For Biden, the main political threat has come from progressives and like-minded voters. A coalition of Arab-American leaders in Michigan organized a push for the “uncommitted” vote through the “Listen to Michigan” campaign. The effort involved organized protests and phone-banks, reaching tens of thousands of voters, with an aim to pressure the president into supporting an immediate cease-fire in Gaza.

For Trump, the threats have been both political and legal in nature. His unbroken swing of early state victories has given him a commanding position in Republican politics. But he remains embroiled in court cases stemming from his business practices and his time in office. And he continues to slash at primary rivals — past and present — even after they have ceased to threaten him politically.

While the threats to each candidate underscore the delicate nature of the state of both parties, the approaches each has taken to dealing with those threats is revealing too.

Trump has taken steps in recent days to claim more direct operational control of the party, including installing loyalists, among them his daughter in law, at the Republican National Committee.

Biden, for his part, dispatched top administration officials and allies in Congress to Michigan to talk with community leaders about the Israel-Hamas conflict. The state’s governor, Gretchen Whitmer, encouraged Democrats to vote for the president even as other Democrats — including Rep. Rashida Tlaib, who represents parts of Detroit and Dearborn, and former presidential candidate Beto O’Rourke — pushed voters towards the “uncommitted” line.

Notably, Biden said on Monday he thought a cease-fire between Israel and Hamas could be in place in a week — “I hope by the end of the weekend,” Biden told reporters, when he was asked about the timing. His comments came ahead of Tuesday’s vote, but they’re also timed with ongoing talks between the U.S., Israel, Egypt and Qatar over a six-week pause in the fighting between Israel and Hamas.

“Listen to Michigan” organizers have not been persuaded by the steps the administration has taken. They had set 10,000 votes as its benchmark for success in a memo sent on Monday, noting that was roughly the margin Donald Trump won Michigan by during the 2016 general election.

That was a low estimate. “Uncommitted” earned about 20,000 voters in the last three Michigan presidential primaries. In 2012, “uncommitted” earned nearly 21,000 votes, when then-President Barack Obama ran with no opposition on the primary ballot in the state.

The “Listen to Michigan” campaign saw “uncommitted” easily clear that figure shortly after polls closed. And its organizers quickly declared that they anticipated getting more than 15 percent of the vote in at least one congressional district, which would qualify it for a delegate at the Democratic National Convention this summer.

“This means Michigan will be sending at least one delegate to Chicago to declare that they are uncommitted to the Democratic nominee as long as he or she funds Israel’s war in Gaza,” said Layla Elabed, campaign manager of “Listen To Michigan.”

Biden allies, for their part, moved to cast the evening as a constructive effort to push new policy but one that ultimately needed to be weighed against the prospect of Trump returning to office.

“We’ve got a stark choice in front of us between Joe Biden and Donald Trump,” Whitmer said in a statement. “In Michigan, it’s time to come together and go full steam ahead to November for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.”

Read More

On Sunday, Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer addressed the issue, saying “It’s important not to lose sight of the fact that any vote that’s not cast for Joe Biden supports a second Trump term,” on CNN’s State of the Union.

But Aiyash rejected the idea that Arab Americans will be at fault for handing Trump the state, even if they don’t vote for Biden. “I think it is very insulting when folks come to Arab and Muslim communities and say, ‘if you don’t support Biden, you are effectively supporting Trump,’” he said. “It’s disrespectful to communities that were impacted.”

He believes that the Biden campaign isn’t as worried as they should be because, eventually, they assume that Arab Americans will fall in line against Trump — who has promised to reinstate and expand his Muslim travel ban in a second term.

“We cannot default every time to a state of fear as a way to motivate people,” he said.

The stakes couldn’t be higher for Biden: If he loses Michigan, he could lose the White House, and Trump is already ahead in both national and state polls. That’s the message Aiyash wants the president to receive when primary results roll in Tuesday night: Muslims and Arab Americans in Michigan have the power to upend his reelection if he doesn’t call for a cease-fire.

