Did Trump solve the border crisis two months before even being sworn in as the 47th president?

Two days after surprising markets – and sending the peso plummeting – by announcing he would enact 25% import duties on Mexican goods if the country doesn’t stop the flow of drugs and migrants across the border.

tariffs on Mexican goods in response to the flood of drugs across the porous southern border, best known for allowing millions of illegal immigrants to enter the US in the past four ears, Trump’s unexpected gambit may have already paid off.

In a post on Truth Social network, Trump announced that after a “wonderful” conversation with Mexican president Claudia Sheinbaum, she “agreed to stop Migration through Mexico, and into the United States, effectively closing our Southern Border.”

He added that the two also talked about “what can be done to stop the massive drug inflow into the United States” concluding that it was a “very productive” conversation which of course, it would be, if indeed Trump – who again is still two months away from inauguration – managed to solve the US border crisis just 48 hours after using targeted tariffs as a bargaining chip.

While it remains to be confirmed on the Mexican side if Trump’s recollection of the conversation is accurate, Trump’s announcement comes just hours after the legacy media reported that Mexico would take on a more aggressive posture, with the AP reporting that Sheinbaum had suggested that “Mexico could retaliate with tariffs of its own” and that while she was willing to engage in talks on the issues, drugs were a U.S. problem.

“One tariff would be followed by another in response, and so on until we put at risk common businesses,” Sheinbaum said, referring to U.S. automakers that have plants on both sides of the border.

She said Tuesday that Mexico had done a lot to stem the flow of migrants, noting “caravans of migrants no longer reach the border.” However, Mexico’s efforts to fight drugs like the deadly synthetic opioid fentanyl – which is manufactured by Mexican cartels using chemicals imported from China – have weakened in the last year.

Amusingly, Sheinbaum also said Mexico suffered from an influx of weapons smuggled in from the United States, and said the flow of drugs “is a problem of public health and consumption in your country’s society” which judging by the libs ongoing reaction to Trump’s victory is pretty much spot on.

As noted, there is still no official confirmation or full context of the agreement from President Sheinbaum’s side, but the market certainly reacted with the peso surging, and almost wiping out all losses from the past 48 hours after Trump’s first unveiled his 25% tariff threat.

If confirmed, this would be the second time Trump has managed to convince Mexico to suspend migrants from crossing its territory to enter the US. Back in 2018, former President Andrés Manuel López Obrador – a charismatic, old-school politician – developed a chummy relationship with Trump. The two were eventually able to strike a bargain in which Mexico helped keep migrants away from the border – and received other countries’ deported migrants – and Trump backed down on similar threats.

While Sheinbaum, who took office Oct. 1, has been seen as a stern leftist ideologue trained in radical student protest movements, and appeared less willing to pacify or mollify Trump, it seems she too has capitulated just 48 hours after Trump unveiled what was coming.

Goldman Sachs analysts have noted a “significant uptick” in merger and acquisition rumors in the press over the past six weeks. The investment bank forecasts positive M&A growth trends over the next 12 months, signaling a potential rebound in dealmaking activity. 

Analysts Matt Michon and Hannah Taylor penned a note Wednesday to clients about the surge in M&A headlines.

“In the last six weeks, there has been a significant uptick in M&A “rumours” relative to the prior three-quarters so hopefully an encouraging sign that corporate activity is picking-up…!” they said. 

The list of companies below is part of the desk’s M&A monitor, which shows “potential M&A situations reported through the press” and also “highlighted in blue are those with news updates since our last note.” A list of failed M&A approaches was also recorded. 

Most recent M&A headlines… 

Failed M&A approaches. 

In a separate but recent note, Goldman analysts James Yaro and Richard Ramsden told clients that internal leading indicators “forecast 20% M&A growth over the next twelve months.”   

The latest remarks from the FOMC Minutes suggest that Fed officials are leaning toward a more gradual interest rate-cutting cycle. One that could certainly provide relief to corporates… 

Via SchiffGold.com,

Last week, Peter participated in a ZeroHedge debate moderated by Keith Knight (who also interviewed Peter recently). He faced off against Bitcoin advocate Robert Breedlove on his show, “What is Money?”  Peter and Robert discuss the future use cases of Bitcoin and gold, the philosophy and economics behind money, and what it would take for each other to change their minds and renounce their preferred sound money.

