America's Trump Rebranding (The Opposition Report #14)

The Opposition Report comes out once a month. Chance Phillips summarizes what has happened in the news since the previous Report. Most news summaries are daily, or weekly at most. But when you are watching these events unfold so rapidly, the big picture can very easily be lost.

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The three topics of last month’s Opposition Report were the continued failure of the pointless war in Iran, the amount of blatant corruption in D.C., and just how incompetent-slash-weird-slash-deranged the various appointees and apparatchiks in the Trump admin are. Would you believe that a month later the war with Iran is still pointless, the federal government is still being used as a couple hundred folks’ personal piggy banks, and Trump’s toadies are still toadies?

Early in the month, reports indicated that Iran still controls the vast majority of its missile sites located along the Strait of Hormuz, and still has a supermajority of its pre-war missile stockpile. Trump’s claim a couple days ago that “we actually left [Iran’s] military alone” was evidently pretty dang accurate. Now, after weeks of a prolonged ceasefire, U.S. Central Command has helped approximately seventy commercial ships through the Strait of Hormuz, but overall traffic still remains far below pre-war levels. So despite hopes for some sort of deal, oil prices are well above where they once were and, if anything, hardliners in the Iranian government appear to be consolidating power.

So naturally, this sort of undeniable success in the Middle East means we need more meddling in Cuba as well! Senate Republicans may appear squeamish, but the Trump administration’s pressure campaign against the communist country continues to escalate, including indicting the 94-year-old Raúl Castro and sanctioning other leaders. Whether the indictment will lead to a Maduro-style abduction of the nonagenarian Castro of course remains to be seen. And, as Cuba continues to struggle with oil and food shortages caused in large part by a U.S. blockade, Cuban and American military representatives met outside Guantanamo Bay last week. Plus, while it isn’t making headlines as often since the war with Iran began, the administration has now killed over 200 people in its illegal series of boat strikes in South America. And the U.S. and Israeli governments are reportedly collaborating to topple the remaining few pink tide governments in the hemisphere.