#Foreign policy of the Donald Trump administration

[justinspoliticalcorner]

David Badash at NCRM:

President-elect Donald Trump says he will not commit to refraining from using military or economic coercion to assume control of Greenland or the Panama Canal, and might consider “economic force” to take control of Canada. “It might be that you’ll have to do something,” Trump told reporters at a press conference from his Mar-a-Lago resort and residence Tuesday (video below), less than two weeks before he will be sworn in to office as the 47th President of the United States. “Can you assure the world that as you try to get control of these areas, you are not going to use military or economic coercion?” Trump was asked. “No,” Trump immediately replied. “And can you tell us a little bit about what your plan is? Are you going to negotiate a new treaty? Are you going to ask the Canadians to hold a vote? What is the strategy?”

“I can’t assure you — you’re talking about uh, Panama and Greenland,” Trump responded, not answering the questions about plans or strategy. “No, I can’t assure you on either of those two. But uh, I can say this, we need them for economic security — the Panama Canal was built for our military.” “I’m not going to commit to that now. It might it might be that you’ll have to do something,” Trump continued, talking over the reporter. “Uh, look, the Panama Canal is vital to our country. It’s being operated by China. China, and we gave the Panama Canal to Panama. We didn’t give it to China.”

[...] NBC News added that Trump “said later that he would not use military force against Canada, only ‘economic force.'” “’That would really be something,’ Trump said of the U.S. taking control of Canada. He has quipped lately that it should become the 51st U.S. state.” [...] Journalist Alan Fisher warned, “Let’s be clear what [Trump] is saying – we will take by force, the land another Democracy has…… Remember he ran on an anti- war platform and is now threatening both Denmark and Panama.” Daily Beast opinion columnist Rotimi Adeoye responded to Trump’s comments, saying: “Gen-Z voters who supported Trump should realize that if any war happens they will be the first to go. Trump is not pro-peace.” Some have noted that Greenland, a territory of Denmark, is by extension part of NATO, and the U.S. already operates a military base on Greenland: Pituffik Space Base (formerly Thule Air Base), a U.S. Space Force installation.

This dangerous lunatic ought to be put in a straitjacket in a padded rubber room.

The people of Canada, Greenland, and the Panama Canal portion do NOT want to give up their sovereignty.

See Also:

HuffPost: Trump Suggests Using Military Force To Take Control Of Panama Canal And Greenland

The Guardian: Trump refuses to rule out using military to take Panama Canal and Greenland

Unmasking Russia: Trump Doesn't Rule Out Using Military Force Against U.S. Allies, Bolstering Russia's Strategic Goals

[hezigler]

World Leader SENDS BRUTAL MESSAGE TO TRUMP after election WIN

[andysouldancer]

Okay world. I've had my 7 day free trial of 2025 - I don't want anymore of it. How do I unsubscribe ?

When will the collective of media just ask, "What the hell are you talking about?"

He would have no answer. He is just throwing shit out there.

No other person would be given such unchallenged airtime.

Dumb white men are given an insanely different standard.

[saxafimedianetwork]

A Trumpian Policy for Africa

A Trumpian Policy for #Africa: Experts weigh in on the potential upsides & downsides of a more deal-focused approach, including compromised #US influence & a renewed focus on meaningful relations. There may be recognition of #Somaliland as a strategic move. #AfricaPolicy #USAfricaRelations

Continue reading A Trumpian Policy for Africa

[truthwars]

Donald Trump Cabinet Picks 2025: Full List and Key Appointments

Trump’s Cabinet picks for 2025 reveal his bold vision for America’s future. From Pompeo to Dr. Oz, explore the full list of appointees, their roles, and what it means for the U.S. Read more on this here: #Trump2025 #Politics #CabinetPicks

President-elect Donald Trump has unveiled his Cabinet picks for 2025, setting the stage for a second-term administration focused on advancing his America First agenda. These appointments, ranging from seasoned insiders to loyalists, reflect Trump’s vision for reshaping America’s policies domestically and internationally. This article explores Trump’s Cabinet picks for 2025, their key roles, and…

[opencommunion]

looking back on how liberal political analysts talked about donald trump during his 2016 campaign, I notice two very important insights that have vanished from the conversation this time around.

