The world is spinning … around Trump. The fundamentals haven’t changed—US leverage with its primary geopolitical rivals. Russia is still winning against the Anglo-Zionist proxy war on Russia—more than ever—and the US has been making one concession after another right down the line to just get Russia to the negotiating table ASAP. China, on the other hand, appears unfazed by Trump’s tariffs. In fact, China has responded with export controls over metals that are critical to US high tech military products. Those metals are difficult to get elsewhere. Larry Johnson has a rundown on this, explaining what these metals are used for and where they can be found—mostly in China. Nevertheless, everyone is talking about Trump.
Trump is hoping to arrange for a face to face with Putin in Saudi in the relatively near future. Two key points. First, once again Putin is insisting that he doesn’t want a Ukraine only meeting—he wants a broad ranging discussion on all relevant geopolitical issues. Ukraine heads the list, of course, but once again Palestine is #2. Putin’s insistence on a global deal cannot be ignored or minimized, and Trump’s plan to withdraw from Syria may play into this. Second, Trump once again—perhaps in passing, but I doubt that it was a throwaway—suggested that Putin would want to talk about nuclear weapons. I’m sure Trump is correct about this, and this points to the obvious fact that Putin’s interest in a global deal is also in Trump’s interest. As I’ve argued before, for domestic political reasons Trump wants or even needs more than an end to the fighting in Ukraine—he needs a real positive to justify the concessions, and nuclear agreement of some sort would fit that bill.
In the meantime, Rubio, Witkoff, and Waltz (Kellogg has been dumped) are preparing to meet with their Russian counterparts in KSA to pave the way for a Putin - Trump meeting. The Euros are frantically pulling all the levers they can, but they’ve been told they’re irrelevant:
Glenn Diesen @Glenn_Diesen
Keith Kellogg makes it abundantly clear to the Europeans that they will not have a seat at the table during negotiations
* Two main reasons: First, the Europeans have taken such an uncompromising stance in terms of their demands and their refusal to even engage in diplomacy, to the extent they oppose peace negotiations and would likely undermine the talks. Second, the Europeans have subordinated themselves and thus become increasingly irrelevant, and now neither the Americans nor the Russians want them at the table. This should have been obvious, but Europe is stuck in an ideological echo-chamber where common sense is not allowed to challenge the narrative
Meanwhile, each day brings something new to show that Trump is so over with the Euros. Like the planned reduction of US forces in Europe (follow link for a nice map). If Trump follows the LIFO principle—Last In First Out—that would mean that the states that most recently joined NATO (Finland, Sweden, the Baltics, etc.) may find themselves without any US tripwire presence.
Part of the reason that Trump is getting so much open field running room on the geopolitical front probably comes down to the Dem’s new strategy of demonizing Elon Musk—who is no longer turning up on the foreign policy front. Instead, the focus is on hair’s on fire nonsense like this:
The liberals in America are in absolute meltdown. They’re claiming to have magical powers to shut down the Trump administration. No one is interested in this stuff. It’s ultra-fringe. Bizarre.
PP may have a point when he says that “No one is interested in this stuff.” I suspect most Americans are simply waiting for the SCOTUS to shut the out of control courts down. That seems to be the inevitable result. The Left’s basic position—in effect, that the Civil Service somehow constitutes a Fourth Branch of government—is so extreme that the SCOTUS will have great difficulty in coming up with any other result than a massive smackdown. In recent days several lower court judges appear to have come to that realization.
The real danger in all this is posed by the New Yorker subtitle’s notion that Trump could “defy the authority of the courts.” That’s exactly the issue: What authority do the courts have to dictate internal Executive Branch functioning? Of course the courts can demand that the executive should follow applicable and constitutional laws, but that’s about it. But the Dem’s claims go far, far beyond that. If, in an excess of TDS, the Roberts Court attempted to exert control over the Executive Branch’s internal functioning Trump could resist—and the SCOTUS would lose that one big time:
Trump Need Not Bend To The 19-State Lawfare Coup Trying To Thwart His Treasury
The president, as the chief executive officer of the country, is not obligated to heel every time an out-of-control federal judge jerks his leash.
So far the Trump 2.0 strategy appears to be to give the opposition plenty of rope with which to hang themselves—to set themselves up for a devastating SCOTUS ruling.
The opening sentence of Article II of the U.S. Constitution is straightforward and grants one person, the president, broad powers: “The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America.”
Nineteen rebellious states are now attempting to usurp that executive power, which the Constitution vests solely in the president.
Consider:
First, we start with the proposition that the judiciary is not the supreme branch of the government. It is one of the three co-equal branches. The lack of supremacy of the entire judicial branch is highlighted when you consider that there are more than 1,000 active district judges. When the Constitution vests the executive power of the United States in one person — the president — it defies common sense to think that he is obligated to obey every order from each of those many judges who might try to second-guess his exercise of that power.
Next, when you consider a couple of examples, the fallacy of that broad reasoning becomes even more apparent. What if one of the 1,000-plus district judges were to enter an order forbidding the president from accessing highly classified military documents such as nuclear attack plans, on the grounds that the president has not been properly trained? (That alleged lack of training was one of the bases for Judge Engelmayer’s order prohibiting certain officers and employees from accessing documents.) Would the president be required to follow such an order? I think not.
Neither would he be obligated to litigate the matter through the court system for months or even years before obtaining an answer from the Supreme Court. No, the president should continue to exercise his command authority over the military and say, as President Jackson famously did, “John Marshall has made his ruling now let him enforce it.”
I believe John Roberts is plenty smart enough to understand that he, as the head of an unelected judiciary that is insulated from We the People, is in no position to challenge the authority of a landslide president to run his own administration—and to initiate measures that are hugely popular. He’ll find a way to avoid a showdown or, failing that, will be forced to administer a smackdown.
Back to geopolitics:
Team USA Hockey Beat the Snow Mexicans 3-1 After They Booed the USA National Anthem Again
Beats having a war, even with 3 fights in the first 9 seconds.
Secret terror blueprints for US NSC to ‘help Ukraine resist’ exposed
https://thegrayzone.com/2025/02/15/secret-nsc-plans-ukraine-resist/
For Trump and the Russians, the EU is becoming what the US coastal elites called middle America: flyover country.