No surprise many Republicans now see toxic Trump as a liability

Such words hearken back to Trump's inauguration speech of a country suffering “American carnage” and in need of him to fix it. But behind this usual Trump swagger, troubles loom large for the former president. Troubles so large in fact that many US political pundits say the Democrats would like better than for Trump to be the Republican 2024 presidential nominee.  

Their reasoning is simple enough based as it is on the notion that his name would all but ensure another Republican defeat. 

It’s now seven years since Trump rode a golden escalator down the atrium of New York’s Trump Tower and declared he was running for US president, but in the intervening years a lot has changed on the American political landscape as it has for Trump himself.  

The most recent evidence of this has been the midterm elections in which Trump was expected to be surfing a red wave of Republican success. But nothing could be further from the truth after his own hand-picked candidates lost nearly all the key Senate or gubernatorial races they contested.  

The simple inescapable fact is that Trump is now politically toxic in terms of election success and many of his fellow Republicans while perhaps not yet openly saying it, must certainly think it. 

While few would deny that the man who wanted to ‘Make America Great Again,’ (MAGA) still has immense strength as a presidential candidate not least an unwavering grass roots support among the US electorate, things this time around will be much harder. There are number of reason for this, not least Trump’s past record. 

Many within the Republican ranks will remember his inability to repeal Democratic healthcare reforms and his repeated promises of infrastructure investment that never happened. Many Americans too remain angry over his handling of the coronavirus pandemic. And then there is that not so little issue of Trump having proved he is a danger to democracy. 

His role in the 6 January 2021 attack on the US Capitol has been laid bare by the committee investigating those events and presented persuasive evidence of a broad-ranging plan by Trump and allies to overturn the 2020 election results by whatever means, including violence. 

If the midterms revealed anything they showed that what happened that day back in January 2021 and Trump’s words and actions leading up to it, has left many American voters still wary of his intentions. 

Then there are Trump’s multiple legal problems. Among these are the US Department of Justice criminal investigation of him for retaining government records, including some marked as classified, after leaving office in January 2021. 

There is too the New York Attorney General civil lawsuit filed in September that uncovered more than 200 examples of misleading asset valuations by Trump and the Trump Organisation between 2011 and 2021. Add to this the Trump organisation being on trial on New York tax fraud charges, in a criminal case brought by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, a defamation case brought by E. Jean Carroll, a former Elle magazine writer and a Georgia election tampering probe and you get some idea of Trump’s legal woes. 

Problematic as all of these are it is of course that investigation into the January 6, 2021, Capitol attack that hangs like a political ‘Sword of Damocles’ over Trump’s latest presidential bid.  

With news this weekend that Merrick Garland, the US attorney general, has appointed veteran prosecutor Jack Smith, to determine whether Trump should face criminal charges the former president typically seized on the issue as a rallying cry for his 2024 White House bid.  

As the Washington Post summed up the standoff, “rather than a contest over policy or the direction of the country, Trump’s anger at the investigations of his conduct have framed the first arguments of the race as a debate over his own behaviour and the response of federal investigators.” Perhaps it’s no surprise that many Republicans now see Trump as an election liability. 

Ukraine: Country prepares for another kind of ‘Cold War’  

Last week for the first time this season Ukraine received a dusting of snow in addition to sub-zero temperatures. Winters in the country can be long and hard at the best of times but with Russia stepping up its targeting of Ukrainian power stations in an effort to deteriorate civilian living conditions the winter ahead could be very hard indeed. 

Already in the suburbs of the Ukrainian capital Kyiv, the pot belly stove known since Soviet times as the burzhuyka, has been making a comeback as people struggle to heat their homes. It’s estimated that about a tenth of Ukrainians used such stoves last year but that number is now certain to rise. 

As the cold weather takes a grip on parts of the country the nighttime temperature in Kyiv has been hovering around freezing. Average temperatures in Ukraine typically fall from 20C in summer to minus 3C in winter, with an average of minus 7C in some regions.  

It’s estimated that over 5 million households, or a third of the total, and especially those in large cities, depend on district-heating systems installed by Soviet engineers decades ago. Plants, usually powered by natural gas, or less often by coal or wood, heat water, which is then pumped into homes through thousands of kilometres of pipes. 

In his nightly address a few days ago Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy said that at least 17 regions, plus the capital, Kyiv, were grappling with emergency shutdowns or scheduled blackouts. Using a combination of missiles and Iranian drones, Russia has successfully attacked 40 percent of Ukraine’s power grids. 

Energy facilitates have borne the brunt of the attacks including hydroelectric dams, leaving more than one million Ukrainians without electricity. 

In Kyiv, 80 percent of residents are without water, according to the city’s mayor. Economists project that the city’s economy will shrink by at least 35 percent in 2022, and the United Nations estimates that nine of ten Ukrainians could be impoverished by Christmas. 

“Putin doesn’t have to use nukes to cause a catastrophe,” said Victoria Voytsitska, the former chair of the Ukrainian Parliament’s energy committee, during a recent interview with Foreign Affairs magazine in Washington, D.C. “It’s impossible to protect Ukraine’s heating system.” 

