Fragments of a blog
Fragments of a blog
The Trump University playbook or whatever that manual of marketing trickery is called. I hate to break it to you, but that’s how people sell stuff – all over the world, regrettably. At corporations large and small, global and local,…
This is a perfect long article for its genre: a foreign policy expert, who also happens to be a professor of literature, on America’s domestic politics. Rabbit’s clever; the insightful parts are two apposite quotes from Max Weber and Richard Rorty. The problem…
The theory that Donald Trump is neither quite a Hitler nor truly a Mussolini but an American Silvio Berlusconi is increasingly popular and invariably superficial. (Politically; psychologically, who knows?) It seems to ignore the constants of Trump’s campaign, which occasionally get lost…
On the subject of Putin and Trump (see my earlier posts 1, 2, 3), Prof. Snyder also writes: As Putin understands perfectly well, the president of the United States has standing in Russia, and enjoys far superior power to the president…
Why would a TV channel owned and financed by an unfriendly country support a US presidential candidate? In the case of RT, I can think of five reasons: The Kremlin thinks RT’s support can help Trump win. That’s naive or…
I spent some time reading up on Jeffrey Epstein’s case in early 2015, when Prince Andrew and Alan Dershowitz were briefly dragged into it. Later in 2015, I thought that sooner or later, either Donald Trump or Bill Clinton or…
Following the 2010 presidential election in Ukraine, which saw Victor Yanukovych prevail over Yulia Tymoshenko, Anne Applebaum wrote in Slate: The only thing that has remained consistent over the past four years is the democratic process itself… Six years after the…
It may prove unfortunate if Donald Trump’s view of the Russian-Ukrainian conflict has truly been influenced, or even shaped, by people like Paul Manafort, a former adviser to Yanukovych, and Carter Page, a former Merrill Lynch banker and fund manager with ties to…
I have little patience with people mocking Trump for saying Tan-ZAY-nia rather than Tan-zah-NEEah. Fifteen years back, some of these folks bent over backwards to prove that George W. Bush’s “nucular” was exactly the way true and genuine Americans had pronounced…
Going back to Timothy Snyder’s piece, what about the top man in the Kremlin? Last December, Putin said this about Trump (in The Guardian‘s translation): He is a very colorful and talented man, no doubt about that… He says that he…
In his latest NYRB piece, Timothy Snyder lists a number of Russian “politicians” supportive of Trump. They turn out clowns of varying colors; none of them operators to be reckoned with. Particularly amusing is Snyder’s naming Alexander Dugin as “the leading Russian fascist ideologue and…
There are a number of reasons why Moscow may sincerely want Trump to be elected president. Trump is more of an isolationist and less of an interventionist than Hillary Clinton. Trump has no foreign policy experience and no experience holding…