So the following paragraphs show just what a person Musk is. His product can not meet the standards so he screams the program that won’t give him money is a waste of taxpayer’s money. Just like tRump, rather than fix the problem he instead attacks the standards demanding they be lowered so his product can qualify. Hugs
After years of negotiation, lawsuits and politicking, the FCC and the NTIA settled on a modern definition for broadband service: 100 megabits per second (Mbps) download speeds, 20Mbps upload speeds, with less than 100 milliseconds of latency.
Right now, Starlink doesn’t meet that standard. It has been getting slightly slower over time even as more people sign up for service, according to internet performance testing service Ookla’s speed tests. In 2022, the FCC rescinded a $900m grant from the Rural Digital Opportunity Fund to Starlink to connect rural communities to the internet, citing its failure to meet the speed and latency standards and declining network performance.
Sadly a lot of stories about Kennedy never mention the verified deaths his crusade against medical science. Below is a quote from the article which points the cost of his inability to understand or comprehend the science behind vaccines. Hugs
A measles outbreak began a few months after his visit. Eighty-three people died, most of them children, a staggering loss in a nation of about 200,000 people.
The health secretary pick and his organization have worked around the world to undermine longstanding policies on measles, AIDS and more.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., an environmental lawyer, has spent years working abroad with organizations and associates that undermine longstanding global health policies, records show.Credit…Uli Seit for The New York Times
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who is in line to lead the Department of Health and Human Services in the next Trump administration, is well-known for promoting conspiracy theories and vaccine skepticism in the United States.
But Mr. Kennedy, an environmental lawyer, has also spent years working abroad to undermine policies that have been pillars of global health policy for a half-century, records show.
He has done this by lending his celebrity, and the name of his nonprofit group, Children’s Health Defense, to a network of overseas chapters that sow distrust in vaccine safety and spread misinformation far and wide.
He, his organizations and their officials have interfered with vaccination efforts, undermined sex education campaigns meant to stem the spread of AIDS in Africa, and railed against global organizations like the World Health Organization that are in charge of health initiatives.
How Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Fights Health Policy Abroad:
Along the way, Mr. Kennedy has partnered with, financed or promoted fringe figures — people who claim that 5G cellphone towers cause cancer, that homosexuality and contraceptive education are part of a global conspiracy to reduce African fertility and that the World Health Organization is trying to steal countries’ sovereignty.
One of his group’s advisers, in Uganda, suggested using “supernatural insight” and a man she calls Prophet Elvis to guide policymaking. “We do well to embrace ethereal means to get ahead as a nation,” she wrote on a Ugandan news site this year.
These people, more than leading scientists and experienced public health professionals, have existed in Mr. Kennedy’s orbit for years. The ideas spread by him and his associates abroad highlight the unorthodox, sometimes conspiratorial nature of the world occupied by a man who stands to lead America’s health department, its 80,000 employees and its $1.8 trillion budget.
Mr. Kennedy did not respond to a list of questions about his organization’s work abroad. His personal email automatically replied with a link to a Google form for people to apply to work with him in government — and name their own job titles. Mary Holland, the chief executive of Children’s Health Defense, said that Mr. Kennedy was the group’s “chairman on leave” and had not been involved in the day-to-day operations in over a year.
As health secretary, Mr. Kennedy would have the opportunity to reshape health policy. The department has a hand in negotiations for an international pandemic-response treaty, is the parent agency of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and finances global projects like vaccine campaigns.
He undermined confidence in the measles vaccine ahead of a deadly outbreak in Samoa.
Mr. Kennedy visited the Pacific island of Samoa in June 2019 in the aftermath of a public health tragedy.
During routine measles immunizations a year earlier, nurses had mistakenly mixed the vaccine with a muscle relaxant, leading to the death of two infants.
Measles, a highly contagious disease, is preventable, thanks to vaccines that have been proven safe since the 1960s.
But vaccine skeptics seized on the death of the two children as evidence that the vaccines should not be trusted. The Samoan government temporarily suspended its immunization program.
