Podcast with Robert Stark: Could Trump Have Done Better?

Check out my latest podcast with Robert Stark here.

No, really. While I’m not always very happy with all the podcasts I’m on, I think this one turned out very nicely. Here are the topics we discussed:

Many of these I have either already written about, and some I will try to write about reasonably soon (i.e. before Biden’s inauguration).

That said, one point I wanted to highlight in particular, since I am unlikely to devote a separate post to it, is how Trump didn’t play some of his best cards:

  • Trump’s Presidency, until 2020, was a huge economic success story, and one that Trump himself constantly touted (best stonks market in history). What he mentioned far less is that not only did the US see large income growth, but for the first time in a very long while, it was broadly balanced across the socio-economic spectrum, including lower-income workers who have been treading water since the 1970s (and, incidentally, have formed the core of the populist reaction across the West). There was a golden opportunity to connect this not just to protectionism, but to the immigration clampdown. But Trump failed to do that in his debates or propaganda. Feeding back into that, immigration has been reduced to record lows. Promise made – promise delivered. What makes this achievement all the more remarkable is that it happened during a period of vigorous economic growth, which are typically accompanied by a flood of Gastarbeiters. The late 2010s proved to be an exception, and could have been cited as an economics-based vindication of the Trump immigration agenda. But he failed to make this connection in his public rhetoric as well, so all he got from it was the “children in cages” meme (which began under Obama anyway, to compound the irony).
  • The Corona crisis: East Asia performed better than well nigh any Western country. That Trump managed to convince most Americans otherwise (at least with respect to China) is, admittedly, an achievement – if one that doesn’t speak well to the intelligence of Americans. Instead it was Europe – the promised land that American libs worship – that came to be seen as a model of how to deal with the epidemic. The reality is that the Americans and Europeans have done about equally badly in terms of the only demographic metric that is rigorously quantifiable – excess deaths. The main difference between them is that the American deaths have been more spread out, including over the summer, whereas the Europeans have seen a much sharper spike this autumn. But, at the end of the day – same area under the graph, plus or minus. This is connected with white people’s voodoo like aversion to modest restrictions on liberty such as mandatory centralized quarantine (which in the end has led to much greater net restrictions on liberty through wide-ranging lockdowns). That said, if you’re fundamentally unserious about suppressing the epidemic – as neither Europe nor the US are – then you might as well ease up on restrictions and allow it to burn through the population more smoothly, blunting seasonal spikes and preserving more of your GDP. Thanks in part to the joint efforts of #BLM and the MAGA rallies over the summer, the American economy will decline less than that of the EU this year. But Trump decided to ramble nonsense about the US having more case numbers because it was doing more testing instead.
  • Trump could have been more generous with helicopter money to individuals. Bolsonaro, floomer as he is, did that in Brazil, and his approval ratings have subsequently recovered on account of that – his mishandling of Corona regardless. (Even if you insist on being a floomer ideologue, the evidence from around the world points to it being a losing strategy politically). But two payments of $1,200 are almost irrelevant compared to American incomes and living costs. Nor was the problem in political opposition to such a project – there was broad-based support for generous, regular payments from Romney to AOC. The corporations got three times as much cash this time round as they did in 2008 and with nary a word of discussion, so it couldn’t have been driven by monetary or fiscal caution either. What exactly were they afraid of? “Socialism”? Speaking of that, all too often during the debates, Trump came across as though he was actually arguing with Bernie, not Biden. Unfortunately for Trump, Biden’s platform was in reality more regressive than HRC‘s in 2016. Yes, this might presage bad things for Democratic Party stability under a Biden administration. But it also means that “socialism” herp-derp attacks slid off him like water off a duck’s back.

I expect that adopting at least any two of those three suggestions would have tipped Trump over from a narrow loss (which I predicted) to a narrow victory. But, at the end of the day, Trump is a fat boomer who doesn’t read.

Comments

  1. Please keep off topic posts to the current Open Thread.

    If you are new to my work, start here.

