Vladimir Putin

Subterms

    More stories

    • 150 Shares189 Views

      in US Politics

      Donald Trump a de facto Russian asset, FBI official he fired suggests

      by

      Donald Trump can be seen as a Russian asset, though not in the traditional sense of an active agent or a recruited resource, an ex-FBI deputy director who worked under the former US president said.Asked on a podcast if he thought it possible Trump was a Russian asset, Andrew McCabe, who Trump fired as FBI deputy director in 2018, said: “I do, I do.”He added: “I don’t know that I would characterize it as [an] active, recruited, knowing asset in the way that people in the intelligence community think of that term. But I do think that Donald Trump has given us many reasons to question his approach to the Russia problem in the United States, and I think his approach to interacting with Vladimir Putin, be it phone calls, face-to-face meetings, the things that he has said in public about Putin, all raise significant questions.”McCabe was speaking to the One Decision podcast, co-hosted by Sir Richard Dearlove, a former head of MI6, the British intelligence service.The conversation, in which McCabe also questioned Trump’s attitude to supporting Ukraine and Nato in the face of Russian aggression, was recorded before the debate in Philadelphia on Tuesday, in which Trump made more controversial comments.Claiming Russia would not have invaded Ukraine had he been president, Trump would not say a Ukrainian victory was in US interests.“I think it’s in the US’s best interest to get this war finished and just get it done,” he said. “Negotiate a deal.”Claiming to have good relationships with Putin and Volodymyr Zelenskiy, the Ukrainian president, Trump falsely said his opponent, Kamala Harris, failed to avert war through personal talks.The vice-president countered that she had helped “preserve the ability of Zelenskiy and the Ukrainians to fight for their independence. Otherwise, Putin would be sitting in Kyiv with his eyes on the rest of Europe, starting with Poland.”In one of the most memorable lines of the night, Harris added: “And why don’t you tell the 800,000 Polish Americans right here in Pennsylvania how quickly you would give up for the sake of favor and what you think is a friendship with what is known to be a dictator who would eat you for lunch.”The candidates were not asked about recent indictments in which the Department of Justice said pro-Trump influencers were paid to advance pro-Russia talking points.McCabe was part of FBI leadership, briefly as acting director, during investigations of Russian interference in the 2016 election and links between Trump and Moscow. Trump fired McCabe in March 2018, two days before he was due to retire. McCabe was then the subject of a criminal investigation, for allegedly lying about a media leak. The investigation was dropped in 2020. In October 2021, McCabe settled a lawsuit against the justice department. Having written The Threat, a bestselling memoir, he is now an academic and commentator.Speaking to One Decision, McCabe said: “You have to have some very serious questions about, why is it that Donald Trump … has this fawning sort of admiration for Vladimir Putin in a way that no other American president, Republican or Democrat, ever has.“It may just be from a fundamental misunderstanding of this problem set that’s always a problem. That’s always a possibility. And I guess the other end of that spectrum would be that there is some kind of relationship or a desire for a relationship of some sort, be it economic or business oriented, what have you.“I think those are possibilities. None of them have been proven. But as an intelligence officer, those are the things that you think about.”Saying he had “very serious concerns” about the prospect of a second Trump term, McCabe said he would always be concerned about Russia’s ability to interfere in US affairs.He said: “Their desire to kind of wreak havoc or mischief in our political system is something that’s been going on for years, decades and decades and decades.“Their interest in just simply sowing chaos and division and polarization. If they can do that, it’s a win. If they can actually hurt a candidate they don’t like, or help one that they do like, that’s an even bigger win.” More

    • 113 Shares179 Views

      in US Politics

      Autocracy, Inc review – fears for liberalism and democracy

      by

      “There is no liberal world order any more, and the aspiration to create one no longer seems real,” Anne Applebaum writes in her new book, Autocracy, Inc: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World.In the eyes of many, US failure in Iraq coupled with the great recession discredited rules-based democracy. Parents of privilege shielded their children from war and economic downturn. The rest were not so lucky. The world’s current crop of rising strongmen are not operating on a blank slate.Russian belligerence and the rise of China play out against this roiling landscape, so too the challenges of Iran and North Korea. The emergence of a reinvigorated Brics bloc is another reminder of western unsteadiness. Indeed the west itself – from Hungary to Paris to Washington – is far from immune to the trend.“Nowadays, autocracies are run not by one bad guy but by sophisticated networks relying upon kleptocratic financial structures,” Applebaum argues. She is a Pulitzer-winning historian, a staff writer at the Atlantic and married to Poland’s foreign minister.Looking back, Applebaum got it wrong on the Iraq war (she had advocated regime change), nailed it on Vladimir Putin (“personal survival is more important than the well-being of their people”) and came close to the mark on Ukraine (“Russia must acknowledge Ukraine as an independent country with the right to exist”).The strength of Autocracy, Inc lies in its description of how autocrats bend and distort opinion, and find allies across national boundaries.In retrospect, the west was too eager to treat China as just another trading partner, not as a rival. The Tiananmen Square massacre signaled what might come next. Xi Jinping is a product of a system.In such systems, Applebaum writes, elites operate “not like a bloc but like an agglomeration of companies, bound not by ideology but rather by a ruthless, single-minded determination to preserve their personal wealth and power”.No single caricature-like figure calls the plays alone. Rather, ad hoc collectives are driven by cash and power.“The members of these networks are connected not only one to another within a given autocracy but also to networks in other autocratic countries, and sometimes in democracies too.”Such elites have lawyers in New York and London, bank accounts and holdings strewn across the world. Applebaum notes that Marc Kasowitz, who counseled Donald Trump during the Mueller investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election, also represented alleged US conduits for a Ukrainian oligarch. As it happens, David Friedman, Kasowitz’s former law partner, was Trump’s ambassador to Israel.As Applebaum writes, “the globalization of finance, the plethora of hiding places, and the benign tolerance that democracies have shown for foreign graft now give autocrats opportunities that few could have imagined a couple of decades ago.”Putin is estimated to be worth between $70bn and $200bn, wealth to rival that of Elon Musk. Xi and his family clock-in north of $1bn.Applebaum examines gas pipeline deals between the then Soviet Union and what was West Germany. The US was rightly concerned.Richard Nixon saw the danger that such transactions would “detach Germany from Nato”. Jimmy Carter imposed sanctions on the sale of US pipeline technology, on account of Soviet human rights violations. Decades later, the Nord Stream pipeline emerged as a battleground between Moscow, Kyiv, Berlin and Washington.Applebaum turns her gaze to Gerhard Schröder, German chancellor between 1998 and 2005. Since then, he has worked for Nord Stream, Rosneft and Gazprom – all Russian. Now 80, he has chaired the shareholder committee of Nord Stream, reportedly earning around $270,000 a year. He also led the supervisory board of Nord Stream 2, now shuttered.He is unapologetic. In February 2022, after Russia invaded Ukraine, he told the New York Times: “I don’t do mea culpa, it’s not my thing.”Applebaum also discusses so-called “hybrid states”, which she characterizes as countries that are a “legitimate part of the international financial system” and possess many of the trappings of democracy but that are “also willing to launder or accept criminal or stolen wealth or to assist people and companies that have been sanctioned”.She points to the United Arab Emirates and Turkey. “Russian property purchases in the Emirates rose 100% after the invasion of Ukraine,” she writes.Not surprisingly, Applebaum lauds patriotism but fears nationalism and isolationism. By such metrics, Brexit was a bust.“Did the removal of Britain from the European Union give the British more power to shape the world?” Applebaum asks.The answer is self-evident.“Did it prevent foreign money from shaping UK politics?”Want a hint? Evgeny Lebedev, son of Alexander Lebedev, a Russian oligarch and ex-KGB agent, is now Lord Lebedev of Hampton and Siberia, neatly ensconced in parliament.“Did it stop refugees from moving from the war zones of the Middle East to Britain? It did not.”Nigel Farage’s dream has left the UK worse for wear. Farage’s admiration for Putin is a feature, not a bug.“I said I disliked him as a person,” Farage recently said of the Russian president, while campaigning for election as an MP. “But I admired him as a political operator because he’s managed to take control of running Russia.”Applebaum hopes liberalism and democracy are sustainable but is uncertain of their fate.“Nobody’s democracy is safe,” she writes. Still, “there are liberal societies, open and free countries that offer a better chance for people to live useful lives than closed dictatorships do.”For autocrats, liberty and autonomy are inconveniences. Conformity is king. There is little surprise that Putin portrays himself as the defender of faith and traditional values.American democrats – as well as Democrats – have reason to be concerned. During the 2016 election, Paul LePage, then governor of Maine, thought Trump needed to show some “authoritarian power”. A lot has happened since then. Come November, LePage just may get his wish.