“You get a sense that [the administration] just can’t believe that people wouldn’t support President Biden over a Trump candidacy,” Aiyash said. “But to see our country be complicit in this genocide — that is far worse than Donald Trump.”

In 2016, when Aiyash was an undergrad at the University of Michigan, he made a bet with a friend: If Trump won the election, he would drink a Heineken and eat prosciutto.

Eating pork and drinking alcohol would be “like a cardinal sin,” Aiyash said. But he was deeply convinced that Trump’s rhetoric, especially around the Muslim ban, would make him terminally unelectable.

That Nov. 8, Trump was elected, and Aiyash backed out of his bet.

A few months later, his uncle, whom Aiyash’s family had spent years trying to move to the U.S., was killed in an airstrike in Yemen. Aiyash blamed it on the “broken immigration system.”

Just days after that, Trump signed the Muslim ban.

“For him to die days before Trump banned people like my parents, who were immigrants from Yemen, from coming into the United States — I felt a need to get back into the arena,” Aiyash said.

The anger rekindled a fire in him. When he was a teenager, he knocked on over 13,000 doors for Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign but had since fallen out of the political sphere; he planned to become a nurse after graduation.

Then Trump’s ascension pulled him back into politics, and he started giving speeches on campus condemning Trump’s policies. In 2018, he ran in an 11-way Democratic primary for a state Senate seat but came in second. Two years later, he won a seat in the state House of Representatives. He quickly climbed the ranks and became the first Arab American to be elected majority leader.

Read More

“You could put the world’s greatest matchmaker, arbiter and negotiator in charge of the WTO right now and I don’t think much could happen,” said Rufus Yerxa, a former U.S. trade official who was a WTO deputy director from 2005 to 2013.

The failure of WTO member countries to produce anything meaningful at the group’s 13th Ministerial Conference could further erode the Geneva-based organization’s ability to create new global trade rules and prevent a world in which competing economic blocs cause higher prices for consumers and businesses.

“There are so many things that could go badly at the ministerial for global trade and economic growth, and the question is whether enough WTO members can do damage control and curb some of their protectionist and populist leanings,” said Christine McDaniel, a former Treasury, White House, Commerce Department and USTR economist now at the Mercatus Center, a free market think tank.

The United States, one of the main architects of the WTO system last century, increasingly questions the organization’s underlying structure. Two decades after shepherding China into the WTO, U.S. leaders of both parties accuse the organization of doing little to bring Beijing’s economic system in line with fair and open global trade.

“For decades, the United States has been proud to champion the international rules-based order and the multilateral trading system,” said U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai last fall in a speech at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “But the functioning and fairness of this order are now in question.”

In an annual report released Friday on China’s WTO compliance, Tai said that “China still embraces a state-directed, non-market approach to the economy and trade” despite being a WTO member for 22 years.

Former President Donald Trump, who repeatedly busted WTO norms during his term in office, is now threatening to impose an additional 10 percent tariff on all other countries if he retakes the White House, a move that would violate WTO rules and likely spark retaliation. He’s also pledged to revoke “permanent normal trade relations” with China, setting the stage for additional tariffs on top of those he imposed on more than $300 billion worth of Chinese goods in 2018 and 2019.

Trump’s tough trade talk makes it hard for the Biden administration to reach any agreements that could make it appear weak in the eyes of blue-collar voters who feel burned by previous U.S. trade deals. That also overhangs this week’s ministerial.

“Why would people make a deal with us now on key WTO issues if they don’t even know whether the next administration will accept the deals?” Yerxa said.

Despite the contentious backdrop, WTO Director General Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala bristles at the suggestion that the WTO is dead in the water. “I’m not the kind to work for a paralyzed or moribund organization. I have too much to do to waste my time on that,” she said in the run-up to the meeting. “If it’s moribund and paralyzed, I’m out. Simple.”

Here’s a roundup of the issues at stake at the upcoming ministerial:

Fishing subsidies: The WTO reached a partial agreement at its last ministerial conference in June 2022 to curb subsidies that threaten the future of ocean fish supplies.

