Building a Better Trump
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Building a Better Trump
Also: Attack on Kakhovka dam throws Ukraine's war plans into chaos, and the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission targets the two biggest crypto exchanges in the world.
Building a Better Trump
What could possibly go wrong?
Remember the 2016 Republican presidential candidates?
Yeah, we don’t either. Other than Donald Trump and Chris Christie – the former governor of New Jersey who plans on running against Trump, again – it feels as though most of them have dropped off the edge of the earth.
But now a new variety act is in town. The 2024 GOP presidential lineup may be a bit more of a mashup, but it comes with a smattering of historic firsts. The presence of Trump, as has been widely observed, marks the first time a former president has sought the Oval Office after being criminally indicted while facing a slew of additional criminal and civil investigations.
Maybe Trump, who turns 77 in one week, really wants to be president again. Perhaps he relishes the idea of spending the healthiest years of the rest of his life back in the White House, presiding over global tensions as commander in chief. Or maybe, as some have pointed out, he sees the presidency as his best chance of dodging some of the legal travails ahead.
“Some people say he’s not even interested in running anymore,” Maria Gallego, a professor of economics at Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Ontario, told Power Corridor back in March. “But he doesn’t want to be out of the public eye, because he wants the protection of being a candidate. If he drops out, he cannot collect campaign money, he cannot raise funds to pay for his legal battles or support himself so, in a way, he cannot stop running for president.”
Trump also cannot assert, in the event there are further charges, indictments, or findings against him, that his woes amount to nothing more than a political witch hunt. As long as he runs, every single battle can double, technically, as a proxy for the presidential race he lost, with the focus on whether he will be allowed to run and win again, or have his hopes dashed, wrongly, as he believed they were in 2020.
Next up is Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who announced his candidacy via Twitter last month and may be best known – at least among non-political junkies – as the politician who got married at Disney World, but is now leading the attack on the Magic Kingdom as a centerpiece of his “anti-woke” culture wars. (The full, freakish story of that would be too long to relate here, but for those of you who believe DeSantis cannot hold a candle to Trump’s propensity for appalling legal messes, this may change your mind.)
While DeSantis represents Trump’s biggest competition so far, he’s lost his momentum in recent months, and Trump is pulling ahead of the increasingly crowded GOP field to win more than 50 percent of Republican and Republican-leaning voters. DeSantis’s support is around half that.
That could change, however, if Trump’s legal problems strike a definitive blow before he can win the primary or be re-elected. According to a poll out this week, 62 percent of Americans said Trump should not be allowed to take office as president again if he is convicted of a “serious” crime.
Among other GOP hopefuls are Nikki Haley, the former governor of South Carolina and Trump’s former ambassador to the United Nations, who lambasted both DeSantis’s showdown with Disney and Trump’s own tempests at a CNN town hall this week, remarking, “All this vendetta stuff, we’ve been down that road.”
South Carolina Senator Tim Scott, who announced his presidential candidacy last month, attracted headlines for appearing on television show ‘The View’ to quibble on systemic racism in America as the only Black Republican in the Senate. He also defended DeSantis’s fight against Disney, which seems to be everybody’s favorite topic of debate and the definitive anti-woke litmus test.
In addition to Christie, who announced his candidacy Tuesday and seems to be promising to personally kick the living daylights out of Trump in the primary (Christie may be oddly suited to this, as he did help Trump with his debate prep in 2020 until Trump gave him a life-threatening case of Covid-19), a number of additional presidential hopefuls have surfaced.
They include: entrepreneur and former pharmaceutical executive Vivek Ramaswamy, who has labeled himself a self-styled “nationalist”; Dallas businessman and non-denominational pastor, Ryan Binkley, who wants America to be “unified and reconciled to God and each other”; former conservative media personality Larry Elder, who tried and failed to unseat California Gov. Gavin Newsom; anti-Trumper and two-time governor of Arkansas Asa Hutchinson; and Perry Johnson, who attempted to run for governor of Michigan last year, in vain.
