In January 2018, when Trump referred to African nations as “shithole countries,” he was relishing the time when apartheid South Africa, Rhodesia, and South-West Africa were considered a pro-US bloc in southern Africa. The links between southern Africa’s exiled black African liberation political parties and movements to Communist- and Marxist-ruled nations, in the minds of Trump and his equally right-wing father, Fred Trump, Sr., made South Africa, Rhodesia, and South-West Africa model nations in the eyes of the Trumps.

Trump’s sympathies for the apartheid countries were crystal clear when, on August 22, 2018, Trump tweeted: “I have asked Secretary of State Pompeo to closely study the South Africa land and farm seizures and expropriations and the large scale killing of farmers. ‘South African Government is now seizing land from white farmers.’”

The South African government was keenly aware that Trump was using a trope from the apartheid era. White South African prime ministers, including John Vorster and P. W. Botha were fond of warning their own constituencies, as well as the West, that if blacks achieved majority rule in South Africa, white farmers would be massacred and their land expropriated. These were fear tactics, pure and simple. Mr. Trump, caught in some sort of time warp, continues to believe the apartheid propaganda.

In response to Trump’s tweet, the government of South African President Cyril Ramaphosa hit back at Trump: “South Africa totally rejects this narrow perception which only seeks to divide our nation and reminds us of our colonial past.” It turns out that Trump got his idea that the South African government was seizing land from white farmers from the disreputable Fox News. As for the claim that white farmers were being killed, that bit of bogus information came from a far-right group called AfriForum, consisting of mainly Afrikaners in South Africa and abroad.

The AfriForum disinformation about white-owned farms and farmers in South Africa was picked up by Trump through Fox News’s Tucker Carlson. Carlson’s father, Dick Carlson, was President Ronald Reagan’s chief propagandist as the director of the US Information Agency (USIA), since closed down. During 1985 and 1986, Dick Carlson ensured that a steady stream of right-wing propaganda emanated from the Voice of America, the anti-Cuban Radio Marti, and other platforms. This included support for apartheid South Africa. Other top Republicans involved in pro-South African propaganda included disgraced Republican Party lobbyist Jack Abramoff and Republican activist Lewis Lehrman. In 1985, USIA and the Voice of America, at Carlson’s direction, highlighted an anti-Communist summit meeting held in Jamba, Angola. The summit, called the “Jamboree in Jamba,” was attended by Abramoff, the Angolan UNITA rebel leader Jonas Savimbi, Nicaraguan Contra leader Adolfo Calero, Laotian Hmong leader Pa Kao Her, and Afghan Mujaheddin leader Abdul Rahim Wardak. Also present was Reagan National Security Council official Marine Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North, as well as South African and Israeli representatives. The South African Defense Force provided the security for the summit. Based on the success of the Jamba summit, the Republican right-wing even had hopes of restoring a proto-colonialist administration in Mozambique, the former Portuguese colony. By attempting to create a RENAMO-led government in Mozambique, the right hoped many Portuguese exiles could return to Mozambique to hold key positions in government and commerce. This, of course, was the same thinking behind the right’s support for Savimbi’s UNITA forces in Angola, also a former Portuguese colony.

One of the US groups backing the apartheid South African government was the Committee on the Present Danger, a fervently anti-Communist group. Extinct since the end of the Cold War, the Committee recently enjoyed a resurgence in Washington under the auspices of Trump’s former chief strategist Steve Bannon, Texas Republican Senator Ted Cruz, and former US House of Representatives Speaker Newt Gingrich.

In the 1980s, it was clear that far-right elements in the Reagan administration were trying to shore up white-rule in South Africa, prevent total black rule in South-West Africa, and roll back rule by Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe – the former Rhodesia. The racist right-wing in the United States had hoped to prevent Mugabe from coming to power in June 1979 by backing the creation of a post-minority rule country called Zimbabwe Rhodesia. The use of the name Rhodesia was a concession to the white minority in the country, which, upon unilateral independence in 1965, was headed by Prime Minister Ian Smith. Smith was a hero to the far-right elements in the United States, including the Ku Klux Klan. Smith and his allies in South Africa decided the best way to maintain the status quo was to form an alliance with Rhodesian tribes opposed to Mugabe, including Ndebele leaders like Joshua Nkomo.

The first Prime Minister of Zimbabwe Rhodesia was Bishop Abel Muzorewa, who, like Mugabe, was a member of the northern Shona tribe. Muzorewa was an opponent of Mugabe as were other officials in the short-lived Zimbabwe Rhodesia, sometimes called “Rhobabwe.” Smith continued in the government as a minister without portfolio. White Rhodesians continued to serve as ministers of finance, justice, agriculture, and finance. When Britain re-established control over Zimbabwe Rhodesia and changed its name to Southern Rhodesia in December 1979 the writing was on the wall for the white-black coalition government. In 1980, Mugabe became prime minister of Zimbabwe. In the subsequent years, many white Rhodesians fled to South Africa, the United States, Canada, and Australia.

In 2015, Dylan Roof, the US white supremacist who massacred African Americans in a Charleston, South Carolina church, appeared on a website called “The Last Rhodesian” wearing a jacket emblazoned with the flags of Rhodesia and apartheid South Africa. Rhodesian expats have also been involved with several racist groups around the world, including Australia, Canada, Britain, and New Zealand. Donald Trump has rekindled hope among these stubborn nostalgists for white rule in southern Africa that what once seemed impossible is now quite thinkable: white-dominated governments in Harare, Pretoria, and Windhoek.

A similar situation was attempted by promoters of white rule in South-West Africa. In 1977, the Democratic Turnhalle Alliance formed a de facto government in Windhoek led by Dirk Mudge. Mudge, an Afrikaner, governed with the support of South Africa and representatives from various ethnic groups, including the Ovaherero, Coloureds (mixed race), Tswana, Damara, a few Ovambo, Caprivians, Nama, Kavango, San, and White Afrikaners and Germans, the latter concentrated on the coast around Swakopmund. The United Nations refused to recognize the Turnhalle government, opting for the exiled South West African People’s Organization (SWAPO) of Sam Nujoma, which was heavily supported by a majority of the Ovambo people. The attempt by whites and their allies to prevent Nujoma from becoming president of independent Namibia ultimately failed.

Thanks to social media, a de facto alliance of exiled white Rhodesians, South Africans, Nyasalanders (now Malawi), and Namibians, along with racists in Europe, North America, and Australia, see – with Trump as president of the United States and the equally racist Jair Bolsonaro as president of Brazil – an opportunity for them to set the calendar back to the 1960s. Just as minority white leaders like Smith, Vorster, Botha, and Mudge attempted to seek alliances of convenience with various African ethnic groups to maintain ascendancy – the Ndebele, Zulu, Venda, Tswana, Damara, and Ndau, among others – Trump, Steve Bannon, former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke, and about a dozen hard right Republican members of the US Congress are hoping to restore de facto white rule in southern Africa.

