refusal to budge on demands, resulting in a deal politically unpalatable even in Trump’s Washington.
For now, Trump’s victory mostly means uncertainty, said Brian Finucane, a former State Department official now at the International Crisis Group.
“Further substantial US military aid seems doubtful, but Trump himself has been vague about how specifically he would deal with the conflict,” Finucane said.
Representative Michael Waltz, a Republican army veteran seen as a contender for a national security position, said in a pre-election interview that Trump could find ways to press Putin, including by tightening enforcement of sanctions on Russian energy exports.
“I think that will get Putin to the table. We have leverage, like taking the handcuffs off of the long-range weapons we provided Ukraine as well,” Waltz told National Public Radio.
Trump, he said, is “very focused on ending the war rather than perpetuating it.”
The long and winding political campaign road is ending (we hope) on the doorsteps of the 60th U.S. Presidential Election. This is only my 16th, my first was just after I joined the Army. But I would wager no other election in our history will compare to 2024’s, in length, breadth, cost or more importantly, historical consequence.
Most clear thinking voters refuse to believe pollsters, who claim this is way, way, too close to predict. They insist it will again come down to the smallest percentage of voters in a handful of states. Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Georgia, North Carolina, Arizona, and Nevada they say, hold the keys to the White House, and the fate of the Republic.
The residents of those swing states have suffered the brunt of the $16 billion onslaught of political ads. Thanks to the 2010 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, the campaign finance floodgates sprung wide open to Corporate and special interest quid pro quo. This judicial abomination of the First Amendment has inflicted America with endless campaigning, astronomical expenditures and a potentially violent polarization. Too many MAGA faithful predict a Civil War on steroids, unless Trump is returned to his ordained position as their White Christian Savior and President.
But I’m not ready to give up on the American Experiment. I honestly and reasonably believe Kamala Harris could get between 6 and 15 million more popular votes that trump. The electoral congress is a bit uncertain, but the Dem’s should prevail; by how much depends on disaffected true Conservative Republicans. I believe the Democrats could take back the House of Representatives, and have an even chance at retaining the U.S. Senate. Hope springs eternal. Polling yesterday revealed a three point lead for V.P Harris, in Iowa of all states. And I like Colin Allred’s chances in Texas at last. The Democrats as usual, have enlisted highly qualified, intelligent, committed and honorable candidates across the country. The republi-cons have insisted on election denying, unthinking, dimwitted, sycophantic cult followers of trump Inc. Inquiring minds have to wonder why people who hate government and governing principles, run for positions running the government. I guess the answer is obvious.
OnSeptember 29, 2023 – Sarah Pruitt, a writer and editor based in New Hampshire wrote:
“The Founding Fathers Feared Political Factions Would Tear the Nation Apart”
“Today, it may seem impossible to imagine the U.S. government without its two leading political parties, Democrats and Republicans. But in 1787, when delegates to the Constitutional Convention gathered in Philadelphia to hash out the foundations of their new government, they entirely omitted political parties from the new nation’s founding document.”
“This was no accident. The framers of the new Constitution desperately wanted to avoid the divisions that had ripped England apart in the bloody civil wars of the 17th century. Many of them saw parties—or “factions,” as they called them—as corrupt relics of the monarchical British system that they wanted to discard in favor of a truly democratic government.”
‘“It was not that they didn’t think of parties,” says Willard Sterne Randall, professor emeritus of history at Champlain College and biographer of six of the Founding Fathers. “Just the idea of a party brought back bitter memories to some of them.”’
“George Washington’s family had fled England precisely to avoid the civil wars there, while Alexander Hamiltononce called political parties “the most fatal disease” of popular governments. James Madison, who worked with Hamilton to defend the new Constitution to the public in the Federalist Papers, wrote in Federalist 10 that one of the functions of a “well-constructed Union” should be “its tendency to break and control the violence of faction.”’
As he stepped down from the presidency, Washington urged Americans to always place the interests of the nation over their political and regional affiliations.
“In George Washington’s Farewell Address to the Nation, Washington and Hamilton worked closely together on the address, which took the form of a public letter to the American people. It was published in the Daily American Advertiser, a Philadelphia newspaper, on September 19, 1796, and later reprinted in papers throughout the country. The letter included three main principles:”
1. Importance of Unity:
“After opening with an explanation of his choice not to seek a third term, Washington’s farewell address urged Americans not to put their regional and sectional interests above the interests of the nation as a whole. “You have in a common cause fought and triumphed together,” Washington declared. “The Independence and Liberty you possess are the work of joint counsels, and joint efforts, of common dangers, sufferings, and successes.”
“Regions such as North, South, East and West should see their common interests rather than their differences, he continued. “Your Union ought to be considered as a main prop of your liberty and…the love of the one ought to endear you to the preservation of the other.”
2. The ‘Worst Enemy’ of Government: Loyalty to Party Over Nation:
“According to Washington, one of the chief dangers of letting regional loyalties dominate loyalty to the nation as a whole was that it would lead to factionalism, or the development of competing political parties. When Americans voted according to party loyalty, rather than the common interest of the nation, Washington feared it would foster a “spirit of revenge,” and enable the rise of “cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men” who would “usurp for themselves the reins of government; destroying afterward the very engines, which have lifted them to unjust dominion.”
“In fact, political parties had already begun to emerge by the time Washington stepped aside. Federalists, who drew their support largely from New England, advocated a strong national government and the fiscal programs created by Hamilton, the nation’s first secretary of the treasury. Republicans (later Democratic-Republicans) led by Southerners like Thomas Jefferson and Madison, opposed Hamilton’s economic policies. They also split with the Federalists in foreign policy, favoring a closer relationship with France over Great Britain.”
“Washington supported Hamilton’s financial programs and sided with the Federalists in supporting the Jay Treaty with Britain. By the end of his presidency, Washington was weathering increasingly bitter attacks from his Republican critics, and his farewell address represented his response to such attacks, as well as a more general statement of his principles.”
3. Danger of Foreign Entanglements:
“Just as regionalism would lead to the formation of political parties, Washington believed, partisanship would open the door to “foreign influence and corruption.” While he advocated for the United States to be on good terms with all nations, especially in commercial relations, he argued that “inveterate antipathies against particular Nations, and passionate attachments for others, should be excluded.”