      Autocracy, Inc: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World is published in the US by Penguin Random House More

    • 175 Shares139 Views

      in US Politics

      Pulitzer-winning author Anne Applebaum: ‘Often, for autocrats, the second time in power is worse’

      by

      A couple of years ago, in the Atlantic magazine, journalist Anne Applebaum wrote an era-defining cover story called “The Bad Guys Are Winning”. Her argument was not only that democratic institutions were in decline across the world, but that there was a new version of old threats to them: rogue states and dictatorships were increasingly linked not by ideology, as in the cold war, but by powerful currents of criminal and mercenary interest, often enabled by western corporations and technology.“Nowadays,” Applebaum wrote, “autocracies are run not by one bad guy, but by sophisticated networks composed of kleptocratic financial structures, security services (military, police, paramilitary groups, surveillance), and professional propagandists. The corrupt, state-controlled companies in one dictatorship do business with corrupt, state-controlled companies in another. The police in one country can arm, equip, and train the police in another. The propagandists share resources – the troll farms… [that] pound home the same messages about the weakness of democracy and the evil of America.”The article took as examples the relationships between Russia and Belarus and between China and Turkey, ad hoc alliances created specifically to preserve their leaders’ authoritarian power and vast illicit personal wealth, and to undermine the chief threats to it: transparency, human rights, any pretence of international law. Three years on, with wars in Ukraine and Gaza further fomenting those forces, with the real prospect of a second Trump presidency, Applebaum has published a book-length version of her thesis: Autocracy, Inc: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World. It is a necessary, if anxiety-inducing read.Applebaum, long a scourge of repressive regimes, is the author of Gulag, the definitive history of the Soviet Union’s forced labour camps. She divides her time between her homes in Washington DC and Poland – where her husband, Radek Sikorski, has recently returned to frontline politics as foreign minister (they tend to discover each other’s whereabouts in the world, she says, through Instagram posts). I met her in London for lunch a couple of weeks ago to talk about her book. She arrived making apologies about jet lag, ordered briskly, and shifted gear seamlessly into foreign affairs. The subsequent fortnight has, of course, proved a very long time in geopolitics. The UK has finally elected a grownup government; France has perhaps temporarily averted the prospect of a far-right administration; and Trump has dodged that bullet and raced ahead in the polls. Having Applebaum’s book closely in mind through all those events is vividly to sense the underlying precariousness of our world, the perils immediately ahead.In many ways, Applebaum is the consummate witness of this new world order, in that she moves comfortably in rarefied political worlds and maintains a robust view from the ground (she has spent a lot of time of late reporting from Ukraine, for example). She grew up in the US, daughter of a prominent anti-trust lawyer and an art gallery director, in a family with Republican roots in the south. “The elder George Bush would have been my father’s idea of a president,” she says. “Statesmanlike, committed to alliances and stability.”After studying Russian at Yale and in St Petersburg, she got her political education on the frontline of the “end of history”, seeing first-hand the collapse of Soviet communism in eastern Europe as a correspondent for the Economist and the Spectator. Having married Sikorski in 1992 – he had been a student leader in the Solidarity movement and for a while lived in flamboyant exile in Oxford (he was a member of the Bullingdon Club with Boris Johnson) – she literally cemented the optimism of the era by helping him restore an old manor house in western Poland. The building became a potent symbol of liberal and democratic rebirth not only in Poland but across Europe. (It was, for example, the first place that David Lammy visited earlier this month on becoming foreign secretary.)The house – Sikorski wrote a book, The Polish House: An Intimate History of Poland, about what it stood for – was the venue of a famous new year party on the eve of the millennium, attended by the couple’s many political friends, mostly on the centre right in Europe and the US. Applebaum’s last book, Twilight of Democracy, looked back at that event, and offered a highly personal, insider’s account of the way in which so many of those friends had been seduced by the siren voices of authoritarian populism and the far right in subsequent years. How Polish friends had sought favour in the thuggish Law and Justice party that gained power in 2005; how British allies – including Johnson – became self-serving Brexiters; and how American Republicans shamelessly fell in behind Trump.As ever, Applebaum’s analysis unpicked difficult truths: notably that significant groups in every society will always support corruption and authoritarianism because they believe they can directly profit from it. That the arc of history does not naturally bend toward democracy.Sikorski and Applebaum had dreamed of a new world order with their country manor somewhere near its centre. “On this patch of land it will seem as if communism had never existed,” Sikorski wrote. “We have won the clash of ideas. It’s now time to stop wagging our tongues and get down to work.” In Applebaum’s case that involved researching and writing her monumental Pulitzer prize-winning book Gulag, drawn from newly opened archives in Russia and first-hand experience of survivors. She watched on, appalled, as that history and those archives were shut down again by Vladimir Putin soon afterwards.View image in fullscreenThe Russian president, a focus of Applebaum’s journalism for 25 years, is the most obvious example of the new-style autocrat she identifies. “The motivation is only power and wealth,” she says. “And towards that end, they think it’s important to weaken democracy and the rule of law. And it’s pretty explicit. I mean, in the case of Russia and China, that’s literally their public doctrine. The Chinese have a document that was published in 2013, which has this marvellous name of Document Number Nine, which lists seven perils threatening the Chinese Communist party. Number one is western constitutionalism. Putin has been talking about this since 2005.”One difference with the cold war, she says, is that by weaponising social media, these states – she also includes Iran, Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, North Korea and others – have been able to exploit and deepen divisions in countries in which free speech exists. Applebaum and her husband have been targets of all kinds of threats and abuse as defenders of those apparently “elite” interests: an independent judiciary and functioning democratic institutions.