    Commenting rules. Please note that anonymous comments are not allowed.

  2. marginalrealist says

    Trump’s net favorability rating went down a percentage from before corona virus to before the election. I don’t think people were persuadable.

    I think the 5 percent drop in white men voting for Trump could be as AE said in his blog is that Biden was a much more palatable candidate then Hilary. Also those voter polls get reweighed later so I am not sure how much you can really look into them.

    I do agree Trump could have done much better but the amount of people he could have changed their vote was very small. Given how close the race was maybe it would have been enough.

  3. You can’t win if you don’t fight, and Trump never really put up a fight. He talks, that’s about it.

    …opportunity to connect this not just to protectionism, but to the immigration clampdown.

    Trump is a businessman, and he supports business priorities. Ever cheaper labor and ever cheaper goods from the cheapest possible locations are what business is about. They call it efficiency, productivity, whatever – it translates into ‘work harder for less‘, and it requires migrants and open borders.

    Trump is a business booster, he cannot at the same time work against business interests. You can’t square a circle and when Trump went on and on about how US has a booming economy needing ‘best immigrants‘, he couldn’t be a genuine advocate for better incomes for the US workers. Those two are in a direct conflict. You have to make a choice and those who thought that Trump made a choice for the American workers were fooling themselves. Trump never did, he just let people project into his boisterous speeches.

    The lesson of Trump is that a modern nationalist capitalism is an oxymoron. You either get a national state with borders and all, or you get a free market capitalism. It’s a choice, but let’s not pretend that we can have both.

  4. Trump 2016-2020 was a great ride. Saved us from Jeb-Hillary nightmare scenario. Biden at his
    worst is better than either.

  5. If Trump were a Pinker (a thin boomer who reads), he wouldn’t have been able to win in 2016, let alone 2020 either. The only way for a serious person outside the Uniparty cabal to get elected is for the parties to break up and reorganize amid social and economic chaos.

  6. Yes, Trump complaining about Socialism during debates was ridiculous. As was talking about the stock market, not when half the people in the USA have less than 10k in retirement assets. He ran with a lot of GOP Establishment talking points. Sad!

  7. “But two payments of $1,200 “ – There was only one. What really mattered were the co-payments for unemployment. Never before American were paid so much for unemployment.

  8. another anon says

    Trump’s Presidency, until 2020, was a huge economic success story, and one that Trump himself constantly touted (best stonks market in history).

    If president is responsible for economic boom, then he should take responsibility for the bust too.

    Feeding back into that, immigration has been reduced to record lows. Promise made – promise delivered.

    Yea, the record lows of 2014.

    Trump’s promises were something more substantial.

    https://www.dhs.gov/immigration-statistics/yearbook/2019/table1

    Persons Obtaining Lawful Permanent Resident Status

    Year Number
    2019 1,031,765
    2018 1,096,611
    2017 1,127,167
    2016 1,183,505
    2015 1,051,031
    2014 1,016,518
    2013 990,553
    2012 1,031,631
    2011 1,062,040
    2010 1,042,625
    2009 1,130,818
    2008 1,107,126
    2007 1,052,415
    2006 1,266,129
    2005 1,122,257
    2004 957,883
    2003 703,542
    2002 1,059,356
    2001 1,058,902
    2000 841,002

    What could Trump have done better? Learn to ride a bear like Putin.
    This would trigger the libs and own them permanently.

    https://twitter.com/hyperboriankiwi/status/1327764485310984198

  9. What does mandatory centralized quarantine involve exactly?

  10. another anon says

    So The Donald hadn’t stopped anyone from coming. Immigrants arrive as previously, see that the country is complete shithole and return home.

    The was not exactly what Trump advertised, but if it works, it is great 🙂

  11. Could Trump have done better?

    Possibly, if he had hired Col. Douglas Macgregor years earlier, rather than traitors like Bolton, and got us out of Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan.

    I’m curious to see if Col. Douglas Macgregor will be able to accomplish much with the limited time he has.