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Mr. Kennedy visited the Pacific island of Samoa in June 2019 and met with the prime minister.Credit…Misiona Simo/Samoa Observer, via Associated Press
Mr. Kennedy arrived in Samoa, on the invitation of a local anti-vaccine activist, and amplified doubts about the vaccine’s safety. It was a crucial moment. Vaccination rates had plummeted, and the World Health Organization called for Samoa to ramp up immunization as soon as possible.
Mr. Kennedy met with the prime minister and other officials. He told activists that vaccines shipped to Samoa might be of a lower quality than those sent to developed countries.
“With his last name, and the status attached to it, people will believe him,” said Dr. Take Naseri, who met with Mr. Kennedy at the time as Samoa’s director general of health.
A measles outbreak began a few months after his visit. Eighty-three people died, most of them children, a staggering loss in a nation of about 200,000 people.
During the outbreak, Mr. Kennedy falsely suggested that defective vaccines could have caused the deaths. He later dismissed the outbreak as “mild” and denied any connection to it. “I never told anybody not to vaccinate,” he said last year.
When Edwin Tamasese, the anti-vaccine campaigner who arranged Mr. Kennedy’s visit, was arrested and charged with incitement for interfering with vaccinations, Children’s Health Defense helped him obtain legal advice and paid for his lawyers, according to Mr. Tamasese.
The measles outbreak in Samoa ended after 95 percent of the eligible population received vaccinations, according to the W.H.O.
He and his organization promote AIDS falsehoods.
Sex education has been central to the global fight against the spread of AIDS in Africa for decades.
But officials with Children’s Health Defense Africa, one of Mr. Kennedy’s nonprofit groups, see a conspiracy at play.
Wahome Ngare, a Kenyan physician who sits on the group’s advisory board, argued at a conference in Uganda this year that contraception and health education were part of a global plot to reduce Africans’ fertility. He attended the conference alongside the head of the Children’s Health Defense Africa, who presented slides bearing the organization’s logo and web address.
Mr. Kennedy himself has questioned the accepted science behind AIDS. He falsely said that AIDS may have been caused by the recreational use among gay people of the drug amyl nitrite. It is caused by the virus H.I.V.
Last year, Children’s Health Defense posted a video promoting a book that questions the link between H.I.V. and AIDS. Another of the group’s interview subjects this year said that the former U.S. government scientist Anthony Fauci should be imprisoned or “taken off this Earth.”
Dr. Ngare is among the many people in Mr. Kennedy’s orbit whose views conflict sharply with those of the health agency that Mr. Kennedy stands to lead.
In an interview with NPR in 2015 before joining Children’s Health Defense Africa, Dr. Ngare mused about stories that “vaccines have been used for spread of H.I.V.” and called for a boycott of polio vaccines. The U.S. government is a major sponsor of polio vaccine campaigns worldwide. Dr. Ngare did not respond to requests for comment.
Ms. Holland, the chief executive of Children’s Health Defense, said those were Dr. Ngare’s personal views, not those of Mr. Kennedy’s organization.
At the conference in Uganda, Dr. Ngare spoke to far-right lawmakers and activists who support draconian punishments, including life in prison, for people convicted of having gay sex.
He aligned himself with fringe figures, including people who ended up on German security watch lists.
When Mr. Kennedy started his nonprofit group’s European chapter in August 2020, he floated questions about whether the Covid-19 pandemic was part of “a sinister game” played by governments to control people.
“A lot of it feels very planned to me,” he said in Berlin.
The next day, he rallied about 38,000 people at a protest over Covid-19 measures. The protest was organized by a German group called Querdenken. Its leaders have since ended up on a government watch list for fomenting antigovernment sentiment.
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Mr. Kennedy speaking during a protest over coronavirus pandemic regulations in Berlin in 2020.Credit…Clemens Bilan/EPA, via Shutterstock
Promoters used Mr. Kennedy’s name to drum up attendance, saying that he personally wanted people to take to the streets and fight back. After the event, hundreds of protesters tried to storm the Reichstag, Germany’s Parliament.
Mr. Kennedy was not in attendance at the Parliament. “That whole Reichstag thing was completely unrelated to the demonstration,” Ms. Holland said.
