The Final Countdown to the Midterms

 

I want to talk about the impending midterms. Conventional wisdom six months ago was that the House was up for grabs, and the Senate was a sure Republican lock. Now, the polls and the pundits have reversed course, and they said it’s a sure thing that the Republicans are going to lose the House and probably the Senate. History is sort of on their side since 1900.

In the last 126 years, only on three occasions did the in-party in the White House pick up seats in the House or Senate: under FDR and the good feelings of the New Deal in 1934, before things sort of fell apart; Bill Clinton’s 1998 midterm, where people were very angry when the economy was booming that he had been impeached; and 2002, when George Bush had rallied the country in the aftermath of 9/11.

And all the other midterms, 90% of the midterms go to the out party. There’s another force multiplier. When the president is at a 40% approval rating or below, and in the cases that I just talked about, Obama and Clinton fit that bill, they especially lose the midterm.

So that is what’s guiding the general historical framework. But there’s a couple of what I would call extenuating circumstances. The first is the 2022 midterms. Everybody had predicted a red wave takeover of the House and the Senate by large margins. The Afghanistan withdrawal had been a disaster. It’s 2022 in November.

We remember in February, Ukraine had been invaded by the Russians. People had blamed Joe Biden because he had said his reaction would depend on whether it was a minor invasion or not. We lost deterrence in Afghanistan. We turned over $50 billion in weapons, equipment, infrastructure and bases to the Taliban.

The inflation rate that year, that midterm year, was 9.1%, three times higher than it is now. The GDP was lower. The price of gas peaked at about $5 a gallon in June and July. It had only gone down to a little over $4. In other words, the situation was pretty much where it is now, and yet Joe Biden only lost nine seats, and he picked up one in the Senate.

So that is a precedent. But the big difference is the media in 2022 played down all the bad economic news of 9%-plus inflation, the foreign policy disasters, the $5 gasoline in June of that year. They’re exaggerating it this year despite robust GDP growth, low poverty rates, high per capita income at a historical level.

So that’s one thing to keep in mind. The others is the polls don’t have necessarily a good record the last three elections. People have studied it closely in 2016, 2024, the midterms, and especially the primaries, midterms in the past. It seems like the Republicans are underrated by about four points.

The pollsters seem to be mostly on the left side of the ledger. They want to drum up support, donations and media coverage by favorable polls, and then they don’t self-correct to the very end, if at all. So we can’t really trust the polls entirely that show the big Democratic wins this week. Then there’s Israel and British Columbia and Brazil.

We’ve just witnessed three international elections abroad. Mr. [Benjamin] Netanyahu was supposed to be wiped out. He’s fighting for his political life, but in the latest election, his party, the Likud Party, got more seats than any other party. It wasn’t supposed to do that. And they’re sort of in a government deadlock, but he’s still in control.

We were told even on election eve that the polls were right, and the exit polls were right, and he would face a resounding defeat. British Columbia has not really had a provincial government that was conservative in about 100 years. The polls suggested the conservatives might show strength, but nobody anticipated this huge win where the conservatives took control of the parliament and the executive governance in British Columbia.

Brazil was kind of the opposite. Bolsonaro was supposed to win because he had won in the primary. Now, that election’s a little different because it was plagued by fraud. But the polls were wrong on that. It was a very close race, and Lula won.

There’s another known unknown. These candidates on the left are pretty scary.

I think if a normal candidate would’ve run in Michigan, Texas, Maine, Minnesota, the Democrats would’ve easily picked up those seats given the Republicans’ problem this year. But [James] Talarico is in Texas, and he’s at one time in his career endorsed vegetarianism over Texas beef, green energy over Texas oil, a strange left-wing evangelicalism over Texas traditional religion and open borders against Texas border security.

It doesn’t make any sense that he can win. He may, but that was the wrong candidate to nominate if you were a Democrat. Same thing in Michigan. Mr. [Abdul] El-Sayed is on record showing sympathy for the Muslim Brotherhood. He has members of his family that have helped run an antisemitic ad, and he’s very curt.

He never answers questions. He ridicules journalists, etc. There’s a strong possibility that blacks and Jews, because of the things he said about those respective communities, may not come out in numbers sufficient for him to win. We’ll see. There’s also a couple of October surprises nationwide.

In Alaska, the Democrats thought they would be cute on this crazy ranked voting. There was only one Republican senator, incumbent [Dan] Sullivan. They thought they would have another Republican. And then, in addition to that, they would have the regular Democratic candidate and then another Daniel Sullivan, a person who was obscure and not interested in running.

They drafted him. They deliberately put on the ballot, in other words, not just a Republican shadow candidate to draw off votes, but another Republican who wasn’t really a Republican but had the exact same name deliberately to confuse the voters. And it seems like the Democrats were behind this. It was a carefully calculated ploy, and it may boomerang on them.

So these are a lot of the outlying factors that may suggest that it’s not quite the sure thing.