“At first,” she says, “I didn’t understand it at all. You are suddenly in this world of unbelievable hatred, all this vitriol focused on you. Some of it was Russian, some of it was Polish, some from the American right, and they all feed off each other. They all use the same bad English.” The attacks were fuelled by a series of magazine stories in Poland and Russia, that suggested, as she writes, that she “was … the clandestine Jewish co-ordinator of the international press and the secret director of its negative coverage of Poland” or that she was in the pay of the Ukrainian government. “To begin with, you think,” she says, “who do I sue? But then you just have to learn to get used to it.”That campaign was backed in Poland by harassment from the ruling Law and Justice party. “It had got to the point where they were investigating everybody,” she says. “For example, the equivalent of the tax service demands all of your stuff, papers and information, and you have to get lawyers. We were targeted, of course, and my fear was that if they won again this time, then they would move towards really prosecuting people and putting them in prison.” As it was, the pro-European liberal democrat Donald Tusk unexpectedly prevailed in last year’s election and appointed Sikorski to his cabinet. “You think,” she says, “OK, so now we’re not going to jail. Instead, the foreign ministry.”Applebaum had already been redoubling her efforts to fight for democracy. In her book she writes of a new network, a democratic forum, that had its first meeting in Vilnius, Lithuania, in 2021. The group is imagined as a countervailing force to her autocracies and involves activists and exiles from the women’s movement in Iran, from among Hong Kong’s umbrella protesters, and former political prisoners from Venezuela, Zimbabwe, North Korea, Turkey and beyond. “There’s an international network of dictators,” she says, “so why shouldn’t there be an international network of democrats? They helped me frame this subject – really, the idea comes from them.”View image in fullscreenThere is an understandable urgency about this work, not least because of the threats posed by Donald Trump to existing multilateral cooperation. “Trump has a vision for how the US should work, which involves him being in direct charge of the military and them fighting not to uphold the constitution but for his personal interests.”She fears that a second administration will be more effective in overcoming constitutional checks and balances. “It’s also often the case for these figures that the second time it is worse. Chávez [in Venezuela] made one coup attempt, and then he went to jail. The second time, when he was released, he knew how to do it differently, take revenge. The same thing with Orbán in Hungary. He was prime minister for one term, and then he lost. When he came back, he seemed determined to make sure he never lost again.”Did it surprise her that the 6 January insurrection didn’t help former Republican friends to come to their senses? “It did. There was a moment – had the Senate agreed to impeach Trump – that would have been the end of it. The fact that they were too partisan to do that meant he survived. And then Trump was incredibly successful at doing something that is a common feature of autocracies, which was seeding a conspiracy theory, convincing something like a third of Americans that the 2020 election had been stolen.”Her book examines some of the ways that Silicon Valley billionaires have become effectively complicit in enabling autocracies to thrive, agreeing to censorship on their platforms, following the money. She has been prominent among those writers shining a light on the ways that coordinated propaganda strategies in autocracies are fuelling division in the west.“Of course, I don’t think either Trumpism or the Brexit campaign were foreign ideas,” she says. “I mean, because I worked at the Spectator in the 1990s I knew many people who were anti-EU then and who had grassroots deep in the English countryside. But as we know, what the Russians do, and now others, they don’t invent political movements – they amplify existing groups.”In the case of Trump, she suggests, “he is clearly somebody who they cultivated for a long time. Not as a spy or anything. But they were offering him opportunities, you know, he was trying to do [property] deals there [in Moscow]. And he’s been anti-Nato since the 80s. He’s openly scorned American allies all of his life. In one of his books, he talks about what a mistake it was for the US to be fighting the second world war. So of course, the Russians would want someone like that, because their aim is to break up Nato. And if they can help get an American president who doesn’t like Nato in office, that’s a huge achievement. It’s a lot cheaper than fighting wars.”Applebaum despairs at the way anything can now become a binary which-side-are-you-on? culture war. “Taylor Swift!” she says, as a case in point. “Taylor Swift is a blond, blue-eyed country and western singer, who lives in Nashville. And whose boyfriend is a football player in the midwest. And yet you’re going to make her into some kind of symbol of leftwing degeneracy?”View image in fullscreenShe fears that the horrific war in Gaza has become a similar kind of simplistic “wedge issue”. Her book was mostly written before the Hamas attack on 7 October. “I was able to make some adjustments to it later on,” she says. “But it was not conceived as a book about the Middle East.”The nature of the rhetoric around the war emphasised that for her. “The fact that the [commentary] became so toxic online so fast, when I saw that happening, I thought: ‘OK, I’m staying out of this,’” she says. “I’m not an expert in the region. I’m not there. I’m certainly not going to talk about it on Twitter. I mean, do people have completely settled views about what’s happening in Sudan, say? That’s another huge crisis.”In the terms of her book, she suggests to me that “clearly, Hamas, which is connected to Iran, is a part of that autocratic world. And clearly, Netanyahu has designs on Israeli democracy. I wouldn’t say he’s a dictator. But he clearly is willing to preside over a decline in Israeli democracy.“As journalists,” she adds, “our role is to try to collect information as accurately as possible and analyse it. If the interpretation leads to describing Israeli war crimes in Gaza or whether it leads in the direction of describing Hamas atrocities in Israel, that’s what it should do. But I think, for example, that it’s a great mistake for universities to announce what their ‘policy’ is on the war…”In this regard, I ask, have our governments been cowardly or naive in not confronting the implications of the great shift in information in our times, the unaccountable algorithms of social media?“We have been very cowardly about that,” she says. “Anonymity online is a big problem. If someone walked into the room right now with a mask over his face and stood in the centre of the room and started shouting his opinions, we would all say: ‘Who’s that crazy person? Why should we listen to him?’ And yet online that is what happens.”Given the prognosis of her book, does she never despair, I wonder, about the implications?“There are always other stories,” she says. “For example, people really misunderstood the recent European election. The French story – the rise of Le Pen – was obviously dominant. But actually everywhere else the far right underperformed: in Germany the big victor was the Christian Democrats, in Hungary Orbán’s party won fewer seats than in previous elections.”And here in the UK, too, she suggests, though Farage hasn’t gone away, the re-emergence of the liberal-left is the real story.“I think the actual transformation of the Labour party – they’re not getting enough credit for that,” she says. “Because they were fighting two kinds of populism, both on the right and from Corbyn. What impresses me about Starmer is that he had a whole career as a human rights lawyer before he went into politics. It’s pretty rare these days to have somebody come from a different walk of life and be at the top of that world. He understands how institutions work and how government works.”So real grounds for hope?“Well,” she says, “I also feel like, here we are sitting in this nice restaurant in London. Do we have any right to be pessimistic? To just say everything’s terrible, and it’s all going to get worse? We just can’t say that to our children, and we can’t say it, for example, to Ukrainians. What right do we have to be pessimistic? We have to do better than that.” More

