I was curious how people in other countries — particularly our European allies — view the man who, despite having been convicted of 34 felonies and indicted for more, could be America’s next president. Fortunately for me, I was reading The Week magazine and it has a section called “How They See Us,” where the “They” refers to other countries.
Featured in the current edition are excerpts from articles by Marina Hyde in The Guardian, Piotr Smolar in Le Monde, Karl Doemens in Redaktions Netzwerk Deutschland, and Tim Stanley in The Telegraph.
Hyde pointed out that Donald Trump has become the United States’ first president to come from reality TV, the first to refuse to concede an election, the first to lead an insurrection, and now the first convicted of a crime. In most Western democracies, a felony conviction would be disqualifying in the eyes of voters, if not in the letter of the law.
Hyde wonders what has become of America. Trump’s convictions might actually boost Trump’s chances of winning in November — immediately after the verdict, polls showed his odds above 50 percent for the first time. Have Trump’s years of lying, badgering, conniving, and conspiracy theorizing so degraded political debate and public life that half of Americans can actually see him as a “political prisoner” and democracy itself as their enemy?
That the Republicans won’t drop Trump as a candidate speaks to the “moral and ethical degeneration” of the party, said Le Monde’s Piotr Smolar. Since the insurrection on Jan. 6, 2021, the GOP has become a cult of personality, filled with sycophants who worship at the altar of MAGA. Trump was impeached for inciting the violent attack on the U.S. Capitol, but he wasn’t convicted, because Senate Republicans stood by him. It was a shocking display of partisanship over patriotism.
Germany’s Karl Doemens wrote, “Trump should have been behind bars long ago,” and it’s an indictment of all American political institutions — and especially American voters, who continue to support him — that he is still a viable candidate. The guardrails have utterly failed to prevent “the law-breaker and would-be autocrat from taking over.”
Even The Telegraph’s Tim Stanley, who is generously sympathetic toward Trump, said that now that the verdict is in, the November election has become “a referendum on whether Trump should go to prison or the White House.” If Trump wins, Stanley continues, “America gets a president with a rap sheet,” a national humiliation. If he loses, he will claim victory anyway and there will surely be violence. “Whatever the outcome, America will lose.”
It’s sad how America’s standing in the world has diminished so dramatically since Trump threw his hat “bigly” into the political ring back in 2015. As Marina Hyde wrote, “It’s been a wild ride in America over the last nine years.”
AI image generated by ideogram.ai.
This, That, and the Other 
America is in a liminal period now, not knowing how things are going to turn out, as maybe we will finally be rid of Trump, or he could be sticking around to have his way with everything.
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Let’s hope we will finally be rid of him.
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It is not going to be easy, but it is the most important choice that we will ever make.
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It’s a trite cliche that the press often uses to characterize every presidential election, but in this case, it is 100% true.
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Had to reblog your post F…so important 👍🏻
Sent from Yahoo Mail for iPhone
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Thank you, Cheryl. Yes, it is important.
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Meanwhile, Biden is a betting man. He seems to believe citizen voters are as beholding to AIPAC as our lawmakers and he are. Either that or Democrats don’t really care about winning this time. Germany and the Britts, elite-wise, same.
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MSNBC Host Goes Mask-Off …
This is the show that made Donald Trump palatable to too many average Americans in the first place. It’s not really much of a mystery how people who voted for Obama in 2008 or even both 2008 and 2012 also voted for Trump in 2016. These hosts would welcome the Don and chuckle with him and smile. This particular one — and it’s not a show with a righty and a lefty format — this fella (a Donny) was saying he might vote for Trump in 2020 still.
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Biden Commits to FIGHT WARS FOR Saudi Arabia
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Saudi Arabia Abandons Petro-Dollar
[This host says he hasn’t seen any other show cover this. I have; not usually on mainstream, though, but sometimes buried and hurried past on mainstream or legacy (if something like CNBC is mainstream) yet somewhat more often on less famous platforms.]
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https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=e40Ju-zNyXk
Neom: An Update on the World’s Most Ridiculous City (It’s Still Ridiculous…)
Megaprojects
May 22 2024
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Neo-Feudalism (neo-liberalism or economic conservatism): G7 supports BlackRock [and BlackStone and more] buying up world’s infrastructure, to make rich even richer
Here’s our chance to boycott the bad guys. Oh… sorry, I know that’s not what most people with any wherewithal do with this kind of information. I indeed divested.
There was a running infrastructure joke or outrage spectacle during the Trump administration. I eventually saw thru it; the joke is on us since most don’t understand.
It’s an old, outdated parental statement to say things such as “You will sit down and shut up and be happy about it.” Again, we are the butt of the joke or in on it.
