Inside Trump’s Deportation Push, and the U.S. Holds Talks With Hamas

Posted on by Lone Candle

Trump paused tariffs on automobiles because big auto companies called him and convinced him to pause them. What about all those companies and consumers who do not have Trump’s ear?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3mP0brCE_ig

Rome’s ‘Weak Hand’ Won a War—Can Ukraine Do the Same?

Posted on by Lone Candle

“France supported the fledgling continental army for about four years with supplies, weapons, advisors, men; you know, [the army got many of its words from the French]. Yeah, I don’t recall France ever telling the U.S. they should just surrender to England. You don’t bend the knee to Communists and dictators…you punch them in the face until they stop. If we bend the knee to Russia now, how long will it be until we beg the dragon that rises in the East to please eat us last?”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m-QXz9wotrU

Putin’s capabilities are suffering, Ukraine can still win | General Sir Richard Shirreff

Posted on by Lone Candle

Russian victory is not inevitable. Russian territorial progress has been slow, by May 9th Russian will have lost a million soldiers killed or wounded, Russia has about a year’s worth of armored vehicles left, Russian logistics is using: civilian vans, golf buggies, and donkeys, and the Russian economy is making huge sacrifices to support the wartime economy.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CMI6tc05Jzk

Trump Uses Old Tricks to Sell a New Agenda

Posted on by Lone Candle

“The 43 days of his second term have revealed a president in the grip of a set of large ideas that were an occasional but far from a paramount feature of his first term. This version of Trump is more serious — determined to dismember large parts of the federal government and upend relations between the United States and the rest of the world on trade and security. He is ready to pursue these ideas in a sustained and pitiless way, all the while asserting vast new powers for himself as president.”

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2025/03/05/donald-trump-address-ideologue-column-00205559

JD Vance’s Gamble on Ukraine Aid Paid Off

Posted on by Lone Candle

“Vance’s gamble to temporarily step into the limelight has paid off in at least one significant way. After Zelenskyy left the West Wing without signing a highly anticipated mineral rights deal, the White House responded by adopting one of Vance’s signature foreign policy initiatives: a total pause on U.S. military aid to Ukraine.”

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2025/03/05/jd-vance-ukraine-aid-zelenskyy-00211618

‘He needs to do much more’: RFK Jr.’s measles response under scrutiny

Posted on by Lone Candle

““He could be misinterpreted that vitamin A will save your suffocating suffering child,” Brett Giroir, a first-term Trump health official now advising Kennedy on infectious disease policy, wrote in a post on X. “It will not.”
In Texas, some local officials have grown concerned that Kennedy’s messaging risks diluting their own communication efforts. They warn that his equivocations could undermine their only hope of ending the outbreak: persuading people to get the measles vaccine.

“We don’t want to diminish the primary message,” Phil Huang, director of health and human services in Dallas County, Texas, said in an interview. “It’s the vaccines that are the most important.”

Katherine Wells, director of public health for the city of Lubbock, Texas, echoed that sentiment.

“We need to make sure that we’re all talking about the importance of vaccination, and although there’s some focus on treatment, preventing the disease in the first place is really what public health works on.”

Since President Donald Trump nominated him to run HHS late last year, Kennedy has labored to convince skeptics that he is not anti-vaccine, despite his past as an activist who repeatedly raised doubts about the safety and effectiveness of various immunizations.

As recently as 2021, Kennedy suggested without evidence that measles outbreaks may have been fabricated to “inflict unnecessary and risky vaccines on millions of children.” But now confronted with a high-risk, real-world opportunity to demonstrate whether his views have changed, the HHS secretary has instead appeared to seek a middle ground — calling the measles vaccine protective for individuals and broader communities, yet stopping well short of the full-throated endorsement public health experts say is necessary from the nation’s top health official.

“What he should be saying is that these kinds of outbreaks are fully preventable and unacceptable, and that as secretary he will do everything in his power to ensure the public that it never happens again,” said Lawrence Gostin, director of Georgetown University’s O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law. “It’s the first major public health crisis that he’s had to face, and he hasn’t reassured doubters about his ability to get on top of it.””

…

“Most importantly, health experts said, Kennedy could simply hit the bar already set by health officials in Texas: Declaring unequivocally that vaccination is the central way to contain the outbreak.”

https://www.politico.com/news/2025/03/05/rfk-measles-scrutiny-00214952

Trump’s tariff war tests his tolerance for political risk

Posted on by Lone Candle

“Following swift market backlash, Trump on Wednesday announced a one-month reprieve for autos and auto parts from the sweeping 25 percent tariffs he levied one day earlier. In doing so, he signaled an openness to hearing appeals from other industries for additional exemptions to the Mexico and Canada tariffs. It’s a stark contrast to the approach he is taking with the American people, whom he is asking to shoulder the risk of higher prices as a result of the tariffs, in exchange for the promise of longer-term economic benefit.

“I don’t know what the administration’s plan is,” said Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.). “If they’re using [tariffs] as leverage, seems to me it would be better to threaten them, negotiate and you put them on or not on.”
Together, the conflicting actions reflect the president’s dual impulses: longstanding sensitivity to stock market fluctuations — which he has long read as Nielsen ratings for his performance — and a love of tariffs as a primary instrument to get what he wants from foreign governments.

That tension is also reflected within Trump’s circle of advisers, who spent much of Wednesday debating whether and how far to mitigate the impacts of a trade war on American industries and consumers.

“It’s the greatest show on Earth. We’ll put tariffs on tonight, but tomorrow we’ll tell you we may negotiate and take them off,” a person close to the administration, granted anonymity to discuss internal conversations, told POLITICO. “But stay tuned, because you never know what tomorrow’s gonna bring.”

The self-inflicted economic uncertainty comes as Americans remain concerned about high prices, with polling showing that people don’t think the administration is doing enough to address the economy even as they are pleased with its performance on other issues. It also comes amid growing frustration on Capitol Hill, particularly among Republican senators from farm states, who fear the ripple effects from the tariffs on their local economies.

And it’s adding to confusion about whether the new tariffs on Canada and Mexico are truly aimed only at stemming the tide of fentanyl flowing across the U.S. border — a message Trump’s lieutenants have underscored far more firmly than the president himself — or reflective of the administration’s broader protectionist goals. The new tariffs, after all, are only a prelude to the more sweeping reciprocal tariffs the president has promised will take effect April 2 — and it’s unclear even to many of the president’s close allies what actions Canada and Mexico could take at this point to lift the tariffs entirely.”

https://www.politico.com/news/2025/03/05/trump-tariff-war-political-risk-00214567