Mr. Kennedy’s influence in Germany lives on, at least in online forums. Recent data from CeMAS, a research group that monitors conspiracy movements, shows that his name is often invoked on conspiracy-focused German Telegram channels, coming up more than 6,000 times this year alone.
His European chapter paid a British lawmaker to speak at a conference promoting vaccine skepticism.
Children’s Health Defense’s chapter in Europe has cultivated relationships with members of the European Parliament.
In January 2022, the organization held a news conference in Brussels demanding a “moratorium on health restrictions.” An anti-vaccine rally that followed the event turned violent, with protesters smashing windows at the European Union’s diplomatic headquarters.
In April 2023, Children’s Health Defense Europe helped organize a conference on the grounds of the European Parliament in Strasbourg, France. At the conference, lawmakers criticized a proposed pandemic treaty being considered at the World Health Organization.
The chapter has hosted press events with European lawmakers and encouraged Parliament to reject vaccination certificate rules.
In 2023, the European chapter paid a member of Britain’s Parliament, Andrew Bridgen, to speak at a conference it had helped organize. The conference discussed opposition to government pandemic measures and promoted vaccine skepticism. The sum was small, at just under $800, according to Mr. Bridgen’s financial disclosures. Such payments are legal in Britain.
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Andrew Bridgen, left, a member of Parliament at the time, in London in 2022. He has compared the Covid-19 vaccine rollout to the Holocaust.Credit…Justin Tallis/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Mr. Bridgen has repeatedly compared the Covid-19 vaccine rollout to the Holocaust, including in an interview with the Children’s Health Defense online television station.
Children’s Health Defense spent $315,000 in Europe last year, including in Iceland and Greenland, its U.S. tax filings show. Ms. Holland said that as of this year, the European chapter was run by volunteers and no longer funded by the U.S. operation.
His Africa chapter pushes measles misinformation and risky remedies.
In 2021, a South African herbalist named Toren Wing reached out to Mr. Kennedy about his effort to ban 5G cellphone towers over health concerns.
In an email, Mr. Wing recalled in an interview, he invoked a rousing speech about liberty that Mr. Kennedy’s father had delivered as a senator visiting apartheid South Africa in 1966.
“This is so cool,” Mr. Kennedy responded, according to a copy of the email. He looped in a Children’s Health Defense lawyer. The anti-5G effort fizzled, Mr. Wing said, but it laid the groundwork for a Children’s Health Defense chapter in Africa.
At the chapter’s launch, Mr. Kennedy said the continent was “a testing and clinical trial laboratory for multinational pharmaceutical companies that see African people as commodities.” His group sent just over $15,000 for “setup expenses” in 2022, U.S. tax filings show.
Shabnam Palesa Mohamed, who leads the chapter, is a frequent host of the nonprofit’s online show. She interviews doctors promoting unproven Covid-19 remedies and rails against vaccines.
After a measles outbreak started in Cape Town, Ms. Mohamed appeared in a video discussing supposed negative effects of “alleged measles injections” in South Africa.
In 2023, Unicef reported a 30 percent decline in confidence in childhood vaccines in South Africa after the Covid-19 pandemic, coming amid the world’s “largest sustained backslide in childhood immunization in 30 years.” The group cited factors including “growing access to misleading information.”
Ms. Mohamed and others affiliated with Children’s Health Defense Africa pushed the discredited theory that the drug ivermectin will treat Covid-19. They also sued the South African government, unsuccessfully, to stop Covid-19 vaccinations. Ms. Mohamed thanked Children’s Health Defense for supporting the case.
Ms. Mohamed has promoted conspiracy theories against the World Health Organization, Bill Gates and two of the world’s biggest money managers, BlackRock and Vanguard. Ms. Mohamed declined to answer questions about her work.
“I don’t think she was speaking on behalf of C.H.D.,” said Ms. Holland, who said the Africa chapter was a volunteer organization. “She’s an individual. She has her own views.”
Kimon de Greef contributed reporting.
