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http://archive.today/2025.02.23-112930/https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/23/us/politics/trump-alternative-reality.html

The United States sent $50 million in condoms to Hamas. Diversity programs caused a plane crash. China controls the Panama Canal. Ukraine started the war with Russia.

Except, no. None of that is true. Not that it stops President Trump. In the first month since he returned to power, he has demonstrated once again a brazen willingness to advance distortions, conspiracy theories and outright lies to justify major policy decisions.

“One of the biggest presidential powers that Trump has deployed is the ability to shape his own narrative,” said Julian E. Zelizer, a Princeton history professor and editor of a book of essays about Mr. Trump’s first term. “We have seen repeatedly how President Trump creates his own reality to legitimate his actions and simultaneously discredit warnings about his decisions.”

Stephanie Grisham, who served as a White House press secretary in the first term, once recalled that Mr. Trump would tell aides that “as long as you keep repeating something, it doesn’t matter what you say.” And that trickled down to the staff. “Casual dishonesty filtered through the White House as though it were in the air-conditioning system,” she wrote in her memoir.

Mr. Trump’s blame-the-victim revisionism over Ukraine in recent days has been among the most striking efforts to translate his alternative reality into policy. Over the course of several recent days, he said that Ukraine “started” the war with Russia in 2022 and called the country’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, a “dictator without elections,” while absolving President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, an actual dictator who had invaded his neighbor. He went even further on Friday, saying, “It’s not Russia’s fault.”

By undercutting public sympathy for Ukraine, Mr. Trump may make it easier for him to strike a peace agreement with Mr. Putin giving Russia much of what it wants even over any objections by Mr. Zelensky or European leaders. Since Mr. Zelensky is a dictator responsible for the war, this reasoning goes, he deserves less consideration.

One of Mr. Trump’s claims about Ukraine offers a case study in his mythmaking. He said that the United States has provided $350 billion in aid to Ukraine, three times as much as Europe, but that much of the money is “missing” and that Mr. Zelensky “admits that half of the money we sent him is missing.”

In fact, the United States has allocated about a third of what Mr. Trump claimed, even less than Europe, and none of it is known to be missing.

Once Mr. Trump makes an assertion, those who work for him — and want to keep working for him — are compelled to tailor their own versions of reality to match his. Even if it requires them to abandon previous understandings of the facts.

http://archive.today/2025.02.20-160548/https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/19/us/politics/elon-musk-republicans-international-development.html

For decades, influential thinkers on the left have criticized American soft-power programs, covert operations and military presence abroad as parts of a particularly American form of imperialism: one that subverts the popular will of other countries’ citizens to serve the interests of the U.S. government and multinational corporations while also producing dangerous consequences — unfettered presidential power, diminished civil liberties — at home.

Mr. Trump’s allies have borrowed liberally from this argument while turning it on its head. They have been using it to justify new frontiers of executive power and the extraordinary empowerment of Mr. Musk, the world’s wealthiest individual.

As the head of the Department of Government Efficiency, Mr. Musk has accused U.S.A.I.D. of “money laundering” and has reposted claims that the agency’s government-backed, democracy-promotion programs are “a C.I.A. front.” During her confirmation hearings, Tulsi Gabbard, the new director of national intelligence, criticized covert operations to arm proxies in Syria and “regime change wars” across the Middle East.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the Health and Human Services secretary, has blamed the war in Ukraine on the foreign policy establishment’s “strategic grand plan to destroy any country such as Russia that resists American imperial expansion.”

The Center for Renewing America, a think tank that was until recently led by Russ Vought, Mr. Trump’s Office of Management and Budget director, has joined in, too. A paper the group published this month accused the National Endowment for Democracy, a government-funded organization created during the Reagan presidency to support democracy and civil society abroad, of being a “tool for neoconservative nation-building.”