1: the dire warnings about the rise of fascism were really centered on trump's followers, not the man himself. what concerned scholars of fascism in particular was that the already well-established neonazi presence in the US was openly rallying around a presidential candidate. trump's campaign emboldened neonazis, but the neonazis were already there — this is why we saw an astronomical rise in hate crimes against many marginalized groups during trump's campaign, before he was elected. trump himself was understood as an opportunist riding the wave of rising fascist sentiment — the wave itself was a bigger concern than the surfer. trump was replaceable. liberals now seem to have forgotten that trump's followers won't disappear if harris wins. the heritage foundation (originators of 'project 2025,' blue maga's favorite boogeyman) won't disappear if harris wins. extreme right politicians — many of whom I would argue are even further right than trump, and more embedded in the establishment — won't disappear. even if you mistakenly see the republican party as the sole provenance of usamerican fascism, republicans won't disappear if harris is elected.

2: the people centered in the crosshairs of trump's agenda were migrants and asylum seekers; chiefly those from south of the US border and from majority muslim countries. the intensified demonization of these groups led analysts to draw parallels with fascist parties that were on the rise in europe. hatred of migrants and muslims is indisputably the primary driver of 21st century fascism, from the UK to India. so tell me why the conversation in the US has shifted to revolve around white trans people? yes, trump supporters are obviously transphobic, but you have to trace this particular manifestation of transphobia to its source, which still comes down to white supremacy and anti-migrant sentiment. when you actually look at the way fascists talk about trans people, it all comes back to the idea that hostile foreign elements invading the country have degraded white christian values. trans people of color have already been targeted for a long time, because we're seen as a sort of vanguard of non-white perversion; this isn't new to us. white trans people are now experiencing increased persecution because transness is seen as infiltrating white families/communities and corrupting their whiteness. I'm not saying we shouldn't talk about the rise of transphobic policies; of course we should. what disturbs me is that anti-migrant sentiment has been shunted to the sidelines of discussions of 'trumpism,' when it is still very much the center of his platform. and that's the part of his platform that the harris campaign has adopted to try and pull voters from him! that's the part of the republican platform that the biden administration advanced with the excuse of 'reaching across the aisle.' and what more extreme manifestation of an anti-migrant anti-muslim platform is there than committing genocide in gaza and then refusing to let gazan asylum seekers (or even gazans with US citizenship!) into the US?

the entire US government, red and blue, is unified around the anti-migrant, white supremacist crux of so-called 'trumpism.' large swathes of the american public, whether they vote red or blue, are enthusiastic about genocidal foreign and domestic policies. none of this stops when trump is gone

[starseedpatriot]

From X: I am an unaffiliated voter who will be voting for Donald Trump for the first time this November.

I’m not your “stereotypical” Trump voter. I’m college educated. I’m part Latino. I’m gay and married. I speak three languages. I am a classical liberal.

And I believe that a vote for Trump is a critical stand against an illiberal, corrupt, and ineffective government system.

The Biden-Harris administration continues to attack its political opponents, censor critics and threaten free speech, bail out violent criminals, put men in women’s spaces, and allow unvetted millions of illegal aliens to enter the country. Its foreign policy is a nightmare resulting in billions in cash and weapons given to terrorists and involvement in numerous wars. Kamala Harris has failed to show effective leadership on a single issue of national importance and continues to prop up a cognitively impaired Biden.

As unattractive as Trump is as a person, his first term oversaw an incredibly peaceful foreign policy, real wage and economic growth, and didn’t threaten my rights to self defense and free speech.

I believe in freedom over force and in our Constitutional Republic that protects individual rights from government abuse. Donald Trump is the best option to secure those.

[gansey-like]

Hey so this is super scary

Meta on Tuesday announced a set of changes to its content moderation practices that would effectively put an end to its longstanding fact-checking program, a policy instituted to curtail the spread of misinformation across its social media apps.

The reversal of the years-old policy is a stark sign of how the company is repositioning itself for the Trump era. Meta described the changes with the language of a mea culpa, saying that the company had strayed too far from its values over the prior decade.

“We want to undo the mission creep that has made our rules too restrictive and too prone to over-enforcement,” Joel Kaplan, Meta’s newly installed global policy chief, said in a statement.