“Europe had its own, very complicated, set of interests, and the United States should keep its distance from European affairs, Washington believed. A foreign policy based on neutrality was the safest way to maintain national unity, and stability, in the United States. Although Washington saw the need for the nation to involve itself in foreign affairs in the case of war or other emergencies, he argued that it must “steer clear of permanent alliances with any portion of the foreign world.” Sarah Pruitt, Updated July 6, 2023
Needless to say, the Founding Fathers would be stunned and appalled at the current state of our multi-billion dollar campaigns and political divide.
“Consider, for example, that after a wealthy 25-year-old man named George Washington, in 1757, bought “$195 worth of punch and hard cider for friends prior to an election,” the Virginia Legislature enacted a law prohibiting candidates, “or persons on their behalf,” from giving voters “money, meat, drink, entertainment or provision . . . any present, gift, reward or entertainment, etc. in order to be elected.”
That historic guard rail hasn’t dissuaded Elon Musk from pledging to give away $1 million each day to registered voters in battleground states, just for signing on the dotted line, and purportedly to vote for his BF Trump.
“Washington’s farewell address urged Americans not to put their regional and sectional interests above the interests of the nation as a whole.”
But Trump’s first and foremost principle, is to divide America into MAGA’s and everyone else. To pit his faithful against the others. To demonize immigrants, in spite of two of his wives and in-laws being recent immigrants. And most recently, to scare the bejesus out of as many American’s as possible, on the dangers of immigration from non-Christians.
Washington warned:The ‘Worst Enemy’ of Government: Loyalty to Party Over Nation:
It’s blaringly obvious that Trump and his myriad of sycophantic MAGAnians, are not loyal to the Republic or to our Democratic institutions, they’re government hating bomb throwers.
Washington feared:Danger of Foreign Entanglements:
But in this ever dangerous and fractured world, with growing numbers of anti-Democratic, autocratic, kleptocratic, theocratic and fascist regimes, NATO, the Indo-Pacific Alliance and other international pacts are necessarily more important than ever.
Unfortunately, trump and his followers are more aligned with leaders he admires and is clearly envious of; trump regards Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, Kim Jong-un, Viktor Orban, and Nicolás Maduro as great world leaders to be applauded and emulated.
Trump, cowardly and treasonous Republi-cons in Congress, Musk and other billionaire MAGA benefactors, and the millions of MAGA, hate filled sheeple, and most importantly, a majority of extreme right supreme court justices, have failed American Democracy on all three of Washington’s governing principles.
The MAGA Republi-cons in the U.S. Senate could have stopped trump, at any time in his 5 year reign of Anti-American terrorism, and then failed to convict him at his two impeachments. The supreme court could have reigned in trump, instead, they gave him free rein to subvert the Department of Justice’s attempts to hold him accountable for his crimes and also ruled to allow him to commit even more consequential malfeasances if he’s returned to the White House.
Numerous journalists and news organizations have attempted to shine a light through the trump smoke-screen of disinformation, conspiracy theories, and countless lies he used to subvert, the Grand Old Party, the conservative movement and MAGA-ward Christians. We know what trump accomplished in his first term. Above all, he attempted to overthrow our Democracy and Democratic institutions, and hired government hating, self-serving like-minded operatives to turn over federal and state power to the rich and powerful, to fossil fuel and extractive benefactors and to enemies foreign and domestic. No opportunity to enrich himself and his friends and family was left untapped. And we know what trump and the MAGA republi-cons in congress would inflict on America and the world if they get control of the White House and the congress. More on the order of massive budget busting tax cuts for the ultra-rich and tax dodging corporations, 80% of which will go, as before, to the top 1%.
But a second trump administration will be operating in “Katie bar the door” territory, thanks to the SCOTUS.
MAGA operatives published their plans in a 887-page book, which was written in part by the former president’s aides.
FactCheck.org®A Project of The Annenberg Public Policy Center enlightens: “Project 2025 provides a roadmap for “the next conservative President” to downsize the federal government and fundamentally change how it works, including the tax system, immigration enforcement, social welfare programs and energy policy, particularly those designed to address climate change.”
“It also wades deeply into the culture war that has been dividing the country. Project 2025 calls for abolishing the teaching of “‘critical race theory’ and ‘gender ideology’” in public schools, and “deleting” terms such as “diversity, equity and inclusion,” “gender equity,” and “reproductive health” from “every federal rule, agency regulation, contract, grant … and piece of legislation that exists.”
“The project is being led and funded by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative public policy think tank founded in 1973. In addition to Heritage, there are more than 100 conservative organizations on Project 2025’s advisory board. Among those “coalition partners” are the Center for Immigration Studies, Moms for Liberty, Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, Tea Party Patriots, Turning Point USA and America First Legal Foundation, which is headed by Stephen Miller, a former Trump senior adviser.”
“In fact, at least 140 people who worked in the Trump administration had a hand in Project 2025,” a CNN review found.
Government ‘efficiency’: Project 2025 proposes cutting federal spending and firing “supposedly ‘un-fireable’ federal bureaucrats.” (Separately, Trump has praised businessman Elon Musk for firing employees, and floated the idea of putting Musk in charge of a government efficiency commission.)
“The project recommends privatizing government functions, including the National Weather Service, Transportation Security Administration, or TSA, and the National Flood Insurance Program, as well as eliminating the Department of Education and scores of programs, bureaus and offices throughout government. The project also calls for removing the Biden administration’s expansion of Title IX, which bans sex discrimination in education, to include sexual orientation and gender identity. The courts have blocked the rule from taking effect.”
“As for other departments, the project calls for the “wholesale overhaul” of the Department of Housing and Urban Affairs, the “top-to-bottom overhaul” of the Department of Justice, and a return “to the right mission, the right size, and the right budget” at the Department of Homeland Security. The Justice Department overhaul would include “a plan to end immediately any policies, investigations, or cases that run contrary to law or Administration policies.”
“One frequent target for cuts are offices and programs that promote clean energy and monitor or mitigate the effects of climate change.”
“For example, the project calls for the dismantling of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which conducts research and issues reports on climate change. Project 2025 says “many” of NOAA’s functions can be “eliminated, sent to other agencies, privatized, or placed under the control of states and territories.”
“Social welfare programs: Project 2025 cites fraud and waste in safety net programs and calls for eliminating or reducing basic benefits for low-income individuals and families.”
“For Medicaid, Project 2025 proposes adding work requirements for beneficiaries and “time limits or lifetime caps … to disincentivize permanent dependence.” The health insurance program for low-income Americans covered nearly 74 million people in May, according to the latest data.”
“The conservative plan also calls for tightening work requirements for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, formerly known as food stamps, and changing the eligibility requirements for Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, which was created by the overhaul of the welfare system in 1996. New eligibility requirements would also reduce the number of students served by the national school breakfast and lunch programs — which were described in the book as “inefficient, wasteful” programs.”