None of this is without precedent in the politics of Mr. Trump, who has revived a long dormant strain of Republican skepticism of foreign interventions. Mr. Trump criticized the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as a candidate in 2016, and he considered rolling U.S.A.I.D. into the State Department early in his first presidency. He also inveighed against the country’s intelligence agencies and the F.B.I. after he came under investigation late in that election for his campaign’s contacts with Russian officials.

But Mr. Trump’s second administration has gone further, embracing specific narratives about nefarious motives behind humanitarian aid and covert operations that were long the province of the left, even as his advisers denounce the same programs as hotbeds of “far left activists.”

Mr. Trump has put the left in the awkward position of defending institutions and policies it once criticized.

“USAID is/was a radical-left political psy op,” Mr. Musk wrote in a Feb. 3 post on X citing Mr. Benz.

To make this case, Mr. Benz has marshaled the decades-old work of left-wing journalists and scholars, such as the historian Alfred McCoy, whose research on the C.I.A. and U.S.A.I.D.’s role in heroin trafficking in Southeast Asia earned the ire of the C.I.A. in the early 1970s.

Mr. McCoy, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, was not familiar with Mr. Benz’s work, but said he had noticed a modest uptick in sales of his book “In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power,” since Mr. Benz cited him this month.

Mr. McCoy, who was shot at by U.S.-backed guerrillas while investigating U.S.A.I.D. in Laos in 1971, said that applying his work from that era to the agency now was a mistake. In the post-Cold War period, “I would venture that U.S.A.I.D. is as good if not better than any of the others that are out there,” he said, and cutting it would be “a tragedy for the people affected.”

http://archive.today/2025.02.20-160548/https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/19/us/politics/elon-musk-republicans-international-development.html

For decades, influential thinkers on the left have criticized American soft-power programs, covert operations and military presence abroad as parts of a particularly American form of imperialism: one that subverts the popular will of other countries’ citizens to serve the interests of the U.S. government and multinational corporations while also producing dangerous consequences — unfettered presidential power, diminished civil liberties — at home.

Mr. Trump’s allies have borrowed liberally from this argument while turning it on its head. They have been using it to justify new frontiers of executive power and the extraordinary empowerment of Mr. Musk, the world’s wealthiest individual.

As the head of the Department of Government Efficiency, Mr. Musk has accused U.S.A.I.D. of “money laundering” and has reposted claims that the agency’s government-backed, democracy-promotion programs are “a C.I.A. front.” During her confirmation hearings, Tulsi Gabbard, the new director of national intelligence, criticized covert operations to arm proxies in Syria and “regime change wars” across the Middle East.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the Health and Human Services secretary, has blamed the war in Ukraine on the foreign policy establishment’s “strategic grand plan to destroy any country such as Russia that resists American imperial expansion.”

The Center for Renewing America, a think tank that was until recently led by Russ Vought, Mr. Trump’s Office of Management and Budget director, has joined in, too. A paper the group published this month accused the National Endowment for Democracy, a government-funded organization created during the Reagan presidency to support democracy and civil society abroad, of being a “tool for neoconservative nation-building.”

None of this is without precedent in the politics of Mr. Trump, who has revived a long dormant strain of Republican skepticism of foreign interventions. Mr. Trump criticized the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as a candidate in 2016, and he considered rolling U.S.A.I.D. into the State Department early in his first presidency. He also inveighed against the country’s intelligence agencies and the F.B.I. after he came under investigation late in that election for his campaign’s contacts with Russian officials.

But Mr. Trump’s second administration has gone further, embracing specific narratives about nefarious motives behind humanitarian aid and covert operations that were long the province of the left, even as his advisers denounce the same programs as hotbeds of “far left activists.”

Mr. Trump has put the left in the awkward position of defending institutions and policies it once criticized.

“USAID is/was a radical-left political psy op,” Mr. Musk wrote in a Feb. 3 post on X citing Mr. Benz.

To make this case, Mr. Benz has marshaled the decades-old work of left-wing journalists and scholars, such as the historian Alfred McCoy, whose research on the C.I.A. and U.S.A.I.D.’s role in heroin trafficking in Southeast Asia earned the ire of the C.I.A. in the early 1970s.

