“The United States and the European Union together count for more than 830 million citizens and more than 50 percent of the global GDP.  In other words, together, we’re more than 50 percent of trade.  If we team up, we can make our planet a better, more secure, and more prosperous place.

 

Already today, the United States and the European Union have a $1 trillion bilateral trade relationship — the largest economic relationship anywhere in the world.  We want to further strengthen this trade relationship to the benefit of all American and European citizens.

 

This is why we agreed today (7/25), first of all, to work together toward zero tariffs, zero non-tariff barriers, and zero subsidies on non-auto industrial goods.” –President Trump with EU President Juncker, White House, July 25

They’re desperately trying to figure out how to downplay the agreement Donald Trump just made with European Union President Jean-Claude Juncker, but it's not going to be easy.

This is the beginning of a massive free trade deal between Europe and the U.S. with zero tariffs outside the auto industry.  If even half of it comes true, there will be a (okay, why not?) YUUUGE growth in trade benefitting both sides of the Atlantic.  What a nightmare for the Democrats.

It’s the middle of 2018. And after spilling several small rivers of black ink (digital and virtual) analyzing, smearing, belaboring, insulting and fact checking President Trump, the media still doesn’t understand him.

That’s not surprising. The media has been writing about America for much longer than that and has even less of a clue about how people live outside its preciously hip urban and suburban bubbles.

But there are 5 simple rules for understanding President Trump. They define how he’s lived his life until now. And what still drives him at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. If you understand them, you will get what he’s doing. If you don’t, there’s always a job waiting at the New York Times.

There was no honeymoon for the unlikely winner of the 2016 election.

No prior president has been under investigation for 80 percent of his first two years in office, by an investigatory team that is so patently compromised by conflicts of political interest, and so unable to find collusion or wrongdoing in a sea of what is likely to turn out to be FBI, CIA, and Justice Department criminality in 2016.

There is no respite from the war against Trump. The NFL, the NBA, late-night comedy shows, cable news, sitcoms, Hollywood movies, books, and music have all found ways to turn their genres into anti-Trump theater.

There is no respite; there is no refuge—not the Super Bowl, not the Emmys, not the Grammys, not the Oscars. Almost every aspect of American culture has been weaponized to delegitimize Trump.

What is the cause of all this hate, furor, and sheer mania?  And what’s to stop it from getting worse?

President Donald Trump scored a diplomatic win on Monday (7/16) at his summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Helsinki, Finland.

The media, the Democrats, and the Never Trump contingent declared immediately that Trump had failed. But they were bitterly prejudiced against the meeting from the start, to the point where many insisted that Trump cancel it.

To them, looking at the summit through the lens of “collusion,” the summit could only be the ultimate payoff for Putin’s election meddling in 2016.

But viewed through the lens of diplomacy, the summit was a milestone in U.S.-Russia relations.

Judging from their remarks at the press conference that followed, the two leaders touched on every major important area of foreign policy:

The Russia conspiracy theory hinges on the single creaky claim that the Democratic National Committee hacks were a Russian plot to elect Trump. The theory and all its illegitimate stepchildren, including Robert Mueller and his infinitely expanding corps of prosecutors, lives or dies by the DNC hacks.

Trying to elect Trump by releasing damaging insider information from the DNC never made any sense. The DNC was already a dysfunctional organization that was being run by the Clinton campaign. Undermining its leadership had little impact on the election, but a great deal on control of the DNC.

When you want to understand the motive of a crime, follow the money. See who benefited from it, not casually, but deeply and significantly enough to justify the effort and risk of undertaking it.

The hacks targeted Clinton allies and sought to undermine their influence within the Democrat Party.  That’s not a plan to help Trump win. It is a plan to take over the DNC.

Let’s look at what the Russians were actually doing during the election.