Donald Trump does not have the best grasp of geopolitics.
Donald Trump is already failing the implicit geography test that is taking office as the President of the United States.
Just hours after being sworn in Monday, a reporter asked Trump about his demand that NATO member states spend at least 5% of their GDP on defense, citing Spain’s defense spending level. The president responded completely incorrectly.
“Spain is very low. And yet, are they a BRICS nation?” Trump asked.
“What?” the reporter replied.
“They’re a BRICS nation, Spain. You know what a BRICS nation is? You’ll figure it out,” Trump said, managing to be both snide and wrong.
“But uh, and if the BRICS nations want to do that, that’s OK, but we’re gonna put at least 100% tariff on the business they do with the United States,” Trump said.
The ‘S’ in BRICS does not stand for Spain at all.
The countries in BRICS are Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa, and new member states Egypt, Ethiopia, Indonesia, UAE, and Iran. No state in the entire European Union is a member of BRICS. Here’s hoping that the president of the United States will eventually “figure it out.”
Mehdi Hasan, the editor-and-chief of Zeteo News, shared a video of Trump’s gaffe on X late Monday, writing, “We need to talk about the president’s age and memory and mental health.”
“If Biden had said this, it would be on a 24/7 loop on cable, and all over TikTok,” Hasan wrote in a separate post on X.
Pete Hegseth, the guy running the US Fucking Military, said in public that one of the signs that Iran was a bad country devoted to "radical ideology" is that - instead of investing its money to make its peoples' quality of life better - Iran "took the money they make and they invest it in tunnels, and they invest it in missiles, and they invest it in launchers and UAVs."
Environmentalists call foul as pro-fossil-fuel senator Joe Manchin backs addition to defense act to fast-track energy projects
Joe Biden and the Democratic party’s climate credentials will be severely undermined if controversial legislation to fast-track energy projects is latched on to a must-pass defense bill, environmental leaders have warned.
Progressive lawmakers and hundreds of climate, public health and youth groups are urging the Democratic leadership to stop the latest attempt by Joe Manchin, the West Virginia fossil-fuel-friendly senator, to force through legislation that would weaken environmental protections and expedite permits and construction of pipelines and other fossil fuel infrastructure while restricting public input.
According to the White House press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, Biden supports including Manchin’s deregulation bill in the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), an annual appropriations bill that will be voted on later this week. The final text of the proposed bill has not yet been published, but if pushed through as an appendage, it would lead to a sweeping decline in environmental protections and public participation without having been debated or scrutinized in committee hearings.
On Tuesday, more than 750 organizations sent a letter to the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, and congressional leadership opposing what they call a “cruel and direct attack on environmental justice communities”. If Pelosi permits the attachment of the dirty deal to the NDAA, it will be one of her final acts as speaker and threatens her credibility on climate, the groups said.
Manchin, who receives more campaign donations from the fossil fuel industry than any other lawmaker, also wants to limit legal challenges to new energy projects including the 303-mile Mountain Valley gas pipeline across the Appalachian mountains that has been stalled by concerned communities and environmental groups in West Virginia and Virginia.
Rashida Tlaib, the Democratic congresswoman from Michigan, called on her colleagues to stand up against the fossil fuel industry and the undemocratic manner in which leadership was trying to push through the bill without scrutiny. “It’s outrageous enough that Congress wants to spend another $847bn on our military-industrial complex, the largest annual military budget in history; we cannot allow them to then ram through Manchin’s dirty deal in the process.”
Tlaib urged her colleagues to also vote no. “We cannot again remain silent while the fossil fuel industry continues to pollute our neighborhoods and sacrifice the health of our residents for their own endless greed,” she said.
Manchin’s bill, described by environmentalists as a “fossil fuel wishlist”, was first attached as a side deal to Biden’s historic climate bill, the Inflation Reduction Act, but was eventually thwarted after widespread opposition from progressive Democrats and civil society groups.