Selam Gebrekidan is an investigative reporter for The Times whose work focuses on accountability — of governments, companies and people who wield power.More about Selam Gebrekidan
A version of this article appears in print on Dec. 1, 2024, Section A, Page 13 of the New York edition with the headline: Kennedy Has Worked Abroad to Undermine Global Health Policies. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe
The paragraph below shows that what happened then is happening again now. It was scary for me as a teen back then. Gay people in deep country settings in the backwoods, especially gay teens desperately trying to keep people from finding out. Especially abused gay kids who felt that abuse was written all over them for people to see. I was so happy to see that time gone for most of the school kids by the 2010s. Kids accepted in their class by their peers, the fellow students. That very acceptance terrified the conservative religious, but I have never understood why? Why is terrifying and hurting kids so pleasing to them? But the quote from the article below says it all. Hugs
The late 1970s was a somber, frightening time in queer history. The rise of a Christian right – branding themselves the “moral majority” – in conjunction with an energized Republican party began a culture war against women, people of color and queer people. The combination of religious rhetoric, nationalism and economic conservatism – Reaganomics, in other words – created a groundswell of contemporary far-right politicking that became the template for our contemporary political world.
December 3, 1833 Oberlin College was founded in Ohio. It was the first college to enroll men and women on equal terms, and to accept African-American men and women on equal terms with white students.
December 3, 1965 An all-white jury in Alabama convicted three Ku Klux Klansmen for the murder of white civil rights activist Viola Liuzzo. Viola Liuzzo The mother of five from Detroit was shot and killed while driving a young black activist, Leroy Moton, back to the town of Selma following a protest march to the state capital in Montgomery. It was later learned that another Klansmen in the car, Gary Thomas Rowe, was an FBI informant. Klansmen Collie Wilkins, Eugene Thomas and William Eaton at their trial
December 3, 1969 Files were destroyed at eight New York City draft boards in protest of the Vietnam War.
December 3, 1984 In the early morning hours, one of the worst industrial disasters in history began when American-owned Union Carbide’s pesticide plant located near the densely populated city of Bhopal in central India leaked a highly toxic cloud of methyl isocyanate into the air. Estimates of the fatalities vary widely, but of the approximately one million people living in Bhopal at the time, 2,000 were killed immediately, at least another 8,000 within a short time, and hundreds of thousands were injured, many still suffering today. The U.S. blocked extradition of Union Carbide officials facing criminal prosecution in India. Union Carbide has since been purchased by Dow Chemical which continues to refuse responsibility for the incident or its victims, and has yet to clean up the site. Contemporary news report on the incident bhopal.org
December 3, since 1992 The International Day of Disabled Persons was declared by the United Nations. “The annual observance of the International Day of Disabled Persons … aims to promote an understanding of disability issues and mobilize support for the dignity, rights and well-being of persons with disabilities . . . .” 2020 Theme: Building Back Better: toward a disability-inclusive, accessible and sustainable post COVID-19 World. more info
December 3, 1997 An international treaty banning land mines was signed by 122 countries. It comprehensively prohibits the use, production, trade or stockpiling of antipersonnel mines. Buried landmines kill about 15,000 people every year worldwide. The dangerous and time-consuming process of removal would take centuries at the current rate of landmine clearance.The United States and approximately forty other countries have yet to sign the treaty, and fifteen countries continue to produce land mines. The Pentagon requested $1.3 billion for research on and production of two new landmine systems—Spider and Intelligent Munitions System—between fiscal years 2005 and 2011, but Congress has resisted funding the programs under pressure from nearly 500 U.S.-based organizations opposing the weapons. Comprehensive information from the International Campaign to Ban Landmines Recent U.S. policy on land mines:
It’s Monday. There are 700 days until the midterm elections. The FBI is about to get way scarier, a warning from a monster’s mommy and Dark Brandon goes Dark Daddy.
Be advised: This newsletter uses profanity. And it’s been saving that shit up for like a week.