  12. Biden at his
    worst is better than either.

    From what we have seen so far, nope. Trump was the long shot at salvaging America, Biden is the sign that it failed. Let the healing begin.

  13. I’m curious to see if Col. Douglas Macgregor will be able to accomplish much with the limited time he has.

    Unlikely. Just a couple of months of slow walking needed, “taking a knee” if you will, to run out the clock.

  14. New Pentagon adviser said Pompeo, senior officials made rich by ‘Israeli lobby’
    https://www.timesofisrael.com/top-pentagon-advisor-said-pompeo-senior-officials-made-rich-by-israeli-lobby/

    In 2018 Macgregor said “There’s sort of a sick mentality that says that generations after generations must atone sins of what happened in 13 years of German history and ignore the other 1,500 years of Germany.”

  15. Donald might be a fat boomer but … [reading the Book club monthly brochure]

    Donald J. Trump
    @realDonaldTrump
    I am the ultimate member of The Book of the Month Club. First I have lowlife dummy John Bolton, a war mongering fool, violating the law (he released massive amounts of Classified Information) and an NDA in order to build badly needed credibility and make a few dollars, which will all end up going to the government anyway. Next up is Mary Trump, a seldom seen niece who knows little about me, says untruthful things about my wonderful parents (who couldn’t stand her!) and me, and violated her NDA. She also broke the Law by givng out my Tax Returns. She’s a mess! Many books have been written about me, some good, some bad. Both happily and sadly, there will be more to come!

    Trump Tweets Vol. 1 Perfect Paperback – Large Print, January 1, 2017
    by Donald J Trump (Author)

    Many smart people say Donald Trump is the Best 140 character writer in the world… Trump Tweets Vol. 1 highlights over 280 of Donald Trump’s best and boldest tweets. @realDonaldTrump tweets relentlessly, posting up to 20 tweets a day. This book takes a look at some of his most famous tweets, organizes them into themes, and tells an interesting story: 140 characters at a time. Republicans, and Democrats alike will enjoy this entertaining collection of Trump’s Tweets. Each party will appreciate these tweets, and share a laugh after seeing where Trump stands on so many issues. Even the losers and haters (of which there are many) will enjoy this book (many well respected people are saying this is a wonderful book)

    https://www.amazon.com/Trump-Tweets-Vol-1-Donald/dp/0578195992

  16. Macgregor will unfortunately just have a short time to do anything at all, and the other team will have every opportunity to drag their feet. For example, even if ordered to go back home, it could be that the imperial forces in Afghanistan haven’t finished packing their equipment properly on the 20th of January. Perhaps they won’t even have gotten started. And who knows what happens after that?

  17. The funny thing are blog authors who want to live in an individualistic society which maximizes and values highly personal freedoms, but at the same time also wants to live in a culture does well in terms of socially coordinated responses like mass quarantines and things like social ostracism of people who do not wear face masks and self isolate properly since both values are in contradiction to one another, so can have either of them, but not both of them.

  18. I’m honestly impressed by the sheer extent of the copium from the Trump side. Lomez, Sailer, Spotted Toad -all generally respectable people- promoted the fraud narrative. My Twitter feed was inundated with it, and so was my RSS feed. It wasn’t like this with the (generally fringe) fraud narrative in 2012, and I even saw some leftist pushback against Russiagate with Greenwald, etc. But this fraud narrative took over virtually the entire right except the Wiggiest of Wig nats (the Twitter poster Cash Money Glock, first and foremost, and Brad Griffin eventually emphasized the 2-3 point uniform swing). Do people just want to believe that the only way Trump could have lost was through fraud and not through a 2-3 point uniform swing across the entire country?

    Pink=Biden doing better than Hillary

    https://uselectionatlas.org/USPRESIDENT/GENERAL/TREND/pe2020swg.png

    No candidate can win while doing this badly across the country!

