Despicable Donnie Goes to Poland

Less than three months after the election of a rightwing government with an absolute majority, young and old protesters gather roaring in the streets. The EU commission, unexpectedly prompt, has opened an inquiry into whether Poland has broken the union’s “democracy rules”.

Lech Wałęsa, ex-president and leader of the 1980 Solidarity revolution, says that the new government is making Poland ridiculous.

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Law and Justice (PiS by acronym) has in a few short weeks packed the Constitutional Court, politicised the appointment of prosecutors, abolished court consent for state access to private internet accounts and brought public broadcasting under direct government control.

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The real power is held by Jarosław Kaczyński, leader of PiS, who has deliberately refused any public office. President Andrzej Duda and Beata Szydło, the prime minister, take their orders from him.

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Socialist and fringe parties have almost vanished: Kaczyński’s regime faces a young, outraged and increasingly coherent “liberal” front determined to resist and reverse all that PiS has done. The question is whether this confrontation can be managed peacefully.

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The brief PiS coalition government eight years ago spawned paranoid conspiracy theories against its critics, sometimes in racialist terms. (I remember going to a so-called “international conference on press freedom” in Warsaw: liberal and leftwing journalists were excluded, while the invited hacks made dotty speeches about patriotic duty and media subversion by foreign bribery.)

  Guardian

Sounds like a perfect place for Donald Trump.

Trump is due to arrive in Poland on Wednesday evening and deliver a major speech in Warsaw on Thursday afternoon. He will also attend a gathering of central European, Baltic and Balkan leaders, before heading to the G20 summit in Hamburg.

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Trump is likely to endorse Poland’s continuing commitment to spending 2% of GDP on defence and – more controversially – its rejection of Muslim immigration.

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[T]he interior minister, Mariusz Błaszczak, has blamed terrorism in western Europe on a drift away from Christianity across the continent.

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Poland’s ruling rightwing Law and Justice party (PiS) has struggled to contain its excitement since the visit was announced last month. The defence minister, Antoni Macierewicz, said it showed “how much Poland’s place in geopolitics and world politics has changed”.

  The Guardian

No, it doesn't. It shows that Trump has only so many places he can go and be welcomed.

Gianni Pitella, leader of the socialist bloc in the European parliament, said: “After a few months of his presidency, Trump has already jeopardised the Paris agreement on the climate change, endangered the EU-US and Nato relationships, and now he risks blowing up the already very delicate situation in Poland and eastern Europe.”

To the horror of the Polish government’s domestic opponents, Trump’s speech will be delivered in front of the monument to the 1944 Warsaw Uprising against Nazi occupation, a doomed enterprise that resulted in the death of approximately 200,000 Poles.

And the money quote...

According to Polish press reports, the government secured Trump’s attendance by promising a rapturous welcome from the Polish public.

That's our Donnie.

In a public Facebook event, Jerzy Wilk, MP for the northern city of Elbląg, invited his constituents for a “Great Patriotic Picnic, the first speech in Europe of the president of the United States … a fully paid bus will take you to the location”.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.