Instead of using news organizations and other third-party groups, Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram and Threads, will rely on users to add notes or corrections to posts that may contain false or misleading information.

Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s chief executive, said in a video that the new protocol, which will begin in the United States in the coming months, is similar to the one used by X, called Community Notes.

“It’s time to get back to our roots around free expression,” Mr. Zuckerberg said. The company’s current fact-checking system, he added, had “reached a point where it’s just too many mistakes and too much censorship.”

Mr. Zuckerberg conceded that there would be more “bad stuff” on the platform as a result of the decision. “The reality is that this is a trade-off,” he said. “It means that we’re going to catch less bad stuff, but we’ll also reduce the number of innocent people’s posts and accounts that we accidentally take down."

Elon Musk has relied on Community Notes to flag misleading posts on X. Since taking over the social network, Mr. Musk, a major Trump donor, has increasingly positioned X as the platform behind the new Trump presidency.

Meta’s move is likely to please the administration of President-elect Donald J. Trump and its conservative allies, many of whom have disliked Meta’s practice of adding disclaimers or warnings to questionable or false posts. Mr. Trump has long railed against Mr. Zuckerberg, claiming the fact-checking feature treated posts by conservative users unfairly.

Since Mr. Trump won a second term in November, Meta has moved swiftly to try to repair the strained relationships he and his company have with conservatives.

Mr. Zuckerberg noted that “recent elections” felt like a “cultural tipping point towards once again prioritizing speech.”

In late November, Mr. Zuckerberg dined with Mr. Trump at Mar-a-Lago, where he also met with his secretary of state pick, Marco Rubio. Meta donated $1 million to support Mr. Trump’s inauguration in December. Last week, Mr. Zuckerberg elevated Mr. Kaplan, a longtime conservative and the highest-ranking Meta executive closest to the Republican Party, to the company’s most senior policy role. And on Monday, Mr. Zuckerberg announced that Dana White, the head of the Ultimate Fighting Championship and a close ally of Mr. Trump’s, would join Meta’s board.

Meta executives recently gave a heads-up to Trump officials about the change in policy, according to a person with knowledge of the conversations who spoke on condition of anonymity. The fact-checking announcement coincided with an appearance by Mr. Kaplan on “Fox & Friends,” a favorite show of Mr. Trump. He told the hosts of the morning show popular with conservatives that there was “too much political bias” in the fact-checking program.

The change brings an end to a practice the company started eight years ago, in the weeks after Mr. Trump’s election in 2016. At the time, Facebook was under fire for the unchecked dissemination of misinformation spread across its network, including posts from foreign governments angling to sow discord among the American public.

As a result of enormous public pressure, Mr. Zuckerberg turned to outside organizations like The Associated Press, ABC News and the fact-checking site Snopes, along with other global organizations vetted by the International Fact-Checking Network, to comb over potentially false or misleading posts on Facebook and Instagram and rule whether they needed to be annotated or removed.

Among the changes, Mr. Zuckerberg said, will be to “remove restrictions on topics like immigration and gender that are out of touch with mainstream discourse.” He also said that the trust and safety and content moderation teams would be moved from California, with the U.S. content review shifting to Texas. That would “help remove the concern than biased employees are overly censoring content,” he added.

[welcometoqueer]

Meanwhile, in Russia:

According to the Russian News Agency, in an interview, Putin's presidential aide Nikolay Patrushev claims Russia helped Trump win the Presidential election and makes a veiled threat that Trump must now deliver the agreed-upon quid pro quo.

His exact words: "To achieve success in the election, Donald Trump relied on certain forces to which he has corresponding obligations. As a responsible person, he will be obliged to fulfill them."

No mainstream media source or U.S. elected official has addressed this interview as of yet (Nov. 11, 2024).

This all comes after a Russian TV network aired nude photos from Melania Trump’s modeling days seemingly as a way of showing Trump who’s pulling the strings.

[ID:

A screenshot of an article by the Russian News Agency. The headline reads "Trump to rely on forces that brought him to power — Russian presidential aide."