Since Trump’s “Make America Great Again” trope has become a racist mantra, so, too, have merchandise bearing mottos like “Make Zimbabwe Rhodesia Again,” “Make Afrikaners Great Again,” and “Make Namibia German Again.” Some whites with roots in Malawi, where the second largest city is Blantyre – named after the town of Blantyre in South Lanarkshire, Scotland – would not mind it if they again enjoyed high positions of influence in the country formerly known as Nyasaland. Some of the descendants of the 75,000 whites who formerly lived in Northern Rhodesia, now Zambia, also pine for the days when whites ruled the country. Afrikaner nationalists also recall with fondness the desire of apartheid South African Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd wanting to turn Bechuanaland (now Botswana), Basutoland (now Lesotho), and Swaziland (now eSwatini) into South African ruled dominions.

Creation of a South Atlantic Treaty Organization (SATO) has long been a goal of neo-conservatives like John Bolton, Trump’s National Security Adviser, and Elliott Abrams, Trump’s “special envoy” for Venezuela. In March 2019, Trump, restarting this goal of the Reagan and Richard Nixon administrations, said during the visit of Bolsonaro to the White House, “I also intend to designate Brazil as a major non-NATO ally, or even possibly—if you start thinking about it—maybe a NATO ally.”

Pleased with the 1970s success of Operation Condor, an intelligence alliance of Latin American military dictatorships that targeted for assassination and arrest leftists in South America and beyond, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger foresaw a military alliance of the Condor partners of Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Uruguay, along with apartheid South Africa and the United States, as firmly extending US military control over the south Atlantic region. Kissinger’s plan for a SATO continued under Reagan. One Reagan administration policy paper was titled “The Security of the South Atlantic: Is It a Case for ‘SATO’–South Atlantic Treaty Organization?” Just as with Trump and Bolsonaro today, in 1984, Reagan and Brazilian President João Figueiredo, Brazil’s last military dictator, had talks on the formation of SATO.

Influenced by the neo-cons in his administration, Trump was recently asked about Africa policy. Trump responded, “We’re looking at Zimbabwe right now.” Just as with the right-wingers gathered at the Jamba Jamboree in 1985, Trump and his racist supporters are looking at Zimbabwe in order to restore something akin to Rhodesia and get the ball rolling on the restoral of white rule and privilege throughout southern Africa and forcing many blacks back to their rural tribal kraals. Trump’s neo-con allies may seek to create a SATO, but the racist elements in Washington want it to be a military club for white governments. Those who sacrificed so much to eliminate the scourge of apartheid and colonialism from southern Africa should be on constant guard against the plans of Trump and his southern African and Brazilian allies. The United States under Trump is a distinct neo-colonialist enemy of the black African people.

Let me remind you of what happened right after World War II. A remarkable group of Americans and Europeans and others, not just from government, but from the world of culture and business, engaged in a collective surge of imagination. And what they imagined and what they created was a new international order, the order that’s allowed you and me to live our lives, all of our lives, without great power war and with more prosperity than was ever seen before on the planet. So, a remarkable story. Interestingly, every pillar of this project that produced these results, when first proposed, was rejected by the foreign policy establishment as naive or unrealistic.

My favorite is the Marshall Plan. After World War II, Americans felt exhausted. They had demobilized 10 million troops, they were focused on an urgent domestic agenda. But as people began to appreciate how devastated Europe was and how aggressive Soviet communism was, Americans eventually decided to tax themselves a percent and a half of GDP every year for four years and send that money to Europe to help reconstruct these countries, including Germany and Italy, whose troops had just been killing Americans. Amazing. This also created the United Nations. Amazing. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The World Bank. NATO. All of these elements of an order for peace and prosperity. So, in a word, what we need to do is do it again.

The US did donate many billions of dollars to rebuild Europe. The Marshall Plan, however, excluded the Soviet Union. It excluded Belarus, which had suffered the largest losses of any nation in WWII, 25% of its population. It excluded Russia, which lost 13%. But those weren’t nations, they were states within the USSR, the nation that lost by far the highest percentage of its population of any nation, to the war: nearly 14%.

Russia had lost, to Germany’s Nazis, 13,950,000, or exactly 12.7% of its population. Another part of the Soviet Union, Belarus, lost 2.29 million, or exactly 25.3% of its population to Hitler. Another part of the USSR, Ukraine, lost 6.85 million, or 16.3%. The entire Soviet Union lost 26.6 million, exactly 13.7% of its population to Hitler. The US lost only 419,400, or 0.32% of its population. Furthermore, immediately after FDR died and Harry S. Truman became President, the US CIA (then as its predecessor organization the OSS) provided protection and employment in Germany for top members of Hitler’s equivalent to the CIA, the Gehlen Organization. (America’s CIA continues flagrantly to violate the law and hide from Congress and the American people crucial details of its relationship with the Gehlen Organization.) By contrast, the Soviet Union was unremitting in killing Nazis whom it captured. So: while the USSR was killing any ‘ex’-Nazis it could find, the USA. was hiring them either in West Germany or else into the US itself. It brought them to America whenever the US regime needed the person’s assistance in designing weapons to use against the USSR Right away, the US was looking for ‘ex’-Nazis who could help the US conquer the Soviet Union. The Cold War secretly started in the US as soon as WW II was over (the OSS-CIA’s “Operation Paperclip”). (There was no equivalent to “Operation Paperclip” in the USSR.)

The Soviet Union suffered vastly the brunt of the Allies’ losses from WWII, but the US, which suffered the least from the war, refused to help them out, and instead the US regime protected most of the ‘ex’-Nazis that were in its own area of control. Without nasty Joseph Stalin’s help, America would today be ruled by the Nazi regime instead of by America’s domestic aristocracy as it now is. And this is the way that our aristocracy thanked the Soviet people, for the immense sacrifices that they had made, really, on behalf of the entire future world. This happened right after WW II was over, and the US regime was already determined, right away, not to help those people, but instead to conquer them — to treat them as being the new enemy, so as to stoke the weapons-trade after the war (and the need for more weapons) ended. How ‘good’ was this behavior by the US rulers — the “Military Industrial Complex” or MIC — actually? (The MIC took over as soon as FDR died and Truman replaced him.)

Truman was unfortunately an extremely effective agent of America’s billionaires in advancing them first to continue their MIC (or, actually, the weapons-making firms), so that the billionaires who controlled them had no reason to fear the breakout of peace in the post-war era — America right away started its world-record-shattering number of coups and invasions, virtually as soon as Truman took over. First was the coup in Thailand in 1948 — right at the CIA’s very start — in order to grab hold of Asia’s narcotics traffic so that the needed off-the-books funding for that spy-agency could be instituted (and its existence didn’t become public until the great investigative journalist Gary Webb uncovered its operations in Nicaragua during President Reagan’s Iran-Contra scandal, which entailed illegal funding — from cocaine-sales — of Reagan’s war against Nicaragua, a Soviet-friendly country) The heroic Gary Webb became blackballed from America’s ’news’-(actually propaganda)-media and plunged into poverty so that he (according to the government) committed suicide and “wasn’t murdered,” but (either way) his death was another of the CIA’s secret victories.

