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Jess Frampton

In the traffic jam of elections that is 2024 – there are over 50 this year worldwide – the US is still the BelAZ 75710 mega hauler of elections, the biggest rig that carries more payload than any other on the political road. So when it tips over, it’s impossible to ignore. Everything matters about the US 2024 election, and we have to stay within the nonpartisan lines to avoid veering off-road.

So after Donald Trump gave a fiery speech in Ohio last weekend about an impending “bloodbath” if he’s not elected, it’s worth sorting through the carnage of coverage to see what he meant. “Now, if I don’t get elected, it’s going to be a bloodbath for the whole…” he said. “That’s going to be the least of it, it’s going to be a bloodbath for the country. That’ll be the least of it.”

Did he mean another civil war, as some thought? Or, more plausibly and as his campaign has claimed, did he say it in the context of the auto industry and his concerns about high tariffs from China and Mexico?

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Annie Gugliotta
For the past 17 years, Perrin Beatty has been the voice of business in Canada. And that means he cares about one key thing: the United States. After all, Beatty has long understood that for Canadian business, the biggest customer, opportunity, market, threat — you name it — has always been the United States. And Canada has been the biggest or second biggest market for the US. Beatty, who served as defense minister under Prime Minister Brian Mulroney in the late 1980s, gave me his view of what to watch for in this volatile election year and why Canada’s three F’s matter more than people think.
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President Joe Biden looks up as he mentions his mother during addressing the Irish Parliament at Leinster House, in Dublin, Ireland, April 13, 2023.

REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque

“Those clouds are not real,” the woman standing next me at the car pickup spot said, pointing to the overcast skies above San Diego.

I had just arrived here to speak to a group of business leaders about Eurasia Group’s Top Risk report and the political landscape ahead in a year of polarizing elections.

“Sorry?”

“It’s usually beautiful and sunny here, but now with the cloud seeding, all we get is this,” she explained, adopting that apologetic tone proud locals use when their home isn’t exhibiting its best for a visitor. She interrupted her weather flow to give me some other tips about local restaurants — “check out Roberto’s taco stand” — and hiking in the area, before returning to the weather.

“Yeah, you know all those floods we had this past month?” she asked rhetorically. “They’re from these clouds the climate folks created with their cloud seeding because they want to block out the sun to cool the Earth down.”

And then she added the kicker: “And it’s poison, you know.”

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Jess Frampton

In an exclusive investigation into online disinformation surrounding online reaction to Alexei Navalny's death, GZERO asks whether it is possible to track the birth of a bot army. Was Navalny's tragic death accompanied by a massive online propaganda campaign? We investigated, with the help of a company called Cyabra.

Alexei Navalny knew he was a dead man the moment he returned to Moscow in January 2021. Vladimir Putin had already tried to kill him with the nerve agent Novichok, and he was sent to Germany for treatment. The poison is one of Putin’s signatures, like pushing opponents out of windows or shooting them in the street. Navalny knew Putin would try again.

Still, he came home.

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Annie Gugliotta

A new poll on AI raises one of the most critical questions of 2024: Do people want to regulate AI, and if so, who should do it?

For all the wars, elections, and crises going on, the most profound long-term transition going on right now is the light-speed development of AI and its voracious news capabilities. Nothing says a new technology has arrived more than when Open AI CEO Sam Altman claimed he needs to fabricate more semiconductor chips so urgently that … he requires $7 trillion.

Seven. Trillion. Dollars. A moment of perspective, please.

$7 trillion is more than three times the entire GDP of Canada and more than twice the GDP of France or the UK. So … it may be pocket change to the Silicon Valley technocrat class, but it’s a pretty big number to the rest of us.

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U.S. media personality Tucker Carlson speaks about his interview with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Reuters

It’s a busy Thursday as we watch the Trump and the Supremes legal dance that could determine whether the former US president is eligible to run in November’s election. The Supreme Court hearing comes from the Colorado case, which argues that Donald Trump’s alleged involvement in the Jan. 6, 2021, “insurrection” legally disqualifies him from running for President, something his team obviously opposes.

Don’t bet on Trump being disqualified by the conservative-dominated court, but in the long-shot scenario that he is – we won’t know a decision until likely just before Super Tuesday, March 5 – well, then, rewrite the playbook as to what happens next. “American Carnage 2” perhaps?

But first, it’s Super Bowl weekend, and while the tailgate conspiracy party over Taylor Swift’s presidential influence steams ever onward, the biggest political football continues to be support for Ukraine.