“Project 2025 also seeks to incentivize at-home child care. “Instead of providing universal day care, funding should go to parents either to offset the cost of staying home with a child or to pay for familial, in-home childcare,” the plan states.”
“The plan calls for the elimination of Head Start, a program that funds education, health and social services programs for low-income children under 5 years old.”
I would personally like to thank all the critical thinking patriots – journalists, activists, fact based news organizations and others, for helping America to think critically about who’s attempting to turn our Democratic Republic over to anti-Democratic autocrats, self-serving kleptocrats, theocrats, misogynists, white national racists and fascists. They’ve gallantly tried to help turn the page on America’s trump presidential nightmare.
Hundreds of true conservative, Eisenhower and Regan Republican party faithful, who’ve been driven out of the party, or fled for their lives, have advocated for and endorsed Kamala Harris and Tim Walz in this consequential election. There are Republican’s for Harris, scientists for Harris, historian’s for Harris, Puerto Rican’s for Harris, Dad’s for Harris, White Dudes for Harris, Black Men for Harris, Mom’s for Harris and probably dozens that I haven’t heard about.
Some, like Liz Cheney, Adam Kinzinger and others, have went further and endorsed Democrats running against election denying trump apologists and January 6th sympathizers in congress. Many tens or hundreds of thousands have resigned themselves to vote against their long lost party. Virtually everyone who worked for trump in his administration have declared they would refuse to endorse or vote for trump in 2024.
trump, fearing another lost election, has become more unhinged from political reality. The MAGA rally lies and campaign promises have become more outrageous by the day. The twice impeached, 4 times indicted, thrice convicted felon, can’t help but envision himself spending time in a federal prison at the ripe old age of 80. If he loses, odds are favoring him fleeing the country before the Justice Department overcomes the $100 million dollars he’s spent trying to subvert a just reckoning. Also if he loses the election, the campaign faithful piggy-bank will dry up and he’ll be forced to spend his own dwindling wealth on his many legal defenses.
trump’s campaign rhetoric becomes darker and more ominous by the day. Aside from immigrants eating cats and dogs, something that should not even be repeated, trump blames immigrants for every crime, malady, immorality, and unfairness imposed on real white Christian citizens.
Kamala, on the other hand, preaches joy, inclusion, unity and optimism. Her message is somehow getting through the right-wing MAGA-phones, republi-con congressional treason and obfuscation, foreign interference, social media conspiracies, and trump’s fantasized, Democratic dystopian future.
Although Jeffrey Preston Bezos, American business magnate and oligarch best known as the founder, executive chairman, and former president and CEO of Amazon, decided to block a Washington Post endorsement of Vice President Kamala Harris for president, most of the Post’s journalists have voiced their choices in the election, through their reporting and writings. “Chief Executive and Publisher Will Lewis explained the decision not to endorse in this year’s presidential race or in future elections as a return to the Post’s roots: It has for years styled itself an “independent paper.” It’s too bad that More than 200,000 people had canceled their digital subscriptions to the paper. Don’t blame the messenger.
I, on the other hand, am not afraid of endorsing Kamala and Tim to bring America back from the abyss. I’m a Veteran who served my country for 3 years in the Army, in a nuclear missile artillery battalion. We had our missiles aimed at the Soviets and they had theirs aimed at us. I think I fell asleep 60 years ago, just woke up and nothing has changed. We’re still butting heads with the Russkies. We were required to have secret clearances to serve in our Pershing unit. We had monthly seminars from intelligence officers on the necessity of protecting secrets and documents, especially when we were out in public. We couldn’t even have a camera near the military Kaserne. They found a camera on one soldier and we never heard from him again. It shocks myself and fellow veterans how trump abused the national trust by illegally taking highly classified government secrets and documents from government intelligence agencies, and then refusing to turn them over when ordered by the courts, and also by recklessly storing them in a public bathroom. A president who betrays his country and his oath of office should not be returned to the White House. I can’t believe how any Veteran could vote for trump.
As a member of a dozen or so unions and working in manufacturing and construction, I vote for the folks who valiantly fought to stem the flight of manufacturing jobs offshore. Those were all Democrats, including Joe Biden, Three-term Democratic U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown, Independent Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, and many other Democrats. The republi-cons in congress greased the pathways and fought for tax incentives for corporations to offshore high-paying middle class jobs.
trump and J.D. Vance have already proposed trying to overturn the Joe Biden and Kamala Harris administrations Chips and Science Act. “The act authorizes roughly $280 billion in new funding to boost domestic research and manufacturing of semiconductors in the United States, for which it appropriates $52.7 billion. The act includes $39 billion in subsidies for chip manufacturing on U.S. soil along with 25% investment tax credits for costs of manufacturing equipment, and $13 billion for semiconductor research and workforce training, with the dual aim of strengthening American supply chain resilience and countering China.
“When the CHIPS and Science Act passed in 2022, it had bipartisan support. Lawmakers from both political parties hailed the law’s importance for reviving US chip-making capacity in the face of China’s growing influence in the semiconductor sector.”
“But in the final days of this presidential election cycle, the law has become a point of contention between the political parties, putting its future in doubt.”
On Friday, House Speaker Mike Johnson, a Republican who voted against the CHIPS Act, drew criticism after suggesting he would consider repealing the program under the Trump administration
“Analysts estimated that the act incentivized between 25 and 50 separate potential projects, with total projected investments of $160–200 billion and 25,000–45,000 new jobs.”
How can any laborer, union member or otherwise, vote for trump and his anti-labor supporters in congress, who overwhelmingly vote against labor issues at every chance.
President Biden, Vice President and Presidential Candidate Kamala Harris, her running mate Tim Walz and the Democratic party as a whole, are strong supporters of labor and labor unions.
The Democratic party, Vice President Kamala Harris and Minnesota Governor Tim Walz have always, and will always fight for women’s reproductive freedom and the right to make their own healthcare decisions, and to have access to safe and legal abortions. Harris wants to restore Roe v. Wade, which protects abortion up until the time of fetal viability or about 22 weeks. The vast majority of voters agree with her; 89%, think this election will have an impact on abortion rights, and 61% said it will have a “major” impact.
If trump and his MAGA Christian supporters regain control of the White House, a national abortion ban will be at the top of their to-do lists.