Hey, if this looks bad for the United States, then the truth looks bad. This is not the propaganda. Deceits such as Graham Allison’s slick distortions are the propaganda — and thus he and the others who do such work are enormously successful and highly honored by America’s billionaires and the rest of their retinues. People such as that, train the next generation of and for America’s aristocracy, so that they can become just as smug in their evil and self-deception as their trainers are. Their parents get vindicated by Allison and others of the billionaire-class’s propaganda-merchants (‘historians’ ‘journalists’, etc.). What’s not to like in this? It’s virtually a cult of the world’s most-powerful people and of their retinues. Lots of people would like to join it — and, “To hell with the truth.”

Even the U.N. has caved to the American behemoth. It offers an article “UN/DESA POLICY BRIEF #52: THE MARSHALL PLAN, IMF AND FIRST UN DEVELOPMENT DECADE IN THE GOLDEN AGE OF CAPITALISM: LESSONS FOR OUR TIME”, eulogizing what maybe its authors didn’t know was actually the very start of the Cold War:

Three events from the Golden Age that left significant lessons relevant for the implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals include: the contributions of the Marshall Plan, the experience leading to the achievement of current account convertibility under the IMF Articles of Agreement and the declaration of the First UN Development Decade. The Marshall Plan marked the very beginning of successful international cooperation in the post-war period.

No mention is made, there, either, that this was the start of the Cold War. The fact that this was the start of America’s war against Russia is simply ignored. Instead, all of this is celebrated. But even the CIA-edited and written Wikipedia acknowledges, in its (heavily propagandistic pro-US-regime) article “Molotov Plan”:

The Molotov Plan was the system created by the Soviet Union in 1947 in order to provide aid to rebuild the countries in Eastern Europe that were politically and economically aligned to the Soviet Union. It can be seen to be the Soviet Union’s version of the Marshall Plan, which for political reasons the Eastern European countries would not be able to join without leaving the Soviet sphere of influence. Soviet foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov rejected the Marshall Plan (1947), proposing instead the Molotov Plan — the Soviet-sponsored economic grouping which was eventually expanded to become the Comecon.[1]

Just think about that, for a moment: The Soviet Union is being blamed there because it “rejected” the US regime’s demand upon all nations that accepted aid from The Marshall Plan, that they be “leaving the Soviet sphere of influence.” How stupid does the writer of that particular passage have to be? Wikipedia’s description of the Molotov Plan continues:

The Molotov Plan was symbolic of the Soviet Union’s refusal to accept aid from the Marshall Plan, or allow any of their satellite states to do so because of their belief that the Marshall Plan was an attempt to weaken Soviet interest in their satellite states through the conditions imposed and by making beneficiary countries economically dependent on the United States (Officially, one of the goals of the Marshall Plan was to prevent the spread of Communism).

The Marshall Plan wasn’t merely “an attempt to weaken Soviet interest in their satellite states” but was instead an actual lure, to draw into “leaving the Soviet sphere of influence,” the nations “that were politically and economically aligned to the Soviet Union.” This wasn’t really about “Soviet interest in their satellite states” but instead it was about the US regime’s policy, immediately after WW II, to take over not merely the nations that the US had helped in Europe to defeat Hitler, but also the nations that the Soviet Union had helped to defeat Hitler. It was, in short, a US grab, to control territory within the lands that the Soviet Union had saved from Nazism. This is the reality.

Look at these tables, again, of how much the US and the Soviet Union — and all other countries — had suffered losses from actually fighting against Hitler, and then consider that the nation which had lost the least was now so war-mongering as to immediately try to grab “sphere of influence” — the very border-nations which were crucial to the Soviet Union’s national security against that very same grabber — grabbing away from the one that had lost the most.

Here is another piece of US-regime propaganda about the Molotov Plan (which they say was the Soviet response to The Marshall Plan even though it wasn’t and the Soviet Union had been so destroyed by Hitler as to have made any such donations to their own satellites only minuscule by comparison):

The plan was a system of bilateral trade agreements that established COMECON to create an economic alliance of socialist countries. This aid allowed countries in Europe to stop relying on American aid, and therefore allowed Molotov Plan states to reorganize their trade to the USSR instead. The plan was in some ways contradictory, however, because at the same time the Soviets were giving aid to Eastern bloc countries, they were demanding that countries who were members of the Axis powers pay reparations to the USSR.

Those weren’t “socialist” countries; they were dictatorial socialist countries, as opposed to democratic socialist countries such as in Scandinavia — the proper term for what the Soviet alliance was is “communist,” not “socialist” — and there was a very big difference between the Scandinavian countries, versus the communist countries (though the US regime wants to slur one by the other so as to sucker fools against democratic socialism — progressivism).

And, by “they were demanding that countries who were members of the Axis powers pay reparations to the USSR,” we’re supposed to think that Germany, and Italy, and Japan, shouldn’t have compensated their victims? What? And yet we’re also supposed to believe that Germany should pay it for Jews who lived in Israel? What’s that about? Why? Why ‘should’ Germany be funding Jews to grab land that for thousands of years has been populated almost entirely by Arabs and for perhaps a thousand years almost entirely by Muslims, thus subsidizing the theft of that land, the grabbing of that land, by Jews who had escaped Hitler’s Holocaust? What is all of this really about, and what is propaganda such as Graham Allison delivers, really about? America’s manufacturers of the machinery of mass-death need to “make a living,” don’t they? And isn’t that propaganda the most effective way to do it? So, that’s what it really is about.

There is the presumption by neoconservatives — American imperialists — that the US Government is both democratic and well-intentioned, but at least after the death of FDR, it hasn’t been either one. (Back in his time, it was a limited democracy, very limited for Blacks.) And this is the reason why the US regime double-crossed Russia and shamed The West when the last Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, ended communism and ended the USSR and even ended its Warsaw Pact in 1991, but the US side secretly continued the Cold War, and does so increasingly today.

None of this fits the US regime’s propaganda-narrative, such as Graham Allison, and many other thousands of other regime-shills, present. Theirs is called ‘history’. The reality is called “history.” In the US and its vassal-nations, there is vastly more of a market for ‘history’ than for “history,” because the billionaires not only control the government — they also control the alleged news-media, history-publishers, and other means of ‘informing’ and ‘educating’ the public. So, it’s a self-selecting circle of deceivers that are at the top.

