All posts tagged "ukraine"

This alarming intel shows how TACO Trump will drag us into World War III

The world has often seen great wars ignited not by inevitability, but by weakness, hesitation, and betrayal. Cowards playing with matches.

History shows that one of the biggest risk factors for war is an autocratic leader who fears for his own future. Which is why the kind of pathetic incoherence we saw at the United Nations this week should concern us all.

This week’s news brings some alarming data points:

  • After four different Danish airports were buzzed by what many assume to be Russian drones (Danes are uncertain), a French airport was hit yesterday and a Norwegian airport was shut down by drones earlier in the week.
  • The US Navy fired Trident II D5 ballistic missiles from the coast of Florida, lighting up the sky as they were testing devices that could carry thermonuclear bombs deep into Russia.
  • A massive US Navy presence in the Caribbean and off the coast of Venezuela was just this week joined by F35s and Reaper drones as Trump has blown three Venezuela boats out of the water without congressional authorization.
  • In an absolutely unprecedented move, Pete “Kegger” Hegseth has ordered all the US military’s flag officers and their staffs to come to Virginia for a meeting with an unknown agenda. This is not normal military procedure; it has the stench of authoritarian consolidation, the kind of maneuver history has shown us precedes purges, coups, and crackdowns.
  • Russia is experiencing a nationwide fuel shortage (also in Russian-occupied Crimea) as the result of Ukrainian drones taking out refineries and depots across the nation. It’s so bad, the Kremlin has banned fuel exports until the end of the year. The nation’s economy is teetering and Putin is apparently in political trouble.
  • Taiwan’s deputy foreign minister Wu Chihchung warns, “China is preparing to invade Taiwan.”
  • Russia’s foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, just said, “NATO and the European Union want to declare, in fact, have already declared a real war on my country and are directly participating in it.”
  • NATO notified Russia that they may shoot down planes that invade NATO airspace, and Russia replied that “would be war.”

As Russian jets cross NATO skies and intelligence warns of an impending strike, while Trump — desperate for a diversion from the Epstein/Trump sex scandal and a collapsing economy —appears to be trying to provoke a war with Venezuela, the question grows louder: are we watching the sparks of a new global conflict?

And is the dangerous bond between Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump the match that could light the fuse of World War III?

Remember back in July when Trump told NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte (during a visit to the Oval Office) that if Europe would pay for the anti-missile defense systems Ukraine desperately needs he’d see to it that they were shipped over there promptly?

President Volodymyr Zelenskyy tweeted:

“I’m grateful to our team and to the United States, Germany, and Norway for preparing a new decision on Patriots for Ukraine.”

Rutte coordinated with Germany and Norway (and later other NATO countries) to raise the billions necessary to pay for the systems to replenish stocks held by European nations, particularly France, Germany, and Denmark, that those countries are supplying to Ukraine.

The replacements should have arrived in Europe by now, a continent that’s increasingly on edge as Putin keeps flying MiGs over former Soviet client states in the Baltics.

As they supply Ukraine — which is suffering under unprecedented attacks with hundreds of missiles and drones every night — Europe’s own stockpiles that could be used to deter Russian aggression are vanishing.

Between that Oval Office meeting and now, however, Trump had his infamous red-carpet meeting with Putin in Alaska and apparently got different orders from his self-described friend and probable mentor.

As Vivian Salama reports for The Atlantic, there’s been a sudden change in the Trump administration’s position with regard to providing NATO or EU countries with defensive weaponry to replace what they’ve given to Ukraine:

“Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Elbridge Colby said that he didn’t believe in the value of certain foreign military sales, according to two administration officials with knowledge of the discussion.”

Adding to European concerns, news broke last week that a Russian Major General who defected claims Putin is planning a full-on invasion of both Ukraine and parts of the Baltic states — all NATO members — “before Christmas.”

The British newspaper the Daily Express reported, in an article headlined “Russia's 'greyzone' invasion plan to start WW3 before Christmas revealed by defector”:

“Moscow is preparing a ‘greyzone’ attack on Poland before Christmas, a senior Russian military official has revealed.

“The warning, sent through an Eastern European ally during London’s DSEI arms fair last week, has triggered urgent discussions in the UK and US about the risk of a deniable strike aimed at fracturing NATO.”

Poland, Romania, and Estonia have all seen Russian MiGs violate their airspace in the past two weeks, scrambling NATO jets as Poland and Estonia have invoked NATO’s Article 4 process to stand up to potential aggression.

It appears to me (just my opinion) that when Putin met with Trump in Alaska either he ordered Trump to back away from Ukraine and NATO, or simply took the measure of the man and concluded he could launch an invasion of the Baltics with a low probability that the United States under the convicted felon would respond militarily. Trump’s recent blocking of Patriot systems to Europe suggests the former rather than the latter.

Europe is taking this threat seriously. Great Britain this past week dispatched Royal Air Force jets to Poland with backup from Voyager tankers; they join German, French, Swedish, and Danish jets that began patrolling the eastern flank of the Baltic nations after the first Polish incursions.