North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum, who announced his candidacy Wednesday via an editorial in The Wall Street Journal, says he believes up to 60 percent of Americans make up a “silent majority” who are sick of ideological debates dominating political discourse. “There’s definitely a yearning for some alternatives right now,” he said. He is a long-shot candidate, pushing for new leadership with a focus on the “changing economy.”
Then there is Mike Pence, former Republican governor of Indiana, evangelical Christian and Trump’s former vice president, who announced he is running for president Wednesday. “It would be easy to stay on the sidelines,” he said in a launch video that did not mention Trump. “But that’s not how I was raised. That’s why today, before God and my family, I’m announcing I’m running for president of the United States.”
Along with Christie, Pence has accused Trump of endangering his life, marking another first for a GOP presidential run.
Pence refused to go along with what, to the eyes of many, looked like a failed coup d’etat as Trump left office, culminating in the insurrection on Jan. 6, 2021. That decision turned off a large number of Trump supporters, who thought Pence should have leveraged his role as vice president to block the victory of President Biden.
While Pence certainly is in need of a job, it seems unlikely he will be looking to cozy up to Trump again, let alone be his running mate.
This spring, Pence denounced Trump’s behavior and rhetoric during the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol following the 2020 election, saying the former president was “wrong” to pressure him to halt the certification of Biden as president. “I had no right to overturn the election,” Pence said, adding that Trump’s “reckless words endangered my family and everyone at the Capitol that day and I know history will hold Donald Trump accountable.”
Pence’s refusal to allow alternate presidential electors during the certification of Biden as president by Congress on Jan. 6 infuriated some Trump supporters who flooded the Capitol, chanting “hang Mike Pence.” According to multiple accounts, Trump was aware of the threats to Pence, saying, “Maybe our supporters have the right idea,” and Pence “deserves it.”
In light of the excessive baggage among GOP hopefuls, it’s staggering that, rather than defining themselves as the anti-Trump, most of the candidates will need to distinguish themselves as Trump-plus – that is, a candidate that can capture the Trump base, only perhaps with more virtues than vices.
So Much for the Silent Counteroffensive
Attack on the Kakhovka dam in Ukraine throws war plans into chaos.
For weeks, Ukraine has prepared for what has been widely billed as its “spring counteroffensive” against Russia in what many had hoped would be Ukraine’s best chance at gaining an upper hand in the Russian invasion.
Western allies have spent billions of dollars shipping weapons systems, ammunition and supplies to Ukraine. Americans have trained thousands of Ukrainians in advanced combined arms tactics with armored fighting vehicles and self-propelled howitzers, along with field and medical skills. Some Ukrainian forces have even been trained to operate Patriot truck-mounted surface-to-air guided missile defense systems – something that requires advanced skills.
Yet the counteroffensive was slow to come amid stubborn wet weather and a laggardly thaw, as Ukraine’s mud season persisted until nearly summer. The ground was difficult to traverse for troops and non-tracked vehicles. One official likened the mud to “soup…you just sort of sink into it.”
Yet Ukraine appeared just hours away from beginning its next phase, urging allies, supporters and the media to refrain from reporting on its movements or potential strategies with a “Plans Love Silence” campaign. It also made clear it would not be announcing the start of the counteroffensive for the same reason.
That all changed with the blowing up of the critical Kakhovka dam and electric plant this week in a Russian-controlled area of southern Ukraine on the front lines of the war.
The dam’s destruction throws the entire conflict into chaos, escalates the war, threatens hundreds of thousands of people, many of whom had to evacuate, and risks Europe’s largest nuclear power plant.
Ukraine quickly blamed Russia for the attack on the dam, which came just as Kyiv’s forces began a new series of attacks across front lines in the east and south of Ukraine in a sign the counteroffensive may have already begun.