Analysts writing in the same journal have also been drawing comparisons with the crisis back in the early Cold War days of 1948 when then Soviet leader Joseph Stalin blockaded the western sector of Berlin, controlled by the United States and its allies as part of his plan to ultimately dominate a unified Germany. 

“Today, as Russian President Vladimir Putin seeks to subjugate Ukraine, the West is facing a new Berlin blockade moment, and it should channel the same determination to prevent Putin from destroying Ukraine that it mustered with the Berlin airlift,” observed Melinda Harin, deputy director of the Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Centre. 

With Russia sensing the impact their concentrated attacks are having most Ukrainians expect such attacks to intensify as the winter deepens.  

The man newly in charge of Russian forces in Ukraine-General Sergei Surovikin, so ruthless that even his colleagues call him “General Armageddon”- certainly shown no signs of relenting. Ukraine is now facing a ‘Cold War,’ of a very different kind and continuing western support will be vital to see its people though the winter. 

North Korea: Kim sets down missile marker that his regime is here to stay 

Needless to say, Japan’s defence minister Yasukazu Hamada, was none too happy last Friday about North Korea’s latest show of missile strength. At a press conference Hamada was at pains to point out that it even had sufficient range to reach the US mainland.  

“Based on calculations taking the trajectory into account, the ballistic missile this time around could have had a range capability of 15,000km, depending on the weight of its warhead, and if that's the case, it means the US mainland was within its range,” Hamada told reporters. 

The launch, described by South Korea’s Joint Chiefs of Staff as a likely intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM), is the latest in an unprecedented barrage of North Korean missiles, amid heightened tensions as the US seeks to assure its east Asian allies of its commitment to their defence. 

The missile which was the latest demonstration of the North’s increasingly sophisticated military arsenal came down in waters west of Hokkaido, Japan’s northernmost island. Already this year North Korea has carried out 34 weapons involving about 88 ballistic and cruise missiles. In a single day this month, North Korea fired at least 23 missiles, one of which fell into waters 35 miles off South Korea’s east coast, prompting islanders to seek shelter underground.  

With North Korean leader Kim Jong Un promising to use nuclear weapons to counter threats from the US, the rhetoric between Pyongyang and Washington along with its South Korean and Japanese allies has taken on a new urgency of late. But many analysts say the player to watch is China which at some point will likely exert pressure on Pyongyang rather than face a more strategically united US, South Korea and Japan.  

Already US President Joe Biden has warned his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping that North Korea's continued pursuit of weapons development will lead to an enhanced US military presence in the region. Not that any of this for the time being at least seems to bother Kim, who presented his daughter to the world for the first time in photographs that made newspapers across the world showing the pair hand-in-hand inspecting the launch site of the latest ICBM. 

North’s official Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) did not name the girl but only said that Kim had attended the test-firing of the ICBM “together with his beloved daughter and wife”. 

To introduce his daughter to the world at this juncture could be designed to send an international message that the North Korean regime is here to stay, Soo Kim, a former CIA analyst now with the RAND Corporation, told the Agence France-Presse news agency. 

Qatar:  Sportswashing debate will linger long after World Cup final whistle 

Even just before the first kick of the contest in there was yet more controversy. This time it was FIFA president Gianni Infantino accusing the West of “hypocrisy” in its reporting about Qatar's human rights record on the eve of the World Cup. 

Infantino pulled no punches at the news conference in Doha yesterday speaking for nearly an hour and making a passionate defence of Qatar and the tournament.  

“Today I have strong feelings. Today I feel Qatari, I feel Arab, I feel African, I feel gay, I feel disabled, I feel a migrant worker.” said Switzerland-born Infantino who insisted that European nations should apologise for acts committed in their own histories, rather than focussing on migrant workers' issues in Qatar. 

The remarks were just the latest in a litany of controversy in a World Cup that by many people’s reckonings should not be taking place where it is. For its part Qatar has been taking aback by the amount of opprobrium directed its way and as an editorial in the Financial Times suggested the other day, “in some ways Doha is correct to point to moral relativism and even racism among its critics.”  

But by any standards say World Cup watchers this has been a flawed choice of host country from the start. Even yesterday barely 24 hours before the competition was due to kick off today, construction workers from Bangladesh were still struggling to complete the building of cabins in the Free Zone Fan Village, in the desert south of Doha.  

But these setbacks pale beside the real concerns that many have over what they see as the latest example of what’s become known as “sports washing.”  

Cases of the state getting involved in sport, predominantly by hosting events or sponsoring teams, to create a more positive public image that directs attention from divisive issues is nothing new of course. But oil and gas rich countries like Qatar and Saudi Arabia have taken sports washing to new heights say critics. 

As the Belgium based football journalist Samindra Kunti pointed out recently in the business magazine Forbes, if Doha hoped the World Cup would cast them in a positive light, they could not have been more wrong.  

“The tragedy however remains that between the superficial protests mounted by governments and teams, and the counter PR drives launched by Qatar, the problems continue to go unaddressed, notably the numerous migrant workers who died constructing World Cup stadiums,” said Kunti.  

Today all eyes will be on the football itself but the questions raised by the choice of Qatar as host will linger long after this World Cup’s final whistle.