    • 163 Shares159 Views

      in US Politics

      Donald Trump says Xi Jinping wrote him a ‘beautiful note’ after rally shooting

      by

      Donald Trump has said China’s president wrote him a “beautiful note” after the assassination attempt a week ago, as he continued to court leaders whom Joe Biden has criticised as dictators.In his first campaign rally since narrowly escaping the attempt on his life in Pennsylvania, Trump told a crowd in Michigan on Saturday: “[President Xi Jinping] wrote me a beautiful note the other day when he heard about what happened.”The Republican presidential nominee recalled how he described Xi as “a brilliant man, he controls 1.4 billion people with an iron fist”, adding that the Chinese leader makes people like Biden look like “babies”.As well as familiar attacks on Biden and Vice-President Kamala Harris, Trump also used the rally in Grand Rapids to hail Xi and Vladimir Putin as “smart, tough” figures who “love their country”, echoing praise he gave in 2022 of the Russian president’s strategy to invade Ukraine. In that same 2022 speech, at a rally in Georgia, Trump called North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un “tough”, and said of Kim and Xi: “The smartest one gets to the top.” On Saturday, Trump said he “got along very well” with both leaders.Still wearing a small wound dressing a week after the shooting, Trump also publicly supported the Hungarian prime minister, Viktor Orbán, saying he was right in saying that “we have to have somebody that can protect us”. Orbán was this week accused by the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, of betraying European leaders after he travelled to Moscow for what he called a “peace mission”, holding a joint press conference with Putin in which the Russian leader told Kyiv to give up more land, pull back its troops and drop its efforts to join Nato.After meeting Trump recently in Florida, Orbán flagged the likelihood of a Trump victory, and urged European leaders to reopen “direct lines of diplomatic communication” with Russia and “high-level political talks” with China.Trump’s reference to a “beautiful note” from Xi echoes the now-famous “love letters” he received from North Korea’s Kim. In September 2018, Trump told a rally in West Virginia: “We fell in love. No, really. He wrote me beautiful letters.”The Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward later obtained 25 letters between Trump and Kim for his second book on the Trump presidency, Rage.In one letter, about a meeting in Singapore in June 2018, Kim wrote: “Even now I cannot forget that moment of history when I firmly held Your Excellency’s hand at the beautiful and sacred location as the whole world watched.”After a summit in Vietnam in February 2019, Kim wrote that “every minute we shared 103 days ago in Hanoi was also a moment of glory that remains a precious memory”.The summits did not reduce tensions with North Korea.With Reuters More