I want to turn very quickly, in conclusion, to what happens if it is the sure thing and Donald Trump loses? We have historical precedents there in Clinton and Obama. Bill Clinton and Obama came in with huge Democratic majorities in the House and Senate.

They lost both of them in their last two years. They did not have the House. They did not have the Senate. Were they done for for two years? No. Bill Clinton had at one point been at a 39% approval rating. He left office over 60%. Obama had been down to 37% at one point. He left office at near 60%. Now, of course, it’s not good for an incumbent lame-duck president in a second term to lose the Senate and House, given the circus that we’re seeing today with lawfare and impeachment.

There’s no doubt that Donald Trump will be impeached, and there’s no doubt that everybody around him will be subpoenaed. There will be investigations. He will not be able to get an appointee confirmed by a partisan Senate should he lose it. But if we look at the Clinton-Obama precedents, it didn’t bother them a bit.

Obama and Clinton both faced that. What did Clinton do? After he was impeached, he was not going to be convicted. It’s very rare for the opposition party to have 60 votes. Instead, he had a big summit, trying to solve the Israeli-Palestinian issue. He worked with Newt Gingrich for two more years of balanced budgets, four in total.

He bombed Serbia without congressional authorization. He thumbed his nose at Congress. He said, “You’ll never give me permission to bomb Milošević. I’ve got to bomb him out of power so he doesn’t kill more people in Kosovo.” He bombed for 77 days. He hit bridges on the Danube. He hit dual targeting.

He hit the electric grid. In other words, he did what he wanted in foreign policy. Was that an outlier? Not hardly at all.

Obama, when he came in, he bragged that he still had a pen and phone. He used executive orders domestically to do what he wanted. Foreign policy, he did a lot of bad things, I think, but he did them with complete impunity.

He had bombed. He had started Predator drone attacks. He would end up with 500 of them. They would kill over 2,500 people, including 800 civilians on the Pakistani border. He kept going. 26,000 bombing strikes. I’m not condoning it. I’m saying that he was flagrantly disrespectful of the majority in Congress.

He couldn’t care less. He wanted to have the Iran deal. The Republicans said, “It’s a treaty, Barack. You need a two-thirds majority of the Senate.” He said, “No, I don’t. I’ll just conclude it.” He sent $400 million at night as a bonus for the Iranians to sign on a pallet. Was that all? No, he did a lot of other things on foreign policy.

He not only continued the bombing strikes, he continued hitting Libya whenever he wanted. And, of course, besides the Iran deal, he got us into the Paris Climate Accord, which was kind of a fiasco. I mean, it had no restrictions on China, but it restricted emissions from Western countries. Was it a treaty?

Yes. Did he go to Congress? No. So Obama and Clinton have taught us that even when you come in with huge majorities and you people, you’re very unpopular below 40%, and that continues, and then you lose all the Congress by the time of your last two years in the last midterms, you’re not done at all. Both, it was the best thing that ever happened to them in some ways.

They ended up very popular. They did what they wanted abroad. They used executive orders in domestic policy. And you know what? What happens when a president is a lame duck and he loses the Congress? The opposition gets heady, and they start talking in megalomaniac terms, narcissistic terms. “We’re gonna do this to the president. We’re gonna do this.”

And the president just acts like he’s a lame duck above the fray. And more importantly, the next campaign starts. So in 2000, George W. Bush and Al Gore fought it out bitterly. Bill Clinton said, “I’m not getting involved. Al Gore does not want me to campaign.” And he seemed statesmanlike.

Barack Obama, Hillary, Trump, acrimonious, tough 2015, 2016. Obama was on the golf course with the assumption that the more you see of Barack Obama, the more you hear, and the less you like him, the more you don’t hear, the more you don’t see. You like the idea of him, and his favorability soared.

What am I getting at? We don’t know, really, who’s going to win the midterms. Democrats should, but there’s enough known unknowns that maybe they won’t.

And if Trump should lose the Congress, Obama and Clinton have set a precedent that a president really does have powers that cannot be checked by Congress.

Democrats’ Dirty Midterm Tricks Are Backfiring—and the Media Are Looking Away

 

person 2: So Victor, we have the midterms coming up very soon and lots of things going on. I was wondering, before you tell us about the races you’re going to be watching, your thoughts on Abdul El-Sayed, that ad that showed, said that Israel was the cause of the high price of bananas and another, oh, eggs and bananas. And so obviously an antisemitic ad that was in support of El-Sayed, and he’s said he’s not associated with it, but he didn’t say it was in poor taste at all.

person 1: Yeah, it was put on by a member of his family, had endorsed it.

I’m a little confused because the federal budget is about six trillion dollars, and this ad wanted us to believe that the price of eggs in Michigan was high because we give three billion a year to Israel. We gave somewhere between 100 and 200 billion over the last four years to Ukraine. We left 50 billion dollars in weaponry in Afghanistan.