The article reads:

Nikolay Patrushev agreed that Trump, when he was still a candidate, "made many statements critical of the destructive foreign and domestic policies pursued by the current administration" MOSCOW, November 11. /TASS/. In his future policies, including those on the Russian track US President-elect Donald Trump will rely on the commitments to the forces that brought him to power, rather than on election pledges, Russian presidential aide Nikolay Patrushev told the daily Kommersant in an interview. "The election campaign is over," Patrushev noted. "To achieve success in the election, Donald Trump relied on certain forces to which he has corresponding obligations. As a responsible person, he will be obliged to fulfill them."

/end ID]

[rjzimmerman]

Here we go, before the mf is even sworn into office he's scaring the shit out of a whole bunch of people, including ordinary Americans who fear for their country's future, such as me. Does this mean that anybody who might be walking down the street and speaking English with a foreign accent are potentially subject to snatching by the US Army?

Excerpt from this story from Rolling Stone:

Donald Trump‘s determination to conduct mass deportations of undocumented immigrants is very real, and he wants to start cracking down immediately. One of the ways he plans to do so is by declaring a national emergency that will enable him to use the military to help boot migrants out of the United States.

The president-elect on Monday responded “TRUE!!!”  to a Truth Social post about reports that his incoming administration is “prepared to declare a national emergency and will use military assets to reverse the Biden invasion through a mass deportation program.”

The confirmation came at 4:08 a.m.

Trump built his 2024 presidential campaign around a vow to lock down the border and forcibly — and violently — deport the undocumented immigrants currently living in the United States. He spoke repeatedly about an “invasion” of migrants who are “poisoning the blood” of the nation, and even claiming that undocumented immigrants have been “conquering” American cities.

He’s been insistent since winning the election that immigration is his top priority, telling NBC News that his administration will spare no expense when it comes to deportation. “It’s not a question of a price tag,” he said. “It’s not — really, we have no choice. When people have killed and murdered, when drug lords have destroyed countries, and now they’re going to go back to those countries because they’re not staying here. There is no price tag.”

There will certainly be a price tag, however, and it will be high given the logistical implications of removing millions of people from the nation. Immigration and Customs Enforcement is not currently equipped to carry out Trump’s deportation agenda, which calls for quadrupling the number of deportations the agency carries out every year. 

Politico reported Monday on some of the tactics the administration plans to start cracking down, noting that deportations will commence within Trump’s first 100 days in office, and that his team is looking for ways to expedite the process that will withstand any legal challenges from rights groups. Trump is also expected to quickly do away with a Biden administration policy that prioritized deporting migrants who threatened public safety and national security, and directed ICE officers to take “the totality of the facts and circumstances” into consideration before deporting migrants with criminal convictions.

Tom Homan, the immigration hardliner Trump recently tapped as his “border czar,” has said criminals will be the first to go, while teasing the administration’s aggressive approach to deportation. “I got three words for them: shock and awe,” Homan told Donald Trump Jr. of the administration’s approach. “Shock and awe. You’re going to see us take this country back.”

[simply-ivanka]

Kamala Harris: Mystery Commander in Chief

How would the Vice President keep America safe in a dangerous world? The voters deserve some answers.

The Editorial Board --- Wall Street Journal

Kamala Harris is all but telling Americans they’ll have to elect her to find out what she really believes, as the Vice President ducks interviews and the media give her a free ride. This is bad enough on domestic issues, but on foreign policy it could be perilous. The world is more dangerous than it’s been in decades, and Americans deserve to know how the woman aiming to be Commander in Chief Harris would confront these threats.

Ms. Harris this week tweeted a photo of her sitting next to President Biden in the White House situation room discussing the Middle East. The point is to suggest she’s a co-pilot on Biden foreign policy.

This isn’t the credential the Harris campaign thinks it is, and the voters should hear directly from her what she thinks about the 2021 Afghanistan withdrawal, the failure to deter Russia in Ukraine, the Iranian nuclear program, China’s island grabs in the South China Sea, and more. The matter is all the more important because Ms. Harris conspicuously declined to choose a running mate who might lend foreign policy experience to the ticket.

Ms. Harris has given a few hints about her own views on the Middle East, and those aren’t encouraging. Her team spent much of Thursday walking back whether she told an anti-Israel group she’d be willing to ponder an arms embargo against Israel. She skipped Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech to Congress when our main Middle East ally is under siege. Did she pass over Josh Shapiro as her running mate because he would have enraged the anti-Israel wing of the Democratic Party?