Last night, Republican senators refused to coordinate the play on Joe Biden’s domestic border deal, one that bundled in military support for Ukraine. Trump sacked any chance it had when he flexed his soon-to-be-the-nominee political muscle and demanded it not be passed. He is the Republican leader again, in every way but his actual election, and there are crisp little creases along the seams of the party where former opponents have folded.

Democrat Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., then picked up the fumbled ball and called an audible, saying he would try to pass a $95-billion bill focused solely on military support for Ukraine and Israel, but that also looks like it won’t get over the line.

Now what?

As the Feb. 24 second anniversary of the Ukraine war nears, the political game has profoundly changed as much as football changed in 19o6 when the forward pass was allowed. Only in politics, they’re now passing backward, instead of forward. Republicans can no longer rally support for a democracy fighting Vladimir Putin and illegal Russian expansion.

Trump’s first term signaled a neo-Republican isolationism and a refusal to honor longstanding foreign policy alliances, but with Ukraine suffering new military setbacks while facing deep shortages of equipment and soldiers, this is more urgent. It is handing Putin a win.

Without the $60 billion in US support – which pays for critical items such as HIMARS, Javelin, and Stinger missiles to take out Russian troops, tanks, and aircraft, and the heavy artillery ammunition the army needs for the grinding land battles – Ukraine will lose the eastern part of its country. As we called it in Eurasia Group’s 2024 Top Risks report, Ukraine will be partitioned. Putin wins.

Ukraine's security and continued US support for NATO’s Article 5 were once articles of faith. Now they are optional items on the foreign policy buffet menu. That is what has been normalized.

It’s not just a uniquely American issue. A consequential Angus Reid poll in Canadathis week revealed that both attention to and support for Ukraine’s fight against Russia is waning, especially among Conservative voters.

The poll found that the number of people saying Canada has offered “too much support” has doubled since the early weeks of the war. “One-quarter (25%) of Canadians believe their country is doing too much to assist Ukraine in its fight against the Russian invasion, up from 13% who said the same in May 2022. During the same interval, the number who say Canada is not doing enough has halved (38% to 19%),” according the Angus-Reid.

But here is the kicker. Of that group, Conservative voters make up the largest numbers. “The number of 2021 CPC voters who say Canada has done too much for Ukraine has more than doubled from 19 to 43% between May 2022 and now.”

Both in the US and Canada, the right is turning away from Ukraine. You might think that would pose some significant political challenges in a country like Canada, which has the largest Ukrainian diaspora in the world, if anyone cared to notice. But that’s another thing the poll revealed ...

Turns out, people are tuning out from the war, even though things are more urgent than ever. “The number of Canadians following news of the conflict closely has dropped from 66 to 45% in that same period – a trend that holds for Canadians of all ages and political stripes.”

On a day when President Volodymyr Zelensky just removed top Gen. Valery Zaluzhny in a desperate effort to reboot his country’s military fortunes and perhaps shore up his own position domestically, the news from indifferent allies abroad is as bad as news from the front.

A newly confident Putin is about to strike again tonight, when he sits down with his sycophant Tucker Carlson for a two-hour, pre-approved … what to call this? A PR stunt? An interview? A propaganda fest?

Here is what to watch for:

  1. Will Putin reveal anything about negotiating a peace deal or simply try to sell Russia’s view of the invasion, a view Carlson has long supported, to the growing far right in North America and Europe?
  2. Will Putin say anything about Trump to try to influence the US election?
  3. Will this interview deepen the resolve of Republicans to block more Ukraine funding to undermine both Zelensky and Biden?
  4. Facts: What will be straight-up lies and BS, and what will be factual?

For people paying less and less attention to the facts on the ground in the war, this Putin ploy will garner millions of views and allow him to shape the political debate.

We will have Ian Bremmer's Quick Take reaction to the Putin interview later tonight on our social media channels, and we will have more fact-checking in tomorrow’s GZERO Daily, so watch for those.

So, as the political Super Bowl of politics is playing out in Ukraine right now, there is no doubt who’s ahead: Russia.

Jess Frampton

This is the year of elections, with half the world’s population set to vote in more than 65 elections, so it’s no wonder there’s a lot of urgency over one issue: election interference.

Right now, Canada is holding a critical independent inquiry into election interference from China and Russia and yet, they naively missed the most disruptive election conspiracy mastermind of them all: Taylor Swift.

Or not.

In the department of “Weapons of Mass Distraction,” Swift merits a brief diversion before we get to China and Russia. As we covered in the Daily this morning, there is a double album of MAGA paranoia around China and Russia – sorry, I keep doing that … around Taylor Swift – and her plot to tilt the US election to Joe Biden.