So why would they pick the Jews as responsible for a 3.4 rate of inflation? And the answer is he’s only confirming what we all thought, that he’s an antisemite. He always has been, he always will be, and that his campaign, if successful, will put him on the Foreign Relations Committee, and he’ll do all he can to demonize the Jewish state.

Any Jewish person that votes for him who identifies as a supporter of Judaism and Israel has got to have a suicidal impulse because this guy really hates Israel and he hates Jews. I hate to say it, but he does.

And as far as the midterms, I said at least three or four times that we should all expect the following: fantastic left-wing polls two weeks before the election, narrowing suddenly the races, and then some puff pieces about Democrats worried.

What was my point? My point was that this election and all of its manifestations, Senate and House, was always close. That’s a tribute to the Trump administration because the last 126 years of midterm elections, only three times has the in-party gained seats: FDR, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush.

So if they get close, and I mean either keep the House or lose the House by four seats while they retain the Senate, that’s an amazing achievement.

So the Left thought that they were worried, so they drummed up support with these phony polls, just like Saeed was gonna win his primary by 10 or Francesca Hong in Wisconsin by 20.

And I’ll have a parenthesis and stop here for a minute to look at Israel. Went back at those Israeli polls, they were all calling for the end of Benjamin Netanyahu. He was a sure loser. In fact, they were celebrating on election night. They flew in 50,000 people under Jewish law, Israel’s law. Jews all over the world, if they want to vote in that election, have to be there. And most of them were left-wing, and they flew them in.

And still, the opposition only got 47 seats and 48 seats so far. And Netanyahu’s only three or four seats short. He may pick up a couple as the tallies come in of winning an outright majority and keeping him in power. But he has so many more alternatives to form a ruling coalition than the Left does that he will be the next prime minister for the foreseeable future.

So they did exactly… My point is just look at that and see what the Left does anywhere it is in an election. It always exaggerates momentum, it exaggerates the poll lead, and it’s intended for three reasons: to get favorable media coverage, to get out the vote so people want to be on a winning team, and to get donors to think that if they give, they’re gonna get something in return with a Democratic officeholder. That’s it.

And then when they see that they have really overshot, they narrow it. They narrow it.

And so, in 2024, Donald Trump was never behind. That poll, PBS, NPR, that had him down four points was beyond the… That was crazy. The Iowa poll that had him down three when he won by 12 was crazy. But they served their purposes. They made the race closer than it would have otherwise been, and that’s what we’re watching. I don’t know who’s going to win.

History, my historical side of my brain says he can’t win because history’s against it. My rational and emotional side of the brain says, wait a minute. Empirically, you can prove, as CNN’s Harry Enten did, that four points is the average exaggeration of polls the last four elections. So I would say there’s a 50/50 chance they can keep the House and a 70/30 they can keep the Senate because you can’t trust these polls.

As far as that other ad, I was confused because a lot of the gatekeepers on the right, the National Review, Andy McCarthy, a good friend of mine at one time, Gerard Baker, who writes for the Wall Street Journal and who’s a very bright guy and I have a great deal of admiration for. They ignored that ad. They didn’t talk about that ad. That was the most antisemitic ad I’ve ever seen. And it said basically, as I said earlier, you have a woman and she says, I got to put the bananas back. I can’t afford them because we’re giving money to the Jewish Israel basically. That is sick.

And yet they went after James Talarico, and they went after the ad that Vivek Ramaswamy ran where he had a mother saying, my daughter’s a liar. The backstory of that was she said she grew up in a tent and was molested and all that. And they had been fighting for years.

So this woman, I think, was recruited to say that. Was it, would I have done it? No. Was it the cheap shot that they claimed? Kind of, sort of, but not as bad as the antisemitic ad, which condemned an entire people, all the Jews in America, the whole state of Israel, as exercising nefarious backroom leverage over our government in a conspiratorial fashion that we otherwise, had we known the true nature of Israel and Jews, we would have never helped them. The only democratic nation in the Middle East that shares Western values.

And then he also wrote that he was, because of Ken Paxton’s problems, he would vote for Talarico, both to send a message that Republicans shouldn’t nominate people like Ramaswamy and also Paxton. But he not only did he ignore the ad in Michigan, but he ignored what Talarico, everything he said he’s retracted. The six genders, the binary God, the vegetarian, the white virus, the white racial virus, the capitalism-has-to-go stuff, the beef stuff, the oil fossil fuel stuff.

He is the most inauthentic candidate I’ve ever seen. And he won’t tell us anything about his, he says he has a girlfriend. We’ve never seen her. He says that he was gone for what, 12 days? All he has, he says he has the flu, but I’ve had the flu a lot, and I have checked in with my university where I work on a daily basis and said, I hope I can be there next week or three days. You just don’t go blank. So he’s never honest.

And yet people are so angry at Trump, they’re looking on the Republican side. And what we’re seeing now is a recrudescence of the Never Trumpers that were low and because they didn’t get their wish in ’24, combined with the Tucker [Carlson] right, it’s the new Never Trumpers.