This time they are trying for a more comprehensive agreement that would hopefully have a much bigger impact on maintaining one of the world’s most important food stocks.

Of all the issues at stake in Abu Dhabi, officials are most hopeful about getting this negotiation over the line. “If there’s no agreement on fish at MC13, that’d be a tragedy,” one Geneva-based diplomat said.

For Okonjo-Iweala, the negotiation is proof the WTO is still relevant. “260 million people depend on fisheries for their livelihood, and the oceans are being overfished. [The question for ministers in Abu Dhabi is] can we save the oceans, be part of the regenerative blue economy and save jobs?” she told POLITICO in an interview.

Digital trade: One of the biggest achievements of the upcoming ministerial meeting could be maintaining a ban on the collection of tariffs on digital goods and other “electronic transmissions.”

The ban has been in place since 1998, but some member countries such as India, South Africa and Indonesia believe they are missing out on valuable tariff revenue because of streaming services that have largely replaced DVDs and CDs.

Supporters of the ban say the lost revenue is trivial compared to the cost of letting the moratorium expire, which they worry could open the door for tariffs on all sorts of data and transactions that cross borders over the internet.

Business groups also argue failure to renew the moratorium would be a major setback since it would be the first time the WTO has made a decision that makes it harder to trade.

“The majority of members want the extension but there are a few members who find it’s a problem because they think it has an impact on revenues,” Okonjo-Iweala said. “Let’s see what comes up from the negotiations. We were able to successfully extend the e-commerce moratorium” at the WTO’s 12 Ministerial Conference in June 2022.

Dispute settlement: The United States’ most meaningful move at the WTO in recent years was a negative one in 2019, when the Trump administration effectively killed the group’s powerful Appellate Body, which decided trade disputes between member countries, by blocking the appointment of new judges.

Trump officials charged the panel had gone too far in restricting how the United States could impose duties on goods it believes are unfairly priced or subsidized. Trump’s chief trade negotiator, Robert Lighthizer, called it “a colossal and tragic failure” in a recent book.

But most other members want to see the Appellate Body restored so they can appeal lower panel decisions that they believe are mistaken.

Some progress could be made in Abu Dhabi, but Biden administration officials have been clear they see the end of 2024 — after the U.S. presidential election — as the real deadline for reaching an agreement to reinstate some sort of judicial function.

Food security: In what has become a regular feature of recent WTO ministerials, India wants its anti-hunger program to be permanently protected against a challenge that it violates the country’s cap on trade-distorting farm subsidies.

It won a temporary peace agreement in 2013, but major agricultural exporters, including the United States, are increasingly frustrated by the way India operates its food security program, particularly for heavily-traded commodities such as rice and wheat.

India has threatened to block progress on all other issues at the upcoming ministerial unless an agreement on its public stockholding is reached. That puts tremendous pressure to accommodate India’s demand or risk having a failed ministerial.

Covid-19 treatment patent waivers: WTO members could also face a decision on whether to waive intellectual property protections for Covid-19 therapeutics and diagnostics. That would open the door for developing country manufacturers to make generic versions of Paxlovid and other treatments, as well as test kits and assorted other products.

But with Covid-19 feeling like a problem of the past for some, expectations of a deal are very low.

South Africa, India and other developing countries have pushed for the decision after winning a waiver for Covid-19 vaccines at MC13. The Biden administration has avoided taking a public position on the issue, which is fiercely opposed by the U.S. pharmaceutical industry and the business community more broadly, but supported by groups on the left.

The WTO committee in charge of discussing intellectual property rights recently told the WTO General Council that it had been unable to reach agreement on the issue after more than 18 months of discussion. That could signal the end of the road for efforts to expand the waiver, but pharmaceutical industry officials fear it could still be approved by ministers at MC13 as part of the final horse-trading that occurs to reach some deal.

WTO accessions: One bright spot on the meeting’s agenda is the accession of two new members, Comoros and Timor-Leste, to the WTO. They will be the first new members since Liberia and Afghanistan joined in July 2016.