For all these reasons, and the fact that trump is the absolute worst, most vile inhabitant of the White House in U.S. history, I believe the Democrats and Kamala Harris will prevail in this election and will be able to turn the page on this ugly and divisive period in our history. As she says, we’re not going back. I just hope that a large resounding victory, might force the republi-cons to alter their anti-Democratic mind set.
So where does that leave the MAGA republi-cons and the unholy, un Christ-like prosperity Christians who went all in on trump’s campaign of grievance, revenge and retribution? They ignored the hundreds of red flags, the habitual lies, the rampant self-serving, the crimes, the indiscretions, the flagrant immorality, and the daily un-presidential conduct. Millions of true and faithful conservative Republicans have fled the party, or the party has left them in it’s toxic wake. Are there enough influential, authentic, conservative Republican’s like Liz Cheney, Adam Kinzinger, Mitt Romney and others, capable of resurrecting the Grand Old Party, or it it destined for the waste bin of history.
trump, Christian Nationalists, and MAGAnians in congress, believe scaring their faithful out of their wits, and holding together their coalition of disaffected, grievance based bro-crew faithful is enough to win trump a second term and keep him out of prison.
$170 million has already been wagered on this election, an abomination causing the founding fathers to turn over in their graves. Who will lose their political shirts.
I believe they’re wrong on all counts. The others, and especially women in every town and burb, in every corner of the nation are not settling for returning to the dark ages of female subjugation and purgatory. The women of America might just save the Republic.
I’ve Covered Authoritarians Abroad. Now I Fear One at Home.
By Nicholas Kristof, Opinion Columnist– November 2, 2024
Credit…Damon Winter/The New York Times
With this presidential election seemingly a jump ball, what might American democracy and the world look like if Donald Trump is again elected president?
I think it’s hyperbole to suggest, as Hillary Clinton did, that a Trump election would be “the end of our country as we know it.” I don’t think that Trump could turn the United States into a dictatorship.
That said, in the course of four decades of covering the world, I’ve repeatedly seen charismatic leaders win democratic elections and then undermine those democracies. The populist left did that in Venezuela, Mexico and El Salvador, and the populist right did it in Hungary, India and Poland (Poland managed to claw its way back). In his lust for power, willingness to ignore democratic norms and eagerness to glorify himself and suppress opposition, Trump reminds me of those leaders.
“He is the most dangerous person to this country,” Mark Milley, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told Bob Woodward.
It’s not that Trump would declare himself dictator for life, but he has already adopted the standard strongman approach of trying to weaponize the legal system to punish and intimidate critics. When he was president, he proposed prosecuting Clinton and did force a criminal investigation into former Secretary of State John Kerry.
“Sometimes revenge can be justified,” Trump said in June.
It’s worth noting that his efforts to prosecute Clinton and Kerry didn’t succeed, and American democracy survived his first term largely unscathed. Democratic institutions are stronger in the United States than in Hungary or Venezuela, and our system is less vulnerable.
It’s also true that in his first term, Trump’s autocratic inclinations were frustrated by incompetence and by frantic efforts by his own aides to impede him. What would be different in a second term is that he is better prepared and seems ready to bring in like-minded aides who would empower his antidemocratic efforts.
I’ve seen in many other countries how threats and revenge can intimidate the business community and civil society into grudging acquiescence. When Trump was in office, his administration reportedly took steps to hurt Jeff Bezos and his corporate interests, possibly costing him a $10 billion military contract for cloud computing. That may explain Bezos’ decision to withhold an endorsement in the presidential election by The Washington Post, which he owns.
When I was The Times’s bureau chief in Beijing many years ago and wrote tough articles about China’s prime minister, the Chinese government responded by aggressively auditing my taxes. So it felt familiar to learn that Trump told aides to use the I.R.S. to audit the taxes of his critics or those who wouldn’t do his bidding, like James Comey and Andrew McCabe of the F.B.I.
Aides initially resisted, but Comey and McCabe were later selected — supposedly randomly — for audits. Trump said he knew nothing about this, but his denials also felt straight out of the Chinese playbook. Officials in China would tell reporters things that we all knew were false not to persuade anyone but to confuse the issue or to establish the party line for followers to echo.
The first time I met Trump as a politician, he made absurd claims and then denied ever making them — and I felt I was transported back into meetings with Chinese officials whose relationship with truth and reality was not just casual but largely coincidental.
The First Amendment is long established in the United States, and it will survive. But Trump can undermine the free press by bullying corporate owners. After all, about a year ago, he called for NBC’s corporate owners to be investigated for treason because of the network’s coverage, and he suggested recently that ABC News should be punished for the way it managed the presidential debate.
“They’re a news organization,” he said of ABC News. “They have to be licensed to do it. They ought to take away their license.” Later he called for CBS to lose its license as well and said that “60 Minutes” “should be taken off the air, frankly.” National news organizations don’t actually need licenses, but their local affiliate TV stations do.
Trump has repeatedly called for changing libel laws to reduce protections for news organizations. Two years ago he called for imprisoning journalists who don’t reveal sources in national security cases and added gleefully that the prospect of prison rape would make journalists ready to give up sources. (I believe journalists are made of sterner stuff, and I’ve seen that in the raw courage of reporters risking their lives in autocracies like Russia.)
Just as alarming is Trump’s suggestion that he would use the armed forces against U.S. citizens. In October he suggested that the National Guard or military be deployed in America against “the enemy from within,” including “radical left lunatics.”
That kind of language may encourage more political violence of the type we already saw on Jan. 6. Trump seemed to acknowledge the risk in his April Time magazine interview, when he was asked about the possibility of post-election violence. “If we don’t win, you know, it depends,” he said ominously. “It always depends on the fairness of an election.”
Spare a moment as well to contemplate what a Trump election might mean internationally.
If Trump had been re-elected in 2020, Russian forces might now be in Kyiv, for Trump could never have mustered the international coalition and rounded up the assistance to keep Russia at bay (even if he had wanted to). Ukraine would probably have collapsed, Russia might have moved on to Moldova or Latvia, and NATO might well be an empty shell. Observing the fecklessness of the West, China would probably be more aggressive toward Taiwan and the South China Sea, so war might be more likely in Asia.
Trump presents himself as a strongman, but my sense from conversations with foreign officials and business leaders is that what he actually projects is weakness. He would damage the Atlantic alliance and threaten the network of countries that Joe Biden has knit together to restrain China, and he seems to discount the challenges from Moscow and Beijing.
Just last month, Trump described some of his American critics as “scum” and “a bigger enemy than China and Russia.” Perhaps that’s why Russia is interfering in the U.S. election with the apparent aim of helping Trump.