So you have Lisa Murkowski in Alaska who is endorsing the Democratic candidate for governor. And yet she’s not bothered by this Mary Peltola woman attacking her own Republican colleague, Dan Sullivan, in the most nefarious ways by recruiting, we know now, not from Victor, of course, but from the left-wing New York Times that has got a confidential source and texts and emails that the Democratic Senate candidate and her staff were working with Democratic operatives to find somebody named Dan Sullivan, who happened to maybe be a Republican or was willing to change his registration to Republican, to put him on the ballot to confuse people in ranked-choice voting.

And so you think that Murkowski would have said, wait a minute, this is voter fraud. Instead, she’s endorsing the Democratic candidate.

But what I’m getting at is all of these Republican conservative writers, opinion writers, pundits, legal scholars, candidates that detest Trump and detest the MAGA movement don’t understand that’s okay to do that if you want, but you’re putting your reputation on the line when you don’t be absolutely empirical and look at both sides. You know what I’m saying?

When I wrote “The Counterrevolution,” I said that Trump could be crude. I said he should have never, ever ridiculed Rob Reiner’s death. I went on and on about that. But I also said that what he’s done is he’s done more good things on oil production, foreign policy, the border, immigration than any Republican could have dreamed of.

But when you only look at one side, and you say that you’re a Republican, and therefore you’re brave and honest and a maverick by trashing your own president or your own party, but you won’t look at what the Democrats are doing, then it’s not credible.

person 2: I just wanna let the audience know that you were talking about an article in The Wall Street Journal by Gerard Baker.

person 1: He’s a very good writer. I keep saying I met him. I like him. I’ve been on his podcast. He’s very astute. I just think he feels, I think he’s confessed it. He’s said so, that he has an almost pathological hatred of Donald Trump and what he thinks Donald Trump is doing to the Wall Street Republican Party.

Now, that said, I will also say that if any disinterested reader reads The Wall Street Journal and reads the headlines from the news division and looks at the bylines of the writers who are writing these stories and then looks at the comments on the opinion, you cannot, in all fairness, say that The Wall Street Journal is a conservative journal anymore.

Its news division come from Washington Post, New York Times, Politico, Atlantic. They’re all left-wing. The headlines are always critical of Trump for the most part, and the stories are slanted. The opinion writers are center-right, not all of them, but center-right. The editorial board may be center-right, but it’s kind of a Romney, Bush, McCain right, right?

And I’ll give you an example. So he’s campaigning and all we hear is how terrible the tariffs are. And Trump says, if you are a European concern and you bring in your company here and you create thousands of jobs, there are no tariffs. There are steep tariffs if you’re in Europe and you want to import when there’s not reciprocal tariffs.

Okay. So I’m reading in The Wall Street Journal the last two weeks how terrible the tariffs are. And then right in the middle of this, Audi announces $1.32 billion investment in this huge new plant because of the what? The guy says because of the tariffs. And that’s been replicated all over.

Now you can say it’s inefficient, it’s not fair to European workers. You can do whatever you want, but you can’t say it’s not helping American workers, is what I’m saying.

And I don’t just mean American workers. I’m talking about the American workers in the Rust Belt, the losers of globalization. And you have to then tell us what the alternative is. Is it really the free-market Bush attitude, laissez-faire, that we all go and outsource and offshore, and we take away millions of jobs in the heartland of the country and invest in China, the greatest mercantile cheater in history, and we put our plants in China or Vietnam or somewhere just to get cheap consumer goods back here?

So what I’m getting at is the midterms are like a scab, and the tensions are so high they peel off, and then they reveal things the way they are. And the way they are is there is no such thing anymore in America as a disinterested media or a disinterested poll or a disinterested anything. Opinion writers’ columns should be partisan. That’s their job. You know what I mean? They can be partisan. They’re opinions, but not the solid news and not the pollsters.

And you’d think that they would be so discredited after 2016 when they were off, and 2024 when they were off, and the primaries in 2026. And yet we … it’s kind of like Lucy and the football. We keep going and quoting the Harris-Harvard poll, the PBS-NPR poll, Gallup, you know. And they have no reason to enjoy that reputation.

So I don’t know what’s going on because I don’t trust any of them. And I think it’s going to be a very tight race. I really do, just like Israel was.

Is the Iran War About to Enter Its Final Phase?

We’re at about 240 days since the Feb. 28 beginning of the so-called Iran war. We’re about five days from the midterm. The mantra of the Left and the Democratic Party, the Islamicist socialist alliance, is the war is lost. It’s Vietnam, a quagmire. The strait is closed.

Before we analyze that, just remember certain data that’s not in dispute. The last three days, about 24 million barrels have left the Gulf’s exporting countries. In other words, they’re leaving through the Strait of Hormuz primarily at a level at or higher than during the period before the war, and they’re also leaving the Red Sea, and they’re also going out of the Strait of Oman.