    • 163 Shares99 Views

      in US Politics

      The stakes of the US election are higher than ever | Sidney Blumenthal

      by

      I saw western civilization pass before my eyes as Joe Biden drowned.“Putin is waiting for Trump,” John Bolton, Donald Trump’s former national security adviser, has said. When the presidential debate turned to foreign policy, the former president made an apparently startling revelation. He implied that he had a previously unknown conversation with Vladimir Putin before his invasion of Ukraine, perhaps in late 2021 or early 2022. According to Trump, Russia’s president discussed the US withdrawal from Afghanistan. “When Putin saw that, he said, you know what, I think we’re going to go in and maybe take my – this was his dream. I talked to him about it, his dream,” he said. That dream, of course, is the conquest of Ukraine as the restoration of the major piece of the collapsed Soviet Union after the cold war.Biden, overprepared to hit his voluminous talking points, was not listening closely. He did not pick up on Trump’s astounding claim: “I talked to him about it, his dream.” The president’s response was accurate and so concise his words jumbled: “And listen to what he said when he went in, he was going to take Kyiv in five days, remember? Because it’s part of the old Soviet Union. That’s what he wanted, to re-establish Kyiv. And he in fact didn’t do it at all. He didn’t – wasn’t able to get it done. And they’ve lost over – they’ve lost thousands and thousands of troops, 500,000 troops.” Abruptly, Biden ended.He had the time, but did not explain the meaning. He bollixed what he wanted to say about Putin’s effort to occupy Ukraine into “re-establish Kyiv”. Biden did not draw any conclusion. He had not listened closely to Trump’s winding patter. He didn’t sift through the word salad to find the nugget of gold. He did not expose Trump’s worship of Putin, whom he “idolizes”, according to Fiona Hill, the Russia expert formerly on Trump’s national security council, who also wrote that Trump believes Ukraine “must be part of Russia”. Trump shares Putin’s “dream”, to make Russia great again. He aspires to be an unfettered strongman like Putin, dictator “for day one”. That is why, as Bolton says: “Putin is waiting for Trump.” Trump’s campaign is the essential linchpin of Putin’s strategy. Without Trump, he faces endless winter. Trump is his indispensable useful idiot.Biden’s whiff on this or that exchange was more than isolated missed opportunities. His painful performance showed him trying to spew out his numbers, often missing the main point. He often countered without making any argument. It seemed like a PowerPoint presentation missing the closing slides. At times, he lost the plot. “We beat Medicare,” he said confusedly. His acuity and agility were evanescent.Yet sometimes Biden hit his mark. He tore into Trump’s low character, “the morals of an alley cat”, though unfair to cats who don’t choose to be in the alley. He called out Trump’s lies, though accounting for them would have consumed every second in every response.But Biden’s physical appearance was more than a problem of optics. His stiffness was accompanied by a frequently vacant look. He was not the Biden of less than four months ago with his firm and adroit handling of his State of the Union address in which he spontaneously talked down his Maga hecklers.Biden cannot hope for a recovery through a future performance. There is not another State of the Union. The acceptance speech at the Democratic national convention will be read through a teleprompter. There will almost certainly not be a second debate with Trump. What’s in it for Trump? He has already banked what he needs, a gift beyond his wildest dreams, not to mention Putin’s. Trump will not lend Biden a second chance. And would Biden’s handlers risk it?Biden’s halting image will cast a shadow over any message he wishes to make. He will not be able to deflect the fake videos because of the real debate. He will not be able to have his aides explain his capability as chief executive without doubt falling on him.Biden’s age had been set aside until the debate. His accomplishments are the result of his political skill, experience and knowledge. For the Democratic party, Biden was a political necessity. The center held around him. His renewed candidacy prevented a tumultuous free-for-all. But his ability to run on the platform he has built through three and a half years has been severely undermined in 90 minutes.Biden has run for more reasons than his grasp of the state of the party. He understands the state of the world. Biden has held together the center of the western alliance. He decided he would run again because he was the crucial leader at an unprecedented, perilous time. His premise that he must win the presidency to sustain the west against the overarching menace of Putin and his sidekick Trump has been the fundamental reason for his second candidacy.Post-debate, Biden soldiers on. He flies to fundraisers. He campaigns. He is overcoming another obstacle in the pattern of his story, his self-image up from underestimation. But if Biden is not politically viable, the stakes not only remain but are even higher than ever. The cause is always greater than the man.
      Sidney Blumenthal, former senior adviser to President Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton, has published three books of a projected five-volume political life of Abraham Lincoln: A Self-Made Man, Wrestling With His Angel and All the Powers of Earth More

    • 200 Shares169 Views

      in US Politics

      The Guardian view on Putin and Kim: an alarming new pact needs close attention | Editorial

      by

      A shiny, sanctions-busting Russian limousine for Kim Jong-un. A fawning, rapturous reception for Vladimir Putin. These grand gestures may be welcomed by the North Korean and Russian leaders, but are intended as much for their global audience as for each other. The real prize is the strategic partnership treaty that they signed during Mr Putin’s first visit to Pyongyang since 2000. The question is what it will mean in practical terms.The relationship has been reinvigorated by events outside Asia, but hopes of containing it lie within the region. The proximate cause is evidently Russia’s invasion of Ukraine: an isolated and impoverished Pyongyang is already believed to have supplied millions of artillery shells in return for cheap oil, food and other sorely needed goods. Russia might also benefit from North Korean manpower, though much more likely for labour than combat.Further back lies Donald Trump’s disastrous wooing and dismissal of Mr Kim. Entirely predictably, by handing him a top-level summit without any realistic strategy to improve relations in the long term, the then president ensured Mr Kim gave up on improving relations with the US and looked elsewhere. He also prompted Mr Putin and Xi Jinping, who had kept Mr Kim at a distance, to hug him closer.The revival of a Soviet-era pledge of mutual support against “aggression” sounds primarily symbolic given North Korea’s nuclear prowess. More disturbing is Mr Putin’s remark that the partnership could include “military technical cooperation”. US intelligence officials have said that they believe Russia is providing nuclear submarine and ballistic missile technology, though it is likely to extract a high price for such expertise and to have mixed feelings about North Korea’s advances. At a minimum, Russia – which signed up to sanctions in the Obama years – is now obstructing diplomatic action to restrain North Korea.The west has long feared a stronger relationship between Pyongyang, Moscow and Beijing. The launch of the Australian, UK and US (Aukus) security pact, a reaction to China’s growing forcefulness in the Asia-Pacific region, has in turn raised Beijing’s hackles. But China does not regard the others as peers and does not want to be seen as part of a trilateral axis with two pariah states, hence the lack of a Beijing stop on Mr Putin’s Asian tour itinerary. It would also like to retain primacy in managing North Korea, and to limit its weapons development. It does not want the US to become more active in the region and is concerned that it is growing closer to Japan and South Korea, which are also increasing their defence capabilities. Mr Kim’s shift from the long-held commitment to unification with the South to stressing hostility has not helped.South Korea also said explicitly that it will consider sending arms to Ukraine in reaction to the Russian-North Korean deal, spelling out the message to Moscow. Until now, Seoul has limited direct support to non-lethal supplies, though it has signed hefty arms deals with allies of Kyiv. Russia, which has also ramped up its own arms manufacturing at speed, may in the longer term seek to rekindle relations with South Korea and Japan anyway; their large economies compare strikingly to the limited attractions of North Korea. That too offers hope that this deal could be constrained both in extent and duration. The danger is how much damage is caused in the meantime. More

