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This looks like it fits in with Trump's strategy to increase executive power by refusing to spend funds that Congress has appropriated, like how he shut down USAID. This is still a legal gambit on Trump's part, and it's not clear that he will get away with it.
If he does hold back aid for even a short period of time, the media response will be withering. Zelensky is popular. Does he have enough time before the midterms to weather the storm and pressure Zelensky to come to the table?
According to this, the funding for Ukraine is drawn from multiple sources, and at least some of those sources are under the direct control of the President/DoD:
Would be a bit odd if the President couldn't simply decline to exercise the Presidential Drawdown Authority. It wouldn't be much of an Authority in that case.
So, there are some funding sources that couldn't be canceled without getting into legally murky area, but Trump could choose to cancel a significant portion of it right away.
Interesting, thank you. That does give the President some short term discretionary leverage. But looking out on a longer timeline, Congress has the power to write spending bills that the President cannot stop
Yes, but in the long term, Zelenskyy could be dead, or at least Ukraine could be in a much worse position. A battle between Congress and Trump would take time, and that time would not be on Ukraine's side.
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He really needs to lie better like the Biden admin did. Just slow role it, tie it up in court, complain about the "Parliamentarian", and give the money to a Republican Patronage Network that might, after 10 years, spent 0.01% of the money on Ukraine versus their pet causes. Shit, spend all of it on that Strategic Crypto Reserve and claim it's to keep Russia from getting all the Crypto. It'll hold up about as well as all the money Biden drained from the government for illegals getting tons of free shit. Trump's problem is that he's such a worse liar than the typical politician to whom words mean nothing, and passive aggression is the primary winning strategy. Trump feels this compulsive need to beat his chest and openly fight with people, instead of just lying that he'll do something, and then doing whatever he wants anyways with 100 layers of indirection and plausible deniability.
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