One-time Republican presidential candidate-turned-Trump Hype Man Vivek Ramaswamy courageously exposed how Swift and her beau Travis Kelce, the future Hall of Fame tight end from the Super Bowl-bound Kansas City Chiefs, have it all cooked up. Working alongside, um … Deep Football and the Democrats, Swift and Kelce have, apparently, hatched an anti-Trump football plot.

“I wonder who’s going to win the Super Bowl next month,” Ramaswamy tweeted out knowingly, “and I wonder if there’s a major presidential endorsement coming from an artificially culturally propped-up couple this fall.” What? No way! Vivek doubled down on his doubters, with one of those cryptic-conspiracy bro things that sound smart but then you realize you have no idea what he actually means.

“What the MSM calls a “conspiracy theory” is often nothing more than an amalgam of incentives hiding in plain sight,” Ramaswamy tweeted. “Once you see that, the rest becomes pretty obvious.” To which Elon Muskretweeted, “Exactly.”

Exactly what is in plain sight? That there is a Super Bowl-Swiftian election interference plot? That a billionaire musician, her record company, the NFL, Travis Kelce, and Joe Biden all got together to fix the outcome of the NFL playoffs and the Super Bowl in order to support the Democrats and undermine Donald Trump?

The Swift-Kelce-NFL-Biden fever dream has been widely repeated and reported on, but it has zero merit, as we covered this morning. Swift has a history of supporting Democrats in places like Tennessee in 2018. In other words, like millions of people, she supports a political party. That is not a conspiracy, that’s called “voting.” Many other celebrities support Trump and Republicans. That is also called voting.

Yes, Travis Kelce does vaccine ads for a pharmaceutical company. Again, not a conspiracy against Trump, but the choice of a man who, like hundreds of millions of people, believes in the science of vaccines – and in making a buck. It’s no more complicated than that. This isn’t a plot for election interference, as folks like Ramaswamy allege; it’s a paranoid new deflection from the very real act of attempted election interference that was the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol.

But foreign election interference is troubling, and Canada’s inquiry merits attention. The independent “Public Inquiry into Foreign Interference in Federal Electoral Processes and Democratic Institutions” – catchy name, I know, so let’s go with the “Hogue Inquiry,” after the commissioner Justice Marie-Josée Hogue, who is overseeing it all — kicked off this week. It is looking into allegations that China and Russia interfered in the 2019 and 2021 federal elections.

Just this morning, Global News reported that it had obtained a secret briefing note from Canada’s spy agency CSIS that says China attempted to interfere with the last two Federal elections. “We know that the PRC sought to clandestinely and deceptively influence the 2019 and 2021 federal elections,” Stewart Bell writes in his superb story today.

That’s exactly why Canada’s allies are watching this case so closely, especially in the US. “Much of the attention about foreign interference in American democratic processes has focused on Russia and its malicious online activities,” Stephanie Carvin, a Carleton University professor and former CSIS national security analyst, tells me. “But Canada presents an important case study in how other state actors, namely (but not exclusively) China, conduct such operations. This includes the harassment of dissidents, alleged interference in electoral nomination processes, and targeting of politicians. Western countries need to observe and learn from the experience of other countries, which may impact them one day.”

Despite the recent assurances from President Xi Jinping to President Joe Biden that China will not interfere in the election, FBI Director Christopher Wraywarned a House Committee on China this week that Beijing has a very sophisticated plan to disrupt the upcoming election and also hack critical infrastructure.

Other countries, like Russia and Iran, are playing copycat. “Unfortunately, malicious actors are learning from one another, and Western countries should expect more foreign interference in the future,” Carvin says. “I am particularly worried about artificially generated content ‘deepfakes’ that may alter perceptions of current events and politicians.”

Canada, the US, and its allies are arming up for a war on the heart of democracy: elections. “If there is a good news story here, it is that countries are not going through this alone,” Carvin tells me. “By working together, states can better inform themselves about what is happening around the world, to make their democratic institutions more resilient.”

Big picture? It might be best not to confuse Swiftian halftime entertainment with political election interference. Both are worth paying attention to, but they play in very different arenas.

Paige Fusco

Tucker Carlson visited Canada this week to “liberate” it from … from what exactly?

Well, that’s what thousands of people – including the premier of Alberta – came to Calgary and Edmonton to hear in packed arenas.

Tucker’s two-day liberation tour from Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s “authoritarian dictatorship” is timed perfectly around two political pieces of populist kindling: Trump’s march to victory in the US presidential primaries and a Canadian judge’s ruling that the Liberal government’s invocation of the Emergencies Act during the Trucker pandemic protest was “unreasonable” and unconstitutional.

It all sent a message: The populist forces are gathering and ready to take down Trudeau (and Biden) and save Canada from “disgusting decline.”

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