PS: To get to the beginning of the Cold War, Truman’s complete diary needs to be published. The excerpts that have been published do include information that contradicts and overrides his published statements, and that thereby helps researchers penetrate to what was really going on in his head at the time. What they show is a tragically unintelligent but well-intentioned person, who had some guiding prejudices and therefore thought in labels instead of trying actually to understand the other person’s real problems (such as FDR did). For example, at the Potsdam Conference during 17 July to 2 August 1945, Stalin tried to explain why the Soviet Union needed to be surrounded by friendly countries just as much as the US and Britain did, but neither Truman nor Churchill would accept any such concern by Stalin. As the BBC summarized that, “Stalin wanted a buffer zone of friendly Communist countries to protect the USSR from further attack in the future.” Truman got his views on such matters from his top generals and other advisors. His diary on 16 July 1945 said “Talked to Mc Caffery about France. He is scared stiff of Communism, the Russian society which isn’t communism at all but just police government pure and simple. A few top hands just take clubs, pistols and concentration camps and rule the people on the lower levels.” But Stalin actually had lots of reason to distrust both Truman and Churchill — just as they had lots of reason to distrust him. FDR hadn’t been so totally in thrall of his generals, nor as naive — nor as manipulable. Just a day after that entry on July 16th, came this on July 17th: “I can deal with Stalin. He is honest, but smart as hell.”

The problem isn’t that Truman often misunderstood, but that he surrounded himself with people that his Party’s top donors liked. Truman wanted to be a progressive but ended up being only a liberal — which his Party’s wealthiest found to be acceptable. His main achievements were in foreign policy and amounted to leading Churchill’s Cold War, pretty much as Stalin had expected. For example, at Potsdam, as Steve Neal’s 2002 Harry and Ike says (p. 40), “Truman was elated that Stalin was preparing to join the Allies in the war against Japan. [But] Eisenhower advised [Truman against that, because, Ike said,] ‘no power on earth could keep the Red Army out of that war unless victory came before they could get in.’” So, Truman rejected the overwhelming opposition from the scientists, who favored doing only a public test-demonstration for Japan’s leaders, and nuked both Hiroshima and Nagasaki — in order to keep the Soviets out of Japan, not in order to win the war against Japan. (Then, of course, the very tactful Ike became Truman’s successor, and led for what at the end of his Presidency he famously named the “military industrial complex.”)

So: those bomb-drops were part of the Cold War against the Soviet Union, not really for the hot WW II to beat Japan. However, Truman could also have deceived himself about what his motives actually were, because his diary on 25 July 1945 said: “This weapon is to be used against Japan between now and August 10th. I have told the Sec. of War, Mr. Stimson to use it so that military objectives and soldiers and sailors are the target and not women and children. Even if the Japs are savages, ruthless, merciless and fanatic, we as the leader of the world for the common welfare cannot drop this terrible bomb on the old Capitol or the new.” The two bombings occurred on 6 and 9 August — right after Potsdam. Obviously, it wasn’t just “soldiers and sailors are the target and not women and children.” And, never, after he perpetrated that, did he express regret about all those “women and children.” He had no difficulty ignoring embarrassing realities.

Truman’s intentions were progressive — for example, his diary-entry on 16 July 1945 said (in the context of damning the Soviet Government) “It seems that Sweden, Norway, Denmark and perhaps Switzerland have the only real peoples government on the Continent of Europe. But the rest are as bad lot from the standpoint of the people who do not believe in tyrany.” (He routinely misspelled like that.) Unlike Republicans, who love to equate “socialism” with communism and simply to ignore the Scandinavian examples disproving that equation, he wasn’t quite stupid enough to fall for the billionaires’ line on it. He didn’t need to be: he was a Democrat. Even the billionaires in his Party don’t spout that line — it’s strictly Republicans who equate “socialism” with “communism.”

FDR was a leader. Truman didn’t know how to lead, because he didn’t even know himself. Himself was a puppet, and he didn’t even know it, much less know the strings (from Ike etc. — the billionaires’ knowing agents) (which were pulling his own brain).

And that’s how the road to today started.

And 200 years from now is, by now, virtually certain to be vastly worse. If persons of FDR’s calibre had been America’s Presidents after his death, then none of this would likely have happened (at least not nearly as much); but none of them were. Leadership matters. It really does. It really did.

“The Mueller report makes Trump look vain, ignorant, inept, and astonishingly dishonest.” So writes my Washington Examiner colleague Quin Hillyer, never an enthusiast of President Donald Trump.

He refers to many passages of the report: one that shows the president ordering his White House counsel to arrange the firing of the special counsel and then ordering the counsel to state in writing he never said that; one suggesting that Trump was dangling pardons to cooperative aides; and others in which Trump vents his rage at the protracted investigation, which eventually, after almost two years, found no evidence that he or his people colluded with Russia.

House Democrats are looking hard to find something a bare majority of House members will find a plausible basis for impeachment. They will ignore the fact that Trump’s aides — notably, former White House counsel Donald McGahn — refused to carry out his orders or ignored his suggestions. They will call this obstruction of justice, even though it’s nothing more than thinking bad thoughts — out loud.

That’s not an offense that will get him removed from office by two-thirds of the Senate. But it is a species of political malpractice, one that may lead the voters to remove him in November 2020.

And it’s very different from the modus operandi of the three most successful presidents of the last 90 years, Franklin Roosevelt, Dwight Eisenhower and Ronald Reagan, who won their second terms with an average of 59 percent of the popular vote.

Donald Trump shares all but his innermost thoughts with us. Moments of irritation and elation prompt instant tweets, full of execration and exultation, respectively.

Not so with Roosevelt, Eisenhower and Reagan. Each of them projected an image of friendliness and cheer. Each seemed to have shared the tastes and gut instincts of ordinary people.

But none of the three had any really close friends, any aides or companions with whom they shared their plans and to whom they revealed their reactions to people and events. Each had gone through a long period of enforced idleness, an enforced hibernation in what are, for most professionals, their peak years — Roosevelt bedridden with polio, Eisenhower stuck as lieutenant colonel, Reagan with his declining movie career. Each then suddenly gained great fame, Roosevelt and Reagan as governors of the nation’s largest states, Eisenhower as commander of the nation’s largest military operation.

Each came to the presidency used to great responsibility and accustomed to long loneliness. As president, each kept his strategy and most of his tactics to himself. None seems to have fully trusted or confided in anyone for any extended period. None seems to have wanted the public to know how knowledgeable and well-read he was, and each managed to fool historians on that point as well.

There are some, but only a few, resemblances between these three presidents and Donald Trump. Trump did enjoy success and gain fame early, and perhaps there was a form of enforced hibernation during his near-bankruptcy in the 1990s. He seems to share the tastes and instincts of many ordinary people.