Go to the about halfway mark and view two news screens for a quick summation in meme R/D or headline form and then take in the full presentation.
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This, too, of which General and President Eisenhower warned us:
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/9-largest-private-military-contractors-174024698.html
Private military companies [play a] … role to play in global security. These contractors are independent businesses that offer specialized military services related to war, combat operations, intelligence gathering and more, to national governments, substate actors, and international organizations.
A majority of these private companies are led by military veterans and offer several war-related services, consultancies, and other forms of support such as construction, logistics, and training. For example, Academi, formerly Blackwater, was founded by Erik Prince, a former Navy Seal. Many of them are even equipped with fleets of utility and transport aircraft.
After World War II, many western countries privatized arms manufacturing, and this was followed by military services. The use of private military companies further gained prominence with the conclusion of the Cold War in 1990, with the United States, United Kingdom, and Russia downsizing their militaries, which resulted in a large number of soldiers left unemployed. This vacuum was filled by private military companies, who were often contracted by the same countries to do their ‘dirty work’ …
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Hillary Clinton Endorses MAGA’s Candidate in NY Primary
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… lying about U.S. boots on the ground in Israel?
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I’ve a feeling that people are going to vote for Trump again.
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I hope you are very wrong, Sadje. But either way, we in the States are in for a rough time.
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Yes, my sympathies for you all
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“Have Trump’s years of lying, badgering, conniving, and conspiracy theorizing so degraded political debate and public life that half of Americans can actually see him as a “political prisoner””
I think many Republicans see him as the Messiah.
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I agree. The second coming of Jesus! Yikes!
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I have heard the same from private and public comments on my site, too. I’m not surprised. We are not doing well in the eyes of the world. But then again, why should we? It’s a mess here.
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Prison, please FFS or something. It’s good at least that some countries look at this a little bit more objective. It’s so weird that the republican party allows an obvious (and now convicted) criminal to lead their party into the miserable future we’d most likely see if he’s elected once more.
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Weird is a good word for it.
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I overheard a comment the other day that both shocked and scared me…”if Trump wins someone needs to take him permanently out of the picture”……….please let us all hope that POS goes to prison.
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Yes, let’s hope so.
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I haven’t met a single German who can understand the support of this man in your country. Even before but especially after his lies, his stupidity, his baseness has been exposed. For all our own political troubles the figure of Trump is non-comprehensible.
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And yet close to half of America worships him as if he is the second coming of Jesus. It is non-comprehensible.
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It truely is. I thought it may be the outside view that we have but that there are people on the inside who see it as well gives me hope.
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Re “In most Western democracies”
Any alleged expert or layperson who talks about “democracies” AS IF a real democracy ACTUALLY EXISTS ANYWHERE IN THE WORLD (or has existed at any time in ‘human civilization’) is evidently either a fool who’s repeating mindlessly and blindly the propaganda fed to them since they were a kid and/or is a member of the corrupt establishment minions whose job is to disseminate this total lie because any “democracy” of ‘human civilization’ has always been a covert structure of the rule of a few over the many operating behind the pretense name and facade of a “democracy”: https://www.rolf-hefti.com/covid-19-coronavirus.html
“There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and ITT and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, Union Carbide, and Exxon. Those are the nations of the world today. […]. We no longer live in a world of nations and ideologies […]. The world is a college of corporations, inexorably determined by the immutable laws of business. The world is a business […].” — from the 1976 movie “Network”
“We can either have democracy in this country or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.” — Louis Brandeis, Supreme Court Justice
Does anyone still not see how the deadly game on the foolish public is played … or still does not WANT to see it?
“We’ll know our Disinformation Program is complete when everything the American public [and global public] believes is false.” —William Casey, a former CIA director=a leading psychopathic criminal of the genocidal US regime
“Repeating what others say and think is not being awake. Humans have been sold many lies…God, Jesus, Democracy, Money, Education, etc. If you haven’t explored your beliefs about life, then you are not awake.” — E.J. Doyle, songwriter
“Elites are afraid of equality, they are afraid of real democracy, and they are afraid of justice.” —Scott Noble, filmmaker
“Imagine a vaccine so safe you have to be threatened to take it.” — from a poster
If you have been injected with Covid jabs/bioweapons and are concerned, then verify what batch number you were injected with at https://howbadismybatch.com
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You’re right. The United States not a true democracy in the sense that every decision is voted upon directly by every citizen. In a country with 340 million people, that would be impossible. However, the U.S. is a hybrid of a democracy and a republic — a representative democracy, where people elect representatives who make decisions on their behalf. But most people, including me, for expedience’s sake, refer to the U.S. as a “democracy.”
Other than that, I’m not going to further engage with you on your rant.
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It is true… no matter what happens it won’t be a good outcome.
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