Trump is heading for a jail cell. Maybe

Judge Merchan wants 42 days to decide what sentence to give Donald Trump, convicted of 34 charges of business fraud. In the intervening time he will call for a full report on Trump's mental state. But 42 days to make up his mind? I wonder if Judge Merchan realises that July 11 when Trump's sentence is to be announced, is just a few days before the Republican national convention is due to meet in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, to crown Trump as the nominee for the White Office. Will he dare sentence Trump to a prison sentence at such a crucial time for the Republican party and for Trump? As a judge he would argue that his duties are not supposed to take into account anything other than the judicial process. But if he sends Trump to prison, it will be the most sensational judgement in the history of American justice. That'S probably why the judge has delayed his decsion for 42 days because he needs time to contemplate his historic contribution to the Trump story. He may well decide that after being convicted of all 34 charges, Trump should be taught a lesson with a year or 18 months in prison. Then what the hell is going to happen?

Russian military targets inside Russia should be fair game

For more than two years the US has held back on giving permission to Ukraine to use any of its American-supplied longer-range weapons to hit targets inside Russia. Joe Biden said from the beginning that while he was happy to send billions of dollars of arms to Kyiv he didn't want to escalate the war and provoke Moscow into using unconventional weapons to strike at Ukraine, ie nuclear or chemical systems. This has been Biden's greatest fear, that Putin might resort to nukes if Russia itself came under attack. But the fact is Ukraine is already hitting bases in Russia, using long-range drones and missiles, although admittedly domestically-produced weapons and not ones sent by the Pentagon. Ukraine has also used the US ATACMS rocket system to hit Russian targets in Moscow-annexed Crimea. So back in Moscow I imagine Putin is thinking the war has alredy escalated. Would it be such a major step if Washington declared that from now on Russia territory (military targets only) is fair game. After all, in war, if one side launches bombs and missiles, the other side should be entitled to do the same. Keeping the counter-offensive attacks strictly within the boundaries of Ukraine makes little sense and gives a huge advantage to Moscow. If Ukraine started really hammering targets inside Russia with longer-range missiles and rockets supplied by the US, that just might force Putin to seriously consider bargaining for peace. I suspect that at some point this year, Biden will change his mind and will give carte blanche to Kyiv to do what they want and what they consider necessary to stop the Russian rockets and missiles from flying over the border into Ukrainian cities. And that would mean striking at every airbase and missile-launching site across the border. The UK and other European countries have already authorised Kyiv to use their longer-range weapons to hit Russian targets over the border and it would be a huge boost to Zelensky if the Us did the same.

The Trump jury is out

The seven men and five women on the Trump jury have an historic time ahead of them. Whatever they decide it will be historic, although a guilty fnding would obviously be more dramatically historic than an acquittal. This is going to weigh on their minds. Even though the judge will expect them to come to their decision based on the evidence alone, it wll be almost impossible. The defendant is Donald Trump for heaven's sake, you can't get a bigger elephant in the room than The Donald. So each member of the jury panel will not only be thinking about the evidence but the reality of deciding whether the former president and now Republican nominee for the presidency can actually be found guilty. There will be some on the jury, probably the foreman and others with strong views who will try their best to persuade the rest that they shouldn't think of the defendant as Trump but merely as the defendant. Again, that will be impossible. However, if the evidence is as good as the prosecution hopes it is, then they will have little choice but to convict Trump, possibly on all 34 charges. But Trump's lawyers have painted the prosecution's main witness, Michael Cohen, as a serial liar, and that description may be enough to cause doubt in the jury's mind. Doubt means an acquittal. And jury members worried about being known for ever for finding the former president guilty might be privately relieved.

Will Trump pick Nikki Haley for vice president?

Donald Trump said he would not be asking Nikki Haley to be his vice presidential running mate. But I predict he will think again. She may not want it of course but if Trump asks her formally I can't see her turning it down. Haley has a large support base and if she takes on the role of running-mate, there will be plenty of voters who might think it's a dream ticket. None of the other potential candidates for the job match her qualities. But Trump is enjoying keeping his thoughts to himself and probably won't announce his decision for another month or so. But Haley has taken the first step towards being welcomed back into the Trump fold with her announcement that she will vote for him. Having a woman as his running-mate will also put Joe Biden and Kamala Harris on the spot. Haley I suspect would outshine Harris on almost any subject. But Trump being Trump he will probably not forgive Haley for daring to stand against him for the Republican party nomination. So he is more likely to give her some less prominent role. The way things are heading, Trump is going to win in November whether he has Haley at his side or not.