The problem is not oil. It’s making up for the dearth of distillery. The distilleries in Russia have been hit by Ukraine. We don’t have enough in Western countries, so there’s a bottleneck on the refinement end, not on the supply.

We may have a kind of a short period where we have to catch up, but there is enough oil going out now, as much as there was in the pre-war. That suggests that this war is not going to affect oil prices into next year. It may have an effect on the midterms.

More importantly, though, we think that a strike is coming right after the midterms. We think that because Iran is preparing for it. They are trying to fortify their bunkers for the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps commanders. There are rumors they’re threatening us with new weapons. They promise to destroy the oil fields of the Gulf, all of this rhetoric. And [President] Donald Trump says he wants to end this war after the midterms.

That raises a lot of questions that we don’t have the answers to. We’ve been talking about how many drones and missiles, we can call them the numerator, that we have destroyed, but we’ve never really known the denominator, how many existing drones and missiles were in the Iranian fleet before the war started. And we’re finding out that they were preparing for years for this war, and all through the Iranian mountain ranges, there are bunkers with mobile launchers almost everywhere.

So we still don’t know how much there are. We know how much we’ve destroyed. It’s quite a lot. We don’t know to what extent China and Russia is still supplying Iran. It doesn’t seem possible they can do it by sea. It doesn’t seem possible they can do it by air. But maybe the rail lines and the overland highways are allowing former provinces of the Soviet Union and Russian allies to facilitate rearming of missile defenses or drones or some rocketry.

And we don’t know the level of which we’ve damaged the industrial base of Iran that was responsible for producing their own missiles.

There’s some more unknowns. We don’t know to what extent the 500 to 800 military aircraft that we have located permanently in the Middle East and now augmented by three fleet carriers will be helped by the 300 to 400 planes that Israel has and the 500 to 600 that the six Gulf states have. That is an unknown.

There’s another unknown, and that is the role of Turkey. Turkey has made it very clear that they did not want the Kurds or other ethnic minorities in Iran to be supplied by outside forces, whether Kurds in Iraq or the Israelis or the American CIA. And we don’t know to what extent the administration has fought back on that. Are we now giving arms to the dissidents?

Put it all together, I think in one way or another, the problem is going to be solved. Either we’re going to eliminate for good the Iranian threat, and we’re gonna damage the industrial base further, and these crippling secondary boycotts and embargoes are going to destroy really the economic viability of Iran to the degree that it cannot supply the Houthis or the Hamas terrorists or Hezbollah or even its own military with the force necessary and the economic support necessary to wage war against the moderate states of the Middle East and Israel, at least for the time being.

And so, we have a lot of known unknowns. But generally, I think we can conclude by making a few generalizations. If Israel and the Gulf States and the United States decide to bomb after the midterm elections are over, it will be to destroy Pickaxe Mountain, the industrial base of Iran that was used for the military and dual use targets.

If they want to take that risk to finish off Iran as an existential threat to the Middle East, I think you will see bridges and dock works and some highways and rail links hit. If they take that dangerous and controversial step after the midterms, I do think we will be joined by at least the Israelis and stealthily, probably by the Gulf States. And if we were to do that, there would be a 50/50 chance that within the next year that regime would fall.

Remember one final thing. They were prepared for years for a blockade, an embargo, and a war against them, given their aggression. They had killed hundreds of Americans in terrorist operations in Africa and the Middle East. They’d killed thousands probably with shaped charges in Iran and Iraq and Afghanistan. And they had probably slaughtered a lot of Israelis via Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Houthis.

And to end that threat for good, we should just finish on another consideration. They don’t have any oil now. It’s completely stopped from being transported. They can’t even transport very effectively by land. And the tankers that they stocked in anticipation for this war, they filled a number of huge tankers full of oil, and they docked them out in the Pacific to sell largely to China. And in addition to that, they filled their own storage facilities to the brim. They’re all empty now.

And so what are they going to do with their thousands of oil wells that have to pump pretty, pretty steadily to prevent collapse or salt intrusion or losing productive capacity when they have nowhere to store it?

Before, we really didn’t have complete sanctions. I don’t know why, but for March, April, and May, June, the sanctions were not absolute, and the oil was getting out. The Strait of Hormuz was being still used. It’s not now. There’s no overseas oil storage. There’s no storage inside Iran. And the oil wells pretty soon are either gonna have to pump the oil somewhere, I don’t know if they can make lakes or artificial ponds, or they’re going to suffer, suffer crippling losses.

The bottom line, one way or another, this chapter in Iranian history is gonna come to a close. Either we’re going to prevail and they are not going to have nuclear weapons, and we’re gonna set the stage for an end to this regime in the next two years, and we’re gonna defang it, or we’re gonna lose heart and go back home, and they will rearm and be a threat within three to five years.

It all depends on the steadiness of the Trump administration and their desire to end this 50-year nightmare once and for all.

Why Is Carney Choosing China Over America?

