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OpEdNews Op Eds    H3'ed 10/13/19

Donald Trump: xenophobe in public, international mobster in private

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From The Guardian

The founding fathers said betraying America to foreign powers was an impeachable offense. The president must go

Donald Trump unleashes fury over impeachment inquiry
Donald Trump unleashes fury over impeachment inquiry
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The most xenophobic and isolationist American president in modern history has been selling America to foreign powers for his own personal benefit.

Trump withdrew American troops from the Syrian-Turkish border, leaving our Kurdish allies to be slaughtered and opening the way for a resurgent Islamic State. Trump's rationale? He promised to bring our soldiers home.

There could be another reason. Trump never divested from his real estate business, and the Trump Towers Istanbul -- is the Trump Organization's first and only office and residential building in Europe. Businesses linked to the Turkish government are also major patrons of the Trump Organization. Which may be why Trump has repeatedly sided with the Turkish strongman Recep Tayyip ErdoÄŸan, who has been intent on eliminating the Kurds.

Back home, Trump has separated families at the border, locked migrant children in cages and tried to ban Muslims from entering the country. He says he wants to protect America's borders.

But guarding America's geographic borders isn't nearly as important as guarding the integrity of American democracy, which Trump has repeatedly compromised for personal political gain. He did this on 25 July when he asked the president of Ukraine to do him a personal "favor" by digging up dirt on Joe Biden, his most likely 2020 opponent.

Trump justifies his trade war with China as protecting America from Chinese predation. But he asked China to start an investigation of Biden, and last week his adviser on China conceded he spoke with Chinese officials about the former vice-president.

During the 2016 election, Trump publicly called on Russia to find Hillary Clinton's missing emails. Within hours, Russian agents sought to do just that by trying to break into her computer servers.

Special counsel Robert Mueller found that Russia sought to help Trump get elected, and Trump's campaign welcomed the help.

Now Trump is playing at being a double foreign agent pushing the prime minister of Australia, among others, to gather information to discredit Mueller.

Rudy Giuliani is Trump's international thug, arranging deals with foreign powers. On Wednesday, two of Giuliani's business associates were arrested in connection with a criminal scheme to funnel foreign money to candidates for office, including donations to a Super Pac formed to support Trump.

Under Trump, thuggery has replaced diplomacy. On Friday, in an opening statement for congressional impeachment investigators, Marie Yovanovitch, former US ambassador to Ukraine, said people associated with Giuliani "may well have believed that their personal financial ambitions were stymied by our anti-corruption policy in Ukraine."

Meanwhile, even as Trump spews conspiracy theories about the Biden family, his own children are openly profiting from foreign deals. Eric and Don Jr have projects in the works in Ireland, India, Indonesia, Uruguay, Turkey and the Philippines.

Trump is pocketing money from foreign governments eager to curry favor by staying at his hotels. The practice has become so routine that during Trump's 25 July phone call, the Ukrainian president assured him that the "last time I traveled to the United States, I stayed in New York near Central Park and I stayed at the Trump Tower."

According to a former Trump Organization official, foreign governments spent more than a million dollars at Trump businesses in 2018, mostly at the Trump Internationalhotel in Washington. Trump will make even more money if he carries out his plan to host next year's G7 meeting at his Doral golf resort, in Florida.

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Robert Reich, former U.S. Secretary of Labor and Professor of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley, has a new film, "Inequality for All," to be released September 27. He blogs at www.robertreich.org.

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