Keith has the debaters start with common ground. The state is the source and cause of inflation, and inflation is a devastating tax on consumers:

The effect of that [inflation] is that prices go up. It offsets the decline in prices that might otherwise have resulted from an efficient, growing, free-market economy, where the tendency is for prices to come down over time. Governments can rob people of those benefits by creating inflation. Inflation is not just how much prices go up, and that’s not just the result. It’s how much they might have otherwise gone down, had the government not created the inflation that caused them to go down less or to go up.

As they move into the debate, Peter presents the Austrian school of economics’ explanation for the origin of money. Notably, precious metals needed some non-monetary use before they were used as a medium of exchange:

Before money, people traded goods, but it was cumbersome because you needed a coincidence of needs. … But man eventually found out that they could have one commodity that could be used in exchange for all other commodities. And gold was basically the commodity that ended up being money. Other commodities have been money, and they can be money, but gold just fulfills that role very well for a lot of the properties that Bitcoin copied. … And what gives gold value is the fact that it’s a precious metal that we need because it, you know, it does a lot of things.

Peter contends that even if cryptocurrencies are eventually used as money, there’s no good reason to think Bitcoin will out-compete other coins, especially in the future:

There’s nothing unique about Bitcoin. You say Bitcoin is the only thing. There’s tens of thousands of other tokens that I could create, that have been created, that will be created. There is nothing special about Bitcoin that anybody else can’t copy or replicate.

All that it has is that it has more people who believe in it right now. You have more computer capacity behind it. But that could change.

The odds that anyone’s even going to care about Bitcoin in 10 years, I think, are pretty low.

The fervor around Bitcoin today is driven by speculation. Most retail investors in Bitcoin are not Bitcoin maximalists who actually expect it to function as a medium of exchange:

The main driver is speculation. In fact, the main buying right now for Bitcoin is coming from ETFs. … They’re buying it because they think the price of this ETF is going to go up.

It has got nothing to do with Bitcoin as money… It’s just that people are buying that particular speculative asset in their brokerage accounts instead of some other speculative asset because, for the moment, they think there’s upside.

Robert raises the problem of counterparty risk, which Bitcoin solves under some circumstances. Peter counters by pointing out counterparty risk is inherent in a market economy. Even Robert tolerates counterparty risk, and market forces tend to minimize its effect:

Your main problem then with gold … is you’re saying that you don’t trust the custodian. That the custodian is going to loan out or embezzle my gold, or they’re going to do something. And so gold can’t work in the electronic world of the future because you can’t trust counterparties, that we’re all criminals, and capitalism doesn’t really work in that respect because there’s no way to know who’s honest and who’s a crook. And you can’t trust counterparties. Let me ask you, Rob, do you have any insurance at all? Like life insurance, fire insurance, health insurance, auto insurance—do you have any insurance?

In Peter’s closing segment, he argues that future technology will enhance gold’s monetary properties rather than supplant them. Moving back to metals, not crypto, is the path forward:

Gold, you know, has worked for thousands of years, and the technology associated with digitization, the internet, and computers doesn’t make gold obsolete or diminish its role in any way. In fact, it makes gold perform all of the functions it has performed so successfully over the centuries that much better. Rather than trying to reinvent the wheel and getting people to think, ‘Oh, let’s just create this new money out of thin air and pretend it has value,’ like Bitcoin, efforts and resources should be spent trying to move the world back to a gold standard and away from fiat money.

Earlier this fall, Peter also debated Bitcoiner Jack Mallers on Bitcoin. Make sure to check it out!

Authored by Andrew Korybko via substack,

Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov said in response to a question about his country’s possible missile deployment to the Asia-Pacific that this “will depend on the deployment of corresponding US systems in any region of the world.” This came less than a week after Putin authorized the use of Russia’s previously secret hypersonic medium-range Oreshnik missile in Ukraine, the strategic significance of which was analyzed here, and parallels newly deteriorating Russian-South Korean ties.

Seoul is considering arming Ukraine in response to unsubstantiated reports about Russia’s use of North Korean troops against that former Soviet Republic, which prompted Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Andrey Rudenko to warn that “we will respond in every way that we find necessary. It is unlikely that this will strengthen the security of the Republic of Korea itself.”