Donald Tusk, Poland’s Prime Minister, warned that his nation — and, implicitly, the region — is now closer to military conflict “than at any time since the Second World War.” The UK’s OSCE (Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe) Ambassador, Neil Holland, was explicit that these were not accidental incursions into NATO airspace:

“Either Russia has deployed systems it cannot control, or it is provoking us deliberately.”

According to the Express reporting, British intelligence isn’t expecting a full-on invasion of Eastern Europe but, instead — at least initially — the same sort of “deniable” pinpoint attacks Putin has used to precede his later, larger assaults on other nations including Georgia and Ukraine. One UK intelligence official said:

“There’s no suggestion of a full-scale invasion. But a calibrated strike – something deniable, something confusing – is exactly how Russia has operated in the past.”

He added:

“They’re probing NATO. If they can strike Poland and NATO flinches — even slightly — it undermines the whole alliance.”

At the same time, Russia has reportedly launched a full-scale “coordinated information warfare” assault on Finland via the internet and social media. Finland shares a 833-mile border with Russia, which, as the USSR, has invaded that nation twice in modern times, once in 1939 and again in 1941.

Marco Giannangeli, Defence and Diplomatic Editor for Express, pointed out:

“Western officials fear the disinformation campaign is intended to soften the ground for further provocations along the Gulf of Finland.”

Putin’s apparently taking Trump’s TACO (“Trump Always Chickens Out”) label to heart. Tragically, the entire world may soon see the consequence of a blustering, incompetent, race/deportation-obsessed, apparently terrified-of-Putin president who’s surrounded himself with people whose singular quality is not competence but loyalty and a willingness to break tradition and the law on the boss’ behalf.

History will not forgive miscalculation at this scale. With Europe bracing for attack, NATO stockpiles running dry, Trump near provoking war with Venezuela, and Putin — in deep trouble at home — probing for weakness, the world stands at a perilous crossroads.

The only question now is whether this moment will be remembered as the turning point that stopped another world war, or the disaster when Trump and Putin together opened the gates to it.

We were warned Trump would sell out key allies. A year later, here we go

Exactly one year ago last night, Vice President Kamala Harris confidently walked up to Donald Trump, looked him in his bloodshot eyes, offered her hand, and then proceeded to spend the next 90 minutes dragging him all over the stage of Philadelphia’s National Constitution Center in their one-and-only 2024 presidential debate.

Harris was prepared, disciplined, and clearly demonstrated her keen understanding of both domestic and foreign policy issues. She wasted no time stating her key plans for her administration, and effortlessly illustrated a command of the Constitution. She made it clear that she, not her opponent, who was a convicted felon, had spent an entire professional career upholding our nation’s laws, not violating them.

She even predicted how the debate would go down telling the world that Trump would haul out “the same old, tired playbook,” and warning he would resort to “a bunch of lies, grievances and name-calling.”

While Harris strongly defended a woman’s right to choose, Trump stammered and lied saying, “As far as the abortion ban, no, I’m not in favor of an abortion ban. But it doesn’t matter because this issue has now been taken over by the states.”

Then he weirdly said, “I have been a leader on fertilization.”

With an incredulous look, Harris stared at him and then the camera, and said without speaking, “I have no idea what the hell he is talking about, either.”

This was repeated several more times, as Trump used the shovel Harris casually tossed him to bury himself.

When she wasn’t relentlessly fact-checking and battering the haggard Trump with the facts, she was nonchalantly casting a line and patiently waiting for the two-ton sucker fish to hit it, before setting the hook, and reeling him in.

By the time she was done, the orange, flapping fish was bleeding out all over the stage, and screaming, “They’re eating the dogs! They’re eating the cats!”

Harris also effortlessly dog-walked Trump into the very racist trap that he set weeks earlier when he questioned Harris’s “Blackness.”

“All I can say is, I read where she was not Black, that she put out. And I’ll say that, and then I read that she was Black. And that’s OK. Either one was OK with me. That’s up to her. That’s up to her.”

That’s up to her … How kind.

Harris again looked at the camera, with a “you decide” look.

When the ass-kicking was finally over, Harris had masterfully humiliated Trump. She had proven she had the capacity to be one damn fine president, and knew how to stand up to fascist bullies, not roll out the red carpet for them.

So badly was Trump beaten, he actually flat turned down an offer from Republican state media at Fox TV to host a second debate, saying “there will be no rematch.”

It’s fitting then, that on the one-year anniversary of Harris’s knockout of Trump on that Philadelphia stage, we are getting news of Russia President Vladimir Putin’s incursion into Polish airspace today. High-ranking Polish military officials are decrying an “unprecedented violation” as a “huge number” of Russian drones were shot down by Polish and NATO forces over that country.

This is the first time in the history of NATO that alliance fighters have engaged enemy targets in allied airspace.

Read that again.