    • 138 Shares169 Views

      in US Politics

      Putin says Trump conviction ‘burns’ idea of US as leading democracy

      by

      Vladimir Putin has described the recent criminal conviction of Donald Trump as politically motivated and claimed that it had “burned” the idea that the US was a leading democracy.Trump last week became the first former US head of state ever convicted of a felony crime after a New York jury found him guilty of 34 charges over efforts to conceal a sexual liaison with an adult film actor, Stormy Daniels, in the run-up to the 2016 presidential election.In a press conference on Wednesday, Putin said: “It is obvious all over the world that the prosecution of Trump – especially in court on charges that were formed on the basis of events that happened years ago, without direct proof – is simply using the judicial system in an internal political struggle.”“Their supposed leadership in the sphere of democracy is being burned to the ground,” Putin said.Putin has previously described the four separate criminal cases against Trump as “political persecution”.His comments echoed Trump’s own response to the conviction. The former president has repeatedly attacked the criminal justice system and claimed, without evidence, that the verdict was orchestrated by Joe Biden.Speaking earlier this week, the former White House Russia specialist Fiona Hill warned that Putin was likely to see Trump’s conviction as a chance to undermine the US’s global influence and boost his own standing.“What mischief does he have to make when you have people within the American system itself denigrating it and pulling it down?” Hill, a former senior adviser to three US presidents – including Trump – said to AP.Putin, she said, was probably “rubbing his hands with glee” at Trump’s attacks on the US criminal justice system.In his 25-year rule, Putin has repeatedly used the Russian court system to impose long prison terms to crack down on dissent and expand political control, transforming the country from once tolerating some dissent to ruthlessly suppressing it. The Russian rights group OVD-Info estimates that more than 1,000 people are currently behind bars on politically motivated charges.Earlier this year, Putin said he would prefer to see Biden re-elected in remarks that were met with skepticism by many Russia watchers who believe his intention may be to use his notoriety to boost Trump. Trump, on his part, has frequently voiced admiration for the Russian leader.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“Basically, we don’t care,” Putin said when asked what this year’s US elections would mean for relations with Moscow. “We will work with any president the American people elect.” He added that he “never had any special ties with Mr Trump”.Trump and Putin have been entangled on the world stage for nearly a decade amid warnings of Russian interference in US elections. Moscow was accused of meddling in the 2016 election with the aim of boosting Trump and damaging Hillary Clinton’s candidacy.A 2019 special counsel investigation of Russian election interference and links between Trump and Moscow ended with multiple indictments and extensive evidence of attempted obstruction by Trump, but no proof of collusion.Last month, Trump boasted that he would quickly free the jailed US journalist Evan Gershkovich from Russia if he wins the election. Putin “will do that for me, but not for anyone else”, he wrote on his Truth Social platform, prompting fresh allegations of collusion. The Kremlin, in turn, denied discussing the case with Trump.“There aren’t any contacts with Donald Trump,” the Kremlin spokesperson, Dmitry Peskov, told reporters. More

    • 188 Shares109 Views

      in US Politics

      ‘A deranged fringe movement’: what is Maga communism, the online ideology platformed by Tucker Carlson?