The two triggers for Russia’s possible missile deployment to the Asia-Pacific are therefore the US doing so first or Seoul arming Kiev.

It’s important to point out that while China is Russia’s close military partner and Moscow believes that Washington is engaged in what Russian officials describe as a “dual containment” strategy against both, Beijing isn’t its military ally, unlike Pyongyang with which Moscow just recently signed a military pact. That document was analyzed here and amounts to updating a Soviet-era one. Its strategic significance is that each pledged to help the other if they come under aggression and such assistance is requested.

Accordingly, Russia’s possible missile deployment to the Asia-Pacific would be in defense of its own and North Korea’s security, with the first immediate consequence being that it could inadvertently worsen China’s by serving to justify and accelerate the US’ regional containment plans against it. To explain, Trump plans to “Pivot (back) to Asia” upon the end of the Ukrainian Conflict, whenever that might be and regardless of the terms agreed to, which is already troubling enough from China’s perspective.

To make it even worse, Trump is inheriting the Biden Administration’s achievement of having brokered the improvement of South Korean-Japanese ties to such an extent that the US’ long-hoped-for regional trilateral is finally on the brink of becoming a strategic reality. The deployment of short- and intermediate-range Russian missiles to the Asia-Pacific, especially the state-of-the-art Oreshnik, would naturally justify the aforesaid and accelerate all three’s convergence into a tighter triangle.

On the diplomatic front, these missiles could always be withdrawn pending a grand deal between Russia, the US, North Korea, and possibly also China, though the latter’s involvement shouldn’t be taken for granted. After all, an agreement could be reached between the first three in exchange for de-escalating tensions in Northeast Asia, which could then free up the US and Japan to concentrate on more muscularly containing China in Southeast Asia via Taiwan and the Philippines, which both are close with.

It’s premature to predict that this is exactly what will unfold, but the point is that Russia’s role in the emerging Asian front of the New Cold War could be leveraged for de-escalation purposes if its and North Korea’s security interests are met, which only requires negotiating with the US and not with China. Given these military-strategic dynamics, it’s possible that Trump might try to fulfill his campaign pledge to “un-unite” Russia and China by playing them off against each other, though that’s very unlikely to succeed.

All told, Russia’s possible missile deployment to the Asia-Pacific would be triggered by the US or South Korea, with the consequences being that it’ll solidify Russia’s role in that emerging front of the New Cold War while inadvertently worsening China’s security by justifying and accelerating the US’ “Pivot (back) to Asia”. The Kremlin wants to fulfill its allied commitments to North Korea and highlight its relevance in that part of Eurasia, both goals of which are driven by security, diplomatic, and soft power motives.

Days ago, The NY Times revealed that US and European officials have discussed a range of options they believe will deter Russia from taking more Ukrainian territory, including the possibility of providing Kiev with nuclear weapons. “US and European officials are discussing deterrence as a possible security guarantee for Ukraine, such as stockpiling a conventional arsenal sufficient to strike a punishing blow if Russia violates a cease-fire,” the report said.

The article then stated, “Several officials even suggested that Mr. Biden could return nuclear weapons to Ukraine that were taken from it after the fall of the Soviet Union.”

Former Russian president and current deputy chairman of the Security Counsel Dmitry Medvedev has responded by pointing out that if the West actually went forward with transferring nukes to Ukraine, this would be seen as tantamount to an attack on Russia. He explained that this is a key aspect of Russia’s newly expanded nuclear doctrine.

In a Telegram post on Tuesday, Medvedev specifically referenced the recent NY Times report, and said: “Looks like my sad joke about crazy senile Biden, who’s eager to go out with a bang and take a substantial part of humanity with him, is becoming dangerously real.”

Medvedev then stressed that “giving nukes to a country that’s at war with the greatest nuclear power” is so absurd that Biden and any of his officials considering it must have “massive paranoid psychosis.”

His biggest and most specific threat came as follows: 

“The fact of transferring such weapons may be considered as the launch of an attack against our country in accordance with Paragraph 19 of the ‘Basic Principles of State Policy on Nuclear Deterrence’,” Medvedev wrote.