    I wonder how Luis Lacalle Pou would have done had he been POTUS and running for re-election in 2020. Probably would have won Oregon. I keep wondering why Cuba and Uruguay don’t get anywhere near the attention they should in American COVID discourse -they’re in our hemisphere! I get why Thailand doesn’t -it’s far away, though it provides a ready refutation of the idea that “a major travel hub in the middle of the global commercial supply chain and was hit by COVID before we even knew fully what it was” had to be hit anywhere near a hundredth as bad as Great Britain.

  19. What personal freedom does Karlin support that you think must go? Is this an objection that he isn’t enthusiastic enough about Bronze Age Hebrew God? Or not willing to jump on the “sex trafficking” white knighting bandwagon?

  20. A fair amount of what occurred during the other 1500 years wasn’t so hot either – the 30 Years War, Prussian centralized authoritarianism. The contributions to the arts, science, mathematics and engineering were great.

  21. Ali Choudhury says

    Sailer’s essentially a grifter producing clickbait for MAGAist fever dreams now. None of the Trump election lawsuits have made any headway. His lawyers can’t submit any proof of fraud nor are they willing to risk being disbarred by mouthing untruths over it in front of judges.

  22. I guess you have to go to a central quarantine facility, where depending on the circumstances you might get a room or a bed in a huge hall. You are given food (and in a rich and well organized country perhaps some luxuries, but don’t expect much) and are subjected to testing until you are released, which might be delayed due to some staff getting infected etc.

  23. A fair amount of what occurred during the other 1500 years wasn’t so hot either – the 30 Years War

    You can blame foreigners like French and Swedes on that.
    If not for them, the war would have ended in the mid 1630s, if not sooner.

  24. Apparently some woman has a chance to become the defense secretary. Her idea is that the US should be able to sink the entire Chinese navy in a matter of days.

    I don’t know if I have seen anything more delusional, but these people are so disconnected from reality that they could easily end up starting a big war. By the way this woman was a strong proponent of the no-fly zones in Syria back in 2016.

    It seems likely that the hard line towards China will stay with us. While the confrontation with Russia is going to intensify as well.

    https://www.scmp.com/news/china/military/article/3109852/harder-us-line-potential-pentagon-chief-floated-idea-sink-china

  25. It’s not like any of that was any worse than what others did at the same time. As has been pointed out to you, foreigners were pretty involved in the Thirty Years War. And I don’t even understand what was wrong with Prussia.

  26. What’s wrong with having an ability to sink the Chinese navy?
    “they could easily end up starting a big war” – Yes they could but perhaps they should.

  27. The only silver lining of the current situation is that it is overall less in favour of the US than it was four years ago. For instance, at this point no-fly zones would make much less of a difference.

    https://twitter.com/joshua_landis/status/1328040189781037059

  28. What’s wrong with having an ability to sink the Chinese navy?

    Nothing wrong with it, though building the Death Star would be even better. And not much less realistic.

    The Chinese navy has already more vessels than its American counterpart, and it’s growing rapidly. Its vessels are much smaller than their American counterparts, but they are growing rapidly not only in numbers but also in size and technological sophistication. They are also operating much closer to their home ports and coastline, and thus are able to rely on help from their air force or other land based assets.

    Sinking the Chinese navy in a few days is already pretty much impossible for America (or pretty much any other power on the planet), and it’s set to grow more difficult, no matter what the Americans might or might not do.

  29. No one forced Germany to import a million Syrians ect. The leadership want to do it, and there are advantages. The Pfizer COVID vaccine science is the work of BioNTech, a German company founded by German Turkish physicians Ugur Sahin and Ozlem Tureci, so yes there are capable first generation immigrants. The problem is their assimilation will be negative because they are from where the culture does the heavy lifting. The immigrants to WEIRD countries will get progressively more criminal, unemployable and obese with every generation. meanwhile the natives suffer demographic decline.

    Germany has the most gold plated health system of any compatible country. Importation of immigrants break the labour power of poor ethnoGermans (or which there are a surprisingly large number) and take the moral high ground from them inside Germany. The long term objective is to make Germany like America, which has the worst health care for poor people of any rich country.

    Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism. For the white working class, today’s America has become a land of broken families and few prospects. As the college educated become healthier and wealthier, adults without a degree are literally dying from pain and despair. In this critically important book, Case and Deaton tie the crisis to the weakening position of labor, the growing power of corporations, and, above all, to a rapacious health-care sector that redistributes working-class wages into the pockets of the wealthy. Capitalism, which over two centuries lifted countless people out of poverty, is now destroying the lives of blue-collar America.

    Anyone who read his public statements going back to 1980 knows that Trump never forgave Iran for humiliating America through the Embassy hostage crisis. Bolton was anti Iran so Trump thought he would be good to scare the Iranians with, but Trump was never one for military adventures against Iranians in Iran Indeed, Trump was very forbearing with Iran about the drone attack on Saudi oil facilities. Advisors were shocked that Trump chose to the Sicilian style ‘blow him up on the airport road’ hit on Iran’s Chuck Norris in Iraq out of a range of options. However that decision was precipitated by an Iranian backed militias assaulting a US diplomatic consulate in Iraq, absolute worst thing they could have done

    Qasem Soleimani was commander of Quds Force . That is the ‘Jerusalem Force’ The Palestinians are Arabs, and neither religiously or ethnically within the Persian sphere of influence; the Saudi complain a lot about the treatment of Iran’s Arab minority even through they are Shia. Trump succeeded in reconciling the Arab world to Israel. Iran is merely highlighting how it is not a part of that world.

    Iran’s troubles with the US since 1979 have are the result of Iran not minding its own business. The country is far too big to be invaded, so what are they so nervous about? They have learned nothing since the disastrous error of 1979. the neocons pursue the same old policies that make them seem indispensable while the mullahs do the ame in Iran; the fellow in charge there now used to beg for money outside mosques I am told, how he is the prime minister.

    The Neocons like treating Iran like it is the USSR and going to take over Saudi Arabia because Middle East strategy was all about keeping the USSR (significantly more formidable than the Russian Federation and immeasurably more powerful than Iran ) out of the Persian Gulf in order to prevent them from controlling energy resources, isolating the US’s European allies and encircling China. The policy marches on with superannuated neocons, despite China long since having ceased to be an ally against the main threat to the US world order; do they not realise that China is that threat?

    As a nation of principalities Germany got tired of foreign countries interfering to stop their rival controlling the vast manpower resources, and became a powerful state. Now Germans do not need to and are not spending on defence because they are cocooned within a friendly alliance on all borders for the first time in history. So they de industilise the rest of the EU, buy energy from the country that the US is has the honour of defending Germans from fro free (Russia), and clean up by selling superbly engineered capital goods to a country with inherently-unbeatable-economies-of-scale: China. Biden is adamant China is no kind of competitor for America. That is the worry not the Middle East, which can be left to Israel. Let it earn its keep for a change.

  30. We need more jobs, not more wars.

  31. I disagree.

    First two points is rhetoric. That shit don’t matter. Third Pelosi knew this point just as well as you did and she was the one not to let them have bailouts.

    My take the only thing he could have done differently is go balls to the wall on mail in voting and voter ID. He needed to suppress the overall turn out. This would have given him the edge. This strategy is risky and the GOP chose not to do it. So the question is who had the final say on strategy and what their contingency scenarios were.

  32. Prior to 1870, the French were considered to be the warmongers of Europe.

    German militarism has had terrible consequences (IMHO, even the Franco-Prussian War was a mistake. Bismarck himself worried that he might have gone too far.); but Germans shouldn’t be seen as inherently militaristic.

  33. Politically, Coronavirus was a wash for Trump. He might have slipped a point or two in the polls (but that could have been polling error); but on the other hand, Democrats were much more likely to vote by mail, and votes by mail are slightly less likely to be counted than votes in person.

    Trump’s popularity was the lowest in the second half of 2017, recovered somewhat by the elections in 2018, and recovered a little bit more by the elections in 2020.

