America's slide to authoritarianism continues with inviting Russia to the G-7
Month of disruption are ahead. and Putin possibly egging on Trump in the phone call on the same day as the St John’s photo-op does not bode well for life in the Drumpfbunker as November approaches.
If the G-7 summit is held in the U.S. in September, and Russia is invited as a nonmember, prepare for the spectacle of a smiling Putin waving to cameras on the eve of a U.S. election.
President Trump’s plans to host a summit of leaders of the G-7 group of industrialized nations this month was put to rest when German Chancellor Angela Merkel waved him off. Coronavirus concerns made it impossible for her to confirm her attendance, she said. Trump then announced the gathering would be delayed until September, and if the story had ended there, it wouldn’t have made much news.
But this was not going to be an ordinary G-7 summit. Instead, the U.S. President also announced plans to rewrite the guest list. “I don’t feel that as a G-7 it properly represents what’s going on in the world,” Trump told reporters. “It’s a very outdated group of countries.” He has a point. Gone are the days when the U.S., the U.K., France, Germany, Italy, Japan and Canada could credibly claim to represent the world’s advanced economies, much less to set an international agenda. The rise of China, in particular, but also the emergence of countries like India, South Korea, Brazil, Russia, Turkey and others have long made the G-7 look like a country-club board meeting.
Trump’s solution: expand the group. “We want Australia, we want India, we want South Korea,” Trump told reporters. “That’s a nice group of countries right there.” As host of this year’s summit, the President has the right to send an invite to whomever he wants. But Trump was proposing what he called a “G-10 or G-11,” a permanent expansion of the group. He has no power to do that by himself.
"President Trump’s effort to expand the G-7 is doomed to fail," @ianbremmer writes https://t.co/Hmbv9LbRA8
— TIME (@TIME) June 6, 2020
This dude trolling the police with Star Wars – Imperial March is exactly the Twitter content I am here for today…https://t.co/zh5R7zm70c
— Rex Chapman🏇🏼 (@RexChapman) June 5, 2020
Let’s elect (a competent POTUS).
The fact that Lindsey Graham may have been using male escorts for years who refer to him as "Lady G" is way less offensive to me than the fact that he's been completely collusive and a pandering to a psychopathic fascist to keep that fact under wraps.
— Shari Lynn (@LynnSharig8) June 5, 2020
