Rupert Stone (@RupertStone83) header
Rupert Stone (@RupertStone83) profile picture

Freelance journo working on security & geopolitics in MidEast & South Asia. Bylines: Newsweek, Spectator, Nikkei Asia, AJE, Prospect et al. RT ≠ endorsements.

Turkey
Joined December 2012
Photo by Rupert Stone (@RupertStone83)Photo by Rupert Stone (@RupertStone83)Photo by Rupert Stone (@RupertStone83)Photo by Rupert Stone (@RupertStone83)Photo by Rupert Stone (@RupertStone83)Photo by Rupert Stone (@RupertStone83)Photo by Rupert Stone (@RupertStone83)
The Taliban takeover has not been good for Pakistan. Drug-trafficking from Afghanistan has increased under Taliban rule, my new piece shows, with frequent large seizures of opiates and crystal meth, the latter feeding a domestic 'ice' epidemic. atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/so…
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So refreshing when politicians talk about their love of books. Reading is so vitally important to the health of a society.
Scott Colom told reporters yesterday that his favorite book is Anna Karenina by Tolstoy. He also enjoys War and Peace, the Robert Caro books and Things Fall Apart. Probably his worst take is he doesn’t enjoy James Baldwin’s novels, but everyone’s allowed a few bad opinions.
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If only they had listened. Susie heard my advice a year ago, as did Trump. Didn't have to be this way.
The word is out about the Election Night Watch Party at the White House on Tuesday. For weeks, Trump had been assured by Susie Wiles and his staff that all the polls were wrong, and that, once again, the Blue Wave would only be a ripple, if one even showed up at all. And the DOJ was ready to pounce on it if it did. Trump, after all, was on the ballot. "Vote like I'm on the ballot,' he said, "Because I am." He told every rally that. He said it on FOX. He had a 90% approval rate, he said. And $5000 checks for everybody. What could possibly go wrong? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . So the East Room was decked out with the finest crystal and china. Staffers thought it would be a fun "cheeky rebuke" to order in platters of finger food from Cheesecake Factory. Just to give a finger to Barack Obama, for his viral joke about Trump’s gaudy renovations to the White House. EVERYONE showed up in their party clothes. His Staff. His Cabinet. Top GOP politicians. Donors. But there was no Host or Hostess to greet them. Which was a little odd. The guests mingled among themselves, and waited to be formally welcomed and invited to sample the refreshments. Where were Trump and Melania? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Trump waited upstairs in his residence, in order to make a grand entrance to a standing ovation with cheers, once the happy results started pouring in. And was Melania also waiting upstairs, to march in at his side? Nope. Melania was not at the White House at all. On election night, the most anticipated night in politics, with the rest of her husband's term on the line, Melania was somewhere else. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Finally at 8:00 the first election results came in. But during that entire first hour, not ONE Republican was named. It was only Democrat after Democrat, starting with Jon Ossoff. Trump never came downstairs. At all. Marco Rubio was the first to go missing, according to the Daily Mail. Then, one by one, the rest of the party goers slipped out the door. Only two hours later, an enormous decision was called. Democrats had flipped the House of Representatives to their control. And in most cases, the Democrats won, not by slim majorities, but by double digits. It was 10:00, and the East Room was empty. The party goers had gone to a nearby Washington bar to drown their sorrows. The Cheesecake Factory food lay untouched on the East Room tables. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . And Trump? He was upstairs watching the results on FOX News, and posting angrily on Truth Social. He wasn't alone. No, Melania wasn't with him. But Natalie Harp was. The Daily Mail reports that Susie Wiles, his Chief of Staff was upstairs as well. The one who had assured him day after day that Republicans would win. By 11 pm, Trump stopped posting. “He’s watching Fox News barely uttering a word and paralyzed into silence,” a source close to the president told the Daily Mail. “It’s very, very dark in the residence,” one senior official said of Trump’s mood. “It’s a dark scene.” Another source said, “They were delusional right until the very end.” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Commentary by Glee Violette
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“"The results were eye-popping. In Michigan, 66% of men between 18 and 29, who made up 7% of the electorate, backed El-Sayed, compared to 32% who supported his Republican opponent, former Rep. Mike Rogers. That’s a 55-point shift toward Democrats from 2024."