  34. Hyperborean says

    I don’t really think the Trump Administration will overturn the results (and Trump was too lazy to prepare for a proper court challenge), so the remaining significance of the question of electoral fraud is in the medium-term consequences of decreasing the legitimacy of the election.

    However in response to banana republic-esque claims of the 2020 elections being “most secure elections in American history”, there is a funny tale from France:

    President Macron swiftly recognised Biden’s electoral victory on the 7th.

    The LREM MP for French citizens in North America published an article on the 14th gushing over the high voting ratio brought on by mail-in voting in America and calling for France to overturn her 45 year ban on mail-in voting and claimed Macron was not averse to this suggestion.

    The response of the French Minister of the Interior (who can hardly be accused of being a pro-Trump “MAGAtard”) to this proposal:

    «les raisons qui ont amené à abandonner le vote par correspondance en 1975 restent valables aujourd’hui : le risque de fraude est trop important».

    https://francais.rt.com/france/80752-retour-vote-par-correspondance-risque-fraude-trop-important-darmanin

  35. Thanks. Sounds like it applies only to the infected. I agree with Anatoly it’s pure voodoo to think it’s a greater infringement of liberty to quarantine the sick than to lock down the healthy. Almost like foregoing quarantine is a deliberate policy to justify tyranny.

  36. With Sandu’s victory in the Moldovan presidential elections, it looks another piece of Russia’s sphere of influence is slipping away.

  37. German militarism has had terrible consequences (IMHO, even the Franco-Prussian War was a mistake.

    Well, it was Napoleon III (with support from the French parliament) who declared war, with the explicit goal of destroying the North German state and restoring French hegemony on the continent, so it’s not at all clear why you blame “German militarism” for that.

    Perhaps French militarism would be more accurate as a cause of that war.

  38. Perhaps. Certainly, both parties share responsibility for that war.

    The Ems Dispatch was a slap in the face, and Bismarck intended for it to spark a war.

    Napoleon III shouldn’t have taken the bait; but perhaps his hand was forced by the belligerence of the French press and public.

    So, I think that you might be right that, as recently as 1870, the French were more militaristic than the Germans.

    After the war, Bismarck was concerned that the severity of the peace treaty could contribute to another war, which could be a disaster for Germany.

    After Bismarck, German leaders made a number of major mistakes, such as declining to renew the Reinsurance Treaty with Russia in 1890.

  39. You do realize that “pro-Russian” and “pro-European” candidates swap places in Moldova every election (plus or minus), LOL. Meanwhile it remains the poorest country in Europe, pilfered by any shyster who can be bothered to. https://www.unz.com/akarlin/color-of-theft/

    Anyhow:

    https://twitter.com/akarlin88/status/1328322621285552128

  40. Mitchell Porter says

    Anatoly Karlin said

    “East Asia performed better than well nigh any Western country… Americans and Europeans have done about equally badly…”

    How has Russia fared? My impression is that Russia has performed like the best of European countries.

    A deeper, perhaps unanswerable question: can we explain Russia’s level of covid performance, in terms of civilizational qualities?

    For example, one perspective on Russia is that ours is a world of nations based in historic ethnic and cultural identities (including the “civilization-states” China and India), versus an empire centered in America that seeks to dissolve all rival historic, national, ethnic, etc identities (though we just had four years of revolt against this, in the imperial heartland); and that Russia is basically a European and Christian nation.

    One could then try to explain Russia’s performance during the pandemic, in terms of this cultural and demographic identity.

  41. The Spirit of Enoch Powell says

    War is big business, and creates lots of jobs (as well as new job openings…)

  42. The Spirit of Enoch Powell says

    Moldova

    When the Wikipedia page of a country is not edit protected, you know the country is irrelevant.

  43. And I don’t even understand what was wrong with Prussia.

    Seizing large chunks of German Catholic territory at the end of the Napoleonic Wars and providing a template of factory like education for our educrats to follow.