 

We’re into five or six months now of the Canadian-American trade wars. It’s kind of Orwellian in the sense that the dispute only involved about 2% of the half-trillion dollars of trade that goes back and forth across our northern border.

And because Canada has been running up a $50 billion to $60 billion annual trade surplus, and that’s not the greatest contributor to our trillion-dollar—prior trillion-dollar—trade deficit, you would think that they would make a gesture, just say, “We’re going to lift the 250% tariff over a certain level on American dairy, cheese, etc., and maybe we’ll just go down from about $50 billion or $60 billion in surplus, just for appearances, optics, to maybe $20 billion.” And they could solve it.

Instead, Prime Minister Mark Carney has taken this trade dispute and used it for his political future, his political career. He basically was given somewhat of a vote of confidence in Quebec and Alberta.

That was the point. He got elected by drumming up this hatred of Donald Trump, and I’ll be candid, of the United States. But here’s what’s really strange. He’s now posed, as I said earlier, as a leader of the middle nations.

So get this: He has 75% of his trade with the United States, with almost no transportation cost, and over a small dispute over agricultural products that at most might cost Canada $10 billion or $20 billion of its huge trade surplus, he’s really destroying the entire American-Canadian relationship.

And here’s what he’s doing, and everybody thinks it’s because of Donald Trump’s crudity, his bombast, but this is more existential. He’s doing three things:

He’s reaching out to make special agreements with China that make no sense because he’s always talking about Canada’s superior moral stature. But Canada is now dealing with a country that put a million Uyghurs into labor camps and has the worst record—worst record in the modern era—of cheating on trade by dumping products below the cost of production, by currency manipulation, by flagrant disregard for patents or copyright.

I could go on, but why would you want to reach out to this communist country, which in some ways is the logical descendant of Mao’s government, which was responsible for the greatest mass murder in history, killing 70 million of its own people, and is a fanatical autocracy?

It makes no sense, but that’s not the end of it.

Now he’s reaching across the Atlantic to capitalize on anger at the United States in the EU and NATO countries, and he wants a special relationship. But it’s like he’s now reaching out to a ship that’s sinking. Paris is engulfed in five weeks of existential rioting. It spread to Italy. Britain is a mess.

The German economy is stalled. GDP is about half of the United States’ GDP. Its economy is $10 trillion smaller than that of the United States, which has 100 million fewer people. It can barely suffice to make its 2%.

Now, I understand that the Canadian economy is in worse condition than the European economy. It’s the lowest of the 30 or so Westernized economies in terms of annual GDP. It’s got a more acute first- and second-generation immigrant problem than does the EU. It has a worse fertility problem than does the EU.

But you would think, given all of those problems in this socialist command economy that Canada has turned into, you would want to be bolstered by developing relationships with the United States, which is booming and will boom even further.

Instead, he’s reaching out to a collapsing economy, and that’s not the end of it, unfortunately, for Canada. There’s a third thing that Carney is doing. Now he wants a special relationship with Turkey.

The EU that he worships would not let Turkey into the EU because [Turkish President Recep Tayyip] Erdoğan is sort of a president for life. His elections are show elections. They’re not real referendums where the people have an open choice. He has persecuted ethnic minorities, like the Kurds and, earlier, the Armenians, mercilessly.

He took Hagia Sophia, a U.N.-protected site, which was, for a millennium, the largest church in Christendom, and he’s turned it away from U.N. protection into a Turkish mosque.

He persecutes Christians. He has threatened Israel, and I’m quoting almost verbatim, that one day he would send missiles into Tel Aviv. He’s threatened Greece. He’s told the Cypriots, the Greeks and the Israelis that we don’t want you to ship natural gas to Europe, and we may disrupt you.

He’s told the Greeks that their Dodecanese islands and other islands off the Turkish coast are really disputed, and he’s hinted that, in neo-Ottoman fashion, one day they may revert to Turkey.

He has said to the Greek people, “You may wake up and find missiles coming into Athens.” He has said that if Greece did not recognize the Turkish occupation of Cyprus, it might be in deep trouble and its allies, quote, “could not save them.”

So Carney is posing as the moral superior to the United States as he’s reaching out not just to illiberal China, but to Turkey, which is occupying 30% to 40% of northern Cyprus, and only one country in the world recognizes it. Turkey does.

And this is supposed to be the moral alternative to the United States?

What’s the problem? The problem is, as we’ve said so many times earlier in so many different contexts, if you take a naturally robust people endowed with a treasure house of natural resources—timber, fossil fuels, minerals—that have a Western tradition, work ethic and a strong military, and performed brilliantly in World War II as one of the major allies of Britain and the United States, and you take that potential and that record, and you socialize and regulate the economy, you start to introduce euthanasia, you have a high abortion rate, you have a low fertility rate, you open your borders, you don’t acculturate, integrate or assimilate 45% of your population that’s either first- or second-generation immigrant.

You cut back on your military, so you just scarcely can make 2%, and you welched on your promises because you didn’t have the money to protect yourself.

