Candidate Donald Trump claimed that he wouldn’t be beholden to campaign  donors and slammed his Republican primary opponents as puppets of their wealthy patrons. “Sheldon Adelson is looking to give big dollars to Rubio because he feels he can mold him into his perfect little puppet. I agree!” Trump tweeted in October 2015. But an excerpt from Michael Wolff’s upcoming book Fire and Fury quotes Steve Bannon, who served as CEO of the Trump campaign and went on to become White House chief strategist, effectively confirming that Adelson has been a driving force behind the Trump administration’s foreign  policy decision-making.

The United Nations general assembly has delivered a stinging rebuke to Donald Trump, voting by a huge majority to reject his unilateral recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital. The vote came after a redoubling of threats by Nikki Haley, the US ambassador to the UN, who said that Washington would remember which countries “disrespected” America by voting against it.

President Trump issued a threat on Wednesday to cut off American aid to any country that votes for a resolution at the United Nations condemning  his recent decision to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel.

The right wing in the United States has long spread around the false story that the US government gives away enormous amounts of money to other countries. Opinion polls show that many Americans think it is as much as 25% of the $4.094 trillion budget, which would be a trillion dollars in aid. That is hilariously absurd. The actual US foreign aid budget is $41.9 billion, about one percent of the Federal budget.

President Trump plans to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and move the American Embassy there, upending nearly seven decades of  American foreign policy and potentially destroying his efforts to broker peace between Israel and the Palestinians.