President Putin had formally approved a lowering of the threshold for nuclear weapons use on November 19. The change has been widely seen as in response to Ukraine being authorized by the Western allies to use US-made ATACMS and HIMARS systems, and British-made Storm Shadow and French Scalp missiles on Russian territory.

The aforementioned NY Times report did note that President Putin doesn’t appear ready to actually significantly escalate the war, giving a chance for the Trump administration to take office.

According to a recent New York Times Report, the Biden Administration has discussed the idea of handing nuclear weapons over to Ukraine as it prepares to leave office.

And France and the UK are discussing sending TROOPS into Ukraine! Do they really want WWIII?

Also… pic.twitter.com/qIoxFoGOKc

— Ron Paul (@RonPaul) November 25, 2024

“But the escalation risk of allowing Ukraine to strike Russia with US-supplied weaponry has diminished with the election of Mr. Trump,” the report said, and added: “Biden administration officials believe, calculating that Putin of Russia knows he has to wait only two months for the new administration.”

Authored by Parker Thayer via RealClearPolitics,

It’s not your imagination; get-out-the-vote ads were more obnoxious this year. Thousands of people were shocked to receive intimidating letters claiming their voting history was being monitored, “nonpartisan” mail-in ballot request forms bearing Michelle Obama’s face, misleading text messages telling them they had already voted, and remember-to-vote postcards designed to look like lottery tickets. Most people had never seen tactics like these before, but they were everywhere in 2024.

Why?

The short answer is that sagging polls made the left’s get-out-the-vote (GOTV) machine desperate, and it dug deep in its bag of tricks to find ways to win. The full answer requires a peek under the hood of the left’s vote machine to discover the hubris of identity politics and Democratic donors.

Most of the obnoxious ads came from voter registration “charities” legally required to be nonpartisan. Despite the law, it’s been an open secret for years – decades – that groups like Voter Participation Center, Everybody Votes Campaign, and State Voices exist almost exclusively to help Democrats win by “organizing” the “New American Majority,” a made-up cocktail of all demographic groups that just so happen to favor Democrats. Hundreds of groups use this model, and a $1 billion industry thrived in the shadows, thanks to the neglect of the IRS and the media.

The industry enjoyed tremendous success in 2020, registering millions of swing-state voters to defeat Trump while attracting more donors than ever before, but after 2020, everything began to collapse. The industry’s success led to unprecedented scrutiny from journalists, Republican legislators, think-tank leaders, and even law enforcement. For the first time, voter registration groups were hiring PR staff. Meanwhile, actual members of the “New American Majority” were leaving the Democratic Party.

It started as a trickle.

In November 2023, George Soros canceled a $67 million pledge to Latino get-out-the-vote groups after “Democrats [saw] Latinos peel away from the party.” In January 2024, an interview with the leader of the Everybody Votes Campaign, the industry’s biggest player, revealed that Everybody Votes, which had registered around 850,000 voters annually and 5.1 million total from 2017-22, had only registered 400,000 more by the start of 2024. The interview also showed EVC was struggling to circumvent newly passed election integrity laws because “keeping up with those laws is time-consuming, it’s expensive … partners, and even funders, are getting worried that this work is too risky.”

In April 2024, the trickle of desertions from the would-be “Majority” became a flood when a memo from Democratic strategist Aaron Strauss “sparked a furious debate in Democratic circles about whether to narrow the focus of voter registration efforts to avoid signing up likely Republicans.” The memo advised Democratic megadonors to abandon “nonpartisan” voter registration because most unregistered voters were now Republicans. “Indeed, if we were to blindly register nonvoters and get them on the rolls, we would be distinctly aiding Trump’s quest for a personal dictatorship,” Strauss declared.

The memo was poorly received. Partisan donors were loath to give up their favorite tax-exempt toy, and the registration industrial complex wanted the money, so the grift continued. In 2024, AllByApril, a donor coalition led by eBay founder Pierre Omidyar, doubled down, ensuring checks to voter registration groups were delivered by April to maximize election impact. The campaign raised $150+ million and was joined by 174 donors. Perhaps some donors quietly cut back, but it seems like Strauss’ warning was ignored.