To the extent she has revealed a larger instinct on national security, it’s been wrong. She told the Council on Foreign Relations in 2019 that she’d rejoin the Iran nuclear deal as long as “Iran also returned to verifiable compliance.” But Iran didn’t comply and is now on the brink of a nuclear breakout.

Her 2018 Senate vote to “end U.S. involvement in the Saudi-led air campaign in Yemen,” as Ms. Harris put it in a tweet, also hasn’t aged well. The Houthis the Saudis were fighting are now targeting commercial ships in the Red Sea almost daily and putting U.S. naval assets at risk. Does she think this status quo can persist—and what would she do differently?

Ms. Harris will surely argue that she and Mr. Biden reinvigorated the North Atlantic Treaty Organization after Vladimir Putin’s invasion in Ukraine. But absent a change in U.S. political will, the war in Ukraine isn’t on track to end on terms favorable to American interests. Her past enthusiasm for banning fracking—which her campaign is trying to walk back—also suggests she isn’t serious about checking Mr. Putin’s main source of war financing.

Ms. Harris would no doubt also tout the diplomatic progress the Biden Administration has made in Asia with Japan, the Philippines and others. Yet she whiffed on one of the single most important diplomatic questions in Asia: She opposed Barack Obama’s Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal that would have excluded China and boosted America as the region’s premiere trading partner.

Most important, will Ms. Harris build up the hard military assets required to deter China’s Xi Jinping and a consolidating axis of U.S. adversaries? “I unequivocally agree with the goal of reducing the defense budget,” Ms. Harris said as a Senator in 2020 after voting against a Bernie Sanders proposal to slash the Pentagon by 10%. That vote needed no explanation, but Ms. Harris wanted to make sure the left knew she was sympathetic. Does she still want to slash the defense budget?

Donald Trump often shoots from the hip on these subjects, and his favorable comments about dictators are witless. But his first-term record, especially on Iran and the Middle East, is far stronger than the Biden-Harris performance.

Americans shouldn’t have to read tea leaves to figure out if Ms. Harris would keep the country safe in a treacherous world.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Walter Einenkel at Daily Kos:

Donald Trump nominated former acting attorney general and Trump loyalist Matthew Whitaker to be the United States ambassador to NATO on Wednesday. The ambassador serves as a crucial liaison with our foreign allies, who have criticized Trump’s pro-Russia statements and sentiments during the Russia-Ukraine War. “Matt is a strong warrior and loyal Patriot, who will ensure the United States’ interests are advanced and defended,” Trump said in a statement.  Whitaker is a relic from Trump’s first term, where he began as chief of staff to Attorney General Jeff Sessions before a brief and stormy stint replacing Sessions as acting attorney general. He was in turn replaced by William Barr, then managed to hang on as an adviser in the Justice Department. But it wouldn’t be a Trump pick without a history of dubiousness. Whitaker’s 2013 bid for a Senate seat in his home state of Iowa was a failure. But during that campaign he argued that states could “nullify” federal laws—if they had the "courage" to do so. As University of Texas law professor Stephen Vladeck told CNN in 2018, “Nullification as a serious, mainstream legal argument didn’t survive the Civil War (or the constitutional amendments that followed).”

He subsequently served as a “prominent member” on the advisory board for the Miami-based World Patent Marketing, an “invention promotion” company that was accused of defrauding customers. Whitaker was reportedly “slow to respond to government investigators probing it.” A Florida court ultimately ordered World Patent Marketing to pay out a $25 million settlement and agree to close up shop. After he was publicly critical of special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Trump's campaign activities and Russian interference in the 2016 election, Whitaker’s ascension to acting attorney general set off red flags.

[...] Whitaker then made a combative appearance in front of the House Judiciary Committee, where he refused to answer questions about his conversations with then-President Trump or the potential for obstructing the special counsel’s investigation. It was later reported that Whitaker left the committee hearing and flew off to Mar-a-Lago for a private chitchat with Trump. The Daily Beast published a report detailing how Whitaker spent his days in Washington after the Trump administration ended and he retired from the Department of Justice. While not registered as a lobbyist, Whitaker seems to have been paid by a “dark money” group to lobby for presidential pardons.

