EA on International Outlets: Anticipating Trump-Putin Meeting on Russia’s Ukraine Invasion
EA-Times Radio VideoCast: Countering the Spectacle and Threat of the Putin-Trump Meeting
David Dunn and I joined BBC outlets on Tuesday to examine Donald Trump’s quest for authoritarian rule, from his chaotic pursuit of a photo opportunity with Vladimir Putin to his deployment of the National Guard in Washington D.C. for a non-existent crime “emergency”.
To listen, you need to be in the UK or to use a VPN.
Listen to BBC Radio Scotland from 2:18.23
I chat with Good Morning Scotland about Trump’s meeting with Putin in Alaska on Friday, stressing his quest for publicity rather than substance — and thus the possibility that he could be “flipped” by the Russian leader.
Donald Trump has almost no knowledge of the situation in Ukraine and Russia’s 41 ½-month invasion. He has personal responses, so in recent weeks he has been frustrated with Russia not only maintaining but escalating its attacks on Ukraine’s civilians.
He does not have a sense of where the frontlines are. He does not have a sense of Ukraine’s attacks deep inside Russia. He has these snap personal reactions and these false statements.
I stress, “Russia will not give up any of the territory it occupies. It not only wants to keep this but is demanding territory which it does not currently hold. These are not negotiations. This is Russia seeing how much it can get out of Trump.”
I then turn to Trump’s military pose in the US capital, detailing the statistics showing violent crime has dropped by about 26% in Washington this year and homicides are at their lowest rate in more than 30 years.
This is a political stunt, but it is a dangerous political stunt. This is a wannabe authoritarian. This is a man who does not believe that cities and states have power. He believes that only he has power, including over the use of the US military for law enforcement.
Listen to BBC Radio WM from 2:44.06
David Dunn outlines the concerns over the Trump-Putin meeting.
He talks about life in Washington and then explains:
Trump is trying to change the subject, away from possibly selling out Ukraine to Vladimir Putin on Friday. He is flooding the zone with a news story which is him being tough on crime by upending the role of the government and the police in Washington D.C., invoking a public safety emergency when there is no public safety emergency.
“Trump thinks he has absolute power,” Dunn notes. “The US Constitution does not give himself absolute power.”
And he knocks back the host’s posturing that “Trump is walking the walk” by summarizing the “performative theatrics” of a man who is not “addressing the issue”.
