Critics of Donald Trump claim there is no rhyme or reason to his foreign policy. But there is – it’s called reciprocity.

Trump tries to force other countries to treat the United States as it treats them. In “Don’t Tread On Me” style, he also warns enemies that any aggressive act will be replied to in kind.

The underlying principle of Trump commercial reciprocity is that the United States is no longer powerful or wealthy enough to alone underwrite the security of the West. It can no longer assume sole enforcement of the rules and protocols of the postwar global order.

This year there have been none of the usual Iranian provocations—frequent during the Obama Administration—of harassing American ships in the Persian Gulf. Apparently, the Iranians now realize that anything they do to an American ship will be replied to with overwhelming force. They can be taught.

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The hard edges of China’s global soft power projection have been put under the microscope in a June 19 White House document entitled How China’s Economic Aggression Threatens the Technologies and Intellectual Property of the United States and the World.

The 35-page statement, attributed to White House economic adviser Peter Navarro, accuses the Chinese party-and-state apparatus of using spies, hackers, state-owned enterprises, front companies, as well as ethnic Chinese scholars and students resident in the US to “threaten the technologies and intellectual property of the United States and the world.”

Along with numerous reports in the Western media about PRC efforts to buy cultural and political influence in the US, the EU, and Australia, the White House document speaks to increasing awareness of the hard edges of Chinese soft power projection: namely, gathering intelligence and pilfering IPR (intellectual property rights) so as to speed up China’s transition to a full-fledged superpower.

Espionage, illegal IPR acquisition, and influence peddling have become part and parcel of China’s soft power push. The result has been an unprecedented pushback from Western nations.

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As Judge Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court nomination tees up another national debate about “reproductive rights” is it too much to ask that abortion’s impact on the black population be part of the discussion?

When the Supreme Court decided Roe v. Wade in 1973, polling showed that blacks were less likely than whites to support abortion.

In the intervening decades, those views shifted. Leaders of black civil-rights organizations today are joined at the hip with abortion-rights proponents such as Planned Parenthood – resulting in the enormous outsize toll that abortion has taken on the black population post-Roe.

In New York City, thousands more black babies are aborted than born alive each year, and the abortion rate among black mothers is more than three times higher than it is for white mothers. Nationally, black women terminate pregnancies at far higher rates than other women as well.

The little discussed flip side of “reproductive freedom” is that among blacks, abortion deaths far exceed those via cancer, violent crime, heart disease, AIDS and accidents.

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“The judge’s job is to interpret the law, not to make the law or make policy.  So read the words of the statute as written.  Read the text of the Constitution as written, mindful of history and tradition.  Don’t make up new constitutional rights that are not in the text of the Constitution.  Don’t shy away from enforcing constitutional rights that are in the text of the Constitution.” 

--Judge Brett Kavanaugh, June 2, 2016

President Trump’s selection of Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh for the Supreme Court last night (7/09) culminates a three-decade project unparalleled in American history to install a reliable conservative majority on the nation’s highest tribunal, one that could shape the direction of the law for years to come.

All of the years of vetting and grooming and lobbying and list-making by conservative legal figures frustrated by Republican appointees who drifted to the left arguably has come down to this moment, when they stand on the precipice of appointing a fifth justice who, they hope, will at last establish a bench firmly committed to their principles.

“They’ve been pushing back for 30 years, and, obviously, the announcement tonight is a big step in the right direction,” said Curt Levey, the president of the Committee for Justice, a conservative activist group, who has been working toward this goal full time since 2005. “It’ll be the first time we can really say we have a conservative court, really the first time since the 1930s.”

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When Russian President Vladimir Putin gave the green light to Russian aerial bombing of rebel-held positions in southwestern Syria two weeks ago, he knew he was asking for trouble.

And he appears to be getting plenty of it.

Since the Russia-led operation against Deraa began, Israeli commentators have assessed that Putin wished to wrap up the offensive ahead of his July 16 summit with President Donald Trump in Helsinki so that he could present Trump with a fait accompli.

A Russian triumph would convince Trump that U.S. operations in Syria are futile, and he would have accept Russia’s predominance, with Iran in the war-torn country.

Yet, just within the past few days Trump has turned the tables on Putin.  Here’s what’s happening.

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Last week I thought the Democrats were having a nervous breakdown. I was wrong.  It's worse.  They actually have a death wish or what Freud called a "death drive" (Todestrieb).

They literally want to extinguish themselves and/or their party, or many of them do. At least they're acting that way.