As registrations became harder to collect, desperation mounted. Multiple vendors to Everybody Votes were caught fraudulently inflating their numbers. Voter Participation Center was caught filtering its Facebook ads to avoid Republicans. Finally, the creepy “we’ll know if you voted” ads were deployed, alienating the “charitable” GOTV industry’s possible allies. Now the industry finds itself alone against hundreds of disgruntled donors and a Republican trifecta that it accidentally helped create, while legislation to revoke the tax-exempt status of partisan “charities” is in vogue like never before.

It’s poetic justice.

Parker Thayer is an investigative researcher at the Capital Research Center.

Authored by Ned Ryun and Mark Corallo via American Greatness,

The time has come to end the Administrative State once and for all.

This failed experiment launched a century ago by Progressive Statists like Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt is a deeply unconstitutional approach to government that is antithetical to the free, representative government founded by the American Republic. It is the polar opposite of what our founders envisioned with the unelected bureaucrats doing the governing of the country while not responsive to “We the People,” as the people didn’t elect them and, more importantly, don’t have any recourse to redress their grievances against the increasingly authoritarian tendencies of the Administrative State via its statutes and regulations that benefit the State and its allies.

The good news is that President Trump has fully empowered Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy and the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), which is a massive step in the right direction. The fundamental reason for this is: Trump rejects the premise that the Administrative State is legitimate or that its unelected bureaucrats should be the final decision makers on anything, whether foreign or domestic policy. But Trump and DOGE should not settle for reducing government spending and the regulatory burden. 

Its goal should be to shatter the Administrative State into a million pieces. 

Everything that is wrong with our government and country today in many ways stems from the Administrative State: out of control bureaucracy, insane spending, and really the Swamp writ large. Understand that the foundation of the Swamp is the State. If you want to drain the Swamp you must break the State. Not only will it fix many of the ills facing America today, it will put the country back on the path of restoring the free American Republic and balancing out the three branches of government once more, which will lead to greater freedom and a Golden Age for this country.

But for this to happen, several fundamental, practical things must take place.

First, on Day 1 of his second term, Trump must fire via his Reduction in Force authority 200,000 federal employees, preferably at the GS-12 and 13 levels. Of course the federal employee unions, which should cease to exist, will sue for a stay. That case will likely wind its way through the courts for 18 months or so (unless the Supreme Court fast tracks it). But once it reaches the SCOTUS, the fundamental question to be asked is: can the head of the Executive Branch, the duly elected President of the US, hire or fire whoever he pleases as per the Constitution? Or do the extra Constitutional statutes and regulations protecting the civil servants supersede the Constitution? With this SCOTUS, the odds are they will side with the originalism of the Constitution and give the President the right to hire and fire whoever he pleases inside the Executive Branch, where most of the Administrative State resides. 

Then Trump becomes the Demolition Man for at least the last two years of his Administration: firing large swaths of the federal government and shutting down departments and agencies. Most importantly in that process, removing those positions from the federal rolls and imploding the buildings he’s emptied and building a Freedom Park (or parks) over the top. Perhaps he even creates the monument he envisioned in July of 2020 and places the statues of our great American heroes over the remains of the Administrative State.

It’s imperative that the DOGE not be just be a cost cutting and regulatory slashing initiative, although that would be reason enough considering the massive bloat, waste, fraud and abuse in the system.  This is about reminding the career bureaucrats they answer to the people through their elected officials.  These bureaucrats have for too long usurped the power of the sovereign people and due to the government employee union contracts are not answerable to the elected officials from whom they derive their power.  They have become a de facto, independent, unaccountable, fourth branch of government that appears nowhere in the United States Constitution.  They are, in fact, the very top-down, authoritarian ruling elite our forefathers rejected in 1776 and replaced in the triumph of the American Revolution. 

Now as the entire process of answering the fundamental question of President Trump’s ability to hire and fire could take well over a year, what is to be done in the short term with the high level federal employees who plan on resisting Trump’s agenda Trump should create the federal government equivalent of the New York City school system’s “rubber room.” 

On Day 1 of his Administration, the GS-15s and SES types, which by the way will likely include Biden political appointees who have “burrowed” into various departments and agencies as civil servants, will report to an empty government building dubbed the Department of Elimination, 30 minutes from Capitol Hill; far enough away to make it painful.