The combined population of the two countries is less than 2.5 million, so the accessions won’t mean much to world trade. Timor-Leste is the larger of the two, with an estimated population of about 1.3 million in 2021, while Comoros has less than 900,000 people.

Another 22 countries are currently negotiating the WTO, another statistic Okonjo-Iweala cites to refute talk that the group is becoming irrelevant. The number of applicants “speaks for itself in terms of the organization and the way that people and countries see it,” she said.

Read More

Trump spoke to the crowd in a generic ballroom at the South Carolina fairgrounds almost immediately after the race was called, having felt like Haley stole the spotlight from him in New Hampshire when she got in front of cameras first despite losing. Standing on stage flanked by family members and political allies, Trump did not mention Haley at all. Aides to the campaign said the message he wanted to deliver today was that the primary is over.

“On November 5th, we’re going to get up here and say, ‘Joe you’re fired! You’re fired! Get out!’” Trump said.

Trump’s win challenges the notion that parties are composed of differing regional interests. The former president won the backing of nearly every statewide elected Republican in Haley’s home state, plowing through the South after decisive victories in Iowa and New Hampshire. While Trump only made five visits to the state since the start of 2024 for rallies and fundraisers, and spent significantly less money than Haley’s campaign in the state, his team here worked to woo grassroots conservatives and faith leaders. And he showed off that political strength early in the primary, flaunting his endorsements from key South Carolina lawmakers at campaign events, including Gov. Henry McMaster and Trump’s former presidential rival, Sen. Tim Scott, who is now a top contender for Trump’s vice presidential running mate.

Though Trump was coasting towards a win in all public opinion polls, his team spent much of the primary’s closing days hammering Haley in harsh terms. Trump’s campaign attacked her record on immigration and the state’s gas tax and ran a statewide television ad targeting her Social Security plan. Trump repeatedly used an insulting nickname, “Birdbrain,” when talking about Haley and even raised suggestive questions about why Haley’s husband, a South Carolina National Guardsman who is deployed abroad, did not appear on the trail with her.

Trump and his team also publicly pressured Haley to get out of the race. A memo sent out this week by top Trump advisers Susie Wiles and Chris LaCivita called Haley a “wailing loser hell-bent on an alternative reality and refusing to come to grips with her imminent political mortality.”

At a rally the night before the primary, Trump highlighted Haley’s support from Democratic donors and said the former U.N. ambassador should “switch parties.”

Haley fought back. Her campaign poured millions of dollars into television, radio and digital ads in the state, and she campaigned aggressively across South Carolina. She called Trump an agent of “chaos,” questioned his age and mental fitness and said that Trump’s multiple courtroom dramas were not only a distraction from issues facing voters but damaged his odds of winning a general election. And she called out Trump for his comments about NATO and for comparing himself to Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny.

But her criticisms of Trump didn’t convince voters. And she has struggled at times to thread the needle between saying Trump should not be president and also that she is not a ‘Never Trumper.’

Gerri McDaniel, Trump’s 2016 South Carolina state director who was one of the founders of the Myrtle Tea Party and supported Haley’s governor campaign, questioned Haley’s political future in the state.

“I really wish that they were not running against each other. I wish that Nikki Haley had waited,” McDaniel said. “People don’t understand. What is she thinking? What is she trying to do?”

Read More

The veepstakes were top of mind for attendees gathered at CPAC, not least because the conference’s annual straw poll is centered on who should be Trump’s pick, with the results set to be announced on Saturday afternoon. While the straw poll results are if anything unscientific, the famously poll-obsessed Trump has long taken an interest in the conference’s yearly survey, according to Schlapp.

“He’s always talked to me about the straw poll, he cares about the questions that are in it,” said Schlapp. “If they get 1 percent in the poll, I don’t think it helps their chances, that’s how I look at it.”

The former president is set to speak Saturday afternoon, just before the straw poll results are to be announced.

Trump has given little indication of who he is favoring for VP, though he has said he is looking for someone who can step into the role of president if needed. The list of candidates often discussed has given some signs of where he and his team are heading. Women and politicians of color make up a major share of the names. And Trump himself recently praised two of them: Stefanik and Scott.

