Please allow me to alert all my Salut! readers to my pages at Substack, which I think can be described as a posh blogging platform.
This item is based on my latest post there, dealing with the disturbing developments emerging at the start of what once seemed unthinkable, a second presidential term for Donald Trump.
My pages at Substack are called Salut! Life. Having published dozens of items on a free-to-view basis, I have now decided to limit full access to those readers kind enough to pay to subscribe. Some have already done so and I am hugely grateful to them. Many, many more are free subscribers and will continue to be offered occasional postings that are not covered by the paywall.
But I write for a living, as I have done since 1967, and need to find a way of compensating for a dramatic drop in freelance opportunities. Budgetary constraints have made a difficult market tougher still. One commissioning editor, for whom I wrote regularly until a few months ago, says he is a "huge fan" of my work but is no longer able to turn to me as he often as he could.
That's it in a nutshell. The step I have taken is a bold one and I may well fall flat on my face. Substack is jam-packed with star writers with vastly bigger followings than I can ever expect to attract. Let us see whether I can make a modest mark there, too.
The subscription rates I have suggested are deliberately pitched how, £4 a month or £45 for a year. I will review my Substack activity in the coming months.
When the convicted felon and alleged inciter to insurrection took office, we knew it was going to be grim. Did we appreciate just how grim? Perhaps not.
So far, even before the toe-curling appeasement of a ruthless, power-crazed dictator for whom a murderous invasion of a neighbouring country is just a special military operation, we had seen plenty to make us shudder.
The cancellation of humanitarian US overseas aid will cause countless deaths, untold misery and the proliferation of diseases that may well find the means to travel westwards. The suppression of press freedom, withdrawing White House access from Associated Press because its internationally respected stylebook insists the Gulf of Mexico is just that, the Gulf of Mexico not America, threatens press freedom as well as victimising one of the world's oldest and noblest of news services.
He dispatched his sinister vice president JD Vance to Munich to misrepresent European laws affecting liberty of expression and offer succour to the hideous far right movements now enjoying or confidently expecting electoral success across the continent (including the UK).
Pausing for breath from waging his economically perilous trade war, he talked of making Canada the 51st state and seizing Greenland, a land grab he now says will occur "one way or the other". With Trump's classic approach to truth, he claims residents of the autonomous Danish territory "want to be with us", an interesting way of interpreting a poll showing 85 per cent desire no such thing.
My latest Substack post looks at the grotesque scenes Trump and Vance engineered in the Oval Office last Friday, humiliating the Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky and finding common ground with Putin, a warmonger who crushes dissent, takes foreigners as hostages with bogus spying allegations, sends agents to commit murder on British streets and lies as effortlessly as, er, his American counterpart. The Trump-Putin bromance, frankly, is obscene.
Extract:
Why wouldn’t a man like Trump feel like giving a man like Putin a big Russian bear hug? In so far as he capable of normal human emotion, Putin will be feeling the bromance, too, after Trump ensured the US voted with Russia - and, for heaven’s sake, North Korea and Belarus - against the UN resolution that included support for Ukraine’s territorial integrity and condemnation of a savage, even Hitlerian aggression against a peaceful sovereign state Putin believes has no right to exist.
Little wonder the Russian president praised Trump's administration for its "pragmatism" and "realistic view of things", noting that initial contact with US representatives has inspired "a certain sense of hope”. No wonder at all that the Kremlin was so chuffed to hear the US, in its transparent attempt to force Zelensky to the table to negotiate his surrender, has halted arms supplies to Ukraine.
Vance, who once called Trump an idiot and reprehensible, privately drawing comparison with Hitler, is also important in the development of such warmth between the two presidents. After Russia’s murderous invasion three years ago, he was happy to declare: "I gotta be honest with you, I don't really care what happens to Ukraine one way or another."
And now the Trump-Vance strategy amounts, to all intent and purposes, not just to Vance-like indifference but to choosing sides.
** Read the full article at Substack. All that remains to be saId for now is that I hope to meet some of my Salut! readers there.
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