Donald Trump taps Matthew Whitaker to serve as the US’s NATO Ambassador.

[mariacallous]

Foreign ministers of the five biggest powers in Europe together with the incoming top EU diplomat and host Poland held talks in Warsaw on Tuesday to reaffirm their commitment to Ukraine in its defence against Russian aggression.

“We were in agreement that imposing on Ukraine peace recipes contrary to its interests or unacceptable socially would have a negative impact on the stability of the country,” Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski said after the meeting of Weimar Triangle foreign ministers (Germany, France and Poland) plus Italy, Spain and the UK.

“Any scenarios for finishing the war and putting an end to Russian aggression must be worked out in close cooperation with the Ukrainian government,” Sikorski added.

The meeting was called to allay fears that Ukraine would be sidelined once the newly elected US president Donald Trump takes office in January. Trump has repeatedly talked about bringing peace “in 24 hours” by imposing a solution that would likely be heavily weighted towards Russia.

Jitters were also caused by the decision of German Chancellor Olaf Scholz to discuss the war with Russian President Vladimir Putin on a one-on-one call last week, the first since the full-scale invasion began. That call has been criticised by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk, among others.

Sikorski was joined in Warsaw by the foreign ministers of Germany (Annalena Baerbock), France (Jean-Noel Barrot), Italy (Antonio Tajani) as well as Kaja Kallas, the future EU high representative for foreign affairs. The foreign ministers of Spain and the UK took part in the talks remotely.

Explaining the reasons for organising the meeting, Sikorski said it was prompted by the weekend’s major attack on Ukraine, the largest since last year, as well as by the US presidential election.

The meeting in Warsaw also served as an attempt by Poland to preserve its key role in European policymaking on Ukraine after apparently being snubbed last month by Berlin when it held talks on Ukraine with the US, UK and France but not Poland. It was also an opportunity for Sikorski to score a few domestic points ahead of his party’s primary election later this week to choose its presidential candidate for next year.

German Foreign Minister Baerbock spoke about the importance of not “having any breaks in securing the peace in Europe” in the context of uncertainties connected to the election of Trump as the next president of the US. EU countries, she said, “must strengthen the European pillar of NATO” and “invest significantly more than 2 per cent of GDP in defence”.

She also warned against “self-fulfilling prophecies”, implying that it was too early to tell what a future US administration would do in relation to the war and US financial involvement in European defence.

All the foreign ministers were careful to highlight the importance of cooperation with the US for ensuring peace in Europe, regardless of who holds the reins of power in Washington. “It’s only by having strong transatlantic ties that we can counter the rising threats from Russia and other countries,” Sikorski said.

[allthebrazilianpolitics]

Trump may try to push Brazil away from China and boost the far-right in the region, says analyst

Professor Barbara Motta says Brazilian diplomacy may seek normalization in its relations with the US

Although Brazil is not currently a priority country for US foreign relations, the effects of Donald Trump's electoral victory, confirmed on Wednesday (6), may be felt in the foreign policy of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva's government. That’s the analysis of Barbara Motta, professor of International Relations at the Federal University of Sergipe (UFS, in Portuguese) and coordinator of the Foreign Policy Observatory for Brazil (OPEB, in Portuguese).

“At first, the main consequence is how Brazil will manage to take a stance amid the trade war between China and the United States. For Brazil, it is important to maintain good commercial and diplomatic ties with both the United States and China, since both countries are important economic partners,” she told Brasil de Fato.

She believes that Trump will resume the policy he used in his first term, applying trade tariffs on Chinese products and pressuring allies to do the same. In a new round of Trump at the White House, Motta points out that this may be political pressure from the US on the Brazilian government.

“The United States sees Latin America as its exclusive area of influence, and Brazil is one of the major countries in the region. This could be pressure from the Trump administration on Brazil to distance the country and the regional bloc from a close commercial and diplomatic relationship with China.”

Continue reading.