Mr. McCoy, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, was not familiar with Mr. Benz’s work, but said he had noticed a modest uptick in sales of his book “In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power,” since Mr. Benz cited him this month.

Mr. McCoy, who was shot at by U.S.-backed guerrillas while investigating U.S.A.I.D. in Laos in 1971, said that applying his work from that era to the agency now was a mistake. In the post-Cold War period, “I would venture that U.S.A.I.D. is as good if not better than any of the others that are out there,” he said, and cutting it would be “a tragedy for the people affected.”

http://archive.today/2025.02.16-163529/https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/16/world/europe/vance-europe-putin-russia.html

Comments by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Vice President JD Vance raised fears among attendees [of the annual security conference in Munich] that under the new administration the United States. might [sic] align with Russia and either assail Europe or abandon it altogether.

The presence of American troops has been the underpinning of 80 years of peace in Western Europe since the end of World War II. But in a speech in Warsaw on Friday, before his arrival at the conference, Mr. Hegseth warned European leaders they shouldn’t assume that the United States will be there forever.

Later in the day, at the Munich conference, Mr. Vance delivered an even scarier message for many European attendees: The enemy he sees isn’t Russia or China, but Europe itself.

Mr. Vance set about attacking European nations for using what he called undemocratic methods to restrain far-right parties that in some cases have been backed by Russia. He argued that the continent needed to recognize the desires of its voters, stop attempting to moderate disinformation in undemocratic ways and instead allow such parties to thrive as the will of the people.

Mr. Vance hit out in particular at Romania, where the country’s constitutional court in December canceled a presidential election that an ultranationalist backed by an apparent Russian influence campaign looked poised to win. The election has been rescheduled for May.

http://archive.today/2025.02.16-014757/https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/15/world/europe/ukraine-minerals-us-deal-rejected.html

Mr. Zelensky, who has shown openness to leveraging Ukraine’s mineral resources in negotiations with allies, said he rejected the deal because it did not tie resource access to U.S. security guarantees for Kyiv in its fight against Russia.

The idea of leveraging Ukraine’s mineral resources began to take shape last summer. Mr. Zelensky’s government, trying to appeal to Mr. Trump’s business-minded approach and fearing he would follow through on his promises to cut off military and financial aid to Ukraine, decided to pitch a deal that would essentially trade Ukrainian critical minerals for American aid.

The Ukrainian president presented the idea to Mr. Trump during a September meeting in New York, and the proposal gained backing from influential political figures, including Senator Lindsey Graham, a Republican. It also came after U.S. businessmen — including as Ronald S. Lauder, a wealthy friend of Mr. Trump’s — showed interest in investing in Ukraine’s mineral resources.

Kyiv had always maintained that access to its natural resources would come in exchange for strong security guarantees from Washington. But one of the Ukrainian officials said that the proposal made no such commitment, instead framing the access to Ukraine’s resources as overdue payment for past American military and financial aid.

But there is precedent for Ukraine to mix security and business with the United States under Mr. Trump. In his first term, in 2017, he struck a deal for Ukraine to buy coal from Pennsylvania to replace coal from mines in Ukraine lost under Russian occupation after the 2014 invasion.

But the deal under discussion now, he [Kostiantyn Yelisieiev] said, elevates the approach in ways that could hand Russia a propaganda win by casting the war as a battle for natural resources, not Ukrainian independence or democracy.

“It’s more important to say this is about protecting democracies and defeating Putin,” he said.

http://archive.today/2025.02.13-124628/https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/13/world/europe/ukraine-russia-us-diplomacy.html

Mr. Zelensky has played weak hands well before. In the opening days of Russia’s invasion, he popped out of a bunker to film selfie videos that rallied his country, and much of the world, to Ukraine’s cause.

Now he is again facing a pivotal moment for his country in a diminished position, sinking in domestic polls and getting a cold shoulder from his most important ally.

