By Stefano Vaccara
NEW YORK (UNITED STATES) (ITALPRESS) – “America Week” is the appointment from New York that every week on Italpress will bring you news and analysis from the United States. Here we will analyze those significant news stories to understand what America will do after Donald Trump’s re-election. Apocalyptic, biblical. That is how the fire fueled by the Sant’Ana Wind, the hot desert wind, that is destroying entire neighborhoods in Los Angeles, a metropolis of ten million people and the capital of the American show business industry, is being described in these hours. Disaster began Tuesday morning, with forecasts warning that weather conditions will be unfavorable through Friday. The fire is devastating neighborhoods where communities of all socioeconomic statuses live. Even Hollywood with its Sunset Boulevard has been hit. The famous Getty Museum has so far been saved from the flames by its modern structure while all around it homes from the most modest to million-dollar mansions are burning.
President Joe Biden, who was scheduled to leave for Italy, gave up his last official trip to coordinate federal aid for California. Biden, who is the second Catholic president in American history after Kennedy, will therefore not see Pope Francis, nor will he see Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni or President Sergio Mattarella. At least this waiver will take some embarrassment away from the two governments after Meloni’s recent visit to Florida by President-elect Trump occurred just days before Biden’s planned visit to Rome and especially before the latter left the White House.
President-elect Trump himself wasted no time in taking advantage of the Los Angeles disaster and attacking both Biden and California Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom. On Wednesday night, as the flames were battling in Los Angeles, with five dead and more than 130,000 people evacuated, Trump declared that California’s environmental choices were entirely to blame for the Los Angeles tragedy, “the incompetence and mismanagement of the Biden/’Newscum’ duo,” mispronouncing Newsom’s name as “scum.” “You can’t even respond to these attacks,” Newsom retorted, “this guy wants to politicize even this event. I’ve thought a lot about what to say, but I won’t do it.”
According to senior researcher at the influential Council on Foreign Relations, Varun Sivaram, the devastating wildfires in California should be a clear reminder that the United States will suffer enormous economic damage from greenhouse gas emissions from abroad. Stopping these emissions is the ‘most important national security goal, Sivaram continued. But other than Climate Change, the incoming Trump administration thinks it becomes imperative for national security right now to “expand the territory” of the United States.
But first let’s move on to Washington, where the funeral of former President Jimmy Carter, who died at age 100, is being held. President Biden as we speak is delivering the eulogy. The ceremony is the culmination of honors given to the president whose job it was to heal the nation after the traumas of the Watergate scandal and the Vietnam War in the latter half of the 1970s. All former presidents were present at the funeral, so Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama and former now president-elect Donald Trump.
Trump a few days ago had said that Carter was a good man but as president he made a very serious mistake by returning the Panama Canal, a mistake that Trump said cost him the presidency Reagan won more than the American hostage crisis in Iran.
Already Trump within days of entering the Oval Office has already announced his plans to “expand” U.S. territory “for economic and strategic security reasons.” Trump’s sights are on Greenland – immense territory under the sovereignty of Denmark but also with an autonomous government and a population that can decide to be able to “abandon” Danish sovereignty – as well as on Panama, for that very important canal built by the Americans and opened in 1914 and then ceded to the final control of the Panamanians in 1999 who, however, again according to Trump, would not comply with the conditions of the treaty with the US. Trump during a press conference at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida did not rule out military use to achieve the goals.
Trump also addressed relations with Canada and went so far as to envision it as the 51st U.S. state. Trump also said the Gulf of Mexico the U.S. will call it by the more appropriate name Gulf of America.
John Bolton, Trump’s former security adviser and former Bush ambassador to the UN, said the questions about Greenland as well as Panama are legitimate, but that Trump makes it more complicated by talking about it that way and in public.
Yeah why is Trump talking about it so now and so blatantly?
Perhaps he wanted to divert attention from certain of his judicial problems that continue to nag at him? On Friday, Judge Juan Merchan in Manhattan is scheduled to give the ruling on the conviction Trump received in the so-called “Hush money” trial for illegally paying porn star Stormy Daniel. Trump has appealed to the Supreme Court to have this ruling postponed again, which now puts him in history as the first “criminal” president in the White House.
Also at any moment the hundreds of pages of Special Prosecutor Jack Smith’s investigation into the January 6, 2021 assault on Congress could be made public by the Justice Department. The trial will no longer be held because after Trump’s election Smith himself recused himself. But the move to make public the investigation on which Smith based his accusation that Trump tried to nullify the November 2020 election result to the point of provoking a revolt could have a serious impact on the image of the president-elect, who meanwhile says he wants to pardon those convicted who ended up in prison for the January 6 events.
Now the voters who re-elected Trump to the White House knew nothing about the controversies over Panama or Greenland, but a lot about the Maga leader’s judicial troubles. Nonetheless, they decided to vote for him because they felt he was best suited to solve America’s problems they considered the most pressing: the economy with ever more expensive necessities, and out-of-control immigration.
Instead, at the end of this week Maga voters find themselves with their leader talking about problems hitherto unknown to them.
We will see in the coming days whether Trump really has certain foreign policy issues so close to his heart that he is ready to solve them even with the use of guns, or whether once he gets into the White House, he will suddenly remember the reasons why he was elected and Panama, like Greenland, will disappear from his political radar.
photo: IPA Agency
(ITALPRESS).