And now you’re in this surreal position of counting on the United States geostrategically to protect the entire North American continent, and you’re part of it, from any potential North Korean, Iranian, Chinese or Russian missile, and you don’t even contribute to the North American defense because you can’t, because your economy is moribund, because you took a different path than the United States did.

A final thought: There’s roughly 33 or 34 nations in the Western Hemisphere, that is, North, South, and Central America and the Caribbean. We are witnessing one of the most radical changes in the last 50 to 60 years, where nation after nation after nation in Latin America is flipping to an open economy, a transparent society, a democratically elected president, a pro-American stance, a pro-Western stance, whether it’s Colombia, Argentina, Chile, or Bolivia.

There’s only about three or four nations that are anti-American and communist now: Nicaragua. I think Brazil’s about ready to flip Western in the next election, if it’s held in transparent fashion. (Note: Socialist President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva won reelection in a disputed contest, with opposition candidate Flavio Bolsonaro forced to flee to the U.S.)

Maybe Mexico, but Mexico is getting closer and closer to the United States, at least it wants to. And Cuba, which is about ready to implode.

And now there’s Canada. So, in other words, this huge Western Hemisphere that is now gaining wealth, gaining power, gaining influence because of the United States is creating a whole Western alternative both to the Russian-Chinese paradigm and to Europe.

And what is Carney doing? Rather than capitalizing on this, he’s holding out. He’s not only going to be orphaned from the United States, he’s soon going to be orphaned from the Western Hemisphere, and he’s reaching out to the most illiberal regimes in the world.

And why in the world would you pick China over the United States? Why would you pick autocratic, illiberal Turkey over democratic and free Greece?

And why would you look to the stagnant, ossified, calcified economy of the EU as your model rather than the United States, over a mild $10 billion or $20 billion that you could settle in trade like that?

Upcoming Trump, Putin and Xi Jinping Meeting Explained

 

There’s a lot of acrimony right now about a planned summit with the three most powerful leaders, at least in terms of nuclear weapons and military: Vladimir Putin, President Xi Jinping of China, and Donald Trump.

And the West is furious right now because they are accusing Donald Trump of selling out Ukraine because he said some negative things about them, the Ukrainian war. And they feel that the Europeans are shut out and the American Congress is shut out, and Trump will deal away Ukrainian sovereignty.

But why are they meeting? Why does Trump want to? What’s he want to get out of this? The obvious thing is he’s mentioned it so much before that he would like to be a triangulator. He would like to tell Putin, “I don’t want you to be friendlier to China than you are to us.” He wants to tell Xi, “I don’t want you to consider us a greater enemy than you consider Putin. We want all three to balance each other out.”

Where does he get this? It’s traditional Henry Kissinger triangulation.

There’s a second reason that Trump wants to meet. During this lull in the Iranian war, it’s pretty clear that we have not hit facilities on the Caspian Sea, nor have we stopped all the highway and rail links by land out of Iran that find their way into Russian provinces, former Soviet provinces, and eventually Russia. And Iran is getting some materials.

Trump wants to say to Putin, “I would like to negotiate the United States’ role with Ukraine if you will stop all of that, and we can finish.” The last thing Donald Trump wants is two wars at the same time.

Three, of course, he wants cheap oil prices. Right now, 24 million barrels are going out of the Gulf. That is at the same level, if not a little greater than before the war. But gas prices haven’t yet felt that decline or that open Hormuz. They haven’t seen it because of refineries. And the Ukrainians are hitting refineries in Russia. And we don’t have enough refineries due to our regulatory and green mania of the last two decades.

So the problem is not going to be oil, it’s refineries. And Trump wants to talk to Putin and say, “Let’s finish the war and let us—we will stop the Ukrainians from hitting your refineries, and we’ll take the sanctions off, and the price of gas and oil will drop, and the world economy will flourish.”

Now, the Ukrainians are scared stiff, and they are thinking that he’s gonna give Putin everything. He’s not. From what has leaked out, it is what we call uti possidetis, as you possess it. It’s a formula for the status before the war.

In other words, before the war, there was a sovereign Ukraine and there was aggressive Russia. You’re not gonna change that. But as you possess it also means that the battle line between the two parties will be the new armistice line.

Ukraine, in that 500- or 600-mile corridor, has linked towns, roads, and has a viable defense front. It has to have that, otherwise, the Russians will keep going into Kyiv. Russia has got about 6 to 8 million Russian speakers by annexing Crimea and annexing Eastern Ukraine.

There is no way that Ukraine, which has lost 25% to 30% of its population and suffered a devastating loss to its economy, will ever have the wherewithal to take back Crimea or to take back Eastern Ukraine.

And you add into that factor that Crimea has traditionally been a part of Russia since the late 1700s. It was only autonomous as an independent country for about three years after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union. And Ukraine grabbed it before the Russians could grab it.