  44. …and votes by mail are slightly less likely to be counted than votes in person.

    You mean some fraudulent absentee votes were actually caught?

  45. Anyone with even a rudimentary knowledge of statistics, probability and the Democrats methods for vote fraud knows that Trump won the election by a large margin, despite having the Media 100% against him….How could Trump have done better? Federal Marshalls in every precinct, maybe, if there were that many Marshalls (there aren’t)….The raid on Dominion’s parent’s offices in Germany and Spain has revealed the large margins by which Trump actually won…

  46. She’s just another State Department puppet, who will result in disaster….

  47. Thinking about this more – isn’t it odd that it turned out quarantining the sick or exposed, which I think was standard pandemic protocol up till now, turns out to have been the right approach all along? We were told it wasn’t enough because of asymptomatic spread, but seems that is wrong. You can let most people live their lives normally provided you are proactive about isolating the spreaders.

  48. No. A lot more can go wrong when you vote by mail. The ballot could get lost, or arrive too late, or the signature on the envelope could be rejected, or signed on the wrong line, etc.

  49. TheTotallyAnonymous says

    Karlin, I think you’re being too complacent about the absolute onslaught that is coming against Russia with Joe Biden and especially his administration. You should take a look at some of the people that will be in key US state/institutions positions from January 20 (unless something dramatic or weird happens by then like Trump somehow wins, US Civil War, Trump leaves Biden with an Iran war or whatever else lol).

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tony_Blinken

    Triple brackets aside, this guy is literally the architect of Kosovo’s independence from Serbia (i.e the one who planned and then executed it).

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R._Nicholas_Burns

    https://twitter.com/RNicholasBurns/status/786592206509510656

    Don’t think I need to state anything else.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samantha_Power

    This bitch literally invented the notion of making up bullshit genocide claims as a legitimate pretext to bomb countries and nations the US Judeo-Liberal Empire doesn’t like for whatever reason (Iraq, Libya, Syria etc). Serbs got the first taste of it in 1995 and 1999 over Bosnia and Kosovo respectively. It’s also harder to imagine a more crazed and hysteric champion of “Srebrenica Genocide” than this bitch …

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mich%C3%A8le_Flournoy

    This woman is a hysteric and unhinged Russia hater. She’s also apparently insane enough to believe that the USA can sink the Chinese Navy in less than 3 days lol (see comment #25).

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evelyn_Farkas

    Another hysterical Russia hater.

    Letting something as small as Moldova slip could prove to be costly in the future. Tying up loose ends in the Caucasus by Putin/Russia is clearly very important in being able to refocus attention and effort on other fronts.

    It’s also needless to say that a massive geopolitical onslaught against Serbs is coming. 3/5 of these people literally built their careers upon vicious lies and propaganda about Serbs and direct anti-Serb policies. The other 2/5 are hysteric and unhinged Russia haters that will also target Serbs “as an extended hand of Russia” no matter how much Vucic symbolically cucks and rants on about how “Serbia is on the European path”.

    Serbs will have to brace themselves for more serious and intense pressure, possibly even future war, over Kosovo and especially Bosnia-Herzegovina (Kosovo has become sort of frozen so they’ll likely increase focus on Bosnia), as I have a strong feeling that they’re going to try destroy Republika Srpska (something I think Serbs are willing to resist with war and endure economic sanctions over at least, yet again) since they see it as an easy target to prove “America is back on the world stage”. Besides Srdja Trifkovic and his listeners, the overwhelming majority of Serbs seem completely oblivious as to what is coming their way very soon …

    It’s definitely fortunate that Serbia now has (aside from domestically produced artillery and other weaponry) Russian tanks and Pantsirs, Chinese drones and Chinese FK-3/Ks-1 which is an S-300/S-400 Chinese equivalent. I still don’t think and feel sure that the state of morale, human organization and everything else of the Serb military and Serbs as a nation is good enough to be ready for this onslaught (hold out, survive, fight and win a prolonged war against NATO and their proxies/allies) …