Impeachment Day 28: G7 Bedbug Summit, Kurds Cancelled
Donald ‘Stonewall’ Trump is more vulnerable politically after several days of backtracking, flip flopping, and finger pointing.
Senators needed to hold off an impeachment inquiry are nervous.
White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney, the man sent out to defend the president has failed; a weeks-long effort at replacing him has come up short because nobody wants the job.
And ‘you get what you pay for with a free lawyer’ is proving to be as true as ever.
These are three threads worth following coming out of this weekend:
The president backtracked on his most excellent idea of hosting a meeting of the world’s economic powerhouses at his Florida resort.
There’s more about the Kurdish enclave in Syria than (most of) the American media has reported.
Rudy Giuliani and his partners in crime are the gift that keeps on giving for Democrats.
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On Saturday evening, the presidential Twitter account blamed backlash for withdrawing the Trump National Doral, Miami, as the host site for the G-7 in 2020.
The “Hostile Media & their Democrat Partners went CRAZY!” said the president, as he claimed he was just trying to do the country a favor.
Authorities in Doral, Florida learned about both the decision to hold and not to hold the G7 conference in their city from the news media. The State Department, which normally handles such matters, was not included in the planning.
Trump’s boast about his resort at this year’s G7 meeting prompted an initial wave of negative publicity, something he chose to ignore.
From the Washington Post:
When President Trump conveyed his unprecedented desire to host next year’s Group of Seven summit at his own luxury golf resort in Doral, Fla., it took mere hours for a 2016 lawsuit to resurface, raising questions about the property’s cleanliness.
It was bedbugs, former guest Eric Linder alleged, that left him with “welts, lumps and marks over much of his face, neck, arms and torso,” following a stay at the Jack Nicklaus Villa, considered one of Doral’s most sumptuous rooms. The Trump Organization denied the claims, and the case was settled a year later, but the president on Tuesday blamed Democrats for spreading the “false and nasty rumor.”
Trump has touted the 643-room Doral club as an ideal fit for the 2020 summit because of its convenient location near the airport and its commodious parking. Should his plan come to fruition, six of the world’s leaders and hundreds of diplomats would reside at the “country’s most magnificent golf resort” — which, according to local inspection reports, has a lengthy history of health-code violations.
It became increasingly obvious that there was no way holding such an event at a property owned by Trump would escape scrutiny for self-dealing, giving Democrats ammunition to add a clear violation of the emolument clause of the constitution to the articles of impeachment.
There was growing unhappiness among GOP politicos expected to defend the president, and the Doral meeting was just the latest incident in a series of missteps.
From the New York Times:
The Doral has struggled financially since the Trump family bought the resort out of bankruptcy in 2012, reportedly paying $150 million for the property. More than $100 million in loans to help finance the project came from Deutsche Bank…
...Senator Richard Blumenthal, Democrat of Connecticut, who has helped lead the effort by Democrats in Congress to challenge federal and foreign spending at Trump resorts, said the president’s reversal was a sign that he himself saw that his standing in Washington was weakening.
“He backed down because of cracks in support from his own party, plain and simple,” Mr. Blumenthal said. “The threat that his shattering Republican support on this issue and Syria potentially impacting the solid wall on impeachment — that all is threatening him more deeply than he ever expected.”
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News about the G7 ended up dominating media coverage. Outrage over the betrayal of Kurdish fighters and bs about what was really happening on the battlefield took a step back.
What’s going on in Northern Syria is a tragedy. As Mazlam Kobane, commander of Kurdish military forces to NBC’s Richard Engel:
“It will be the biggest ethnic cleansing operation in the 21st century and it’s happening in front of the American army’s eyes"
https://twitter.com/jimsciutto/status/1186232522637807616?s=20
Lost among the many stories of military actions and reactions is the destruction of a unique political exercise in self-government, known to Kurds as the Rojava.
WNYC’s On The Media program included interviews with Jenna Krajeski, a journalist with the Fuller Project for International Reporting who has reported on the Kurds. Then, he speaks with Rapareen abd Elhameed Hasn, a 27-year-old activist and co-president of her local health authority in Rojava, about what it's been like on the ground.
Rojava: it’s the three cantons at the top of Syria that comprise what’s more commonly referred to as “Kurdish Syria.” Each canton is governed independently but according to a shared social contract based on principles of local democracy, feminism and ecology. It’s a land that, until recently at least, had about two million people, mostly Kurdish but with ethnic and religious diversity. And its political experiment was mainly functioning — until the abrupt retreat of the United States from northern Syria. Now Rojava is being pummeled by the invading Turks — martyred to the impulses of an unmoored American president.
And so it has been reported: a ruinous betrayal of an ally that has made unimaginable sacrifices in the Ameican wars against Sadaam Hussein and ISIS. But lost in that narrative is another story: the equally unimaginable sacrifice of an equitable model of governance in a region where other models have stifled freedom for centuries.
That’s right, folks, in a region dominated by strongmen and regressive thinking there was an experiment in inclusive democracy in progress. Each of the three cantons had *both* a woman and man in leadership. You can be sure that whatever replaces this entity (whether it’s the Turks or Syrians) won’t be anything but cruel and unusual.
Here’s a snip from Krajeki’s reporting at the New York Times:
As an experiment, Rojava was deeply compelling. I met political leaders like Hediye Yusuf, a woman whose early political identity was shaped in Syrian prisons and who eventually became co-president of one of Rojava’s three regions. I met women who were trained to intervene after reports of domestic violence. I talked to shopkeepers who distributed their goods to families in need, and to a Christian Syrian who stayed in northern Syria to ensure Christian representation in the P.Y.D., the governing political party.
What I saw was in keeping both with Rojava’s guiding doctrine — a document called the Social Contract — and a result of extreme circumstance. ISIS wasn’t far away. One farmer shared his food not because he had read the Social Contract but because that’s what you did for your neighbors during a trade embargo. A female fighter would have preferred to be a photographer, but that would have to wait. The ideals of Rojava were often impossible to separate from the pressures of war.
This was not utopia. Like many dreams of a more perfect society born under the auspices of repression, there were problems. And, yes, I am aware that authoritarians in the region label the Kurds as “Marxists.”
It is rightly criticized. In my reporting, I’ve talked to Kurds who fled the political dominance of the P.Y.D., and human rights groups who have accused the Y.P.G. of recruiting child soldiers. Rumors of a political alliance, perhaps tacit, with the regime of Bashar al-Assad have now been given more weight as a result of a new military alliance in the face of the Turkish assault. Those who consider the revolution delegitimized by any ties to the Assad regime will have their argument strengthened; others will say Kurds, as they often have, are simply trying to survive in an impossible situation.
But Rojava has been successful against astonishing odds, laying the foundations of a flawed but ambitious local democracy. “I do not claim it was a perfect place,” Yasin Duman, an academic whose research focuses on the administration in northern Syria, wrote to me in an email. “But they have taken a huge step toward achieving an autonomous region that is able to accommodate many of the needs of different ethnic, religious and political groups. All this happened when the region was under attack from different groups and regimes.”
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The Wall Street Journal and others have turned their focus to Rudy Giuliani, and there are bits of bad news for the president coming out with regularity.
The video embedded below demonstrates some of the latest news.
https://twitter.com/shelbyholliday/status/1186230286734053376?s=20
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