But he has nothing like the self-discipline apparent in the determination of Roosevelt, Eisenhower and Reagan to keep their long-term strategies and as much as possible of their short-term tactics to themselves. Roosevelt cordially disliked some political allies; Eisenhower had a volcanic temper; Reagan had his pet hates — but they all kept these things secret from the public and, mostly, from their closest aides as well.

The contrast with Donald Trump is obvious. You can get his instant responses to just about any public events or political developments by signing up for his Twitter feed. Former aides, political allies and rank-and-file supporters have all suggested, multiple times, that someone grab and hide the cellphone on which he tweets. No one has done it.

It’s obviously foolish for Democrats to follow the advice of Trump haters in the media and impeach Trump for making comments and threats he and his subordinates never acted on. Nor is expressing rage at an investigation evidence of guilt, as CNN’s Jeffrey Toobin argues, even after special counsel Robert Mueller found no collusion with Russia. Vagrant musings should not be the basis for overturning the result of a presidential election.

But neither is the dismissal of charges evidence that Trump’s undisciplined self-exposure is the best way to govern. Maybe he should click off cable news and read a few books to see how his three most successful recent predecessors managed to keep to themselves.

creators.com

Countering technology transfer, as it was referred to back in the 1970s, was a big deal for western intelligence agencies, driven by concern that the Soviet Union would be able to steal western technology and use it to upgrade its weapon systems as well as its military related infrastructures. A number of European CIA stations, including Germany, actually had tech transfer as the highest priority in their operating directives, meaning that it was considered to be more important than recruiting Soviet officials to learn what the Kremlin was planning to do about recurrent areas of friction like the controversial stationing of intermediate range ballistic missiles in Europe.

Given the still ongoing dissection of the events surrounding the 2016 election, the title of the Dorfman article was intriguing, suggesting that the Soviets and now the Russians have been attempting to infiltrate America’s political parties for over forty years. But, like the endless Robert Mueller investigation, is it actually true or is it a contrivance that is useful for those who want to continue to depict the Kremlin’s activities in the most negative possible light?

The intelligence war between the Soviets and the United States at the midpoint in the Cold War was certainly multifaceted and fraught with real danger as “mutual assured destruction” by the two great nuclear powers was by no means a notion empty of meaning. Looking back on the GOP nomination battle in 1976, one might reasonably recall that Ronald Reagan was a bit of an anomaly, a potentially dangerous hardliner with sometimes quixotic opinions, not unlike Donald Trump. His views on the Soviet Union were largely unknown apart from the usual bromides and the KGB would have had as a high priority the collection of information that would illuminate the somewhat outside the norm Hollywood actor turned politician.

All of that given, it would appear that the headline to the Dorfman article is not supported by evidence presented in the text. The narrative describes how an American businessman was used as an access agent to two Soviet intelligence officers beginning in 1975. One of the Russians, Yuri Pavlov, was under diplomatic cover at the Soviet San Francisco Consulate. The American businessman, John Greenagel ran a public relations firm in the city and had a relationship with the Reagan campaign that predated Reagan’s first run for the Republican nomination in 1975-6. He was also reporting to the CIA about the contact with the Russian, clearly with the objective of developing personal insights into Pavlov’s personality and character to permit an eventual recruitment pitch by an Agency officer.

In the article, a former FBI counter-terrorism officer concedes that Pavlov “wanted to learn about the American political system, and what people were thinking at the time,” and he did so openly by asking questions at diplomatic receptions and cocktail parties he was invited to. For example, over lunch with the American Greenagel, Pavlov asked questions about the former California governor: “He asked, ‘Is Reagan a warmonger? Why does he want military superiority? Why doesn’t he support détente?’”

It was all something that diplomats as well as spies and journalists normally do and it did not include any attempt by Pavlov to recruit Greenagel or anyone else to collect specific information from individuals working on the Reagan campaign. On the contrary, to set the hook for a recruitment pitch of Pavlov by CIA, it was Greenagel who provided the Russian with expensive gifts, including a designer suit and handfuls of $100 bills “for expenses.”

The article concludes “In the cat and mouse game of recruiting Cold War spies, it’s hard to say who came out ahead. What is perhaps most striking about Pavlov’s efforts to develop contacts in the Reagan camp was, in fact, how fruitless they seemed in the end. Some of the academics Pavlov targeted did indeed end up working in presidential administrations, recalls Kinane, though Pavlov failed to recruit any of them.” Nor was Pavlov ever recruited, or even pitched, by CIA. So did the KGB want to “infiltrate the Reagan camp” suggesting that 2016 was no anomaly? The answer would have to be “no,” or at least that if they wanted to do so they didn’t try very hard and any comparison to the current state of Russian-American relations as seen through allegations of mutual electoral interference is more than a bit of a stretch.

So, the Dorfman article’s headlined political message about Moscow’s alleged interference in US politics is not supported by the story. But Dorfman or his editor gets in the last word coming from the former FBI counter-intelligence officer, even though the evidence does not support the claim: “People think this is new. This isn’t new. The Russians have been doing this stuff for 40 or 50 years. It’s news now because they’ve been so successful. You’ve got to hand it to the Russians: they know what they’re doing. They’re more and more sophisticated; they’ve learned an awful lot. Now they get somebody like Donald Trump Jr. meeting with them — they’re killing them — because Americans like Trump Jr. don’t know what they’re doing.” Nor does the FBI, apparently.

On August 22, the People's Court of Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon) convicted members of the Provisional National Government of Vietnam (PNGV), which is based in California, for planning to carry out terrorist attacks in South Vietnam. The PNGV was formed in the 1990s by former officials of the Republic of Vietnam, which was defeated by North Vietnam and the South Vietnamese Vietcong in 1975. The California “government-in-exile” has proclaimed Dao Minh Quan as its prime minister. The two US citizens imprisoned in Vietnam for 14 years — Nguyen James Han and Phan Angel – were convicted of planning to carry out attacks on police agencies and Ho Chi Minh City's Tan Son Nhat airport. They were also charged with attempting to hack into a Vietnamese radio station to broadcast anti-Hanoi propaganda.

On August 22, 2018, Trump tweeted, “I have asked Secretary of State [Mike Pompeo] to closely study the South Africa land and farm seizures and expropriations and the large scale killing of farmers. ‘South African Government is now seizing land from white farmers.’” Trump’s belief that there are “large scale killings” of white farmers originated with the lunatic conspiracy nitwittery of Fox News host Tucker Carlson, whose father, Richard Carlson, was the director of the US Information Agency (USIA), Voice of America, and Radio Marti, all organs of American propaganda during the Reagan administration. Part of the elder Carlson’s mission was to tilt US policy in support South Africa’s minority white apartheid government and against the opposition African National Congress (ANC) of then-imprisoned Nelson Mandela. Richard Carlson later became the vice chairman of the right-wing neo-conservative Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, a foe of the ANC-led governments of post-apartheid South Africa.