Note: Sexy Patriots! Holy shit we sure missed your hot asses. How the hell are you?! How was your Thanksgiving? Does Uncle Trump Trash have third-degree burns on his crotch thanks to an “accidental” gravy boat spill? Oh that’s a shame. Well we sure are glad to be back with you, and we’re damn grateful to you for letting us take some time off to recharge. Lots of scary fucked up shit happened while we were away. But right now we need to talk about this…
Um… We don’t really know what to say here. There’s weird, there’s fuck-a-couch weird and then there’s whatever the hell that is. We kinda like that Jello Diddler (JD) Vance has gone missing, but when he pops up just to do shit like this it really freaks us the eff out. It’s like there’s a roomful of horrifying serial killers but the one you really gotta worry about is the guy who keeps disappearing. We like to think Trump traded him out for Elon Leon or he’s just off defiling a sofa, but we all know he’s probably up to something stupid and evil. Whatever it is, dude, it ain’t worth it if you’re posting shit like that on Thanksgiving. Yikes. Y’all have a blessed day.
Note two: We’d just like to take a second to congratulate all the dumbshit mainstream media reporters who bought Trump’s bullshit denials about Project 2025. More: AP News
Note three: Jamie Raskin is making a move to replace Nadler on the House Judiciary Committee. Nadler is a nice man, but this needs to happen. We need warriors in key places, and few people fight like Raskin does. More: Axios
Note four: Ex-convict Charles Kushner, who was pardoned by his son’s father-in-law, will be our next ambassador to France because the only thing Trump loves more than criminals is nepotism. More: AP News
Note five: We like y’all too much to show you the clip of RFK Jr. in the shower while Cheryl Hines sells her crap. So here’s the story without the video. You’re welcome.
Note six: We understand there are people who wish Biden hadn’t done what he did for Hunter (more in the news section), but watching Colorado Gov. Jared Polis try to cozy up to the right every chance he gets is really pissing us off. Go ahead and run for president, asshole. More: The Hill
Note seven: You’re not gonna believe this but pardoned criminal Dinesh D’Souza is totally full of shit. Ok so you will believe it. This weekend Dinesh apologized for the lies in his movie, 2,000 Mules, which was about voter fraud in the 2020 election. He should have kept lying. He might have gotten elected president. More: Independent
Note eight: Did y’all watch “A Man on the Inside” over the break? Isn’t it wonderful?
Note nine: Elon Leon Musk has like 50 kids of his own, but he spent Thanksgiving with Baron Trump. How fucking weird is that? More: CNN
Note 10: Politico and other kiss-asses just don’t understand why normal decent people are leaving Elon Leon’s nazi playground Twitter for Bluesky. (snip-MORE)
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OK. Now for the message from Ali. Can you tell I watched a lot of PBS this weekend, with the interruption of a perfectly good and funny bit of work to remind people that democracy and freedom are not free? I feel like I’m doing that.
The thing is better and more succinctly explained here, but very briefly, tomorrow the US legislature opens a session, and we want to meet them with the message that “LGBTQ+ People Are Not Going Back.” And neither are your allies-we aren’t going back, but we are going with you wherever you need us to, and many of us have free mom hugs to go along with that. After you wash your hands. Anyway, my bit, which I’m working on and is saved in drafts, will be to encourage all of us to write to our Congress critters, and any other Congress critters to whom we’re moved to write. I’m likely to do the Congress critters writing tonight, so they see it in the morning first thing. As the draft post here will be.
We can fight like Jamie Raskin! (See above; Parkhomenko has that bit of great news up there. It could be a great idea to write to him, and encourage him to make the move.)
NPR took a hard right turn from impartial reporting years ago. Maybe some time around 2005. All studies show the main stream media has a right bias overall. But nothing but complete agreement with and capitulation to them will ever please republicans now. Also notice in all the talk of slashing government programs and services to save money none of the subsidies to corporations along with SpaceX and Tesla. Hugs
Dr. Bhattacharya, who is not a practicing physician, has called for overhauling the N.I.H. and limiting the power of civil servants who, he believes, played too prominent a role in shaping federal policy during the pandemic.
Trump just picked Dr. Jay Bhattacharya to lead the National Institutes of Health.In 2020, Bhattacharya pushed anti-COVID lockdown theories that were promptly dismissed as crankery — fringe policy prescriptions that would have led to millions of unnecessary deaths. http://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/26/u…
Fine resigned from the Florida Senate on Monday shortly after Trump posted an endorsement, urging him to run for the US House.
He has appeared here many times for his vicious anti-LGBTQ actions and threats of violence.
