🇺🇸⚡️- CNN anchor Erin Burnett says that Biden "knows every one of these questions is coming" seemingly admitting that CNN gave Biden camp the debate questions beforehand.

🇺🇸 Trump: “I really don’t know what he said at the end of that sentence, I don’t think he does either.”

📎 Auron Macintyre

🇦🇷🚨🏛🗳

Official Results of the vote in the Chamber of Deputies for the Bases Law Package of the General Law:

🟢: 147
🔴: 107

The Law Package 6 months in the waiting finally goes to the desk of Argentine President Javier G. Milei.

But I think this raises an important concern about Trump's seemingly inevitable march back into the White House. The two developments that radically changed his fortunes in 2023 are each a double edged sword.

The series of indictments against Trump transformed him into a powerful martyr figure, but they have also left him politically and financially vulnerable. Without the presidency and without an unlimited glut of cash, Trump faces bankruptcy and possibly house arrest for the rest of his life. This is an all or nothing scenario where he must win by any means necessary, and that makes him politically dependent on Republicans and financially dependent on donors.

The cardinal rule in Art of the Deal is that you must be willing to walk away from the table and in this case that is not an option. Did the indictments substantially harden the resolve of the base? Or did they make Trump more pliable to powerful interests? I think this is a fair question, and it always is when serious indictments are brought.

On the second point, Jewish donors have flocked to Trump owing largely to the impact of the October 7th attack on the Jewish consciousness. Not only Israel but all of World Jewry was pushed far to the right seeing Israel imperiled on October 7th. This was the first time Israel has faced such an existential threat since the Yom Kippur War 50 years ago which produced generations of neocon Jews.

So yes Trump gained very powerful allies like the reliably Republican Miriam Adelson and also from lifelong Democrat Jews like Jacob Helberg from Silicon Valley and like Bill Ackman from Wall Street. But their resources are not unconditional. And suddenly the Trump campaign becomes the one that is backed by billionaires, foreign governments, security contractors, and big business.

It certainly doesn't alleviate these concerns to see Trump roll out a new agenda based on drilling oil, deepening the Paul Ryan tax cuts, and stapling greencards to diplomas.

So the question becomes— what is this all for? When Trump wins in 2024 will his MAGA revolution have conquered the system, or will the system have conquered the MAGA revolution?

If Trump wins and serves his full term, the MAGA Revolution will have spanned 14 years from his announcement in June 2015 to the inauguration of a new president in January 2029. Will the Trump movement have been transformational and changed the trajectory of America on the three foundational issues that he ran on in 2016, which are trade, immigration, and foreign wars? Or— did the Trump movement merely re-legitimize the same uniparty consensus by leading the disaffected on a dramatic adventure right back to where we started?

I do believe the Trump movement has led to a course correction maybe most notably on trade and political correctness, but it seems that the foreign wars and immigration are worse than ever. Those will be what define the second term and to what extent Trumpism was a success. And if Yoram Hazony and Bill Ackamn have any sway over the hiring... it isn't looking good.

Regardless, we must begin to think ahead to the battle within the Trump administration to restrict immigration, protect free speech online, and fight for independence from Israel. And then beyond to the post-Trump period when Christian and White identity may be at the forefront of the political struggle.

Beijing's New Play

Excellent thread from Michael Pettis, that would have amazing implications for China (TL;DR at bottom):

"According to Pekingnology, Tsinghua University's Li Daokui believes Beijing has finally gotten around to the idea of a major fiscal push to stimulate domestic consumption.

I've argued the same since March, but for different reasons.

Li's argument is that Xi Jinping and the people around him have had a change of view on the idea that support for the household sector will cause Chinese workers to become lazy (he calls it the 'British disease'). They are now more willing to subsidize household spending.

I argued back in March, however, that Beijing would be forced into fiscally stimulating consumption directly, probably in the third quarter, simply because it would be very hard otherwise to achieve the 5% GDP growth target set that month.

The two main sources of demand for any economy, after all, are investment and consumption, and the three major investment areas in China all had problems. It was obvious that property investment – one of the three – wasn't going to be a source of growth.

It was also pretty clear that while we would still see this year an increase in infrastructure investment – the second of the three – Beijing was becoming increasingly reluctant to depend on more infrastructure investment to generate growth. That's because Beijing was wary of the sheer extent by which, over the past decade, non-productive infrastructure investment had caused the surge in local-government debt burdens. They want to restrain the former to rein in the latter.

Finally Beijing had bet very heavily on a surge in manufacturing investment – the third of the three major areas of investment – to fill the gap, but it had seriously underestimated the reaction of the rest of the world to a policy which required that it accommodate a growth strategy in which China's share of global manufacturing (currently 31%) would rise at twice the rate its share of global GDP (17%) and at 3-4 times the rate of its share of global consumption (13%). The rest of the world was never going to accommodate this.

By a process of elimination, and assuming that an exogenous surge in household confidence was unlikely, that left a large consumption stimulus.

Many analysts have insisted that this would never happen because of Xi's opposition to 'welfarism'.

But that wasn't the right way to look at it. What Beijing has to choose is not between 'welfarism' and 'no welfarism' but rather between 'welfarism', a disruptive surge in debt, and missing the growth target altogether."

TL;DR: Beijing is shifting its economic policy to stimulate domestic consumption due to challenges in other areas of investment such as property, infrastructure, and manufacturing. Initially resistant to welfare-like support for households, Chinese leaders authorities are now more open to subsidizing household spending to meet their 5% GDP growth target.