They will report there promptly every day to sit at empty desks for 8 hours until SCOTUS addresses the fundamental question. Then, as the Administration proceeds, any high level bureaucrat caught resisting will be immediately reassigned to the Department of Elimination “rubber room.” They won’t be fired. They just get to sit there and not have the ability to resist inside the various departments and agencies.

It’s time to use the political power given to Trump by the American people to restore the Republic. In 1911 Woodrow Wilson, shortly before taking the White House and erecting the Administrative State, declared, “We are not bound to adhere to the doctrines of the Signers of the Declaration of Independence. We are as free as they were to make or unmake governments.” Trump should have that exact same mentality: we are not bound to adhere to the doctrines of the founders of the Administrative State. We are as free as they were to unmake governments and by God, we must do it: we must break the shackles of the bureaucratic statism holding us down — the future happiness and freedom of generations yet to come depend on it.

Break the State. Drain the Swamp. Restore the Republic.

New York is set to shutter 12 migrant shelters before the end of the year, marking a significant shift in its response to the city’s ongoing migrant crisis. The closures, announced just weeks before President-elect Donald Trump takes office for a second term, highlight the strain on resources and the political tensions surrounding immigration policies.

As Mike Shedlock of MishTalk.com noted in June, 20% of NYC hotels have become migrant shelters, driving up the cost of hotel rooms elsewhere for paying customers.

Two hotel-based shelters, the Hotel Merit in Manhattan and the Quality Inn JFK in Queens, have already been closed. An additional 10 facilities across the state – including in Albany, Dutchess, Erie, Orange, and Westchester counties – will cease operations by December 31, according to New York City Mayor Eric Adams’ office. The sprawling Randall’s Island shelter, which was designed to accommodate up to 3,000 migrants, is slated to close by February 2025, shortly after Trump’s inauguration.

A Crisis of Scale and Cost

Since the spring of 2022, more than 223,000 migrants and asylum seekers have arrived in New York City – roughly half the population of Albany. The city has struggled to house and support this influx, operating 210 city-run shelter sites across the five boroughs. Currently, 58,000 migrants remain in taxpayer-funded shelters, costing the city an estimated $352 per migrant per night. Only $130 of that amount goes directly to housing costs, with the rest allocated to social services, food, and cleaning.

The NYPD has spent $21 million on public safety and security related to the migrants.

The eye-popping figures, listed on the city’s online asylum-seeker funding tracker, shows the city overall spent $4.88 billion combined through fiscal years 2023 and ‘24. Based on the rate of spending, the city likely exceeded more than $112 million since the start of the new fiscal year beginning July 1, or will soon, cracking $5 billion.

Mayor Eric Adams’ administration has even projected the cost could double, hitting $10 billion over the three year period ending June 30, 2025. -NY Post

Without policy changes, the crisis is projected to cost New York taxpayers $12 billion over the next three fiscal years, according to city estimates. Mayor Adams praised efforts to consolidate shelter operations and reduce costs, noting a 19-week decline in the migrant census.

“Over the past two years, our teams have accomplished the Herculean task of providing compassionate care for a population twice the size of Albany and saving taxpayers billions of dollars,” Adams said. “The new policies we’re implementing today will build on our successes, save taxpayers millions, and help even more migrants take their next steps towards fulfilling their American Dream.”

Meanwhile, an audit released in August found that NYC overpaid upstate hotels by millions of dollars for sheltering illegal immigrants.

Of the questionable payments, $2.5 million were for unauthorized security, medical, and social services, $1.7 million for vacant rooms, and $230,000 for inflated food bills, according to the audit.

In another example, a Newburgh hotel billed a total of $57,000 for hundreds of unoccupied rooms in early May, for which DocGo got an additional $40,000 in commissions.

Tensions Over Shelter Evictions

Despite efforts to ease the burden on the system, the city’s shelter eviction policies have sparked controversy. Families issued a second 60-day eviction notice are now allowed to stay in their assigned shelters if they need more time, a move Adams touted as cost-saving and beneficial for children’s schooling continuity.

However, adult migrants face stricter rules, with a policy permanently evicting them from city shelters after 30 days. The policy has drawn criticism from activist groups, including Jews For Racial & Economic Justice, which staged a protest at City Hall during a hearing on the issue.