      by

      In the last few years, a self-styled political movement that sounds like a contradiction in terms has gained ground online: “Maga communism”.Promoted by its two most prominent spokespeople, Haz Al-Din, 27, and Jackson Hinkle, 24, Maga communism comprises a grab bag of ideas that can seem lacking in coherence – ranging from a belief in the power of Donald Trump’s followers to wrest power from “global elites” to an emphasis on masculine “honor”, admiration for Vladimir Putin and support for Palestinian liberation.The two have been repeatedly kicked off social media platforms for spreading disinformation. Hinkle, for example, was booted from Instagram earlier this year – shortly after claiming in a series of posts that Ukraine was behind the terrorist attack on a concert hall in Moscow, despite Islamic State claiming responsibility for the act.Hinkle and Al-Din have been ridiculed by critics as pseudo-intellectual, cravenly opportunistic grifters who have carved out an intentionally provocative niche designed to siphon followers away from other highly online political communities.“If you look at their policies, like what they actually propose, it’s clear that this is a deranged fringe movement that doesn’t really have a great deal of articulation,” said Alexander Reid Ross, a lecturer at Portland State University and author of Against the Fascist Creep, which explored how rightwing movements co-opt the language of the left. “It seems ludicrous, but I would say it’s really a symptom of the erosion of rational political life.”Until recently, Al-Din and Hinkle’s reach seemed limited to corners of the internet largely populated by young men attracted to their messages on masculinity and US foreign policy. But with their inflammatory and often misleading posts about the Gaza war, and as they rail with increasing frequency against what they view as American imperialism, their footprint is growing.“Deranged” or not, Hinkle and Al-Din’s “movement” is attracting recognition in increasingly high places on the right. Hinkle’s defense of Putin’s foreign policy has earned him an invitation on to Tucker Carlson’s show and praise from Trump’s former national security adviser Michael Flynn. Hinkle and Al-Din have also forged international alliances with the likes of the Russian ultranationalist philosopher Alexander Dugin, whom they met at a conference in Moscow earlier this year.The founder of Maga communism cultivates a militant aesthetic when he addresses his followers via livestream from his home.His beard is carefully coiffed, and he often wears an oversized black blazer and black collared shirt. Behind him, swords are mounted on the wall, “to symbolize the war I am waging to defend the message I believe is true amidst mountains of lies”, Al-Din, 27, who streams on Kick and YouTube under the name “Infrared”, said in a phone interview.Both Haz and Hinkle say they support Trump not out of admiration for the man, but out of the belief that his followers represent the most significant mobilization of the American working class in decades.They subscribe to social conservatism in a way that appeals to the growing numbers of gen Z males who believe feminism is harmful to men, and cast issues such as transgender rights, the climate crisis and racial justice as neoliberal distractions.“It’s not that we’re against women. We just perceive that the discourse, culture and the political sphere have seen a huge decline in the notion of honor,” Al-Din said. “One of the reasons for that is the decline in basic masculine virtues, the rise of a kind of effeminization, especially of men.” Hinkle has regularly made anti-trans comments on his own social media, making declarations such as: “We need to protect our youth from trans terrorists and propagandists.”“They’re firmly embedded in a corner of social media that is the most vitriolic, terminally online, troll culture,” said Reid Ross.View image in fullscreenHinkle and Al-Din’s links to communism are tenuous at best, but they may be opportunistically emphasizing the label to tap into shifting attitudes. Polling has indicated that members of gen Z, even gen Z Republican voters, are more open to socialist ideas compared with previous generations. In a video debunking Maga communism published last year, the Marxist economist Richard Wolff noted that there’s precedent for nationalist movements co-opting communist rhetoric, particularly during times of social upheaval and economic hardship.“If you’re a political movement and you want to get supporters at a time when socialism is attracting more and more interest, well, you might be tempted to grab hold at least of the name,” Wolff said, noting that this was a strategy most famously used by Adolf Hitler during his rise to power.“It’s provocative,” Hinkle said of his movement’s name, smirking, in a 2022 interview with the comedian Jimmy Dore. “But that’s why it’s trending on Twitter right now.”According to an infographic regularly recirculated by Hinkle, proposed Maga communist policies include “dismantling big tech”, banning “antifa street terrorism”, ending “woke academia” and subsidizing gyms in every community. They also propose exiting Nato; deporting the Obamas, Bushes and Clintons to the International Criminal Court; ending “open borders”; and “putting banking into the hands of the people”.Hinkle and Al-Din also claim they’re anti-imperialists and cling to the enduring myth of Trump as the more dovish candidate. Their band of online followers see themselves as pitted against “the unipolar world” and “western hegemony”, and they often support authoritarian nations that the US sees as its adversaries, such as Russia, China, Iran and North Korea. Al-Din, for example, told the Guardian that he has a “profound” admiration for North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, in part due to his “resilience in defending the honor and history of Korean civilization”.Neither Hinkle nor Al-Din have typical Maga backgrounds, and they both take a tepid view of Trump, whom they praise as the figurehead of the Maga movement but not necessarily an enduring one.“We have a saying, as Maga communists, which is that when you go to McDonald’s, you don’t go for the clown, you go for the burger,” Al-Din said in an interview. “Trump is the mascot of the movement.”View image in fullscreenBefore Hinkle was a cigar-smoking Maga communist who supports fossil fuels, he was a denim-clad Bernie bro and an environmental activist. He founded a successful ocean clean-up club at his high school in San Clemente, California, organized a student walk-out to protest gun violence after the 2018 Parkland shooting, was invited to speak at a congressional briefing in Washington DC about decommissioning nuclear power plants, and took a knee at his graduation to protest racial injustice. “He’s the kind of guy that gives you hope about the future,” one environmental activist leader once told the Los Angeles Times about Hinkle.In 2018 and 2019, immediately after graduating high school, Hinkle ran (unsuccessfully) for San Clemente, California, city council, and campaigned against homelessness and corruption.By 2020, Hinkle was still entrenched in progressive politics, identifying as a member of the Democratic Socialists of America. But he was also starting to flirt with various personalities considerably outside the progressive mainstream, getting a boost after interviewing the then Democratic presidential candidate Representative Tulsi Gabbard on his YouTube show, The Dive with Jackson Hinkle. (He was kicked off YouTube for spreading disinformation and now streams on the fringe platform Rumble.)Al-Din is the son of Lebanese Muslim immigrants and grew up near Dearborn, Michigan. When he was in college at Michigan State University, he says, he was a full-fledged Marxist. While he claims he’s never voted in a presidential election, he says he was probably most sympathetic toward Bernie Sanders.When Trump won, Al-Din says, he concluded that the left was “out of touch with actual working people”. Put off by what he calls the left’s association with “so-called alternative sexualities and fringe countercultural tendencies” and lack of patriotism, he started developing the set of ideas he called Maga communism.“We were just telling these leftists, these crazy-looking septum-piercing purple- haired leftists, that when you go up to working class Americans and tell them they have to hate their country, and they have to hate being American, you are aiding the enemy, you are not helping, you’re not helping fight imperialism,” said Al-Din.Despite Al-Din’s background, Trump’s anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant rhetoric didn’t bother him, he says. “The whole thing about the Muslim ban, I mean, I really couldn’t care less,” he said in reference to Trump’s 2017 executive orders barring travel to the US from majority Muslim countries. “I didn’t really find anything significant about that at all.”Hinkle and Al-Din’s paths didn’t cross until July 2021, when Hinkle was getting attention online for promoting conspiracy theories rejecting a report that the Syrian government had engaged in chemical weapon attacks. He was invited to appear on a show on the topic hosted by the leftwing streamer Vaush. (Vaush later published the clip with the title Debating the Slipperiest Conspiracy Theorist I Have Ever Met.) It attracted Al-Din’s attention, and the two began messaging.Later that year, Al-Din visited Hinkle in LA and pitched him on what he calls his take on Marxism-Leninism: Maga communism, which envisions harnessing the populist, nationalist fervor of Trump’s base in pursuit of a working-class revolution.The following year, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine offered the perfect opportunity for Hinkle and Haz to promote their new gospel. The conflict animated online armies on both the far left and far right, who expressed strong criticisms of Ukraine’s political system and voiced concerns about the expansion of Nato.