Similarly, some Chinese people joke that Trump’s Chinese name is Chuan Jianguo, or Build-the-Country Trump — meaning that for all Trump’s anti-China rhetoric, his chaotic approach and disregard for allies make China stronger.
Trump has little interest in foreign wars, but he can be reckless and inclined to escalate; the upshot is that early in his presidency we came “much closer than anyone would know” to war with North Korea, in Trump’s own words to Woodward. His defense secretary, James Mattis, was so worried that he slept in gym clothes for a time and installed a flashing light in his bathroom to alert him to a crisis if he happened to be showering.
None of us knows how events will unfold, and Trump would not achieve all his aims. Two years ago, he urged the “termination” of the Constitution, and that won’t happen. When he was in office and a federal circuit court blocked one of his programs, he told an aide to “cancel” the court — it didn’t work then, and it won’t next year.
But could Trump make the United States less democratic and make the world far more dangerous? Absolutely. We would be gambling with our future.
The New York Times editorial board is a group of opinion journalists whose views are informed by expertise, research, debate and certain longstanding values. It is separate from the newsroom.
New York Times Editorial Board Rips Apart Donald Trump in Single Paragraph
Liam Archacki – November 2, 2024
Brian Snyder
The editorial board of The New York Times just eviscerated Donald Trump in a single paragraph.
The piece, published on Saturday, was only the Times’ latest attack on the former president during the run-up to the election, but the searing indictment was all the more brutal for its brevity.
Rhetorically matter-of-fact, the piece succinctly lays out many of the reasons Trump’s critics think his second term would be disastrous for the country—the implicit point being that nobody really needs a lengthy review of all Trump’s actions; everyone already knows what he’s about.
Last week, the Times’ editorial board published a longer and nearly as scathing article urging voters not to elect Trump.
“Donald Trump has described at length the dangerous and disturbing actions he says he will take if he wins the presidency,” the piece reads. “We have two words for American voters: Believe him.”
Many major publications have endorsed Harris in the upcoming presidential election.
Another even lengthier editorial called Kamala Harris, Trump’s Democratic opponent, “the only patriotic choice for president,” citing Harris’ vow to unite the country and describing Trump as “morally unfit for an office that asks its occupant to put the good of the nation above self-interest.”
Presidential endorsements from newspapers have been a point of debate in recent political discourse after The Washington Post’s owner, billionaire Jeff Bezos, blocked the paper’s planned endorsement of Kamala Harris. The decision prompted multiple resignations from the Post’s editorial board, and significant criticism from throughout the journalism world.
The billionaire owner of The Los Angeles Times, Patrick Soon-Shiong, also controversially ordered its editorial board not to endorse a presidential candidate.
Joining the Times’ in endorsing Harris are other major publications such as The Boston Globe, The Atlantic, and The New Yorker, among others. The New York Post endorsed Trump.
What I Truly Expect if an Unconstrained Trump Retakes Power
By Michelle Goldberg, Opinion Columnist – November 1, 2024
Credit…Damon Winter/The New York Times
Lately, I’ve seen conservatives taunting liberals online by asking why, if we really think America could be on the verge of fascism, our bags aren’t packed. “It’s tempting to begin trolling my anti-Trump friends by asking if they are liquefying assets, getting passports in order, etc.?” Scott McConnell, a founding editor of The American Conservative, posted on X. National Review’s Michael Brendan Dougherty said something similarly snarky: “So fascism is here and you’re not doing what people did when fascism showed up, which is contemplating emigration in terror or joining armed resistance.”
These jabs seem meant to mock the dread many of us are living in. But despite their bad faith, they’ve lodged in my mind, especially during the late-night insomniac hours when I’m up panicking about what’s going to happen on Tuesday. They’ve goaded me to think through what I truly expect to happen if an unconstrained Donald Trump retakes power, and what it would mean to raise children in a country sick enough to give it to him.
Many people I know who have the privilege to do so are in fact making contingency plans; friends whose family histories entitle them to European passports have secured them. But while I’m having lots of half-idle conversations about emigration, I’m not living my life as if either tyranny or exile is imminent, even though I believe, in keeping with assessments by prominent generals who’ve worked closely with Trump, that he’s a fascist.
Partly, I just feel frozen with horror. This awful liminal period is like waiting for the results of a biopsy, and it’s hard to reason clearly about the future until there’s a prognosis. Beyond that, a lesson of modern autocracy is that ordinary life, or at least a diminished version of it, can go on even as democratic hopes are slowly strangled.
My single biggest fear about a Trump restoration is that he keeps his promise to carry out “the largest domestic deportation operation in American history.” As The New York Times has reported, that would mean sending ICE to carry out “workplace raids and other sweeps in public places aimed at arresting scores of unauthorized immigrants at once,” and warehousing them in a network of newly built prison camps.
If this happens, there will almost certainly be large protests. And when they break out, it is not far-fetched to think Trump would order the military to violently suppress them; the generals now warning about a second Trump term say he wanted to do just that in the past. This is what I envision when I think of MAGA fascism: people demonized as “vermin” being dragged off to camps, while dissent is violently crushed by the armed forces. I don’t know how anyone who has listened to Trump and those around him can dismiss this scenario as hysterical.
There will, I assume, be persecutions of Trump’s more high-profile enemies. We know that Trump, in his first term, harangued Attorney General Jeff Sessions to prosecute Hillary Clinton, and the ex-president and his allies have been clear about their intention to end the independence of the Justice Department. Mitt Romney is taking seriously the possibility that Trump will use the government to go after him, telling The Atlantic’s McKay Coppins, “I think he has shown by his prior actions that you can take him at his word.” Gen. Mark Milley, who was chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under Trump and President Biden until he retired last year, told the journalist Bob Woodward that he fears Trump could have him recalled to duty and court-martialed for disloyalty. Anyone significant enough to threaten Trump could find themselves targeted.
And it won’t be only the powerful who need fear attacks by the MAGA state. Just look at those who’ve found themselves in the cross hairs of America First Legal, an organization headed by the former Trump aide Stephen Miller, which The New York Times called “a policy harbinger for a second Trump term.” It has sued charities that help women pay for abortions, Maryland schools that “expose children to radical gender ideology,” and “woke” corporations — including the N.F.L. — trying to increase diversity. In a second Trump term, Miller and his allies will be able to deploy the power of agencies including the Justice Department, the Department of Education and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission against their foes.