“Immigrants are welcome here – Trumpian policy is not!” protesters chanted, accusing the city of violating its decades-old right-to-shelter rule, originally established to address homelessness. Activists called the eviction policy “cruel and destabilizing” before being removed from the chamber.

A Changing National Landscape

While the flow of migrants into New York has slowed, with fewer arrivals and a reported 101,790 encounters at the U.S.-Mexico border in September—the lowest since February 2021—concerns persist about potential surges before Trump’s border policies take effect. A caravan of 1,500 migrants in southern Mexico, near the Guatemala border, is reportedly attempting to cross before Trump’s inauguration.

Trump has pledged to implement strict immigration measures, including sealing the southern border, carrying out a large-scale deportation operation, and ending Biden administration parole programs and the CBP One app. South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem has been appointed as secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, with former ICE Director Tom Homan named “border czar.”

As New York City consolidates its migrant operations, Adams has a tough road ahead. The closures signal a pivot in the city’s approach but also underscore the broader national debate on immigration policy.

In the continuation of well-established trend observed across Western democracies, yet another populist, nationalist, right-wing candidate has posted an election result that far exceeded what polls indicated he was capable of. The latest upset took place in Romania on Sunday, and it has positioned a NATO critic and Ukraine war skeptic to potentially take over the country’s presidency.  

With 99% of ballots tallied, populist Calin Georgescu led all 13 candidates with 23% of votes, edging the Save Romania Union Party’s Elena Lasconi and Prime Minister and Social Democratic Party member Marcel Ciolacu — who had 19.17% and 19.16%, respectively. Another right-winger — the Alliance for the Unity of Romanians’ George Simion — placed fourth with 13.87%. That sets the NATO- and EU-member country up for a second-round vote on Dec. 8 against either Lasconi or Ciolacu; Simion has already thrown his support behind Georgescu.  

“The 35-years-long economic uncertainty imposed on the Romanian people became uncertainty for the political parties today,” said Georgescu, who took the poll-outperformance phenomenon to a whole new level: An October poll showed him with only 0.4% support, and a November survey had him racking up just 5.4%. 

The outcome will be highly unwelcome to the Western establishment: Georgescu pledged to restore Romanian sovereignty and put an end to what he characterizes as subservience to NATO and the EU. He has taken a hard line against the presence of NATO’s missile defense system that’s based in Deveselu, southern Romania, calling it a “shame of diplomacy” that is more confrontational than peace-promoting. 

He has also pushed for Romania to pursue a non-interventionist policy in the Ukraine war, and said US arms-makers were manipulating the conflict. Since Russia’s invasion, Romania has facilitated Ukrainian grain exports and furnished military assistance including the donation of a Patriot missile battery.  

If EU bureaucrats thought Viktor Orbán was a problem for them and their funding for the proxy war in Ukraine, wait until they meet Romania’s future president, Călin Georgescu.

Zelensky’s worshippers hate this man!
pic.twitter.com/KzvGss1RSn

— Gabe (@GabeZZOZZ) November 25, 2024

As in the US election, a large portion of the Romanian electorate may have been fed up with resources dedicated to foreign refugees and foreign wars rather than the country’s own citizens. According to the X account GeoInsider, “In one widely shared clip, Georgescu highlight[ed]…striking disparities: Romania pays a monthly allowance of 3,700 lei to the children of Ukrainian refugees, compared to just 248 lei for Romanian children.” 

“For the unjust, for the humiliated, for those who feel they do not matter and actually matter the most … the vote is a prayer for the nation,” the 62-year-old Georgescu said via Facebook after casting his vote. Georgescu has a doctorate in soil science and previously held various roles in the country’s environmental ministry, and represented Romania as a member of the UN’s Environmental Program. In addition to his broad theme of restoring Romanian sovereignty, he also ran on countering price inflation, addressing Romania’s worst-in-EU poverty rate, supporting farmers and decreasing the country’s reliance on imports. 