When asked by Fox News host Laura Ingraham if his shortlist includes former Democratic Hawaii Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, Donalds, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, Noem and Ramaswamy, Trump said it did.

Read More

Needless to say, she was a long way from South West Norfolk.

Truss’s appearance was perhaps the most incongruous part of the four-day Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), an annual event held in a resort hotel just outside Washington, D.C. The event had once been perhaps the premier conference for American conservatives. But its stature has gradually declined in recent years as it has come to be seen as a mere adjunct of Trumpism and, as its head, Matt Schlapp, has fended off allegations of sexual misconduct and financial mismanagement.

The result has been a gathering with an increasingly shabby and low rent vibe. An exhibition hall that once featured major corporate sponsors now has a January 6 themed electronic pinball game and sells vibrating boards that promise that users can lose weight simply by standing on them. A hotel once packed with attendees seemed half vacant as other conferences were held simultaneously — including one for an outsourcing company, a fitting companion for a conference that has increasingly outsourced its speakers from abroad.

Some of the other foreign speakers were already well known on the populist right. Newly elected president Javier Milei of Argentina was considered a major get for the event — and it’s almost impossible to hold a conservative gathering in the United States without former UKIP leader Nigel Farage. Truss was an entirely different creature.

Many had simply not heard of her. “Who is Liz Truss?” asked R. Gregg Keller, the former executive director of the group that hosts CPAC and a veteran Republican political operative. Mike Lindell, the pillow magnate turned election conspiracy theorist, was just as befuddled when asked about her appearance. “I didn’t know. ...I’m focused on machines,” he said, as he continued on a diatribe about election fraud in the United States.

Matt Whitaker, the former acting U.S. attorney general under Trump, when asked to put Truss’s appearance at the event in perspective, said “the conservative movement is finding its role and organization worldwide. Donald Trump has motivated a lot of people to be attracted to his movement and translate into their own unique thing.”

When asked how Truss fits into that movement, he said “I don’t know. I have no idea.”

Even Clegg Ivey, who ran a King George III themed booth in the exhibition hall that compared Biden officials to the monarch overthrown by the American Revolution, couldn’t quite muster an opinion. “It’s not really for us to have a position on executives from other countries and other systems.”

When asked about the incongruity of his booth criticizing a deceased British monarch, he caveated, “that’s a very specific instance.”

There was some Truss skepticism, however. Attendees were widely circulating a piece by Raheem Kassam, an Anglo-American Steve Bannon ally that trashed her as too leftist for the venue. Joe Proenza, the political director for the socially conservative group American Principles Project, was befuddled at her attendance.

“Why are you here?” he asked rhetorically. “There’s literally nothing you share with conservatives in America, besides some vague tax policy agreements we might have. What are you doing here?” Proenza disdainfully added that Truss will likely be at the conference longer than she was in 10 Downing Street.

Truss spent her 15 minutes on stage warning that there were only 10 years left to save the West (which is incidentally the name of her upcoming book), while also deriding “wokenomics,” Joe Biden and “the usual suspects” in the media and the corporate world who undermined her during her brief stint as prime minister.

She ended with a call for Americans to elect Republicans “who aren’t going to cave into the establishment” and are willing to be unpopular with elites, even if it means “they don’t get invited to any dinner parties.”

Attendees seemed to appreciate her remarks. The room slowly grew more full as she talked and her ovation upon leaving the stage was louder than when she entered. Bryan Betancur, a Marylander wearing a QAnon shirt, said that the speech was “educational.”

“You get to learn a lot of things. For me as a conservative, it’s pretty inspirational,” he said. Betancur said he hadn’t heard of Truss before, although did know of several other former British prime ministers.