[sapphicscience]

update from the uncommitted national movement about their meeting with harris (from their email list):

tl;dr: she didn't make any commitments but appeared willing to open a dialogue regarding an arms embargo. now is the time to push harder than ever.

full email and action link under the cut

Dear Uncommitted Supporters,

It’s Abbas here, one of the Co-Founders of the Uncommitted national movement.

On Wednesday, Layla Elabed and I had a pivotal moment of engagement with Vice President Kamala Harris and Governor Tim Walz in Detroit. In brief but powerful conversations, both of us made it clear that while our communities want to support Vice President Harris, but first, we need a shift in policy that prioritizes saving lives in Gaza.

We were honest and direct about the devastating impact of current U.S. policies on Palestinian families abroad and here at home and the urgent need for an arms embargo.

Vice President Harris expressed empathy and a willingness to meet with us to discuss this critical issue. While she did not commit to supporting an arms embargo at this time, she did agree to have an open dialogue about it.

This represents an important step forward, one that gives us an opportunity to push for the changes we so desperately need. Together, our movement has shifted the national conversation from only discussing a ceasefire to elevating the demand to an arms embargo on Israel - a concrete step our administration can and must take to stop the bombing of the Palestinian people.

We need a more humane and just foreign policy to mobilize voters, who see the current administration's policies as unsustainable and who are seeking a candidate that will genuinely differentiate themselves from Trump’s destructive agenda.

By pushing Vice President Harris to adopt policies that reflect our values, we are building the kind of coalition that is not only principled but also powerful enough to win in November and defeat Donald Trump.

As we move forward, it is crucial that we remain united and focused. This is a moment to push harder than ever before, to ensure that the issues that matter to us are not only acknowledged but acted upon. We need to make it clear that the status quo is unacceptable, and the time to save Palestinian lives is now.

Please join us to raise our voices for an arms embargo and ceasefire at the Not Another Bomb Day of Action on August 18. Find an event near you, and spread the word.

Thank you for your continued dedication to this movement. Together, we can make a difference. Not Another Bomb.

In solidarity,

Abbas Alawieh

Co-Founder, Uncommitted National Movement

[olivafans]

Trump takes Elon Musk's side in H-1B visa debate, says he's always been a fan of the program

President-elect Donald Trump on Saturday sided with his top supporter and billionaire tech CEO Elon Musk in a public spat over the use of the H-1B visa, saying he fully supports the foreign tech worker program, which some of his supporters oppose. Trump’s remarks followed a series of social media posts by Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla (TSLA.O) and SpaceX, who vowed on Friday night to go to “war” to protect the U.S. foreign worker visa program. Trump, who has tried to limit the use of visas during his first term, told the New York Post on Saturday that he also favored the visa program. “I have a lot of H-1B visas in my portfolio, I’m a big fan of H-1B. “I’ve used it many times. It’s a great program,” he said. Elon Musk, a naturalized U.S. citizen born in South Africa, has been granted an H-1B visa, and his electric car company Tesla has been granted 724 such visas this year. H-1B visas are generally valid for three-year periods, although holders can extend them or apply for a green card.

The row was sparked earlier this week by far-right activists who criticized Trump's choice of Sriram Krishnan, an Indian-American venture capitalist, to be an artificial intelligence advisor, saying it would influence the Trump administration's immigration policies.

Elon Musk's tweet was aimed at Trump supporters and immigration extremists, who are increasingly calling for the repeal of the H-1B visa program amid a heated debate over immigration and the place that skilled immigrants and foreign workers bring into the country with work visas. On Friday, Steve Bannon, a confidant of Trump, criticized the "big tech oligarchs" for supporting the H-1B program and called immigration a threat to Western civilization. In response, Musk and many other tech billionaires have drawn a line between what they consider legal immigration and illegal immigration. Trump has promised to deport all immigrants who are in the United States illegally, impose tariffs to help create more jobs for American citizens and severely limit immigration. The visa issue shows how technology leaders like Musk - who played an important role in the presidential transition, advising key personnel and policies - are now attracting the attention of their base. The U.S. tech industry relies on the government’s H-1B visa program to hire skilled foreign workers to help run their companies, a workforce that critics say undercuts the wages of American citizens. Elon Musk spent more than a quarter of a billion dollars to help Trump get elected in November. He has been writing regularly this week about the lack of domestic talent to fill all the positions needed at American tech companies.