That was the first thing that crossed my mind watching the explosion of demonstrations by liberals and progressives to abolish ICE and US border control.  It’s their greatest cause célèbre since, well, whatever was their greatest cause célèbre three days before.

The polls show the vast majority of Americans think they're cracked and want, as do citizens of almost all countries, secure borders and legal immigration.

So why are they doing this?  Do they secretly want open borders?  Are they actually wannabe socialist revolutionaries out to change American society at its core?  Or is it……

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[This Forum post by Joe Katzman responding to The Brittleness of the Left needs to be read by all TTPers. You are encouraged to share your thoughts]

The impulses of the Left you will always have with you. But that doesn’t mean we can’t raze the treasonous infrastructure and personalities that make up its modern variants, and makes them effective:

• Arrest and jail the leftists who have abused their position with rampant illegality. Time for Justice.

• RICO against the Antifa/ BLM/ Occupy types, their funders, and those that provided material aid.

• Break the pedophile and human trafficking networks that stretch from Hollywood and beyond, and publicly hang them around the Left’s neck.

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How delicious is it that the face of the Democrat Party is that lovely duo, Maxine Waters and Nancy Pelosi?  They are the gift that keeps on giving.

So deluded as to why Trump won, they seem to think their particular brand of madness that includes the public shaming of anyone and everyone in the Trump administration is going to win back the House and Senate for their party.

It is by now undeniable that the Hate-Trump Left has gone stark-raving mad.  Its members have lost all semblance of sanity, decorum, and class.

It can be lost on no one that the Democrats care not one bit for American citizens.  Thousands of them have been murdered by criminal illegals, who are most often given a pass by the courts for numerous DUIs, drug crimes, and gun crimes for which Americans would be imprisoned.

The crimes of members of MS13 are not at all different from those of ISIS – vicious beyond imagination.  And yet the Democrats defend them, seeks to embrace their arrival here.  How is it possible for them to think this is a winning electoral strategy?

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This Sunday, July 1st, Mexico could elect one of its more anti-American figures in recent memory, Andrés Manuel López Obrador.

Obrador has often advanced the idea that a strangely aggrieved Mexico has the right to monitor the status of its citizens living illegally in the United States.

Lately, he trumped that notion of entitlement by assuring fellow Mexicans that they have a “human right” to enter the United States as they please. For Obrador, this is an innate privilege that he promised “we will defend” — without offering any clarification on the meaning of “defend” other than to render meaningless the historic notion of borders and sovereignty.

Obrador went on to urge his fellow Mexicans to “leave their towns and find a life in the United States.” He has naturally developed such a mindset because he assumes as normal what has become, by any fair standard, a historically abnormal relationship.

Facts are stubborn, however, and reveal Mexico, not the United States, as a de facto aggressor and belligerent on many fronts.

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[Note – this is Sidney’s follow up to her The FBI, DOJ, and Hillary Clinton’s Huge Weiner Problem last week (6/20)]

The Department of Justice, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and Hillary Clinton have a huge problem that is even bigger than we first realized.

Massive evidence is accumulating that James Comey, with Andrew McCabe, Peter Strzok and others at the Obama FBI and DOJ covered up the motherlode of Clinton criminal culpability.  Here’s what we know so far.

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Does someone from the Trump family, the Trump Cabinet, or even the Trump administration have to be assaulted or worse, killed, before we accept the fact that a growing number from the far-left have put a rhetorical bounty on their heads?

If has-been actor Peter Fonda suggesting Barron Trump be "ripped from his mother's arms and put in a cage with pedophiles" does not horrify you with the obscene brutality of its message, nothing ever will.

From this cauldron of bubbling and putrid hate filled from the twisted minds of enraged liberal politicians, "journalists," entertainers, and academics, spews forth the dangerously deranged like Fonda who have proven there is no line they will not cross to inflict "punishment" and harm upon anyone connected with President Trump.

Beyond the terrifyingly rhetorical, is the real.

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Remember Anthony Weiner, also known as “Carlos Danger” — the former congressman who kept texting people pictures of well, umm, that part of his name? It all made quite the splash because he is married to Hillary Clinton’s consigliere and constant sidekick, Huma Abedin.

Turns out that Anthony was such a perp — and so enthralled with his own — that he was sexting with a minor. That is a federal offense carrying up to 10 years in prison. So, he got raided by the New York Police Department and the New York office of the FBI.

They seized his laptop computer. It would have been bad enough if it had only had contained all his porn. But it posed a huge problem for the FBI, DOJ and Mrs. Clinton.