Tucker Carlson relied on his incorrect information about South Africa from the right-wing libertarian Cato Institute, which, in turn, received its information from the white Afrikaner-led AfriForum, a lobbying group for white South African farmers, who own 72 percent of farmland in South Africa. South African President Cyril Ramaphosa and the ANC are considering legislation to return white-owned land to black South African farmers. However, Trump’s contention that there is large scale killings of white South African farmers is confronted by the fact that the murder of South African farmers, white and black, is at a 20-year low. Further exaggerating the claims of mass killings of whites in South Africa was US neo-Nazi leader Richard Spencer, who counts Trump speechwriter and suspected Twitter message adviser Stephen Miller among is close friends.

Mr. Trump decided that is was best to take the word of an overly-manicured bow tie-wearing Tucker Carlson over that of Vaughn Bishop, his deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency on the situation in South Africa. Bishop happens to possess a Doctorate in African Studies from Northwestern University. Tucker Carlson, on the other hand, has a bachelor’s degree in history from Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut. In addition to AfriForum and the Cato Institute, the nonsense about mass killings of white farmers was ricocheted around the alt-right echo chambers by Stefan Molyneux, a Canadian conspiracy theorist who traffics in discredited white genocide propaganda, and his Canadian colleague, Gavin McInnes, whose beliefs generally fall in line with those of Molyneux.

During the 1980s, the Reagan administration created a covert weapons, mercenary, and logistics network in support of the Afghan mujaheddin that was fighting Soviet and government forces in Afghanistan. What grew out of this clandestine network, which was based in northwestern Pakistan and financed by Saudi Arabia, was Al Qaeda. Trump is currently considering an offer from Erik Prince, the founder of the Blackwater mercenary firm and brother of Trump’s Education Secretary, Betsy DeVos, to deploy his new army of mercenaries, Reflex Responses (R2), based outside of Abu Dhabi, to fight a “privatized” war against the Taliban and its allies in Afghanistan. Prince is already fighting a semi-privatized war in Yemen, on behalf of his United Arab Emirates bosses. That war, which involves US air support for Saudi, Emirati, and R2 ground forces, has resulted in thousands of civilian deaths in the country, the latest being 40 schoolchildren, whose bus was hit by a US-made laser-guided bomb made by Lockheed Martin and sold to Saudi Arabia.

In the early 1970s, as Taiwan began facing diplomatic isolation as more and more nations switched their recognition from the “Republic of China” on Taiwan to the People’s Republic of China in Beijing, the Nixon administration constantly berated nations for changing diplomatic ties, even as it was secretly negotiating with mainland China at talks in Warsaw amid the much-publicized “ping-pong diplomacy” between the two nations. As the United Nations was debating seating the People’s Republic of China and expelling Taiwan in 1971, even as plans were afoot for Nixon to visit China the following year, the United States warned nations with relations with Taiwan not to switch them to China. Ecuador and Peru were among the Latin American nations warned by Washington. Recently, as El Salvador announced it was recognizing China and abandon relations with Taiwan, the Trump administration attacked El Salvador.

The White House announced in a statement that, “The El Salvadoran government’s receptiveness to China’s apparent interference in the domestic politics of a Western Hemisphere country is of grave concern to the United States and will result in a reevaluation of our relationship with El Salvador.” The Trump rhetoric could have come right out of the early 1970s, when similar threats were made by the Nixon administration to nations switching ties from Taipei to Beijing.

The Trump administration’s hostility toward Venezuela and Nicaragua is reminiscent of the dark days of Nixon, when the CIA launched a successful coup in Chile, toppling the democratically-elected president, Salvador Allende, from power and replacing him with a right-wing military junta. Trump is known to favor US military intervention against Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, while his Pentagon and CIA have been actively promoting a “themed revolution” against Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega. These Trump operations are taken right out of the playbooks of Nixon in dealing with Chile and Ronald Reagan in dealing with Nicaragua. It appears that Trump is intent on reviving the infamous CIA “contra” war against Nicaragua from US bases in Honduras.

Trump foreign policy, like that of Nixon and Gerald Ford, does not want to see the end of colonialism and the emergence of newly-independent nations in the Pacific – New Caledonia and Bougainville – or in the Middle East – Kurdistan and South Yemen. Trump’s policy against Palestinian statehood is out of the 1960s and 70s. Trump’s foreign policy is an anachronism that should be chased back into the history books as soon as possible.

Central American migrants – particularly unaccompanied minors – are again crossing the U.S.-Mexico boundary in large numbers.

Under the Obama administration In 2014, more than 68,000 unaccompanied Central American children were apprehended at the U.S.-Mexico boundary. There were more than 60,000 in 2016.

The mainstream narrative often reduces the causes of migration to factors unfolding in migrants’ home countries. In reality, migration is often a manifestation of a profoundly unequal and exploitative relationship between migrant-sending countries and countries of destination. Understanding this is vital to making immigration policy more effective and ethical.

Through my research on immigration and border policing, I have learned a lot about these dynamics. One example involves relations between Honduras and the United States.

U.S. Roots of Honduran Emigration

I first visited Honduras in 1987 to do research. As I walked around the city of Comayagua, many thought that I, a white male with short hair in his early 20’s, was a U.S. soldier. This was because hundreds of U.S. soldiers were stationed at the nearby Palmerola Air Base at the time. Until shortly before my arrival, many of them would frequent Comayagua, particularly its “red zone” of female sex workers.

U.S. military presence in Honduras and the roots of Honduran migration to the United States are closely linked. It began in the late 1890s, when U.S.-based banana companies first became active there. As historian Walter LaFeber writes in “Inevitable Revolutions: The United States in Central America,” American companies “built railroads, established their own banking systems, and bribed government officials at a dizzying pace.” As a result, the Caribbean coast “became a foreign-controlled enclave that systematically swung the whole of Honduras into a one-crop economy whose wealth was carried off to New Orleans, New York, and later Boston.”

By 1914, U.S. banana interests owned almost 1 million acres of Honduras’ best land. These holdings grew through the 1920s to such an extent that, as LaFeber asserts, Honduran peasants “had no hope of access to their nation’s good soil.” Over a few decades, U.S. capital also came to dominate the country’s banking and mining sectors, a process facilitated by the weak state of Honduras’ domestic business sector. This was coupled with direct U.S. political and military interventions to protect U.S. interests in 1907 and 1911.

Such developments made Honduras’ ruling class dependent on Washington for support. A central component of this ruling class was and remains the Honduran military. By the mid-1960s it had become, in LaFeber’s words, the country’s “most developed political institution,” – one that Washington played a key role in shaping.

The Reagan Era

This was especially the case during the presidency of Ronald Reagan in the 1980s. At that time, U.S. political and military policy was so influential that many referred to the Central American country as the “U.S.S. Honduras” and the Pentagon Republic.

