Joe biden

When Donald Trump won the 2024 election, the first foreign leaders to congratulate him were Israeli officials. Now, as he embarks upon his first overseas trip, Trump is visiting Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates – and forgoing a stop in Israel. It increasingly seems apparent that Trump is pursuing an American First foreign policy that treats Israel not as a vital ally but a nettlesome supplicant. In pursuing this course, he is returning to an older Republican foreign affairs tradition that has seen a variety of presidents, from Dwight D. Eisenhower to George H.W. Bush, treat Israel with skepticism, if not antipathy. For Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, this turn of events comes as a rude surprise.

President Donald Trump is continuing his consistently inconsistent stance on abortion as his administration’s Justice Department has asked a federal court in Texas to dismiss a case aiming to increase regulations on mifepristone, an abortion pill shown in some rare cases to involve serious health risks. Trump has claimed many times in the past to be pro-life, even saying in 2016 that “there has to be some form of punishment” for abortions.

“You don’t have to go home, but you can’t stay here.” So goes the bartenders’ refrain to customers at closing time. The Trump administration is issuing that same call to millions of illegal immigrants, beginning with the most violent (and those caught staying with them). You can’t stay here. It’s a wildly popular stance, but it is running into predictable problems. The first is that rounding up the millions here illegally is costly, time-consuming and sometimes dangerous. That problem was vastly increased by Joe Biden’s deliberate decision to open the southern border, allow millions of people to cross it illegally and then lie to the public and Congress about what his administration was doing.

The ongoing (unsuccessful) attempt to persuade the world that Joe Biden is something more than a marginally-sentient head of cauliflower continued on Thursday, as Biden appeared with his wife, Dr. Jill Biden, on The View. The money moment arrived when co-host Alyssa Farah Griffin asked Biden about the spate of books, “deeply sourced from Democratic sources, that claim in your final year, there was a dramatic decline in your cognitive abilities.” Biden stared downward, with an angry smirk. “What is your response to these allegations?” Griffin asked, “Are these sources wrong?” “Are wrong,” Biden gurgled, even though they were obviously not wrong. “Nothing to sustain that. Think of what we left with.

Historically, ex-presidents spend their golden years on the speaking circuit, writing their memoirs or planning for the inauguration of their presidential libraries. What they don’t do is lash out at their successors when they disagree with a policy or decision. Joe Biden, however, has no intention of keeping quiet. A little more than three months after vacating the White House, Biden is unencumbered from conventional decorum and feels free to speak his mind. Last month, he gave his first post-presidency speech in Chicago, where he blasted the Trump administration for taking a sharp hatchet to the federal workforce, including the Social Security Administration.

Donald Trump’s “Liberation Day” was the culmination of a 30-year insurgency against the global economic system. It was the most fiscally significant event since lockdown. By the fiat of the President, tens of trillions of dollars were on the move; stock markets trembled; and the US-China relationship – the material basis of globalization – seemed at risk of permanently freezing over.  Yet just under a week later, tariffs were to be displaced in the news cycle by the case of a deported "Maryland man," Kilmar Abrego Garcia, and his possible gang affiliations. Only one of these events would prompt five Democratic lawmakers to drop everything for an urgent trip abroad.

The politics of the abortion issue in the post-Dobbs environment has been dramatically altered, both by the introduction of state-level restrictions in Republican states and by pressure campaigns in Democrat-dominated states to increase the subsidization and solidification of existing lax abortion policies. But the most significant development in the abortion space in recent years wasn’t a decision that came from the Supreme Court, but from the Biden administration – first temporarily (with Covid as the justification) and then permanently granting the ability to dispense abortion-inducing pills via telehealth, without the previously required visit to a doctor.

Somewhere atop the sun-drenched hills of coastal California, failures go to rebrand themselves, and rebrand their rebrands as "pivots." There, Kamala Harris and Meghan Markle are busy writing the next chapter in the book of blaming the system for the personal failures of wealthy and powerful people. Harris, fresh from discovering that Democratic strategists had invented the America that was enthusiastic about her, now contemplates her political afterlife. She does so from the same region of the same state where Markle, having learned that royal traditions don't yield to Instagram aesthetics, crafts multi-million-dollar deals to explain why it's everyone else's fault. Welcome to the Golden State, where yesterday's rejections become tomorrow's empowerment memoirs.

There’s a delicious Russian verb that derives from the criminal underworld: “koshmarit,” literally “to nightmare someone.” It usually denotes how authorities give criminals, or anyone they dislike, so much relentless hassle from so many different angles they bend them to their will. Vladimir Putin, always keen to bring mafia language into politics, was the first Russian statesman to make use of it in public – he once instructed his authorities to stop “nightmaring” the business community. I keep returning to that word when I think of how Putin’s own foreign policy could be restrained to make real the Reaganite slogan that helped Donald Trump win the election: “peace through strength.

National Security Advisor Mike Waltz spoke to the press this afternoon for the first time since the Atlantic editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg described how Waltz had inadvertently added him to a Signal groupchat in which air strikes on Yemen were planned. Waltz claimed that he'd “never met, don’t know, never communicated with” Goldberg. The only problem: Goldberg says in his report that the pair has met before. So who's lying? The Atlantic reported Monday how Goldberg was granted access to “precise information about weapons packages, targets and timing” from Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, two hours before the US attack on Yemen targets on March 15. “There are a lot of lessons,” Waltz told the press while meeting with President Donald Trump and US ambassadors.

Trees fall in forests, and forgotten statesmen make speeches. Last Saturday, Joe Biden gave his first post-presidential speech to something called National High School Model United Nations, which seems to be a conference for people who maybe don’t exist and nobody outside the room noticed. The event was, according to Philip Wegmann at RealClearPolitics, closed to the press, with no recording of Biden’s remarks made. It’s spooky. The 46th presidency only ended eight weeks ago and already Biden is a ghost. Donald Trump constantly evokes his name – the worst president ever, a catastrophe for this country etc. etc. – and yet the man himself has evanesced.