President Donald Trump’s Foreign Policy Becoming A ‘Crisis Of The West’| Deadline | MSNBC
"Ex-Fox News analyst" [Col. Ralph Peters] "rips Sean Hannity and calls the network a 'destructive propaganda machine'"
MSNBC Published on Jun 8, 2018
The New Yorker’s Susan Glasser, NYT’s Peter Baker, and MSNBC political analyst Rick Stengel on Trump railing against allies and embracing Russia ahead of the G7 and Singapore summits. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yiJc7OVvMu4
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Under Trump, “America First” Really Is Turning Out to Be America Alone
From trade to the Iran deal to NAFTA, the President has created the highest level of tension between the U.S. and its allies in decades.
By Susan B. Glasser June 8, 2018 President Trump at last year’s G-7 summit, in Taormina, Sicily. Canada’s Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, will host this year’s gathering in La Malbaie, Quebec, this weekend. Photograph by Jonathan Ernst / Reuters
The Canadian Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, was less than forty-eight hours away from hosting the biggest diplomatic gathering of his career when I spoke with one of his top advisers on Wednesday afternoon. Trudeau’s team was searching for strategies to salvage the annual G-7 summit with the American President, Donald Trump, and leaders of five of the world’s other large democratic economies—all of them close allies of the United States, and all of them furious with Trump. “Look, he personally decided he wanted to be fighting with everybody,” the Trudeau aide told me, referring to Trump. “Maybe he thinks it’s in his best interests to be combative and fighting.”
For close to a year and a half, Trudeau and his counterparts have employed various strategies to try to head off conflict with the volatile American President, from flattery to stonewalling to hours of schmoozing on the golf course. But in recent weeks Trump has confounded their efforts, unleashing a tit-for-tat trade war with allies, blowing up the Iran nuclear deal over European objections, and walking away from a deal with Canada and Mexico to overhaul NAFTA, all while lavishing praise on the North Korean dictator with whom he hopes to reach an accord next week. Adding insult to injury, Trump even cited an obscure national-security provision to justify the tariffs, as if America’s closest friends had suddenly become its biggest enemies. As a result, the G-7 meeting that Trudeau will host on Friday and Saturday was shaping up to be the most contentious, and possibly the most consequential, since the summits began, in 1975.
Trump’s chief economic adviser, Larry Kudlow, told the White House press corps on Wednesday that this was all just a “family quarrel,” but, if so, it’s one ugly fight. As Kudlow acknowledged the rift, Trudeau and France’s President, Emmanuel Macron, were meeting to plot strategy, and everyone was wondering why Trump, who is often described as averse to face-to-face conflict, had chosen the weeks preceding the annual G-7 summit to punch his allies in the face. In the days leading up to the meeting, Trump had tense phone calls with Trudeau, Britain’s Prime Minister, Theresa May, and Macron, who has been especially humiliated by the series of adverse decisions after flying to Washington to lobby Trump personally. All of them appear to fix blame on Trump himself. “We’ve gotten used to unorthodox behavior from your President,” the Trudeau adviser said.
For his part, Trump seems to relish the confrontation he has unleashed and is spoiling for more. On Thursday morning, the President tweeted that he was “getting ready to go to the G-7 in Canada to fight for our country on Trade,” insisting, as he often does, that “we have the worst trade deals ever made.” But others involved in the summit were preparing for an America more alone than ever before, and now Trump faces the very real risk of allies teaming up against him. “The American president may not mind being isolated, but neither do we mind signing a 6 country agreement if need be,” Macron tweeted pointedly to Trump, in English, later on Thursday. Trump quickly fired back. “Please tell Prime Minister Trudeau and President Macron that they are charging the U.S. massive tariffs and create non-monetary barriers,” the President tweeted. “Look forward to seeing them tomorrow.” Soon after that, the White House said in a statement that Trump would skip the second day of the summit entirely, and it seemed increasingly certain that the traditional joint communiqué signed off on by all seven leaders will be discarded because of Trump. (As of Wednesday, when it would normally be in the final stages of elaborate negotiations, the communiqué was not even being circulated.) Instead, the Trudeau adviser told me, the Canadian Prime Minister, as the summit’s host, was likely simply to release a “statement from the chair,” summarizing the discussions without requiring Trump to approve it. The American President has blundered his way into “opening a four-front-at-least war simultaneously,” the Trudeau adviser said, and now the goal of the summit has become unlike any other that preceded it: “to get allies together to try to contain the amount of damage he’s doing.”
