



In a story in which the Washington Post basically admits the Democrats have no candidate who can beat President Donald Trump in the 2020 election, it’s not that he has had a strong three years with the economy and successes in foreign policy. It’s that, despite his many weaknesses, Democrats have not been able to break through.

At first, the “massive” Democrat field “was hailed as the most diverse in history, with candidates who spanned the ideological spectrum and offered enough in a broad buffet of options to excite any voter.”

But now, “In conversations with 17 state and national party leaders, nearly all expressed some level of unease with where the field stands and a deepening concern that, even as Trump suffers through one of the darkest phases of his presidency, the leading presidential contenders would struggle mightily in a one-on-one contest with him,” wrote Annie Linskey and Matt Viser in “Anxiety rises among Democrats worried about party’s prospects in 2020.”

Joe Biden, “has been forced on the defensive about his family’s ethics, performed haltingly in debates and set off alarms with his poor fundraising.” The other two top-ranking candidates – Sens. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., “are too liberal to win a general election,” party poo-bahs fear.

Now they are begging Bob Iger, chief executive of Disney, Adm. William McRaven, who oversaw the raid that killed Osama bin Laden and recently wrote an op-ed critical of Trump, and, of course, Hillary Clinton to step in. Clinton has “felt vindicated over the past few weeks as Trump’s political difficulties have deepened,” the Post reported.

The Post acknowledges it won’t be easy. “For all of his challenges, Trump commands a gigantic operation that has vacuumed up unprecedented sums of money, an unparalleled megaphone to lure in voters and a lock on most of the Republican Party.”

Trump got exactly what he wanted from the Turkey-Syria-Kurds clash – a deal that puts others, such as Russia, Turkey and Syria, in charge of patrolling the area and gets American soldiers out of the conflict, as he promised on the campaign trail.

But that’s not how CNN played it in “Putin and Erdogan just did a deal on Syria. The US is the biggest loser,” by Nathan Hodge. The Russians and Turks made a deal, Hodge wrote, and the 10-page memorandum of understanding is clear on one point: “The Americans do not have a place in shaping the future of Syria.”

CNN admits Trump’s analysis is correct. The deal addresses the concern of Kurdish YPG forces operating near the border but “acknowledges a major fear of the Kurds – that Turkish-backed Syria rebel groups might unleash a campaign of ethnic cleansing against them and other minority groups.”

The deal forces the Kurds to pull back to an agreed line, Hodge noted. But it also “implies that the Kurds have a new guarantor. After President Trump effectively abandoned the Kurds, by ordering the sudden withdrawal of U.S. forces from Syria and leaving the YPG exposed to a Turkish advance, that role now falls to the Russians,” which was Trump’s intention all along.

Despite achieving all his objectives – the US out, the Kurds protected, the conflict removed from America’s agenda and placed on a pipeline to peace – Hodge wrote: “The biggest geopolitical loser in this deal is Washington. The rapid exit of US forces that left the Kurds exposed was a gift to Putin. Russian journalists roaming newly abandoned US military bases played the moment for all it was worth, casting it as a hasty helicopters-on-the-roof moment for American power.”