🚨New in NBC News: How Abdul El-Sayed swung young men from Trump by 55 points in Michigan "The El-Sayed team’s plan consisted of a laser focus on cost-of-living issues that proved especially salient for this age cohort, while showing a willingness to mix it up and go off script in spaces that might traditionally be hostile to Democrats. El-Sayed, 42, leaned into his millennial identity, as well as his ease talking about sports." "The results were eye-popping. In Michigan, 66% of men between 18 and 29, who made up 7% of the electorate, backed El-Sayed, compared to 32% who supported his Republican opponent, former Rep. Mike Rogers, according to NBC News’ exit polling. That’s a 55-point shift toward Democrats from 2024, when Trump bested then-Vice President Kamala Harris by 21 points with this group." “Young men chose Abdul because he chose us,” Milo Slevin, an El-Sayed campus organizing manager, said in a statement. “In every reel, town hall, and debate, we saw him acknowledge our anxieties about unmitigated AI growth, corrupt corporate politics, and the debilitating cost of living, and we saw him speak transparently about the bright future we can win when we fight back.” nbcnews.com/politics/2026-el…
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Rupert Stone retweeted
“This American delusion—our excessive faith in the capacity of military power to achieve victory and thereby fundamentally political ends-has gotten worse rather than better, especially in the past quarter century.” —William H. McRaven
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Rupert Stone retweeted
How the Dems could get to 60 or more senate seats.
2028 Senate Primaries that need to happen: IN - Todd Young OK - James Lankford SD - John Thune AR - John Boozman ID - Mike Crapo ND - John Hoeven SC - Tim Scott (if Mark Burns runs) The old guard needs to go.
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Rupert Stone retweeted
Miller's jackets are too short and the buttoning point is too high. When the person has a pear-shaped body, this only emphasizes the narrowness of their shoulders and wideness of the hips. Would be better if his jackets were longer and had an extended shoulder.
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Rupert Stone retweeted
The @VP may run in '28 but he faces some sobering history and daunting odds. Only twice in the last 200 yrs has a sitting VP been elected to succeed the president he or she has served. And the odds are even worse when that president is as deeply unpopular as Trump. Having been #2, you can't plausibly run away from the @POTUS or his decisions. wsj.com/politics/elections/j…
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Unlike Trump’s first term, when the overwhelming focus was on Russiagate, multiple different scandals are now converging on the administration. The next two years are shaping up to be very bad for the president and his party.
Jensen Huang and his relationship with an alleged Chinese Ministry of State Security agent is about to get a whole lot of attention in the next Congress
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Rupert Stone retweeted
The evidence is piling up by the hour at this point: the way that the Department of Commerce is administering and enforcing export controls related to AI chips is either historically incompetent or willfully negligent. This can’t continue.
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Rupert Stone retweeted
I personally paid @LauraLoomer to post tweets earlier this year. A good amount of cash too. I will gladly share screenshots, receipts, texts, and the names of other people who paid her. It was always very intresting to hear from her who she was willing to be paid to trash and who was off limits. @alexbruesewitz @washingtonpost @thedailybeast @Jerusalem_Post
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Rupert Stone retweeted
SUPERCUT: This is not gonna be months-long thing.
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BREAKING: In a stunning moment, Republican Senator Ron Johnson just went on Fox News and admitted there is RAMPANT corruption within the Trump Administration. Every American needs to see this.
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Rupert Stone retweeted
The incoming Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee says he will investigate Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang allegedly getting honey trapped by an alleged Chinese spy who allegedly pushed him to push the White Hosue to ease tech export restrictions on China.
The more I learn about the insane relationship between the Trump Administration, Chinese spies, and AI billionaires, the more I’m convinced there is nothing this administration does that isn’t corrupt. Congress will investigate and get answers.
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Breaking news: President Herzog has just announced that Gadi Eisenkot, the frontrunner to replace Prime Minister Netanyahu, will receive the mandate to form a government. According to senior sources in Eisenkot’s party, he intends to form a government as quickly as possible- even a minority government - which he would define as an emergency government. His goal is to do so within the next ten days.
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It’s hard for people to understand how much pressure is coming to the President from outside the White House to continue the war, even at the expense of his voters. It’s tremendous
From WSJ: "Several hawkish outside advisers have called Trump since Election Day to make the case that his legacy depends on forcing Iran to surrender its nuclear program, which would allow the president to boast the political sacrifice was worth the cost, U.S. officials and another source familiar said." wsj.com/world/middle-east/tr…
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BREAKING Israeli President Hertzog gives opposition leader Eisenkot the mandate to form a government
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Netanyahu seems desperate. He realizes that Eisenkot is on the way to forming a government that will send him packing. He is also setting the stage for his next election campaign. He'll claim he called for unity and Gadi went with the Arabs.
אחדות לאומית 🇮🇱
Readers added context they thought people might want to know
בשונה מהנטען, במהלך קמפיין הבחירות, יו"ר הליכוד, מר נתניהו, לא קרא לממשלת אחדות. להפך, הוא קרא לממשלת ימין רחבה. x.com/yoavr/status/2…
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💥Hours before Gadi Eisenkot is expected to get the nod, Netanyahu posts a video, apparently new, in which he seems genuinely panicked, calls on his supporters to stop the formation of any new government by any means necessary, and threatens violence. For 11 days, no one has seen this man in public.
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Rupert Stone retweeted
Investigations seem likely, per the next Chair of SFRC.
The more I learn about the insane relationship between the Trump Administration, Chinese spies, and AI billionaires, the more I’m convinced there is nothing this administration does that isn’t corrupt. Congress will investigate and get answers.
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