From my Saturday post…
Randy Fine, the sponsor of Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” bill, appeared here last month when he was held in contempt for flipping off a judge during a virtual hearing about an election lawsuit.
Before that he appeared here when DeSantis vetoed funding for a “woke zoo” because it wouldn’t host a fundraiser for Fine.
Fine also appeared on JMG in May 2022 when he tweeted what many interpreted as a threat to assassinate President Biden. That tweet remains online.
Before that, Fine appeared on JMG when he called for felony charges after Florida Democrats staged a sit-in over the racist US House map submitted by DeSantis.
And before that, he appeared here when he threatened to defund a Florida Special Olympics event and called a local school board member a “whore” because she’d been invited to its fundraiser gala and he was not.
Fine was a sponsor of the bill that stripped Disney’s self-governing status. His family owns annual passes to the “woke” theme park giant. In April 2023 he declared, “Damn right, we ought to erase” LGBTQs.
In 2022, he arranged for a Florida town to honor a war criminal who was convicted of executing four Iraqi prisoners.
Fine is also a sponsor of Florida’s bill criminalizing drag shows in view of minors. Of note, his wife runs a self-described “sultry” burlesque show that would violate her husband’s law.
President-elect Trump’s advisers are discussing how to unilaterally strip federal resources from Chicago and other Democratic-run cities if they refuse to participate in deportations of undocumented immigrants
Donald Trump had been the president-elect for just two days when he reportedly spoke by phone with Russian President Vladimir Putin on Nov. 7.
On the call, Trump advised the Russian president not to escalate the war with Ukraine and reminded him of the U.S.’s military presence in Europe, according to an account first published by The Washington Post, which cited multiple sources familiar with the conversation.
The Kremlin, however, denied that meeting had ever taken place. “Pure fiction,” Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov insisted.
Normally, the U.S. would be able to document that the call had happened. But not this time.
That’s because the State Department, which traditionally helps coordinate phone calls between incoming presidents and world leaders, has been shut out of Trump’s calls with foreign dignitaries.
That means the conversations were not held over secure phone lines, no State Department staff were available to offer guidance on the nuances on foreign policy and no official interpreters were on hand to overcome language barriers that can sometimes lead to confusion or misunderstandings about exactly what was said.
For U.S. foreign policy analysts, Trump’s calls with Putin and other world leaders after his victory over Vice President Kamala Harris in the Nov. 5 election are cause for alarm.
“We’re entering a dangerous territory of telephone games, where Trump is going to have private chats with foreign leaders, and they’re going to tell their teams one thing, and Trump is going to tell our national security team another,” said Brett Bruen, a former diplomat who worked in the White House under President Barack Obama.
Different interpretations of private conversations stemming from translation difficulties or misunderstandings could not only sow confusion, Bruen said, but also could trigger an international crisis.
Trump’s transition team did not respond to questions about why he has not involved the State Department in his calls with foreign leaders.
After he won another term as president, Trump waited three weeks to sign some of the legal documents needed to formally begin the transition of power from President Joe Biden’s administration. The delay in submitting the documents – which typically are filed at least a month before presidential elections – meant the government couldn’t provide security clearances, briefings and resources to Trump’s incoming team.
Trump’s transition team announced Tuesday that it had finally signed one of the documents so that it could access nonpublic government information, receive government briefings and deploy personnel inside the federal agencies and departments it will soon take over. It was not immediately clear whether Trump would tap into the State Department’s resources on his future calls with foreign leaders.
Historically, the State Department has helped coordinate phone calls between incoming presidents and foreign leaders because it’s important to ensure during the transition that the government is always speaking with one voice, particularly on matters of national security and foreign policy, according to the nonpartisan Center for Presidential Transition.
But since his first term as president, Trump has openly expressed suspicion and resentment of what he derisively calls “the Deep State,” the government bureaucrats who he argues worked secretly behind the scenes to sabotage his agenda.
A phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in 2019 deepened Trump’s distrust of government employees. During the call, Trump threatened to withhold U.S. aid to Ukraine unless Zelenskyy investigated then-former Vice President Biden and his son, Hunter Biden. A summary of the conversation, made public by Trump’s Justice Department and prepared by a government aide who had been permitted to listen to the call, helped lead to Trump’s first impeachment.