Georgescu’s result was all the more surprising given he didn’t run as a member of any political party, and used social media platform TikTok as the principal mechanism of his campaign. Racking up 1.6 million likes, his account showed him going to church, running, practicing judo, and being interviewed by podcasters. TikTok’s centrality to his highly unorthodox campaign prompted some howling by people who didn’t like the outcome: 

What happened today in Romania must be a wake-up call for the entire West that TikTok needs to be banned as soon as possible! I’ve been saying this for over five years: TikTok is a tool of the China-Russia coalition to stage coups in any Western country!

— Alin Vlad (@AlinStVlad) November 24, 2024

…and, as is the case whenever a right-wing nationalist wins these days, people are blaming RUSSIA, RUSSIA, RUSSIA! 

Panic in Romania today as a pro-russian candidate that no one’s ever heard of, with no visible means of funding wins first-round presidential elections after only registering on October 1st.

Romanians and Romanian media are considering it a Russian attack. https://t.co/9G5XZHxhC8 pic.twitter.com/MfjtioNOIq

— Jay in Kyiv (@JayinKyiv) November 25, 2024

Gg Romania… you have been conquered by Russia without even being in an open war with them… The Russian TikTok trolls have managed to influence the votes of almost 23% of the population…

This is why education matters. This is why being informed from the correct sources… pic.twitter.com/hepO2mZHVr

— Larisa Kralik ⭕️ Artoons-Design (@ArtoonsDesign) November 25, 2024

So what I’m seeing is Russia backed a Hitler in the Romanian elections and he came in first place in the first round.

— A. Bartaway🇺🇦❤️✊✌️ (@Bartaway) November 25, 2024

After this extreme pro-russian comes from nowhere tonight to win the first-round Romanian Presidential election, a literal Nazi that no one has ever heard of, a quote from a friend of mine in Romania, who is as shocked as the rest of the country.

It looks like russians have… pic.twitter.com/LwI1eJqu2f

— Jay in Kyiv (@JayinKyiv) November 24, 2024

Authored by Kyle Anzalone via AntiWar.com,

According to the New York Times, US and European officials have discussed a range of options they believe will deter Russia from taking more Ukrainian territory, including providing Kiev with nuclear weapons. The outlet reports that Western officials believe the Kremlin will not significantly escalate the war before Donald Trump is sworn in as President in January.

Following the election of Trump earlier this month, the US and its NATO allies began taking steps to rush weapons to Ukraine and give Kiev the ability to strike targets inside Russian territory with long-range weapons.

American officials who were briefed on the intelligence community’s assessments told the Times that weapons will not alter the challenging situation that Kiev is currently facing. “US spy agencies have assessed that speeding up the provisions of weapons, ammunition and matériel for Ukraine will do little to change the course of the war in the short term,” the Times reports.

Desperate to bolster Ukraine’s standing in the war before the transition of power on January 20, the Biden administration is looking at a range of serious escalations. “US and European officials are discussing deterrence as a possible security guarantee for Ukraine, such as stockpiling a conventional arsenal sufficient to strike a punishing blow if Russia violates a cease-fire.”

The article continues, “Several officials even suggested that Mr. Biden could return nuclear weapons to Ukraine that were taken from it after the fall of the Soviet Union.”

According to some officials who spoke with the Times, the administration believes that Russian President Vladimir Putin won’t significantly escalate the war until Trump returns to the Oval Office.

“But the escalation risk of allowing Ukraine to strike Russia with US-supplied weaponry has diminished with the election of Mr. Trump,” the report says, adding, “Biden administration officials believe, calculating that Putin of Russia knows he has to wait only two months for the new administration.”

That assessment is based on the belief that Trump and his incoming Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, will take a more favorable stance on Russia. However, Trump proved to be a Russia-hawk during his first administration by ramping up sanctions on Moscow, providing lethal arms to Ukraine, and expelling a large number of Russian diplomats from the US.

In September, Putin said he preferred Vice President Kamala Harris to win the White House. “Trump has imposed as many sanctions on Russia as any president has ever imposed before, and if Harris is doing well, perhaps she will refrain from such actions,” he explained.

US officials actually discussed a nuclear option, via the NY Times report:

Much of the American political class has cast Trump and Gabbard as agents of Russia. However, extensive investigations into Trump’s ties to the Kremlin have come up empty. Additionally, the Times reported last week that there was no evidence Gabbard was in any way an asset of Putin.