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(RightWing.org) – On Saturday, July 13, former President Donald Trump (and now-official Republican party candidate in 2024) came literal inches away from being assassinated by a bullet from the rifle of Thomas Matthew Crooks. Just two days later he was in Milwaukee, Wisconsin for the beginning of the Republican National Convention where he nominated Ohio Senator JD Vance as his running mate to take on the presumptive Democratic Party ticket of President Joe Biden/Vice President Kamala Harris, bringing cheers from Conservatives and angst to others in the United States and abroad.
European Nervousness
Trump and Vance are both founding members of the MAGA movement which opposes the Democrat agenda pushed by Biden and self-avowed Socialists like Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez a.k.a. AOC (D-NY) and Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and all that they represent. This could explain some of the anxiety from across the pond when one considers that the Liberal Labour Party won an outright majority in the United Kingdom’s Parliament and the alt-Left New Popular Front of the plurality of the seats in their French counterpart’s legislature.
On April 12, an op-ed written by Vance was published in the New York Times detailing why he voted against Biden’s $60 billion supplemental military aid package for Ukraine in the war they are fighting after Russian President Vladimir Putin launched an all-out invasion of the country in February 2022. He points out that the administration claimed that this iteration of help “means the difference between victory and defeat” for the defenders but, in his opinion, the math doesn’t add up in two ways when one considers what Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and his advisors have asked for.
Vance notes that the Ukrainian defense minister estimated that they would need approximately 4 (perhaps as many as 7) million 155-millimeter artillery shells per year, which at the current per unit price of $5,000 would be $20 billion; the United States has ramped up its output to 360,000 yearly which Biden hopes to increase to 1.2 million, roughly 30% of the ask. At the February Munich Security Conference, the Republican VP candidate said that the Europeans need to take up more of their own defensive needs, bluntly telling them “the American security blanket has allowed European security to atrophy.”
It can be a scary time for a little kid on the playground to be told he has to stand up to the local bully with only a little help from his bodyguard, so it’s easy to understand why the European Union and the UK might be a little jumpy. But, there is no doubt that Vance is right when he points out that Israel is fighting for its existence against the Islamic Republic of Iran and their proxy terrorist Hamas, Hezbollah, and Houthis along with the People’s Republic of China and their growing military aggression in the Indio Pacific region.
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