Tag: Iran

…meanwhile…

Britain’s New PM – Speaking in front of 10 Downing Street after his appointment by King Richard III, Britain’s third prime minister in less than two months, Rishi Sunak, vowed to make economic stability his priority, The Guardian reports. Admitting that “mistakes were made” by predecessor Liz Truss, who announced a “mini-budget” with unfunded tax cuts during her 50 days as PM, Sunak warned of “difficult decisions to come.”

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More on the Trump Tapes – CNN cited this quote from Bob Woodward’s new audiobook, The Trump Tapes, in Jake Tapper’s lead-in to an interview with The Washington Post’s associate editor Tuesday night: “The record now shows that Trump has led – and continues to lead – a seditious conspiracy to overturn the 2020 election, which in effect is an effort to destroy democracy.”

--Edited by Todd Lassa

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(MON 10/24/22)

Iran and China – At the end of the week in which the Iranian government denied it was supplying kamikaze drones to Russia for its war on Ukraine – a denial no one other than Tehran and the Kremlin believe -- The Washington Post reported Saturday that some classified documents the FBI recovered from Donald J. Trump’s Mar-a-Lago last August 8 included highly sensitive secrets about Iran and China.

“If shared with others,” sources told the newspaper, “such information could expose intelligence-gathering methods that the United States wants to keep hidden from the world.” At least one of the documents details Iran’s missile program, WaPo reports. 

The Woodward Tapes: These revelations come before release of The Trump Tapes: Bob Woodward’s Twenty Interviews with Donald Trump, available from Simon & Schuster Audio on Tuesday. Associate Editor Bob Woodward writes in his WaPo op-ed that the tapes “show why he is an unparalleled danger” to the U.S., siding with such dictators as North Korea’s Kim Jong Un and valuing loyalty from political associates over all else. 

Connecting the Dots: Prospects the Biden administration will re-negotiate the 2015 Obama Iranian nuclear deal dismantled by Trump are surely over. But the whole of the Trump administration foreign “policy”, from swift cancellation of that agreement with Iran to the former president’s antagonism toward NATO and his admiration for Vladimir Putin must be examined in the Justice Department’s investigation of Mar-a-Lagogate.

--Compiled and edited by Todd Lassa

COMMENTS: editors@thehustings.news

Trump is the Most Conservative Republican President of Our Time

By Andrew Boyd

The question at hand, is Trump a conservative, is an interesting one for sure. Stephen argues first and foremost that it’s family values and fiscal conservatism. It’s certainly arguable that the conservative movement put a lot of its eggs in these two baskets over the past several decades and has largely failed to deliver on either. But I think there are greater fundamental issues at play. More on that later. Let’s first unpack the stuff in Stephen’s argument.

In character, I'd agree that Trump is not a conservative. In his deeds, he most certainly is.

On the fiscal front, Trump is a mixed bag. He’s not taken on the systemic issues of government bloat and out-of-control federal spending (yes, it’s a spending issue), but he has installed pro-growth tax and regulatory policies that led to a booming post-Obama, pre-COVID economy the likes we’ve never seen. Sadly, I’m not sure there’s a serious political player on the national stage who’s willing to go to bat for a balanced federal budget or the reeling in of the welfare state. These are cans virtually everyone seems happy just to kick down the road. I’d say that, systemically, our body politic is in something akin to a persistent vegetative state on the debt and deficit thingy, which is certainly not ideal from this conservative’s point of view, but not something particularly attributable to Trump.

But what about free and fair trade? asks Stephen. Yes, it could be argued that Trump stepped over the line on the Canadian aluminum tariffs, but I don’t think there’s anything inconsistent in a conservative’s appreciation for the free exchange of goods at home and nationalistic international economic policy. Trump was elected to represent the people of Peoria, nor Paris, after all, and I’m mostly down with that. Tariffs are lousy, long-term structural tools, but they can come in handy at the negotiating table, which is by and large how the administration has used them, in my estimation. 

But what about family values? Seriously, in Washington, Stephen?  Surely you jest.  Personal peccadillos of the Trumpian sort have been baked into the swamp cake since the dawn of the republic. Do I wish he was less like JFK and more like Obama in the category of marital fidelity? For sure. But you work with what you’ve got. And in the new age of a leftist, socialist-slouching Democratic party, I think an increasing number of conservatives are inclined to take a more macro view.  

At the macro level, Trump, I would argue, is the most conservative president in my lifetime.  Drawing down the 15-year Afghanistan fiasco, taking the hard line with China, appointing textualist Supreme Court justices, delivering American energy independence and leveraging the same in foreign policy, supporting Israel, the Middle East’s only functioning Democracy, putting Hezbollah and the Iran mullahs on their heels and calling out the leftist media establishment for their gross journalistic malfeasance. 

The only blind obedience I’m aware of within my Republican circles is to the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights and the ideals these documents embody. Trump isn’t perfect by a long shot, but he’s drawn the party back toward its genuine center of gravity, motivating its base and drawing a stark contrast with the socialist, globalist, identity politics dogma of the unhinged left.  

If time and space weren’t issues, I’d take another thousand words to explain how Obama was, by contrast, the least traditionally liberal, least inclusive president in my lifetime, by a long shot, but that’s a column for another day.

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