There have been some bright spots for Ukraine. Soon after his inauguration, Mr. Trump criticized Mr. Putin harshly, saying he was “destroying” Russia with the war.

And while Mr. Trump’s claim on Ukraine’s minerals comes at a big cost for Kyiv, it has also been viewed by Ukrainian officials as a hopeful sign. The talks on mineral rights, which began on Wednesday with a visit to Kyiv by the American Treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, open a path for Mr. Trump to continue military aid while claiming to have secured a benefit for the United States.

Ukrainian officials say they view the Russian demand for democratic elections as part of a ploy to destabilize the government and compel Ukraine to let its guard down for a vote. They have urged the Trump administration not to endorse the idea.

“It is the Russians who are raising the topic of elections because they need their man in Ukraine,” Mr. Zelensky said in an interview with the British broadcaster ITV News that aired last weekend. “If we suspend martial law, we may lose the army. And the Russians will be happy because the qualities of spirit and combat capability will be lost.”

http://archive.today/2025.02.12-171604/https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/12/us/politics/tulsi-gabbard-senate-confirmation-vote.html

Democrats remained united against her. Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the minority leader, said Ms. Gabbard was not qualified. He said that in a secret vote, she would have received little Republican support. He said he was troubled by her “long record of weakness” against Russia.

“We simply cannot in good conscience trust our most classified secrets to someone who echoes Russian propaganda and falls for conspiracy theories,” Mr. Schumer said.

http://archive.today/2025.02.09-005201/https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/08/world/middleeast/israel-hamas-hostages-prisoners.html

Gideon Saar, Israel’s foreign minister, invoked the defining Jewish trauma of the last century, writing on social media, “The Israeli hostages look like Holocaust survivors.”

The spectacle on Saturday was sure to reinforce pressure from some Israelis for the government to find a way to recover all of the remaining hostages in Gaza. For others, it will bolster the view that Israel should resume the war after the first six-week phase of the cease-fire expires on March 2, rather than negotiate a long-term peace.

What happens next is far from certain.

http://archive.today/2025.02.10-121624/https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/09/us/politics/federal-workers-trump.html

http://archive.today/2025.02.09-171358/https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/09/science/dog-breed-health-behavior-westminster.html

"China and Russia have not been shy about exporting propaganda across the world and seeking to co-opt journalists on the ground into bolstering it. We shouldn’t want a US equivalent, of course—but truly independent journalism can shine a light through this sort of behavior, and through the workings of autocrats more broadly, in ways that are good for the truth and for U.S. strategic goals," journalist Jon Allsop wrote for CJR.

As referenced by CJR, Reporters Without Borders (RSF) said the USAID aid freezes may have put a hold on $268 million earmarked for the funding of "independent media and the free flow of information" in 2025.

USAID has previously reported that their funding supports more than 6,000 journalists, approximately 700 newsrooms and almost 3,000 civic society groups across 30 odd countries.

RSF said the full impact of the freeze is hard to quantify as recipients of the funding fear risking future aid or political retribution if they speak out.

The non-profit also claims that troubles at USAID may have severe consequences for Ukrainian journalists—where 90 percent of news organizations rely on USAID funding for operations.

http://archive.today/2025.02.08-210523/https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/06/opinion/usaid-trump-samantha-power.html

"Ms. Power was the administrator of the United States Agency for International Development in the Biden administration.

"We are witnessing one of the worst and most costly foreign policy blunders in U.S. history. Less than three weeks into Donald Trump’s second term, he, Elon Musk and Secretary of State Marco Rubio have halted the U.S. Agency for International Development’s aid programs around the world."

http://archive.today/2025.02.07-032739/https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/06/us/politics/trump-gaza-two-state.html

"The prospects for a Palestinian state had already dwindled in recent years, especially after the Hamas terrorist attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, that killed 1,200 people and led to the Israeli retaliatory war in Gaza that has killed 47,000 combatants and civilians, according to Gaza health authorities."

http://archive.today/2025.02.07-090830/https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/06/us/politics/usaid-job-cuts.html