Israel facing more criticism over airstrikes

Israel gets good intelligence that two leaders of Hamas are in a certain area in the town of Rafah in southern Gaza and they launch an instant airstrike. This has happened many times before in the eight-month war in Gaza. The intelligence was right. Two Hamas commanders were killed. But they were hiding in a Palestinian refugee camp. So Israel also killed about 45 civilians, many of them it seems burnt to death when their tented camps caught fire. War is never precise, it's never so minutely targeted that only the bad guys get killed. Yet it seems extraordinary when the Israel Defence Forces (IDF)have come under such scrutiny around the world that they should launch such a strike from the air when the chances of civilian casualties must have been unacceptably high. Israel is losing the public relations and propaganda battle. Could the two identified Hamas commanders not have been taken out by an Israeli special forces unit or was that deemed by IDF chiefs to be too risky? Bombing from the air onto a refugee camp was never going to be free of risk for civilians. Under the international rules of war, civilians must not be targeted and every effort must be made to avoid killing or injuring innocent people. The IDF is carrying out an investigation to see what went wrong. But it's petty clear what happened. They had a short period when the intelligence was ripe for action and the IDF launched an attack before the Hamas indivduals could escape. It was a gamble that went fatally wrong. Not for the first time in this war.

Could Trump be spending his last weekend as a free man?

Will Donald Trump be sitting in a jail cell by the end of the week? It would seem to be a very remote possibility. But what if he is convicted of the 34 business fraud charges against him AND the judge rules he has continued to be in contempt of court for violating the gagging order on public comments attacking him (the judge) and members of the prosecution. Trump hasn't really stopped attacking the whole judicial system whenever he gets a chance even after being fined twice; and if there is one thing which judges hate more than anything it's a defendant who ignores and disrespects the court and all its works. So, even if the judge in this case, Juan Merchan, considers a large fine to be the most appropriate sentence for fraud convictions, might he contemplate a tougher sentence if he throws in a contempt of court penalty as well? Could that lead to a prison cell for the former president? Again, it's unlikely. But judges are very individual human beings and if Judge Merchan were to feel a spot of jail time might do Trump a lot of good to remind him that he is not above the law, then he just might. I suspect that Trump himself is thinking these sort of thoughts right now as he tries to celebrate the holiday weekend in memory of veterans. He will no doubt come to the conclusion that Judge Merchan wouldn't dare. But this is the trial of the century so far and the judge will want to seize his moment to ensure that Trump is not given special treatment of any kind just because he spent four years as the boss in the White House. We could be less than a week away from knowing the answer.