“The media lied to you every day for two straight years about Covid,” Hinkle wrote on Twitter/X, days after Russia’s invasion. “Why would you believe anything they’re telling you about Russia & Ukraine?”Most recently, Maga communism has glommed onto the Palestinian cause – to the chagrin of much of the movement – which has also helped to amplify its reach.If Al-Din is the thought leader behind Maga communism, then Hinkle is its salesman. In the six months since 7 October, Hinkle has enjoyed a surge in visibility by pivoting into generating pro-Palestine content online. That’s included sharing gruesome images of dead children among rubble in Gaza, posting AI self-portraits in combat gear with the caption “FREE PALESTINE” and hawking coffee mugs with the words “Zionist Tears”, sold at $16.99 a pop. His followers on X leapt from less than 500,000 to more than 2.5 million in just six months, and he has a premium account, meaning he’s entitled to a share of ad revenue according to the level of engagement on his posts.Al-Din has a much smaller following on X – just shy of 90,000 – but these days, his posts often garner hundreds of thousands, even a million, views, significantly more than he was netting prior to 7 October. Al-Din told the Guardian he makes about $5,000 a month via streaming. Hinkle declined to say how much he made from his platforms; according to the New York Times, he made $550 last September via X.Al-Din and Hinkle’s position on the Israel-Gaza conflict makes them outliers in the broader Maga movement, which has largely rallied behind Israel. Trump and his allies have cast pro-Palestinian protests in the US as another manifestation of “wokeness”. Trump recently described protesting college students as “raging lunatics and Hamas sympathizers”.While some other young leaders on the far right, such as the white nationalist livestreamer Nick Fuentes, oppose Israel for explicitly antisemitic reasons, Al-Din and Hinkle insist that their position on the conflict is grounded in their broader “anti-imperialist” stance, shared by more prominent conservatives such as Tucker Carlson, who has also criticized US support for Israel. Hinkle and Fuentes have been allies in the past; Hinkle and Al-Din have previously streamed on Fuentes’ platform Cozy.tv, and Hinkle said he had gotten dinner with Fuentes last September. They fell out shortly after following an argument about class politics and the country-folk artist Oliver Anthony’s viral song about the working class.But despite Hinkle and Al-Din’s high-profile support for Gaza, the pair were recently jeered at a pro-Palestine event at Emory University. The event was co-hosted by Cair (Council on American-Islamic Relations) and was to feature the political activist Norman Finkelstein. The Emory law student Grayson Walker, the showrunner for Al-Din’s Infrared show, was a co-organizer, and added Al-Din as a speaker at the last minute.In his bizarre speech, Al-Din berated members of the audience, saying that they were responsible for spreading “imperialist and Zionist propaganda and slander against my comrade Jackson Hinkle” and were “just as culpable in the crimes of the Zionists as those who give their dollars and money to them”. The audience booed him and shouted “shame on you”, after which Cair abruptly canceled the event and put out a statement.“Today, we unwittingly damaged the movement for Palestinian liberation by allowing a rogue actor to hijack an event intended to highlight the Palestinian genocide,” Cair said in a statement. “A student co-organizer commandeered this platform by inserting hateful and divisive guests into the program,” it continued, adding that the organizer, Walker, had “greenlighted a deeply problematic speech”. (Hinkle and Al-Din later claimed they’d been “canceled” by “the Zionists” and used a homophobic slur to refer to the pro-Palestinian students at Emory.)Al-Din and Hinkle see Israel as part of a “globalist” deep state network, while rejecting the notion that such terminology relies on antisemitic dog-whistles. They see Ukraine as part of that same network, as well as Nato, the European Union, and the Biden administration. “We are fighting to win over the hearts and minds of the Maga common man,” Al-Din told the Guardian. “Israel is just as much connected to the same multinational corporations and special interests that Maga despises.”Al-Din and Hinkle have been suspended or banned from a number of platforms for spreading disinformation, mainly about the Russia-Ukraine conflict or about the war in Gaza. A recent profile of Hinkle by the New York Times cited research indicating that a network of bots or inauthentic accounts may be responsible for amplifying some of his most incendiary posts. In January, Hinkle’s account on X was ranked third for posts flagged with “community notes”; his posts have been repeatedly flagged as disinformation by watchdogs.Last month, Hinkle posted a video that he claimed showed Israelis “panicking” as Iran’s missiles reached Israel. Online sleuths verified that the video was actually of pop star Louis Tomlinson’s fans near the Four Seasons hotel in Buenos Aires.Asked by the Guardian about charges that he spreads disinformation, Hinkle said he “rejected the question”.Despite Hinkle’s apparent penchant for sharing disinformation about contentious world events, he’s landed some high-profile media appearances in the last six months. He appeared on former the CNN host Chris Cuomo’s show and Alex Jones’ Infowars to pitch Maga communism. Jones, who often goes on red-faced rants about communism, appeared relatively open to what Hinkle had to say.“Most of the Maga movement understands that the resources, the land and the means of production of the United States of America should be in the hands of the Maga working class,” said Hinkle. Jones called the idea “very interesting”. Last month, Jones also changed his tune and began referring to Israel’s war in Gaza as a “genocide”.Hinkle and Al-Din have also continued to expand their international reach. In February, they attended a conference in Moscow hosted by a Bulgarian oligarch who has been placed under US sanctions. At the event, called “The International Movement of Russophiles”, Hinkle met Dugin, the ultranationalist philosopher, and the Russian foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov. During the conference, Hinkle became the first American appointed to the Russophiles’ executive board. Weeks later, Dugin wrote approvingly of Hinkle, Al-Din and “the emergence of Maga communism” in a blog for Arktos, a far-right publishing house based in Budapest.View image in fullscreen“These individuals are allies of conservative Tucker Carlson but are also Marxists who support Trump and advocate the ‘Make America Great Again’ (Maga) slogan,” Dugin wrote. “Together, they are committed to dismantling liberal dominance.” Last year, Hinkle appeared on the Russian state broadcaster VGTRK and claimed “Joe Biden is controlled by a satanic cabal of DC deep-state leadership.”Reid Ross says Hinkle and Al-Din occupy an overlap in the left-right venn diagram that is probably rooted in an “anti-imperialist” ecosystem that has proliferated online in the last decade.Last year, Hinkle spoke at an event at the Reflecting Pool in Washington DC called “Rage Against the War Machine”, which was promoted by Tucker Carlson and hosted by the Libertarian party and the People’s party, which was briefly affiliated with Cornel West. The event drew together a curious amalgam of far-right and far-left personalities – including Matthew Heimbach, one of the organizers of white supremacist “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, and the former Green party presidential candidate Jill Stein. Participants rallied under the banner of pacifism; reports from the event suggested overall messaging supported Russia’s war on Ukraine.A Discord server – essentially a chat room – called “IGG MECHA-TANKIES”, linked to Al-Din’s show Infrared, has about 5,000 members and offers some insight into the movement’s internal dynamics. The general chat is awash with pseudo-intellectual posturing and armchair historical analysis. Members often feature obscure quotes by Bolshevik revolutionaries in their bios, Russian flags, or pictures of a young Kim Jong-un as their profile pictures.Joseph, who joined the Infrared community two years ago, described the appeal of Maga communism (he declined to share his last name due to privacy concerns). He’s 19, a resident of Kentucky, and works overnight shifts in a factory making air vents for luxury cars.“I was always sympathetic to Maga, but I’d also liked some of what Bernie Sanders had been saying around the time of his campaign,” Joseph said. But, he said, he found himself feeling alienated from leftist spaces because he considers himself socially conservative.The emphasis on hyper-masculinity in these kinds of ultra-nationalist or conspiracy-based movements, experts say, often draws in vulnerable men who may crave affirmation or a sense of belonging. “The thing about Haz [Al-Din] and his success as this great leader is that he really understands the cultish aspect of fascist leadership,” said Reid Ross. “Haz has an intensity that makes him seem like a huge believer.”Their support for Trump does not translate into loyalty to the GOP. Al-Din told the Guardian that his end goal was to “reclaim” the century-old American Communist party, whose numbers have dwindled to 5,000 and which he says has become co-opted by “liberals, federal agents and Democrats”.An animated propaganda video, made by one of Al-Din’s followers, projects a dystopia where the US government is persecuting known communists. Al-Din escapes from Washington DC with a cache of weapons stolen from antifascists, seeking refuge with midwestern farmers. The video ends with a communist uprising against the government, led by Al-Din, cast as revolutionary folk hero. More