What should you do when you’re struggling to make ends meet at the end of the month and you’re a mobster ? You’re racketting your allies/henchmen instead of asking them nicely to lend you money to get through the winter.
Donnie Boy wants—demands—that Europe reimburse him for the aid the United States has provided to Ukraine. It’s pure hijacking.
Had he already forgotten that he sent Scott Bessent—his yappy dog—to extort Ukrainian raw materials in exchange for that aid at the beginning of his secund term. An extorsion with no time limit attached. A pseudo-aid that, moreover, was primarily used by the Ukrainians to purchase weapons from American manufacturers. And today he can no longer pull the rug (a metaphor of financial and military aid) from under Zelensky’s feet : he has already stop the money flow, two years ago, without any serious reason whatsoever (except that Zelensky was not wearing a tie when he came visiting him in the Oval Office).
One might have thought—as Paul Krugman notes in his latest Substack article—that Donnie Trumpoleon no longer held any cards in his hand to pressure Ukraine into going easy on long range drones attacks againgst Russian refining capacity. But no. That was to overlook the twisted mind of that bidet’s scraping inhabiting the White House.
@Ursula : why don’t you ask European banks to sell off a good chunk of that US debt they hold—debt that is starting to smell like absolute shit and whose rates are rising abnormally these days ? Do you really want / Are you ready to sink with Trumpoleon and his monkey’s gang ?