Gerri Poplin of New Jersey, who was wearing an American flag scarf and multiple pro-Trump buttons, thought Truss’s speech was “on the same parallel” and shared many of the same frustrations that she had with American politics. Poplin, who thought the 2020 presidential election was stolen from Trump, found similarities between what the former president experienced then and the struggles that Truss described on stage as she dealt with being undermined by the administrative state as well as what she called “CHINOS, conservatives in name only” — a nod to the American nomenclature of RINO, Republican in Name Only.

After her speech, Truss wandered up and down the hall of the event with a gaggle half composed of British reporters trying to ask her questions and half of American security guards trying to block them from doing so. Only a handful of attendees stopped her for selfies on her journey, which included a brief video interview with a conservative activist group that long pushed false claims of election fraud.

One request for a selfie came from Barbara Coward, a suburban Baltimore woman whose husband was British and thought it would be a good memento for her half-British children. Coward came away pleasantly impressed with the speech, although she was well aware both that Truss was “not prime minister for very long” and the British politician was hawking a book.

The other selfie request came from Sami Gold, a George Washington University student, who insisted to Truss that “I’m your biggest fan” as she walked by. He wasn’t, he later revealed. Instead, Gold just thought it would be neat to take a photo with a world leader and seeing her was part of the charm of showing up at CPAC.

“It’s 50 bucks for meeting some of the most insane people on Earth,” said Gold. “It’s great.”

Read More

The term of current NATO chief Jens Stoltenberg, who has steadily navigated the political-military bloc through a tumultuous time in transatlantic politics since 2014, ends in October.

Pressure is mounting to approve Rutte’s leadership bid before the NATO summit in July, which will be held in Washington to celebrate the alliance’s 75th anniversary.

Estonian Prime Minister Kaja Kallas expressed interest in the NATO top job during an event hosted by POLITICO in November. But NATO officials say she’s not in the mix since she has not declared her candidacy. The same goes for Latvia’s Foreign Minister Krišjānis Kariņš, who did a mini media tour last year to test the waters.

Rutte’s path to the secretary general role puts him on a collision course with Russia, as the alliance steels itself against Vladimir Putin’s aggression two years since the full-scale Ukraine invasion. And should former President Donald Trump get back to the Oval Office, the Dutch leader would have to navigate the Republican’s skepticism of NATO and collective security.

Rutte wouldn’t discuss his bid to lead the alliance at this past weekend’s Munich Security Conference gathering world leaders, saying he’d learned his lesson back in October when he suggested he was interested in the job.

“I made the mistake in October talking about, ‘I might be interested in that role’ and then that mushrooms,” he said during a small media scrum. “I shouldn’t have done that, so I decided not to talk about that anymore.”

Rutte has a ways to go before any decision is made. Under NATO rules, the secretary general has to be decided by unanimous consent, meaning that Rutte still has to win the backing of all 31 member nations. Any candidate for the job must get through Turkey and Hungary, which have proven the biggest hurdles to accepting new members. Turkey has reportedly asked for reassurances before backing Rutte, while Hungary has had longstanding disagreements with the Dutch premier.

Speaking with Dutch television over the weekend, Dutch Chief of Defense Gen. Onno Eichelsheim said it was “very likely” that Rutte would get the top job.

Defense spending remains a major concern of the alliance, with countries struggling to hit the decade-old 2 percent of GDP defense spending target that the alliance established in the wake of Russia’s initial invasion of Ukraine in 2014.

This year, 18 of the 31 NATO countries are set to finally meet the 2 percent standard, compared with only seven last year. The Netherlands has yet to reach that mark, but is on track to spend 2 percent this year.

As much as he dodged questions about potentially leading the transatlantic alliance at Munich, Rutte still sounded every bit the presumptive NATO leader. He told reporters in the same scrum that the threat of Russia attacking a NATO country is real, but “the best way to prevent it is to make sure that we have done everything to invest in our defense, making sure that the alliance stays strong.”

Part of that means keeping Washington in the fold, something that outgoing NATO chief Stoltenberg invested plenty of time and energy into ensuring during the Trump years.

With Stoltenberg — who has already had his term extended twice — leaving in October just weeks before the next U.S. presidential election, his successor might face a similar task.