Trump has pledged to fire bureaucrats who would impede his agenda during his second term.
All presidents field phone calls from world leaders after winning office – and not all of those calls have been handled in coordination with the State Department. Some of Biden’s phone conversations with foreign dignitaries after the 2020 election were done without State Department officials because Trump refused to concede he had lost, said Daniel Fried, a former diplomat who played a key role in carrying out U.S. policy in Europe after the fall of the Soviet Union.
Trump started receiving phone calls from foreign leaders within hours of his victory over Harris. The callers included Zelenskyy, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, French President Emmanuel Macron and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, all of whom publicly acknowledged reaching out to the president-elect. Two days after the election, Trump said he had already spoken to more than 70 world leaders.
In most cases, calls between the president-elect and a foreign head of state usually involve just congratulatory remarks and pledges of cooperation with the incoming administration. But some of Trump’s calls with world leaders appear to have gone beyond the routine and delved into policy discussions.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu wrote in a pair of messages on the social media platform X on Nov. 10 that he had spoken three times with Trump since the election. “We see eye-to-eye on the Iranian threat in all its aspects, and on the dangers they reflect,” Netanyahu said. “We also see the great opportunities facing Israel, in the area of peace and its expansion, and in other areas.”
Trump’s remarks to Putin that he should not escalate the war with Ukraine raised eyebrows because federal law makes it a crime for an unauthorized American citizen to negotiate a dispute between the United States and a foreign government.
“There can only be one foreign policy at a time,” Bruen said. “What Trump is doing is saying you need to do X or Y, even though he hasn’t been sworn in, even though he doesn’t control U.S. foreign policy right now.”
Russia’s denial that the call ever took place also shows why it’s problematic for Trump to hold private conversations with foreign leaders without the involvement of the State Department, its official interpreters or other support staff, said Fried, who worked under Democratic and Republican administrations and is now a fellow at the Atlantic Council.
“Somebody’s not telling the truth,” he said. “If the Trump people had used the State Department, the Kremlin wouldn’t be able to get away with denying that the call took place, or at least there’d be no doubt.”
Fried said private calls with foreign dignitaries are not always held over secure phone lines because some leaders may not have such lines at their disposal. Still, phone conversations over unsecured lines are risky.
“Most of our adversaries are able to tap into these calls, which in and of itself is concerning because it means that the Russians are spying on the calls he’s having with Europe and the Middle East, and the Chinese are accessing the same ones,” Bruen said. “These are sensitive discussions. They allow countries’ leaders to understand where there may be potential compromises or vulnerabilities.”
When Zelenskyy called Trump at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida to congratulate him on his victory, Trump handed the phone over to Elon Musk, the billionaire business titan who has become one his advisers and a ubiquitous presence at his side. Musk, a government contractor, has provided communications services to Ukraine through his Starlink satellite network during its war with Russia.
Musk also met on Nov. 11 with Iran’s ambassador to the United States in an effort to help defuse tensions between the two countries, according to multiple reports. Iran later denied that the meeting had taken place.
Allowing Musk to participate in a private call with Zelenskyy is alarming, Bruen said, because “Musk does not have a government role. He doesn’t have a security clearance. He does have a whole of lot of interest in the outcome of what is happening in Ukraine” because of his business interests there.
Worries about Trump’s calls with foreign leaders are compounded by questions of how he has handled classified documents in the past, Bruen said.
Trump suggested his Democratic opponent in the 2016 election, Hillary Clinton, should be jailed and disqualified from holding office amid questions about how she handled classified information. Seven years later, after he left office, a federal grand jury in Florida indicted Trump on 40 counts of mishandling classified documents, some of which were stored in a bathroom in Mar-a-Lago. The special prosecutor, Jack Smith, effectively killed the case Monday when he dropped his appeal of a judge’s ruling that had dismissed the charges.
Given Trump’s past, his unsupervised phone calls with foreign leaders should set off alarms, Bruen said.
“It’s a hot mess,” he said.
Contributing: Joey Garrison
Michael Collins covers the White House. Follow him on X @mcollinsNEWS.
Michael Collins