Often, of course, they won’t have to; we’re already seeing troubling signs that some plutocrats are obeying in advance. The Washington Post’s decision to quash its editorial board’s endorsement of Kamala Harris shocked so many of the paper’s readers because it seemed, despite the Post owner Jeff Bezos’ insistence to the contrary, like an act of corrupt capitulation.
As The Post itself has reported, Bezos’ companies have billions of dollars in government contracts at stake, and during the last Trump administration, the president went out of his way to punish the billionaire for Post coverage he didn’t like. In 2019, The Post reported, Marc Short, then Mike Pence’s chief of staff, told leaders of Bezos’ space exploration company, “You have a Washington Post problem.”
The transition from democracy to autocracy is a process, not an on-off switch. By the end of Trump’s first term, when the president was pressuring state officials to change vote totals, staffing the highest levels of government with thugs and lackeys, and, eventually, siccing a vigilante mob on the Capitol, we’d already gone farther on the path to authoritarianism than I’d once thought possible. The place we left off at in January 2021 will, in all likelihood, be the starting point for a Trump administration in 2025.
Johnny McEntee, who started as a Trump bag carrier, had by the end of Trump’s presidency become so powerful that some referred to him as the “deputy president.” As The Atlantic reported, he turned the Presidential Personnel Office, an agency in charge of hiring and firing political appointees, “into an internal police force, obsessively monitoring administration officials for any sign of dissent, purging those who were deemed insufficiently devoted to Trump and frightening others into silence.”
Now a leader of Project 2025, McEntee will most likely have a major role in staffing a new Trump White House. He recently called — with the kidding-not-kidding sneer common to MAGA — for scrapping the 19th Amendment, the one giving women the right to vote.
Days out from the election, pointing out the potential nightmares ahead feels like screaming into a void. Trump’s deep contempt for liberal democracy is, as they say, baked in. When Milley called Trump “fascist to the core,” and when Gen. John Kelly, a former Trump chief of staff, said that he wanted to rule as a dictator, the political debate wasn’t about whether they were correct, but about whether their words would matter. (The consensus seemed to be no.) So those of us who recognize what Trump is lurch forward to Tuesday, a coin flip away from losing what we thought was our democratic birthright, trying and often failing to think through the aftermath of the unthinkable.
But even if the unthinkable happens, it won’t happen all at once. Hannah Arendt wrote, in “The Origins of Totalitarianism,” about how the dislocations of World War I created a mass of stateless people who lived “outside the pale of the law.” Seeing these people deprived of human rights, those secure in their citizenship did not generally worry about their own. “It was precisely the seeming stability of the surrounding world that made each group forced out of its protective boundaries look like an unfortunate exception to an otherwise sane and normal rule,” wrote Arendt.
My kids keep asking anxiously what will happen if Trump wins. I tell them that their lives won’t change, that we’ll have to try to stand up for others who are more vulnerable, but that we ourselves will be fine. The last two words I only say in my head: “For now.”
Michelle Goldberg has been an Opinion columnist since 2017. She is the author of several books about politics, religion and women’s rights, and was part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize for public service in 2018 for reporting on workplace sexual harassment.
By Jamelle Bouie, Opinion Columnist– November 1, 2024
Credit…Damon Winter/The New York Times
What does it mean to say that “democracy is on the ballot” on Election Day?
In her speech on Tuesday in Washington, D.C., delivered from the same place near the White House where Donald Trump incited a crowd to attack the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, Vice President Kamala Harris said it was a question of whether Americans “have a country rooted in freedom for every American” or whether they have one “ruled by chaos and division.”
It was a question, she said later in her remarks, of whether the United States would “submit to the will of another petty tyrant” and become a “vessel for the schemes of wannabe dictators.”
The vice president was not wrong. Election Day will be a referendum on whether we want an autocrat in office — a plebiscite, of sorts, on the very idea of government of the people, by the people and for the people. But Harris’s answer is incomplete. Also at stake on Tuesday, when it comes to the question of American democracy, is the future of the Constitution.
Will it continue into the 21st century as Frederick Douglass’s “glorious liberty document,” or will it legitimize an American-style authoritarianism as a new “covenant with death,” to use the words of Douglass’s erstwhile abolitionist ally, William Lloyd Garrison.
It is important to remember that the Constitution was neither written nor ratified with democracy in mind. Just the opposite: It was written to restrain — and contain — the democratic impulses of Americans shaped in the hothouse of revolutionary fervor.
“Most of the men who assembled at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1787 were also convinced that the national government under the Articles of Confederation was too weak to counter the rising tide of democracy in the states,” the historian Terry Bouton writes in “Taming Democracy: ‘The People,’ the Founders, and the Troubled Ending of the American Revolution.”
The framers’ Constitution would tamp down on and bind the democratic energies of those Americans who thought their revolution stood for something more egalitarian — more revolutionary — than what its leaders and leading figures imagined. It would channel democratic energy through divided institutions backstopped by counter-majoritarian rules and requirements, each designed to make it as difficult as possible to turn popular energy into governing majorities.
In short, the founders built a limited, exclusionary government centered on elite management of the people’s affairs. But by the start of the 19th century, it was clear that the people would not allow the Constitution to contain their democratic impulses and aspirations. The American Republic would not be as limited or as exclusive as the framers had envisioned.
Broad literacy and the wide availability of newspapers, pamphlets and books brought a vibrant culture of political debate and contestation. The emergence of organized political factions and, later, formal political parties brought large numbers of Americans into the political process, transforming the very nature of the union.
As Americans democratized their culture, their Constitution followed. They reshaped their constitutional order around political parties and embraced mass political participation as an integral part of the system.
You can see the vibrancy of this early form of American democracy, as exclusive as it still was, in the multitude of movements and minor parties that emerged throughout the antebellum period. There were Know-Nothings and Anti-Masons and Free Soilers, Liberty Party partisans and groups like the Wide Awakes.
“In America,” Alexis de Tocqueville observed during his tour of Jacksonian America, “democracy is given over to its own inclinations. Its pace is natural and all its movements are free.”
Out of the contradictions of America’s nascent democracy came a catastrophic civil war. And out of the practical and ideological demands of that war came the most expansive and, to that date, most inclusive vision yet for American democracy, encoded in a set of amendments that reconstituted the union as a nation. The 13th Amendment abolished chattel slavery. The 14th Amendment enshrined birthright citizenship and guaranteed the “privileges and immunities” of that citizenship. And the 15th Amendment outlawed racial discrimination in voting, giving Congress all the authority it needed to enforce that prohibition.