Whoever occupies the White House, NATO will have to contend with what many expect to still be a shooting war in Ukraine, and a push by many Republicans in Washington to leave Kyiv’s war to Europe, refocusing American attention on China in the Indo-Pacific.

One of the big concerns of the alliance in 2024 and beyond is how to work with individual nations that are restocking their warehouses after two years of funneling weapons and equipment to Ukraine, and had previously spent relatively little on defense after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

The alliance has big decisions to make in long-term investments for new, often expensive, precision-guided munitions. It also must strike a balance between calls in Washington to buy American and Europe’s own ambitions to build up the continent’s defense manufacturing capabilities.

Under Rutte, the long-serving Dutch prime minister and one of Europe’s longest-serving leaders, the Netherlands has already committed to send Ukraine 24 of its F-16 fighters — the most of any country — and is helping train Ukrainian pilots. The Dutch military has also sent tanks, artillery systems, ammunition and Patriot air defense systems to Kyiv over the past two years. The government has pledged another $2.1 billion in military and humanitarian aid for Ukraine over the coming year.

Rutte said in Munich that the need for Europe to invest more in its own defense has more to do with Russia than it does who sits in the White House.

“Let’s stop moaning and nagging and whining about Trump,” he said. “We need to invest in our defense expenditure. We need to massively ramp up arms production and then we need to massively do more in support to Ukraine.”

Read More

“Calling for an immediate cease-fire … would send the wrong message to Hamas,” Washington’s U.N. Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield told reporters after the veto. She added the Algeria-penned resolution would give “them something that they have asked for without requiring them to do something in return.”

Other countries on the Security Council condemned Washington’s move, saying a cease-fire is needed to protect civilians and allow humanitarian aid into Gaza, where an estimated 29,000 have been killed in the four-month war, according to the Gaza Health Ministry.

“It is not that the Security Council does not have an overwhelming consensus, but rather it is the exercise of the veto by the United States that has stifled the council consensus,” said Zhang Jun, China’s U.N. envoy.

The U.S. resolution instead calls for a temporary pause in hostilities and is the first time Washington has put forth language using the word “cease-fire.” It also warns against Israel’s planned ground offensive into Gaza’s southern city of Rafah, where many Palestinians have sought refuge.

Israel’s U.N. Ambassador Gilad Erdan criticized the focus on the term cease-fire “as if [the word] is a silver bullet, a magical solution to all of the region’s problems.”

It’s unclear when the U.S. resolution could come up for a vote in the Security Council.

Meanwhile, Arab states are weighing their next steps and considering bringing some version of the vetoed Algerian resolution to the floor of the U.N. General Assembly.

“We are contemplating also the possibility of seeing the representative that casted the veto to address and to defend itself before the General Assembly,” Tarek Ladeb, Tunisia’s ambassador, told reporters after the veto.

He vowed that Arab countries would continue to push for an immediate, permanent cease-fire.

Nahal Toosi contributed to this report from Washington.

Read More

“My main task is for our family to stay the same, despite everything,” she told Harper’s Bazaar. 

Behind the scenes, however, those who knew the couple well said Navalnaya not only shared her husband’s views, but also helped shape them. 

Telepathic connection

“At every stage of Alexei’s career, Yulia has always been by his side,” Anna Veduta, employee of the U.S. branch of Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation, told POLITICO.  

“There was some kind of telepathic connection between them, they sometimes didn’t even need to speak; they thought alike.”

At rallies and court hearings, Navalnaya was always at her husband’s side, attracting the media’s attention with her striking physique and composure, despite her stated wish to avoid the limelight.

“These bastards will never see our tears,” was her response when Navalny received his first prison sentence in 2013 in an embezzlement case his supporters denounced as politically motivated.

Read More

Those criminal cases could put him in jail. And in the meantime, his escalating troubles in his civil cases are packing a devastating financial punch.

Even for a man who claims to be a billionaire, $440 million is a potentially crippling amount of cash to turn over. Can Trump afford the judgments? When does he have to pay them? And what happens if he says he can’t — or if he outright refuses?