And Ukraine’s eastern part was ceded to Ukraine by Nikita Khrushchev, partly to assuage Ukrainian national liberation sympathies. In other words, cool an independence movement. So there’s a checkered history there.

This is very reminiscent, this meeting that will occur, of the Finnish War, the Winter War of 1939. Russia, as aggressive as ever, attacked little Finland, just like Putin attacked Ukraine. And they said they were gonna roll over Finland.

And the Finns fought completely outnumbered 10 to one. They fought ferociously for the whole fall and into the spring of 1940, just like the Ukrainians. And then they realized they could not defeat this Soviet juggernaut.

So they cut a deal and they said you wanted us to surrender 10% or 15%. We went to war to preserve that. You’ve got that now. You can take it. However, we will fight you to the death, or we will promise not to attack you and keep to ourselves. The Germans are our allies. Should there ever be a war, we will not join the Germans in attacking you on Russian soil.

Gen. [Carl Gustaf Emil] Mannerheim kept his promise, and Finland, for all the jokes about Finlandization during the Cold War, that it was like Austria or Switzerland, kind of a neutral opportunistic nation, it survived.

That’s a good model for Ukraine. It can say, “I don’t wanna be in NATO. I wanna be armed to the teeth. I’ll be the bulwark of Europe on the front lines, but we cannot be openly a part of NATO and openly aggressive to Russia, but we will be in a position to repel Russian aggression.”

That’s the outline of a deal that I think they’re going to make.

Why else do they wanna do it? Besides the Iran war, besides the unrest in the Middle East, and besides the humanitarian consideration that almost nobody on the Left is talking about, probably two and a half million total casualties. This is Stalingrad and the Somme and Verdun combined. This is the worst massacre in Europe since the German invasion of the Soviet Union, and it’s endless.

There’s no end in sight. Nobody has come up with a peace plan. Nobody has come up with an end to it. Ukraine has not folded to the Russians’ anger. It won’t fold, and Russians won’t stop. They’re very ironic. As I said, they’re in the reverse Stalingrad position where the German army, remember, couldn’t go forward and beat them, but it wouldn’t go back. It refused to go back and be saved.

The Russians will not withdraw, but they can’t advance, and so it’s in everybody’s interest to find an end in humanitarian terms.

Finally, there is the question of Taiwan. When you have Russia and Europe and the United States occupied in Ukraine and you have the United States occupied in Iran, China sees an opportunity and they might move on Taiwan.

So it would be better to talk to Russia and Taiwan, especially to Russia, that China going into Taiwan is not in their interest. I know that they’ve lost Syria, they’ve lost Iran, they’ve lost Venezuela, they’ve lost a lot of clients. But the last thing you want to do is have an aggressive ascendant China right next to Russia that’s underpopulated with the largest area in the world and the richest natural resources in the world.

So there’s a lot of self-interest among these three countries. The criticism, to end, is from Europe because Europe feels it’s left out, and Trump is evil, and he’s Putin’s pup. They have absorbed all the propaganda from the first term.

But if Europe wanted the United States to be engaged more, and we’ve given somewhere between 100 and 200 billion, depending how you calibrate logistics, reconnaissance, intelligence costs. But if you really want Europe to be engaged in this high-stakes diplomacy, then you might have said to the United States we have to have Russian natural gas. We’re the biggest customer, so I can understand why you also are worried and might buy diesel.

They didn’t do that. They blasted Trump.

They might have said, “Just as Russia represents an existential threat to Europe, much less to Ukraine, much more to Ukraine, and we wanted you to give weaponry and to intervene and spend a lot of money and support. So too, you were in an existential war with Iran to stop Iranian nuclear missiles pointed at you and us especially. And therefore, we wanted to help you with Iran like you’re helping with Ukraine on our borders.”

And what did they do? They said, “Not only are we not going to help you, you’re not going to use any of our NATO bases. You’re not gonna use any of our airspaces. We’re not even gonna provide adequate security for your bombers in the UK, and if they’re the object of an Iranian-inspired terrorist attack, we’re gonna let the terrorists out on bail.”

That’s what they did.

So you can see why they are left out. And when you add into the equation that they would have never armed themselves to 2% unless this person that they despise forced them to, Donald Trump, for their own interest. And even then, they’re barely reaching the 2%, at least in Western Europe.

And so, the reason the Europeans are not there is some of the countries are in total chaos with riots in the streets, Italy, Belgium in some cases, but especially France, Albania. In addition to that, their economies are weak, and they’re anemic, and they were not reciprocal.

They said, “We’re buying Russian energy, but you are satanic because you might do the same. We want you to come in as a NATO partner and help us and give aid to Ukraine to stop the common enemy, but we won’t do that for you when you’re trying to stop the common enemy of Iran.”

And the result of it is they were ostracized, and they’re losing influence, and they’re furious, and they’re mischaracterizing what is a realpolitik meeting with a leader of the largest democracy in the world with two autocrats.

But believe me, the United States, Marco Rubio, and Donald Trump know whom they’re dealing with.