It should be said here that it wasn’t simply the act of amendment that changed and further democratized the Constitution. A political document as much as a legal one, its character and meaning are realized as much through practice and the everyday challenge of making it work as they are in law and legislation. Which is to say that if the Constitution that emerged out of the Civil War was more democratic than the one that helped produce that war, a good part of that was because Americans themselves, like the freed people of the South, fought to realize their democratic aspirations.
They were joined, in subsequent decades, by Americans of many other backgrounds. Over the next century and through great effort, American democracy would grow in fits and starts to include women and a broad variety of immigrant groups. And while Black Americans would suffer under the long night of Jim Crow, they would continue their struggle for equality, inclusion and recognition.
We were not given a democratic Constitution; we made one. We unraveled the elitist and hierarchical Constitution of the founders to build something that works for us — that conforms to our expectations.
But nothing is permanent. What’s made can be unmade. And at the foundation of Donald Trump’s campaign is a promise to unmake our democratic Constitution.
Consider his priorities. He wants to use the law enforcement arm of the federal government to harass his opponents and exact “retribution” on his political enemies.
“I will appoint a real special prosecutor to go after the most corrupt president in the history of the United States of America, Joe Biden, and the entire Biden crime family,” Trump said last year. In September he threatened “Lawyers, Political Operatives, Donors, Illegal Voters, & Corrupt Election Officials” with “long-term prison sentences” if they are found guilty of voter fraud, which Trump seems to equate with any form of political opposition.
Trump also wants to deport tens of millions of people from the United States, which will inevitably include American citizens, whether they’re the children of undocumented immigrants or students demonstrating in support of Palestinians. “Immediately after taking the oath of office, I will launch the largest mass deportation program in American history,” Trump said at an event in Texas last week.
To accomplish this, the former president intends to use the 1798 Alien Enemies Act, which allows the president to detain and deport noncitizens from countries at war with the United States. The idea, if it needs to be spelled out, is to classify undocumented immigration as an act of war and use the law to remove foreign nationals from the United States without due process. To obtain the personnel necessary to carry out deportations on such a large, national scale, Trump would deputize local and state law enforcement as well as deploy the National Guard.
It is not just that Trump would attempt these power grabs — which would, on their own, introduce a level and degree of state repression heretofore unseen in American history — but that he would have the support of a legal and political movement eager to constitutionalize his actions as a legitimate exercise of presidential power. Trump would act in an authoritarian manner, and his allies would then write that authoritarianism into the Constitution.
That, in fact, is what the Supreme Court did in Trump v. Hawaii, when it turned a blind eye to the clear evidence of racial and religious bigotry driving the former president’s “travel ban” (neé Muslim ban) and freed the administration to impose its restrictions under a theory of broad (or perhaps a better word would be “credulous”) deference to the executive branch.
The court took a similar approach this year in Trump v. United States, when it gave the president a broad grant of criminal immunity from prosecution for “official acts.” Rather than reckon with the overwhelming evidence that Trump abused the office of the presidency in an illegal effort to overturn the results of an election he lost, what is in effect the Republican majority on the court turned the plain meaning of the Constitution on its head, freeing future presidents — including, perhaps, a future President Trump — to abuse their power under cover of law.
More so than most of his predecessors, Trump strained against the limits of the presidency. He never understood that the office was bound by higher law — that his power wasn’t absolute. He never understood that he was an officer of the Constitution and a servant of the people; he never understood that he was a subject and not the sovereign.
It was because of this fundamental misunderstanding — itself tied to his bottomless solipsism — that Trump tried to twist and turn the presidency into an extension of his ego. To the extent he failed to accomplish this, it was only because he was stymied by those around him — officials who chose to honor their commitment to the Constitution over the interests of one man. Those same officials now warn that if he is given another term in office, he will rule as a tyrant.
America got lucky. It won’t get lucky again. Free of the guardrails that kept him in place the first time, affirmed by the Supreme Court and backed by allies and apparatchiks in the conservative movement, Trump will merge the office of the presidency with himself. He will shake it from its moorings in the Constitution and rebuild it as an instrument of his will, wielded for his friends and against his enemies. In doing so, he will erode the democratic assumptions that undergird our current constitutional order. And he will have the total loyalty of a Republican Party that itself is twisting and abusing the counter-majoritarian features of the American system to undermine and unravel democracy in the states it controls.
“Democracy is never a gift bestowed by benevolent, farseeing rulers who seek to reinforce their own legitimacy,” the historian Sean Wilentz writes in “The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln”:
It must always be fought for, by political coalitions that cut across distinctions of wealth, power and interest. It succeeds and survives only when it is rooted in the lives and expectations of its citizens and is continually reinvigorated in each generation. Democratic successes are never irreversible.
Most Americans have lived only in a world where democracy was secure, where democracy was assumed. On Tuesday we’ll decide if we want to stay in that world or leave it behind.
North Korean troops will become ‘cannon fodder’ if they join Russia’s war against Ukraine, South Korea says
Kwan Wei Kevin Tan – October 31, 2024
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South Korea’s UN ambassador says North Korean soldiers will become “cannon fodder” in Ukraine.
North Korea is believed to have sent thousands of troops to aid in the Russian war effort.
South Korea’s prediction echoes what Ukraine and the US have said about Russia’s war of attrition.
North Korean troops headed to fight in Ukraine will “end up as mere cannon fodder,” Joonkook Hwang, the South Korean ambassador to the UN, said on Wednesday.
Hwang was speaking at a UN Security Council briefing in New York on the Russian invasion of Ukraine when he referenced North Korea’s involvement in the conflict.
North Korea is believed to have sent thousands of troops to aid Russia in its war against Ukraine, per officials from South Korea, Ukraine, and the US.
“As legitimate military targets, they will end up as mere cannon fodder, while the wages they are supposed to receive from Russia will end up squarely in Kim Jong-un’s pocket,” Hwang said of the Russia-bound North Korean troops.
“Pyongyang’s treatment of its young soldiers, its own people, as expendable will be never forgiven,” he added.
South Korea’s mission to the UN declined to comment when approached by Business Insider.
‘Cannon fodder’
The news of North Korea’s troops joining Russian troops comes as Russia has struggled to find the manpower for its military. It has turned to tactics like offering significant signing bonuses — as high as 1.9 million rubles, or about $22,000 — and turning to its prison population to fuel its war effort.
Hwang’s prediction of the fate that awaits North Korean troops echoes comments Ukraine and the US have made over the course of the war.