Only a few hours after the New York office of the FBI took possession of the Weiner laptop, on September 26, 2016, the FBI computer expert discovered it contained more than 140,000 emails involving Hillary Clinton. They were from multiple domain names: State.gov, Clintonemail.com, ClintonFoundation.org, HillaryClinton.com and Blackberry devices.

Here’s what happened then.

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As FBI Director Christopher Wray started giving his response to the blistering report on the Hillary Clinton investigation, I hoped he would accept the findings as proof that the agency lost its way and must be shaken to its foundation.

By the time he finished talking, I felt ­naive for daring to hope.

Wray’s performance was worse than disappointing. It was infuriating proof that it will take more than one election to change the corrupt culture of Washington.

By circling the wagons, Wray shows he is unprepared to carry out big changes. That makes it three strikes at Justice, as Wray joins Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Deputy AG Rod Rosenstein as Trump’s biggest whiffs.

They are worse than weak links. They simply don’t see themselves as being part of the same administration.

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What was going on in Donald Trump's head when he tweeted Friday (6/15) in response to the inspector general's devastating report on the FBI that "Christopher Wray will bring it proudly back!"?

Perhaps the president thought he had better things to do than face another interminable nomination battle for a new director. Or perhaps he was trying to co-opt Wray. But if the FBI is meant to come back, proudly or otherwise, Christopher Wray is not the man. He is part of the problem.

In fact, Wray's continuance as director signals the government is not serious about significantly reforming the FBI and that what changes will be made will be essentially cosmetic, lipstick on the proverbial pig.  (The inspector general's report can be read that way as well.)

This is not just because Wray worked under James Comey in his first important job as assistant attorney general in charge of the criminal division (2003-2005). That would be guilt by association, although in this instance it's some association. What's more important is what Wray himself has done recently or, more specifically, has not.

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Robert De Niro marched onto last Sunday night’s Tony Awards show stage like a man possessed, exuding raw fury and menace from every pore.

If you could morph his most violent, unhinged on-screen characters into one smoldering carcass of molten human hatred and ferocity, then this was that hybrid beast.

And he was intent on unleashing a verbal weapon of mass destruction at the man he despises more than life itself: Donald J. Trump.

The 74-year-old tuxedo-clad thespian stood at the microphone for several long, lingering, intense seconds, driving the Broadway audience to whoops of expectant excitement.

‘I’m gonna say one thing,’ he snarled.

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Nobody knew.  None of us saw it.  Among his biggest supporters, maybe a handful suspected it.

Many of us expected the economic renewal of the U.S. to happen.  Many of us foresaw a significant roll back of Saint Barack's horrid, destructive agenda.   A lot of us hoped for a major push back on the Left.

All of which we have gotten.

None of us expected Donald Trump to be a giant in foreign policy.  No one expected him to reshape the world.  Yet Donald Trump, in a short time, is doing so.  We have not seen a better, more fruitful, and more capable foreign policy than this administration since the great Ronald Reagan.

Here are some of President Trump’s accomplishments – less than half way into his first term.  They are simply astounding – to America’s great benefit, to the great dismay of the Left.

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Department of Justice Inspector General Michael Horowitz, an Obama Administration appointee, is scheduled to deliver a report this afternoon (6/14) on DOJ and FBI abuses during the 2016 campaign cycle.

Remember: His last investigation of FBI misconduct advised a criminal referral for fired former Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe, who allegedly lied to federal investigators.

McCabe and at least a half-dozen other FBI employees quit, retired, were fired, or were reassigned as a result of fallout from the politicization of the FBI.

Yet, as Barack Obama left office, his chief of staff, Denis McDonough, strangely boasted that the Obama Administration “has been historically free of scandal.” Obama himself recently concluded of his eight-year tenure, “I didn’t have scandals.”

That’s because the Obama Administration succeeded in covering up its non-stop scandals by waging a veritable war against the watchdog inspectors general of various federal agencies.  Here’s the record.

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When every last Trudeau eyebrow has been scraped off the floor of the Manoir Richelieu, it's worth remembering that the divisions in the G7 are not quite as straightforward as the media would have us believe. For one thing, it's not G6 vs. Trump, for there's another disrupter in town:

And how about this for getting it right?  For the first time since the "humanitarian crisis" began five years ago, the Italian government has closed its ports to a migrant vessel: The MV Aquarius, operated by SOS Mediterranée and Médecins Sans Frontières, was refused permission to dock in Sicily, and told to push off and find somewhere else.

As the London Economist sniffed (6/12):  Italy Refuses to Let a Boat Full of Migrants Land. After all, what could be more heartwarming than an NGO rescue ship named after a song from Hair?

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