The Real Main Difference Between Donald Trump & Kamala Harris

6 October 2024, by Eric Zuesse

Donald Trump really does believe that America’s ‘allies’ are exploiting the U.S. Treasury and contributing to the enormous $35+ trillion federal debt if they don’t pay to the U.S. Treasury the full costs that America expends in order to ‘protect’ them from other countries, such as Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, or whatever — countries that have no such intention of freeloading upon U.S. taxpayers.

On 10 February 2024, CNN headlined “Trump says he would encourage Russia to ‘do whatever the hell they want’ to any NATO country that doesn’t pay enough”, and reported:

Former President Donald Trump on Saturday said he would encourage Russia to do “whatever the hell they want” to any NATO member country that doesn’t meet spending guidelines on defense in a stunning admission he would not abide by the collective-defense clause at the heart of the alliance if reelected.

“NATO was busted until I came along,” Trump said at a rally in Conway, South Carolina. “I said, ‘Everybody’s gonna pay.’ They said, ‘Well, if we don’t pay, are you still going to protect us?’ I said, ‘Absolutely not.’ They couldn’t believe the answer.”

Trump said “one of the presidents of a big country” at one point asked him whether the US would still defend the country if they were invaded by Russia even if they “don’t pay.”

“No, I would not protect you,” Trump recalled telling that president. “In fact, I would encourage them to do whatever the hell they want. You got to pay. You got to pay your bills.”

At the core of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization is the promise of collective defense — that an attack on one member nation is an attack on all the nations in the alliance. Trump has long complained about the amount other countries in NATO spend on defense compared with the United States and has repeatedly threatened to withdraw the US from NATO. But his comments Saturday are his most direct indication he does not intend to defend NATO allies from Russian attack if he is reelected. …

As president, Trump privately threatened multiple times to withdraw the United States from NATO, according to The New York Times. Trump has described NATO as “obsolete” and has aligned himself with Russian President Vladimir Putin, who wants to weaken the alliance. Trump has long praised Putin and went as far as to side with the Russian leader over the US intelligence community over Russia’s interference in the 2016 presidential election.

CNN made no mention that neither Robert Mueller nor the U.S. Senate could find any case that Trump had in any way colluded with Russia in order to defeat Hillary Clinton in 2016 such as the Democratic Party long dominated America’s news-media by charging had been the case. Those charges shaped a hostility and (by repetitions such as CNN’s here), a continuing one, by millions of Americans, against Trump, and against Russia; and many millions of U.S. taxpayer dollars were expended in order for congressional Democrats to find real and reliable evidence to back up the charges, but none were found. CNN’s tactic of reporting that “Trump has long praised Putin and went as far as to side with the Russian leader over the US intelligence community over Russia’s interference in the 2016 presidential election” is reviving that corpse, that dead and gone lie, as-if it still has legs with anyone who is intelligent and well-informed, but it doesn’t: it is instead making its appeal solely to the prejudices of voters who are or lean toward the Democratic Party; it’s an attempt to fool them, yet again.

The burden of proof in an impeachment trial is far lower than in any criminal trial. The federal House of Representatives can impeach with a simple majority of the House members present or such other criteria as the House adopts in accordance with Article One, Section 2, Clause 5 of the United States Constitution. This impeachment triggers a federal impeachment trial in the U.S. Senate, which then comes into play, and can convict with a vote by a 2/3 majority (67 votes) to affirm the given charge. Trump was impeached twice (first on Russiagate/Ukraine, then on the January 6th event) by the Democratic-majority House, but, on the first trial (which concerned Russiagate/Ukraine, the topic of that CNN deceit), only 48 Senators voted him guilty on the first charge, and only 47 voted him guilty on the second one. The only Republican Senator to vote “Guilty” on either charge was Trump’s personal enemy Mitt Romney, on the first of those two Russiagate charges. However, U.S. polls showed that overwhelming majorities of the U.S. public believed the Russiagate/Ukraine (Trump/Russia collusion) charges to be true.

By contrast: Kamala Harris disagrees with Trump, and believes that U.S. taxpayers must carry the financial burdens of ‘protecting’ all ‘allies’ against Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, and any other countries that the U.S. Government craves to, but doesn’t yet, dominate over. In short: she believes that America needs to dominate all countries, and must provide its nuclear-forces umbrella, and its 900 foreign military bases, in order to carry out that function of being the world’s ‘policeman’ ‘protecting’ all of its ‘allies’.

In this belief of hers, she is passionately supported not only by a vast majority of Democratic Party voters, but, also, by many of the federal officials whom Trump himself had appointed. He was an exceedingly weak President — not because he was controlled by Vladimir Putin, but because, just like Harris and Biden and Obama and the Clintons and the Bushes, etc., he was controlled by the Deep State, the billionaires who profit enormously from having the taxpayers fund this global ‘policeman’, the U.S. empire, from which America’s billionaires have derived so much of their personal wealth.

Here’s just one of many examples to show what a weak President he was:

The order [to start the process of relieving U.S. taxpayers of this enormous financial burden] had been drafted by Douglas Macgregor, a retired colonel and a Trump favorite from his television appearances, working with a junior McEntee aide. The order was then brought to the President, bypassing the national-security apparatus and Trump’s own senior officials, to get him to sign it.

Macgregor often appeared on Fox News demanding an exit from Afghanistan and accused Trump’s advisers of blocking the President from doing what he wanted. “He needs to send everyone out of the Oval Office who keeps telling him, ‘If you do that and something bad happens, it’s going to be blamed on you, Mr. President,’ ” Macgregor had told Tucker Carlson in January. “He needs to say, ‘I don’t give a damn.’ ”

On the day that Esper was fired, McEntee had invited Macgregor to his office, offered him a job as the new acting Defense Secretary’s senior adviser, and handed him a handwritten list of four priorities that, as Axios reported, McEntee claimed had come directly from Trump:

1. Get us out of Afghanistan.

2. Get us out of Iraq and Syria.

3. Complete the withdrawal from Germany.

4. Get us out of Africa.

Once the Afghanistan order was discovered, Trump’s advisers persuaded the President to back off, reminding him that he had already approved a plan for leaving over the following few months. “Why do we need a new plan?” Pompeo asked. Trump relented, and O’Brien then told the rest of the rattled national-security leadership that the order was “null and void.”

That comes from an 8 August 2022 article in the extremely anti-Trump New Yorker magazine, headlined “Inside the War Between Trump and His Generals: How Mark Milley and others in the Pentagon handled the national-security threat posed by their own Commander-in-Chief.” Of course, they would hope, if he becomes re-elected, that he will be just as weak a President as he was the first time around.

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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse’s latest book, AMERICA’S EMPIRE OF EVIL: Hitler’s Posthumous Victory, and Why the Social Sciences Need to Change, is about how America took over the world after World War II in order to enslave it to U.S.-and-allied billionaires. Their cartels extract the world’s wealth by control of not only their ‘news’ media but the social ‘sciences’ — duping the public.