In April 2022, Ukraine’s defense ministry said Russia was having trouble conscripting troops because people didn’t want “to become cannon fodder for the occupier’s army.”
In June, the Pentagon said North Korean soldiers will become “cannon fodder” if they are sent to aid the Russian war effort.
Russia has come to rely more on its allies as it sustains its war in Ukraine. Facing a shortage of arms, Russia has turned to countries like North Korea and Iran for weapons.
In June, Russian leader Vladimir Putin signed a wartime pact with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. The agreement stands to open up another source of war supplies and ammunition to Russia.
“With boots on the ground alongside the supply of munitions, the DPRK has become the most visible, ardent, and committed supporter of Russia’s aggression in Europe,” Hwang said on Wednesday.
The war in Ukraine has now passed the two-and-a-half-year mark. As Russia continues to wage war, it faces a slew of problems at home, including inflation, currency issues, and a demographic crisis.
Wartime spending is propping up Russia’s economy, with some economists saying the war is the only thing keeping the country from entering an immediate recession.
November 1, 1:00 a.m. — This story has been updated with a response from South Korea’s mission to the UN.
Small number of North Korean troops are already inside Ukraine, officials say
Natasha Bertrand, CNN – October 30, 2024
TOPSHOT – This aerial photograph taken on February 1, 2024, shows residential buildings destroyed by shelling in Izyum, Kharkiv region, amid the Russian invasion of Ukraine. (Photo by Roman PILIPEY / AFP) (Photo by ROMAN PILIPEY/AFP via Getty Images)More
Yahoo is using AI to generate takeaways from this article. This means the info may not always match what’s in the article. Reporting mistakes helps us improve the experience.
A small number of North Korean troops are already inside Ukraine, according to two western intelligence officials, and officials expect that number to grow as the North Koreans complete training in eastern Russia and move toward the front lines of the war.
The North Korean troops’ presence inside Ukraine goes a step beyond what NATO and the Pentagon confirmed on Monday, which is that roughly 10,000 North Korean troops are training in eastern Russia with some en route to Russia’s Kursk region. Ukrainian troops have held territory inside Kursk since August.
“It seems that a good many of them are already in action,” one of the officials said on Tuesday, referring to the North Koreans. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said last week that Ukrainian intelligence assessed that the troops would start to enter combat zones on Sunday.
A US official said the US can not yet corroborate reports that North Koreans troops are already inside Ukraine. The US has been playing catchup, however, when it comes to North Korea’s deployments — US officials did not confirm publicly that the troops were in Russia until weeks after South Korea first alleged it.
US and South Korean diplomatic and military officials are meeting in Washington, DC this week to discuss the deployment and North Korea’s “expanding relationship with Russia” more broadly, State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller said on Monday.
Separately, top Ukrainian official Andriy Yermak is in the US capital Tuesday for meetings with National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan and Secretary of State Antony Blinken. Yermak said he and Sullivan discussed the “North Korean soldiers whom Russia is preparing for war.”
South Korean officials also traveled to NATO headquarters on Monday and briefed allies on the North Korean deployments. NATO allies have been hoping that the intelligence spurs South Korea to begin providing military aid to the Ukrainians, which would be at odds with the South Koreans’ longstanding policy of not arming countries at war. But South Korea’s president has signaled an openness to changing that policy.
“While we have maintained our principle of not directly supplying lethal weapons, we can also review our stance more flexibly, depending on the level of North Korean military activities,” South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol said last week.
It is still unclear how helpful the North Koreans will be to the Russians on the battlefield. Many of the troops deployed are special forces, the sources said, and intelligence assessments suggest that the North Korean government believes their troops have more combat power than regular Russian troops because they are better trained and specialized, officials said.
But North Korea’s military has not fought in an actual war for over 70 years, and intelligence officials believe the North Korean government sent them in large part so they could gain combat experience.
Officials also expect that at least some of the troops will desert their units once they get to the battlefield, and that the language barrier with the Russians will be a significant impediment to conducting seamless operations. The Russians have been teaching North Korean soldiers basic Russian commands in training, like “fire” and “in position,” South Korean lawmakers told reporters on Tuesday.
Some Russian troops are already raising concerns about how the North Korean soldiers will be commanded and provided with ammunition and military kit and have wondered “what the f**k to do with them,” according to audio intercepted by Ukraine’s Defense Intelligence on October 23 from encrypted Russian transmission channels.
The intercepts also reveal plans to have one interpreter and three senior officers for every 30 North Korean men, CNN has reported.
‘The number may rise’
Many of the public assessments that have emerged on North Korea’s troop movements have come to light via South Korean lawmakers speaking to the media after briefings with the country’s intelligence services.
On Wednesday, two lawmakers – Lee Seong-kweun and Park Sun-won – spoke to reporters after a closed door briefing from the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA). Their assessment was that North Korea had sent members of its elite XI Army Corps to Russia, which specialize in urban terrain and infiltration. But the DIA questioned such a unit’s effectiveness in the more open terrain of the Kursk region.
The DIA added that there was not exact information on whether North Korean troops have been sent to fighting positions, but there “is a possibility that an advance team may have been sent to the frontline,” the lawmakers said.
South Korean intelligence has put the number of North Korean troops inside Russia right now at about 13,000, higher than the US and the UK. The number could go up further — the US has already revised its assessment upward from last week, when the White House assessed that only about 3,000 North Korean troops were in Russia.
“The number may rise,” a third western official said. “Allies and partners across the globe are watching and consulting and will proactively share intelligence on the matter as it affects the security of the Euro-Atlantic and Indo-Pacific regions and beyond.”
In addition to military personnel, North Korea has provided Moscow with 11,000 containers of ammunition consisting of around 2 million artillery rounds since last year, a senior NATO official told CNN earlier this month.
The US has also been urging China, which maintains a relationship with Pyongyang, to intervene and pressure the North Koreans to pull back, officials said.
Sullivan “directed the US government to engage the PRC and to organize an effort to get other countries to reach out to the PRC as well over our concerns about DPRK sending troops into Russia and the implications of that,” a US official told CNN, referring to China.
“We have communicated with the PRC about this matter to make clear that we are concerned about it, and that they ought to be concerned about this destabilizing action by two of its neighbors, Russia and North Korea,” Miller said.
Western officials are not optimistic, however, that China will intervene with North Korea’s plans, the sources said. China has continued to be a “critical enabler” of Russia’s war effort, according to the NATO official, and is still fueling Russia’s defense industry with substantial amounts of dual-use goods like microelectronics and machine tools that can be used to build weapons.
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