Ever since Trump took office, America’s allies have desperately sought to avoid this moment. Over the last year and a half, though, many of them have come to realize, with growing dread, that it was inevitable. The rift between the world’s great democracies that Trump’s election portended is coming to pass, and it is about far more than Iran policy, obscure trade provisions, or whether Germany spends two per cent of its G.D.P. on NATO. Many senior European officials speak of it, as one Ambassador to Washington did to me recently, as nothing less than a “crisis of the West.”
Call to suspend Mueller probe was just posturing, Giuliani says
"Ex-Fox News analyst rips Sean Hannity and calls the network a 'destructive propaganda machine' "
Giuliani floats irresponsible anti-Mueller comment, then ducks the flack by saying he was joking as Trump has for years. Giuliani grazes.
The former New York mayor’s aggressive public comments challenging the legitimacy of the Russia investigation have been the source of frequent controversy. | Andrew Harnik/AP Photo
By DARREN SAMUELSOHN 06/18/2018 07:46 PM EDT
President Donald Trump’s attorney Rudy Giuliani said on Monday that he was actually just bluffing last week when he called for Justice Department leaders to suspend special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation within 24 hours.
“I didn’t think it would,” Giuliani told POLITICO with a laugh when asked about the Mueller inquiry’s still being very much an active investigation. “But I still think it should be.”
Giuliani’s demand .. https://www.politico.com/story/2018/06/14/giuliani-mueller-russia-probe-suspended-647022 .. for the Mueller investigation to be terminated came on Thursday night in response to a report the Justice Department’s Office of Inspector General that criticized former FBI Director James Comey’s decisions overseeing the Hillary Clinton email investigation. Appearing on Fox News with Sean Hannity, Giuliani said Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein should “redeem themselves” the next day by shutting down the Mueller inquiry.
“That’s what I’m supposed to do,” Giuliani explained on Monday. “What am I supposed to say? That they should investigate him forever? Sorry, I’m not a sucker.”
The former New York mayor’s aggressive public comments challenging the legitimacy of the Russia investigation and defending the president on both politics and policy have been the source of frequent controversy. Trump last month said Giuliani, his newest personal lawyer, would need to “get his facts straight”[That's called a Trumpian brain-snap. It's like a pig telling a peacock it's gotta be cleaner. after he’d revealed on live cable television that the president did know about a hush-money payment that Trump’s longtime personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, made to the adult-film actress Stormy Daniels. More recently, Giuliani has struggled to explain his criticism of former Vice President Joe Biden, a potential Trump rival for the White House in 2020, whom he has called a “mentally deficient idiot.” Breaking News Alerts
Amid those outbursts, Giuliani and his colleagues on Trump’s legal team continue to negotiate with Mueller’s office surrounding the possible terms for a sit-down interview.
“We’re pretty close,” Giuliani said, adding that a final decision by the president and his legal team could come in the next two weeks. “I hope maybe before the Fourth [of July]. That might be safer.”
Jane Raskin, a Miami-based attorney who joined the Trump legal team at the same time as Giuliani, has taken the lead in discussing with Mueller key logistical issues surrounding an interview, including the scope of the possible questions and how long Trump would be expected to sit under oath.
“We don’t want to waste time on picayune details that we can hypothetically agree to in advance,” Giuliani said, explaining that the location for the interview would probably be the White House or Camp David.
“That’ll be the easiest one to work out,” he said.
Giuliani knocked down the notion that Trump would go to the special counsel’s office in downtown Washington or even travel to the federal courthouse just blocks from the Capitol for an interview. “I don’t think a judge would allow that,” he said. “It’d be too much of a freak show.”
Trump is also likely to have two or three of his lawyers at his side if the Mueller interview happens. “Then we’ll have to decide who,” Giuliani said.
Giuliani on Monday also dismissed a Washington Post article published over the weekend that said Mueller had told Trump’s lawyers he might break up his work into two different reports, with a first set of findings issued as early as this fall centering just on questions of whether the president obstructed justice with the Comey firing. Broader conclusions about possible Russian influence in the 2016 election would be saved for later.
“I don’t see the point of it,” Giuliani said of splitting up Mueller’s findings into two parts. “They’re going to be stapled together anyway.”
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