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@PalmerReport

Feb 22

Biden is enacting partial sanctions against Russia right now, and he’ll probably end up having to do full sanctions later. But Biden has to do this in strategic, not frenzied, fashion. It’s far more nuanced than most of the hysterical foot stompers on Twitter think.

Biden has begun a partial, limited invasion today. We still don’t know if Putin has the ability and/or stones for a risky full invasion. But if Biden does full sanctions now, it means Putin is being punished as if he had fully invaded – giving him no reason NOT to fully invade.

Biden is wisely going with partial U.S. sanctions for now, which – combined with full European sanctions – hits Putin very hard but leaves room for more. If there is any scenario where Putin would compelled to back down, it’s consequences with the threat of further consequences.

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@PalmerReport

Feb 21

Putin just keeps digging himself a deeper hole. His murder of Magnitsky led to sanctions that cost his oligarchs money. So he invaded Crimea to steal its resources. But that led to more sanctions. So he installed Trump, but that backfired. Now Putin is eyeing mainland Ukraine.

Putin's arrogance with Magnitsky cost his oligarchs billions, and ever since then he's been making increasingly high risk moves to try to make up for it. But his each new move has only created more of a mess for him.

Putin has spent the past eight years not invading the rest of Ukraine, which tells you that he's not confident he can pull it off, and that he's afraid it'll cost him everything if it doesn't work. To finally try it now, he'd have to be desperate.

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Palmer Report

@PalmerReport

Feb 21

Whatever Putin is doing, it's not just some scheme to distract us from Trump's worsening legal troubles. Putin wouldn't go to all of this, with all the risks involved, just to run a bit of PR for Trump. Besides, Putin gave up on the failed Trump experiment awhile ago.

In fact you could argue that BECAUSE Trump failed to ease Russian sanctions and was too much of a disaster to get reelected, Putin has had to move on to his next attempt at getting a leg up on the West, which is whatever Ukraine game he's playing right now.

While the Trump debacle did help Putin in terms of general discord in the U.S. (and the absence of the U.S. on the world stage) for four years, Trump's #1 job was to ease existing U.S. sanctions against Russia. But Trump, the bumbler, couldn't even get his GOP majority to do it.

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Palmer Report

@PalmerReport

Feb 19

Many of you are finally figuring out that Trump's future consists of bankruptcy and prison, not some comeback. If you look back, you see he's been on this path for a year now. Yet the media fed you fictional "Trump 2024" hype the entire time. You should be outraged at the media.

Every major media outlet and pundit – left, right, or center – knew this was where things were heading with Trump. It’s been clear since well BEFORE HE LOST, that if he did lose, New York would do this to him. There was no other path Trump could end up on.

Yet because the media knew that it might take some time to get to this point, and that you’d grow impatient hearing every day about how we were gradually moving to this point, the media instead made up a more ratings-friendly fictional version of the story in the meantime.

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Palmer Report

@PalmerReport

Feb 17

Trump’s lawyers are complaining in court today that New York is using its civil probe of the Trump Organization to nail down its related criminal case against Trump and put him in prison. New York prosecutors aren’t denying the strategy, they’re just explaining why it’s legal.

Yet with some notable exceptions, the media and pundits are still mostly covering the civil probe as if it exists in a vacuum and Trump is only facing financial penalties. Why? Once the media admits Trump is on a clear path to prison, it can’t milk “Trump 2024” for ratings.

“Trump 2024” was never going to be a narrative in 2024. But the media really wants to spend the next year chasing ratings by pretending Trump 2024 is going to be a thing. Hard to get people to stay tuned in for that narrative though if they figure out Trump will be in prison.

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Palmer Report

@PalmerReport

Feb 16

Even if Rudy Giuliani is just using the threat of cooperation with the 1/6 committee to get Trump to pay his legal bills, it's still a minor victory for the committee, bad news for Trump, and probably self defeating for Rudy.

Just to get the committee to say that Rudy is cooperating, he must have had to give them key evidence against Trump already. So now they get to use that evidence, whether Rudy flakes from here or not.

This would help the committee, and damage Trump, for obvious reasons.

It would also ensure Rudy is fairly quickly indicted for contempt, which would only make his legal bills even worse.

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