As part of its effort to overthrow the Sandinista government in neighboring Nicaragua and “roll back” the region’s leftist movements, the Reagan administration “temporarily” stationed several hundred U.S. soldiers in Honduras. Moreover, it trained and sustained Nicaragua’s “contra” rebels on Honduran soil, while greatly increasing military aid and arm sales to the country.

The Reagan years also saw the construction of numerous joint Honduran-U.S. military bases and installations. Such moves greatly strengthened the militarization of Honduran society. In turn, political repression rose. There was a dramatic increase in the number of political assassinations, “disappearances” and illegal detentions.

The Reagan administration also played a big role in restructuring the Honduran economy. It did so by strongly pushing for internal economic reforms, with a focus on exporting manufactured goods. It also helped deregulate and destabilize the global coffee trade, upon which Honduras heavily depended. These changes made Honduras more amenable to the interests of global capital. They disrupted traditional forms of agriculture and undermined an already weak social safety net.

These decades of U.S. involvement in Honduras set the stage for Honduran emigration to the United States, which began to markedly increase in the 1990s.

In the post-Reagan era, Honduras remained a country scarred by a heavy-handed military, significant human rights abuses and pervasive poverty. Still, liberalizing tendencies of successive governments and grassroots pressure provided openings for democratic forces.

They contributed, for example, to the election of Manuel Zelaya, a liberal reformist, as president in 2006. He led on progressive measures such as raising the minimum wage. He also tried to organize a plebiscite to allow for a constituent assembly to replace the country’s constitution, which had been written during a military government. However, these efforts incurred the ire of the country’s oligarchy, leading to his overthrow by the military in June 2009.

Post-coup Honduras

U.S. Marines in Honduras in July 2016. (Wikimedia Commons)

The 2009 coup, more than any other development, explains the increase in Honduran migration across the southern U.S. border in the last few years. The Obama administration played an important role in these developments. Although it officially decried Zelaya’s ouster, it equivocated on whether or not it constituted a coup, which would have required the U.S. to stop sending most aid to the country.

Then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, in particular, sent conflicting messages, and worked to ensure that Zelaya did not return to power. This was contrary to the wishes of the Organization of American States, the leading hemispheric political forum composed of the 35 member-countries of the Americas, including the Caribbean. Several months after the coup, Clinton supported a highly questionable election aimed at legitimating the post-coup government.

Strong military ties between the U.S. and Honduras persist: several hundred U.S. troops are stationed at Soto Cano Air Base (formerly Palmerola) in the name of fighting the drug war and providing humanitarian aid.

Since the coup, writes historian Dana Frank, “a series of corrupt administrations has unleashed open criminal control of Honduras, from top to bottom of the government.”

Organized crime, drug traffickers and the country’s police heavily overlap. Impunity reigns in a country with frequent politically-motivated killings. It is the world’s most dangerous country for environmental activists, according to Global Witness, an international nongovernmental organization.

Although its once sky-high murder rate has declined, the continuing exodus of many youth demonstrates that violent gangs still plague urban neighborhoods.

Meanwhile, post-coup governments have intensified an increasingly unregulated, “free market” form of capitalism that makes life unworkable for many. Government spending on health and education, for example, has declined in Honduras. Meanwhile, the country’s poverty rate has risen markedly. These contribute to the growing pressures that push many people to migrate, raising ethical questions about the responsibility of the United States toward those now fleeing from the ravages U.S. policy has helped to produce.

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Photo: Linda Hess Miller

Donald Trump believes that space is becoming a “warfighting domain,” just like the land, air, and sea, and is thus encouraging the creation of a space force on par with the other branches of the armed forces. It was hardly an off-the-cuff comment.

The idea enjoys strong support in Congress. Pushing forward such an initiative would strengthen the president’s position at a time when he needs it the most. Some lawmakers say that force could be created as part of the Department of the Air Force in just three to five years. The proposal is not popular among the military brass, but on March 13 the president made his views known. "The president is very focused on outcomes. He has prioritized space, he has recognized the threats that have evolved, and the pace with which they've evolved, and he recognizes that as a warfighting domain," says Kenneth Rapuano, assistant defense secretary for homeland defense and global security.

The initiative dovetails with the recently issued National Security Strategy. Some initial steps have already been taken. Deputy Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan, the chief space adviser, provided lawmakers with an interim report on upcoming space reforms this month. An updated report is due August 1.

No doubt Donald Trump’s statement was prompted by President Putin’s March 1 address to lawmakers in which he unveiled some details about Russia’s new weapons. The balance of forces in the air, land, and sea is not tilting in America’s favor, but domination of space could change that picture. The Joint Vision 2020 states that the US should dominate and control the military use of space.

What could this mean in practice? It’s logical to assume that all the satellites belonging to the branches of the military and STRATCOM will operate under the new command. No doubt the structure will have teeth, such as the HTV-2 and AHW hypersonic-glide-vehicle weapons, the Boeing X-37 spacecraft, and the Dream Chaser reusable space planes. The X-37 has flown several secret missions into orbit carrying mystery payloads. Anti-satellite weapons have been tested. Now that they have undergone testing on land and at sea, laser technology will move to space.

The 1967 Outer Space Treaty imposes no restriction on conventional weapons. The diplomatic efforts to reach an international agreement regulating space activities have been rejected by the US as disingenuous non-starters. In 2014, the UN General Assembly adopted a Russian resolution, “No First Placement of Weapons in Outer Space,” which was dismissed by Washington. The US has never come up any initiatives of its own.

So, the US wants to dominate space. But will it? The USSR has suspended many space-war programs, such as “space-to-space” munitions, which could be quickly brought back to life. The R36 ORB was actually the third stage of the well-known Voevoda (Satan) ICBM. Its warhead could be placed in orbit and left there for some time, reducing to just a few minutes the time required to strike any target on Earth. The weapon was even operational for a short period.

The have been programs to create space platforms, including some that were nuclear powered. Russia was the only country to successfully use Hall–effect thrusters to maneuver objects in space. In his famous “new weapons” speech, President Putin mentioned the Avangard boost glider that could be easily reconfigured for space-interceptor missions. In 1984 Russia launched a program to create the 79М6 Kontakt anti-satellite (ASAT) system as a direct response to US ASAT tests. The system carried a modified MiG-31D fighter on board that theoretically could attack as many as 24 satellites within a 36-hour period. The Kontakt never became operational, as tensions subsided and Moscow reached an agreement with Washington to terminate the program. It could be resurrected, leaving no American satellite safe. Some sources report that the development has already been revived. And almost all modern US systems are heavily dependent on satellites.

It could be that opening up discussions with Russia on measures to curb the militarization of space might be a much cheaper and more reliable way to safeguard US national security than throwing down the gauntlet. It’s quite likely that the US would touch off a race it won’t win.