Joe Biden and Bibi Netanyahu's relationship breakdown

After the atrocities committed by Hamas in southern Israel on October 7, President Biden offered his total and unflinching support for retribution against the terrorist-designated rulers of the Gaza Strip. Benjamin “Bibi” Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, vowed to annihilate every member of Hamas and to gain the release of the 252 Israeli and foreign hostages abducted and taken into Gaza. Biden agreed that these objectives were right and proper. So, too, did the UK government and other like-minded nations, appalled by the images and reports of slaughter, rape and brutality by the Hamas interlopers. Nearly eight months later, that policy of unflinching support for Israel has gone through several stages of doubt, alarm, dismay and anger. What went so badly wrong? Did the Biden administration underestimate or misinterpret what Netanyahu and the extreme right-wing members of his cabinet had in mind? As a faithful and longstanding ally to Israel, did Biden unrealistically trust Netanyahu to perform what many Middle East specialists saw as an impossible mission: to remove every trace of Hamas in Gaza by military force without inflicting suffering on the Palestinian people. In other words, not a war as such but a clinical dismantling of the Hamas leadership and organisational structure in Gaza. The Pentagon sent a high-ranking urban warfare veteran to spell out how he thought it could be done and warned of the risks of high civilian casualties. Israel took all the advice from its allies but what followed over the following months looked to the outside world neither clinical nor precision-guided. The manner in which the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) bombed and shelled their way into the multitude of Hamas hideouts, all located within or beneath the densely populated civilian population began very rapidly to undermine the Washington/Tel Aviv relationship, upon which the survival of Israel has depended for decades. Moreover, the back-and-forth by Biden’s top national security officials, urging Netanyahu to start planning for a post-war Gaza and to accept the reality that Hamas in some form would probably survive met with stubborn rejection. “American officials and others are having the same difficulty that [Benny] Gantz and [Yoav] Gallant [part of the three-man war cabinet along with Netanyahu] are having which is understanding what Bibi’s strategic endgame is,” said a veteran US defence source with long experience of Middle East politics. “Ultimately, Biden and Bibi are operating on very different political calculations. Bibi’s is political survival after his disastrous management of Israeli security was revealed by 10/7 [the October 7 Hamas assault on Israel] and Biden is trying to navigate US election-year politics and a party deeply divided over support for Israel,” the source said. “When one looks back over the history of US-Israel relations during Middle East wars it is not surprising that they would hit a bumpy patch but that it has taken so long to emerge,” the US source said. Conscious of his own vulnerability as Israel’s leader, Netanyahu has told his recent Washington visitors that he had no other option but to pursue the top military leadership of Hamas, and to destroy the remaining four out of an original 24 combat battalions still operating in Gaza. The IDF have killed around 14,000 Hamas fighters, according to Israeli figures. This would mean that of the 35,000 Palestinian deaths reported by the Hamas-run health ministry in Gaza but disputed by Tel Aviv, since the war began, 40 per cent were members of the terror group. Netanyahu has been trying to get this message across, but the reality is that as the Palestinian civilian casualty figures rose exponentially and television broadcasters highlighted the terrible scenes of women and children injured and dying in Gaza, the impact was generating increasing alarm in Washington. Pro-Palestinian protests, denouncing America’s continuing arming of Israel, proliferated in the US, adding to Biden’s discomfort in election year. The US president started issuing red lines to Netanyahu. Israel, he said, must not do to the city of Rafah, in southern Gaza, what it had done to Gaza City and to Khan Younis, also in the south, where destruction and civilian deaths – known in the military as “collateral damage”- had been judged in Washington to be wildly disproportionate. Even though the principal Hamas leaders in Gaza – Yahya Sinwar and Mohamed Deif - were at one point thought to be in bunkers beneath Rafah, Biden told Netanyahu an all-out attack on the city would be unacceptable and would have consequences for future arms shipments to Israel. This warning was duly followed up with a suspended delivery of 1,800 of American 2,000lb air-launched bombs and 1,700 500lb bombs which had caused such devastation in northern and central Gaza, and in Khan Younis. “We are especially focused on the end-use of the 2,000lb bombs and the impact they could have in dense urban settings as we have seen in other parts of Gaza,” said Major-General Pat Ryder, Pentagon press spokesman. “We have not made a final determination on how to proceed with this shipment,” he said. Netanyahu did take due notice when the Pentagon delivery of heavy bombs was halted, on Biden’s instructions. Rafah has come under attack but so far not on the scale and shock-and-awe gravity of strikes in the earlier stages of the war elsewhere in Gaza; and the vast majority of the 1.2 million Palestinian refugees in the city have moved out to a supposedly safer area to escape the Israeli airstrikes, following leaflet warnings and telephone calls made by the IDF. While Washington may have breathed a sigh of relief, there has been rising irritation about Netanyahu’s refusal to think beyond the bombs, to start planning for a meaningful political future for Gaza, in which the Palestinians would have independent control over their own destiny. The so-called two-state solution -Israel for the Jewish people and Palestine for the Palestinian people – first negotiated as part of the Oslo Accords in the 1990s (and subsequently aborted) has been persistently promoted by the Biden administration. However, the likelihood of that concept emerging from the current war has become progressively unrealisable because of Netanyahu’s total opposition. It is a major reason why Biden and his national security team have become so frustrated by the Israeli leader’s actions and his perceived obstructive approach to anything that looks and sounds like giving Palestinians their independence and sovereignty. Netanyahu wants not just the elimination of Hamas. He wants any future Gaza to be demilitarised so that no attack of any kind can ever again be aunched against Israel from the territory. And that means, in his view, a strong Israeli presence on the Gaza-Egypt border, maintaining security control over all land west of Jordan, including the occupied West Bank and Gaza territories. So, for months, relations between Washington and Tel Aviv have been deteriorating. But they are not beyond repair. When the British chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court announced that arrest warrants would be applied for Netanyahu and for Yoav Gallant, Israel’s defence minister, as well as for the three top Hamas leaders, accusing them jointly of war crimes and crimes against humanity, Biden denounced the decision as “outrageous”. The unequivocal condemnation by Biden must have been a good moment for Netanyahu. But it won’t have removed the underlying tension and strain that continue to put the political, diplomatic and personal relations between Washington and Tel Aviv in jeopardy.