GUEST BLOG: Lois Griffiths – The Matchmaker
I love you! I love you too!
How touching!!
We know those 2, Trump and Netanyahu, but who’s the other guy, in the other photo?
Him?
Why, he’s the matchmaker!
He’s the most powerful man in America!
Remember the Abba song, “Money, money, money..it’s a rich man’s world!.”
So he’s a millionaire?
Please!!!
He’s a billionaire, a multi-billionaire. That’s Sheldon Adelson, the multi-billionaire Las Vegas Sands Casino magnate.
OK, he’s very wealthy, so what. Donald Trump is the most powerful man in America. Everyone knows that.
What does Trump want, more than anything else, especially now with an election coming up?
He wants to be reelected. He’s convinced he CAN be reelected IF he has enough money, huge amounts of money, to run a winning campaign and sweep to success.
And here is where Sheldon Adelson comes in. Adelson is a mega donor to the Republican Party and to Likud. He is expected to donate..oh, guesses are beween $100 -$200 million dollars on Trump’s campaign.
Guardian Feb 10, 2020 “One source predicted that Adelson, who in tandem with his Israeli-born wife, Miriam, donated more than $100m to Super Pacs and dark money groups in each of the last two presidential cycles, could wind up contributing close to $200m in 2020 “
Why does he do this? What’s in it for him?
Sheldon Adelson, an ardent Zionist, expects and gets, a lot for his money. He could be seen as the ‘éminence grise’ behind several of the hardline pro-Israeli regime stands take by Trump, including recognising Israel’s annexation of the Golan Heights, relocating the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem and ditching the Iran nuclear deal signed by the Obama administration.
The Adelsons had front row seats at the at the White House for the unveiling of Trump’s so-called ‘Deal of the Century’.
The Intercept reports that the event…
“was staged as a celebration, and acted as a dual campaign rally, with the American president and the Israeli prime minister boasting of all they had achieved for Israel to a room filled with far-right supporters of the Jewish state, including business magnate Sheldon Adelson, the Republican and Likud megadonor who spent millions of dollars to elect both leaders.“
The wealthy have always been powerful in the US. Under the present administration there has been a massive transfer of wealth to the ultra wealthy.
The US is a plutocracy. The billionaires are very powerful. With enough money one can buy newspapers, influence at universitites, politicians ..and even the US foreign policy.
These are dark times.
Lois Griffiths is a human rights activist.
I don’t think Trump ever expected to be elected . And since it happened it must have been an exhausting frustrating and humiliating 3 years.
He isn’t going to quit, but I strongly suspect that loosing would be a huge relief. I doubt that he has greatly enjoyed his presidency.
One of his first comments was that the presidency was not what he expected . I think that meant he found immediately that he did not have the autonomy he had imagined . I don’t think he liked that he is’nt really a team player and all the team was on the other side anyway.
How people imagine being president and quite separately being Trump might be a long way from reality.
D J S
David Stone: “I don’t think Trump ever expected to be elected . And since it happened it must have been an exhausting frustrating and humiliating 3 years.”
That’s certainly how it looked at the time. And the Trump team won because it paid attention to which states it needed to win, rather than just assuming that they were in the bag, as the Clinton team did. And Hillary wouldn’t accept any help from that old goat of a husband, despite the fact that for all his many faults, he’s a master of the political process. Whereas she most certainly isn’t; fortunately for the rest of the world.
I agree with the rest of your comment, too.
It puzzles me that both bloggers and commenters here apparently care so much about Trump, and write about him, as if he were our president. He isn’t: we cannot vote for or against him. It’s only US foreign policy which affects us.
Anyone would think that he’s uniquely awful among US presidents. He isn’t: they’ve all been variably awful in my longish lifetime, from his immediate predecessor going right back to Eisenhower. With the possible exception of Jack Kennedy, and he was assassinated too soon for anybody to be sure what he’d accomplish, if anything. Probably the very worst was Lyndon Johnson, but hey! the bar is pretty low.
The other thing that I’d assumed is that leftwing commenters here understand the role of the msm, especially in US politics. The media, being liberal, in general hates Republicans and gives them a very rough ride. On the other hand, they love Democrats, and cut them endless amounts of slack (as we saw with that egregious little rat, Obama). This despite the fact that they’re all variably awful (as I said above): there’s nothing to choose between Democrats and Republicans. This is what I’ve observed throughout my life.
“…he found immediately that he did not have the autonomy he had imagined.”
Yeah, as a businessman, Trump was used to giving orders and having them obeyed. It must have come as a considerable shock to discover that the Establishment was working against him. A household member remarked that in that regard, he’s not unlike Eisenhower, who, coming from the military high command, was accustomed to giving orders and having them obeyed without question. He, too, struggled with the lack of autonomy.