Here’s a look at what comes next.

Can Trump afford to pay?

Trump’s company isn’t public, and he has famously refused to disclose his tax returns, so his cash flow situation is shrouded in mystery.

Even if he has $440 million in cash on hand — and it’s far from clear that he does — paying the judgments could wipe out his accounts, since Trump himself has placed his cash reserves in the ballpark of that amount.

Trump claimed in a deposition last year that he had “substantially in excess” of $400 million in cash on hand.

“We have, I believe, 400 plus and going up very substantially every month,” he said, adding: “My biggest expense is probably legal fees, unfortunately.”

But it’s unclear whether that number is accurate. That deposition, after all, was part of the very lawsuit in which a judge found that Trump has repeatedly inflated his net worth.

If he doesn’t have enough cash on hand, would he have to sell properties?

Trump would likely have to sell something, although it wouldn’t necessarily have to be property. He could sell investments or other assets.

What happens if he resists paying?

In the civil fraud case, which is in New York state court, if Trump can’t post the funds or get a bond, then the judgment would take effect immediately and a sheriff could begin seizing Trump’s assets.

The rules are slightly different in federal court, which is the venue for the $83.3 million judgment that Trump owes for defaming the writer E. Jean Carroll after she accused him of raping her. (He also owes Carroll an additional $5 million from a separate verdict last year.) Carroll could pursue post-judgment discovery under the jurisdiction of the judge who oversaw the trial. Through that process, the judge could order Trump to produce his bank account records, place liens or garnish his wages.

“I think he’s going to have to pay. And whether it requires him to sell or to put a lien on something to get a loan, that’s his problem, not ours. He’s going to pay,” Carroll’s attorney Roberta Kaplan said on CNN last month.

The judge, Kaplan added, will use “judgment enforcement mechanisms” to “make sure that he pays.”

If Trump truly can’t afford the judgments, he would have to declare bankruptcy.

Can Trump delay payment by appealing the verdicts?

No. In all three cases, he has to put money in an escrow account with the court or get a bond while he’s appealing the verdicts.

With the civil fraud verdict, which Trump has vowed to appeal, the amount to be posted or bonded is set by the court. It is typically about 120 to 125 percent of the judgment amount, to account for additional post-judgment interest that accrues during the appeal.

With last year’s Carroll verdict, which Trump has appealed, he turned over $5.5 million to the court, which was worth 111 percent of the judgment.

For the more recent Carroll verdict, which Trump has also vowed to appeal, 111 percent of the judgment would be $92.46 million. Trump has a 30-day window after the Jan. 26 verdict to either pay cash into the court’s escrow or get a bond while he appeals. If he chooses to file a bond, he will likely have to pay a 20 percent deposit ($16.66 million) and put up collateral, but it could come with fees and interest, making it more expensive in the long run. And it would require Trump to find a third party willing to take on the risk of loaning him money.

Does he personally have to pay the verdicts? Could he get his campaign or PAC or the RNC to pay?

The courts don’t have restrictions on the sources of funds used to pay judgments, and Trump would surely like to tap other funds than whatever money is in his own personal accounts.

He could transfer assets from the Trump Organization to himself in order to help satisfy the judgments.

Using his political vehicles to pay would be far trickier. There is a general ban on using campaign donations for personal uses unrelated to a campaign or the official duties of an officeholder. And as for his political action committees, Richard Pildes, a professor of constitutional law at New York University law school, said they can’t pay Trump’s judgments.

“Campaign funds cannot be used for that purpose regardless of whether the PAC is the decision-maker,” he wrote in an email.

Besides, Trump’s PACs may not be able to afford the judgments, since he has been using them to pay the many lawyers defending him across his criminal and civil cases.

Two of Trump’s PACS spent $29 million in legal consulting and legal fees in the second half of last year, leaving only $5 million in his leadership PAC’s coffers.

The Republican National Committee doesn’t have the same ban on the personal use of funds as Trump’s campaign committee, but paying Trump’s judgments could jeopardize its nonprofit status.

Read More