The dam’s collapse flooded the war zone of southern Ukraine, leading to the evacuations of entire towns to avert a humanitarian crisis and fears that destruction from the floodwaters of the Dnipro River would lead to an “ecological disaster.”
Officials in Kyiv called it a “terrorist attack,” while Russian officials attempted to downplay it and even blame Ukraine for the destruction. The U.S. government said it had intelligence that seemed to show Russia was behind the attack, but a National Security Council spokesman said Tuesday the U.S. “cannot say conclusively what happened at this point.” The U.S. State Department concurred. Either way, the dam’s collapse likely will have long-term consequences for this war.
SEC Comes for Crypto
In a one-two punch, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission targets the two biggest crypto exchanges in the world.
As crypto maximalists have long suspected, Washington regulators are out to get them.
The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filed 13 charges against Binance, which operates the largest crypto asset trading platform in the world and its U.S.-based affiliate, along with the company’s founder, Changpeng Zhao, detailing a litany of securities law violations.
That was on Monday. On Tuesday, the SEC sued Coinbase, a publicly traded San Francisco company and the second largest cryptocurrency exchange by trading volume, accusing it of making billions of dollars by “unlawfully facilitating the buying and selling of crypto asset securities.”
As part of its complaint against Coinbase, the SEC alleged that at least 13 of the more than 250 cryptocurrencies offered by the exchange to its customers are securities, worth a combined market value of $37 billion. (It seems that the number 13 loomed large in both these complaints.)
In its case against Binance, which is based offshore in the Cayman Islands, the SEC alleged that Binance and its chief executive, Zhao exercised supreme control over customers’ assets across company platforms. This level of control allowed Binance and Zhao to commingle or divert customer assets at will, including to an entity Zhao owned called Sigma Chain, which conducted manipulative trades to artificially inflate his exchange’s huge trading volumes.
The SEC said Binance and Zhao also concealed they were “commingling billions of dollars of investor assets” and shifting them to another entity that Zhao owned called Merit Peak Limited. As is well known on Wall Street, customer funds should never, ever, get mixed with companies’ other funds. Touching customer funds without disclosure or approval is quite literally the third rail of finance and can result in a prison sentence.
With both Binance and Coinbase, the SEC said the companies failed to register with the regulator as a securities exchange, broker and clearing house, in violation of federal securities laws.
For its part, Coinbase pushed back hard against the allegations, stating that U.S. regulators’ murky approach to regulating cryptocurrency was to blame for the suit. In a statement on Twitter, Coinbase’s chief executive, Brian Armstrong, noted that the SEC had reviewed the company’s business and allowed it to go public just a few years ago. “We’re proud to represent the industry in court to finally get some clarity around crypto rules,” he said.
To be sure, it is not disingenuous for crypto companies to call the current regulatory terrain confusing. The rules of crypto at the SEC, which has called cryptocurrency a security, have often been at odds with the rules of crypto at the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission, which has called cryptocurrency a commodity.
“The SEC and CFTC have made conflicting statements, and don't even agree on what is a security and what is a commodity,” Armstrong said, adding, “Instead of publishing a clear rulebook, the SEC has taken a regulation-by-enforcement approach that is harming America.”
The allegations against Binance, which were far more damaging for its alleged, FTX-like misuse of customer funds, included a colorful statement, tucked away in the SEC complaint, sent by Binance’s chief compliance officer to a colleague, saying, “We are operating as a fking unlicensed securities exchange in the USA, bro.”
In a response to the charges, Binance issued a statement lamenting the SEC’s approach. “We now join a number of other crypto projects facing similarly misguided actions from the SEC and we will vigorously defend our business and the industry,” it said.
The SEC asked a federal judge late Tuesday to freeze all U.S. Binance assets throughout the world and repatriate any fiat or cryptocurrency held by Binance customers, alleging Zhao held a “disregard” for the law.
Looks like a shot across the bow for the cryptoverse.