In most cases, leaders suffering from toxiphobia – the dictionary definition for someone afraid of being poisoned – have also been ruthless tyrants who have suffered from extreme paranoia. Although Trump’s pipe dreams of being a tyrant are checked by the US Constitution and two other equal branches of the federal government, he does meet the definition, as defined by those toxiphobes who have preceded him in history, of being a paranoid would-be dictator.

Trump’s fear of being poisoned has resulted in his affectation for meals that consist of two Big Macs, two fish filet sandwiches, French fries, and a chocolate milkshake, which are reportedly ordered and picked up by his Secret Service detail at the McDonald’s located three blocks from the White House at New York Avenue and 13th Street. Trump’s opting to eat food from a fast-food restaurant arise from his concern that “deep state” forces might try to poison the food prepared by the well-vetted and US Navy-operated White House mess. US Navy mess specialists, who are part of the White House staff, also travel with the president and taste any food before it is eaten by the chief executive.

Although many modern world leaders have taken precautions when it comes to their food and drink, including measures that employ food testers, Trump’s paranoia about being poisoned is extreme, more so than any of his predecessors in the presidency, including the very paranoid Richard Nixon. Abraham Lincoln, Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama have all employed food testers, to varying degrees, especially while on foreign trips. George W. Bush reportedly ordered two FBI agents to taste his food while he was on a November 2003 visit to the United Kingdom.

President Franklin Roosevelt had no qualms about accepting a case of vodka and a supply of caviar from Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, following the February 1945 Yalta conference. Roosevelt even served the vodka and caviar to his guests in the White House. Stalin used his own trusted food tester, his half-brother Sasha Egnatashvili, who was nicknamed “the Rabbit.”

Reagan, although employing a White House food tester, became ill with nausea, vomiting, and diarrhea in January 1988, the night before a Washington meeting with Japanese Prime Minister Noboru Takeshita. It was never reported whether the food tester also became sick.

Another Japanese prime minister, Kiichi Miyazawa, would figure prominently in another US presidential nausea spell. On January 8, 1992, George H. W. Bush fainted after vomiting in Miyazawa’s lap during a state dinner at the prime minister’s residence in Japan. Even though sushi was served at the dinner, Bush was not stricken by bad fish or intentional food poisoning. During the afternoon, he and US ambassador to Japan Michael Armacost played a foursome tennis match with Emperor Akihito and Crown Prince Naruhito. Apparently, Bush imbibed too much and later, while various types of raw fish and moving gelatinous substances were being served at the state dinner, Bush took ill at the sight of the food.

Among many of Trump’s current international counterparts, food testing is merely a normal part of personal security and complements bodyguard, motorcade route, rope line, assembly hall, airport tarmac, and other protective measures taken to safeguard heads of state and government. Poisoning of a designated protected person is a significant concern for all professional security details. Poisons range from the faster-acting cyanide and arsenic trioxide, to more gradual-acting strychnine and atropine, which are all easily-obtainable by a potential assassin.

In 1991, the body of US President Zachary Taylor was exhumed and examined for signs of an arsenic poisoning assassination. Taylor died in the White House in 1850 after eating a bowl of cherries, possibly containing arsenic. Taylor was believed poisoned by Southern activists opposed to his anti-slavery stance. Although the 1991 autopsy concluded Taylor died from gastroenteritis, or “cholera morbus,” critics noted the tests were conducted in Kentucky and Tennessee, which remained and continue to remain hotbeds for the neo-Confederate cause. Whether or not he was poisoned, Taylor, would not look kindly upon Trump’s dalliances with white supremacists, neo-Confederates, and southern secessionists.

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s food is tested by the Special Protection Group before being served to him. Samples of food eaten by Modi are also tested and the results are even kept for 72 hours.

No different than the White House, the Kremlin also employs food specialists, including a doctor, who examine dishes prepared for the Russian president.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan begins to approach Trump-level paranoia. He employs a special food analysis unit in the presidential mansion in Ankara that tests all food destined for Erdogan’s table for poisons, radioactive substances, and biological warfare-grade bacteria that might be used in an assassination attempt. The special unit employs five on-site food analysts who are on duty for 14 hours a day examining every bit of food and liquid prepared for the Turkish president. Erdogan follows in the footsteps of the founder of the Turkish republic, Kemal Ataturk, who was paranoid about being poisoned and used several food tasters. There may be some reason for Erdogan to be paranoid. It is believed that Turgut Ozal, one of Erdogan’s predecessors, died in 1993 from drinking poisoned lemonade served to him at a Bulgarian embassy reception in Ankara.

Saddam Hussein employed an Assyrian Christian named Kamel Hana Gegeo as his personal food taster. Gegeo was eventually beaten and shot to death by Saddam’s son Uday Hussein at a 1988 dinner honoring Suzanne Mubarak, the First Lady of Egypt. Like Trump, Saddam preferred store-bought food products. Saddam had a particular penchant for Raisin Bran cereal and Mars chocolate bars. Trump’s toxiphobia concerns are more in line with regimes like those of Saddam Hussein and various Roman emperors. Roman Emperor Claudius, whose paranoia almost matches that of Trump’s, was believed to have been poisoned by his food taster, Halotus, who poisoned the emperor’s favorite dish, mushrooms.

One of the more paranoid dictators to have used food testers was the Romanian leader Nicolae Ceausescu, who traveled with not only a full-time food examiner, a Securitate intelligence service chemist, and mobile food-testing laboratory, but also his own food. Ceausescu insisted on drinking raw vegetable juice with a straw, even at state dinners arranged by foreign hosts.

Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte relied on a Newfoundland retriever as his food tester during his exile on Elba. Thailand used mice to test food served to foreign leaders attending the 2003 Asia-Pacific Economic (APEC) summit in Bangkok in 2003.

Other notable toxiphobes included German Fuehrer Adolf Hitler, a noted vegetarian, who preferred asparagus, bell peppers, rice, and pasta. Hitler’s food testers consisted of over a dozen women who ate vegetarian food specially prepared for the Fuehrer. If they did not get sick or die within 45 minutes after eating samples from the meals, they would be delivered to Hitler. Mao Zedong, a prolific carnivore, also used food testers. African dictators Jean Bedel Bokassa of the Central African Republic, Idi Amin of Uganda, and Francisco Nguema of Equatorial Guinea employed food tasters. Their menus often included cannibalistic dishes of human beings. According to his cook and assumed food taster, Bokassa reportedly once dined on a human corpse stuffed with rice and flambéed in gin.

While food security is a normal part of VIP protection for most presidents, prime ministers, kings, queens, sultans, and pontiffs, Trump’s paranoia about food poisoning and his penchant for certain foods, in Trump’s case, McDonald’s – itself, a slow poison for someone 71 years of age – places him in the bizarre company of some noted tyrants. They include Adolf Hitler, Saddam Hussein, Nicolae Ceausescu, Kemal Ataturk, Idi Amin, and Jean-Bedel Bokassa, and Emperor Claudius.