As I type this, Poland’s government has invoke Article 4 of the NATO treaty, that states alliance members “will consult together whenever, in the opinion of any of them, the territorial integrity, political independence or security of any of the parties is threatened.”

Without invoking Article 4, there cannot be Article 5, which could entail military action.

From reporting in The New York Times this afternoon:

Since NATO’s founding in 1949, Article 4 has been invoked eight times. Before Wednesday, the last was on Feb. 24, 2022, the day Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

What we know for sure right now is that the world is less safe today than it was yesterday, and certainly one year ago. We still don’t have a clue what Trump has to say about any of it, except what he posted on his social media account:

"What’s with Russia violating Poland’s airspace with drones? Here we go!"

Here we go? Good God.

This is the terrifying stuff of world wars, but of course, Harris was on top of this issue, too, during that debate, because unlike Trump, she read her national security briefings, and could tell our friends from our enemies.

At one point, Harris turned to Trump and said this:

“Why don’t you tell the 800,000 Polish Americans right here in Pennsylvania how quickly you would give up for the sake of favor, and what you think is a friendship with a known dictator (Putin) who would eat you for lunch?”

She wasn’t done:

“If Ukraine loses, Putin would be sitting in Kyiv with his eyes on the rest of Europe, starting with Poland.”

Holy hell …

And let me remind you that Trump promised to end Russia’s war with Ukraine on Day One of his presidency. Of course, anybody who was paying attention, and/or really loves this country, knew that like so much of the heated bilge that pours out of his lying mouth, it was all complete bulls–––.

Instead, just last month he surrendered to Putin on American soil by giving the murdering dictator the red-carpet treatment Harris had predicted.

But if we are really being accurate here, all of this was forecasted on another debate stage in 2016, when Trump was dragged around by another smart, tough, unflappable woman.

When Hillary Clinton went after Trump’s bromance with Putin, the man who would violently attack America only four years later said this:

“He (Putin) said nice things about me. He has no respect for her (Clinton), he has no respect for our president (Obama). I’ll tell you what, we’re in very serious trouble.”

Clinton responded this way:

“Well that's because he'd rather have a puppet as president of the United States.”

Truer words have never been spoken.

Both of these patriotic women were right about everything, and we should all be reminded of that every single day.

Neo-Nazi group with US links may be backed by Russian intelligence

Before a law enforcement crackdown hobbled it in 2021, the Base established itself as one of the most active neo-Nazi accelerationist groups — a term for groups that seek to hasten societal collapse by violent means.

Now the Base has rebuilt, to the extent that last year it earned a spot on the European Union list of sanctioned terrorist groups.

A sudden burst of activity in Ukraine has renewed suspicions that the Base and its leader, Rinaldo Nazzaro, are linked to Russian intelligence and security services.

“The Base’s activities in Ukraine suggest that there is more to this group than meets the eye,” said Steven Rai, author of a report released on Tuesday by the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD).

“While there is no smoking gun that proves state sponsorship of the Base, there are numerous indicators that should at least raise questions as to whether they are being covertly supported by Russia.”

Suspicions of Russian influence have persisted since the group’s founding in 2018 due to the fact that Nazzaro, a former FBI intelligence analyst and onetime U.S. civilian analyst supporting military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, now lives in St. Petersburg.

According to the ISD, Nazzaro has continued “to fundraise and provide strategic direction to the group from Russia.”

Rai said the Base’s use of Russian communications applications such as VKontakte, RuTube, Mail.Ru and the social network Odnoklassniki, along with its use of inauthentic accounts, or bots, to spread its message, raise suspicions about potential Russian state support.

The ISD report also flags the Base’s offer to pay recruits in cryptocurrency to carry out acts of sabotage and violence, “which implies a level of financing that is unusual for neo-Nazi accelerationist groups and raises questions about where the funding originates.”

'Hate camp'

The Base first captured U.S. headlines from 2019 to 2021, as Nazzaro purchased a remote property in eastern Washington state while organizing online recruits to meet for a “hate camp.”

They hoped to practice guerilla warfare, with the long-term goal of establishing a white ethnostate in the U.S. Pacific Northwest.

The group’s decline began in early 2020 with the arrest of U.S. members for harboring an AWOL Canadian service member, building a machine gun to carry out an attack at a pro-gun rally, and plotting to murder an antifascist couple.

News reports and research point to the Base having been active in 18 countries, including the U.S., U.K, Russia, Ukraine, Italy and Sweden.

Rai says Nazzaro’s “profile alone raises questions about whether the Russian government would seek to exploit his access and capabilities by recruiting him as an intelligence asset.”

As reported by The Guardian, in March the Base began posting propaganda on social media announcing a campaign in Ukraine, signaling that the group has shifted its target for a white ethnostate from the Pacific Northwest to the Carpathian mountains near the Hungarian border.

According to The Guardian, the Base made posts on the social media platform Telegram offering to pay volunteers to carry out attacks on “electrical power stations, military and police vehicles, military and police personnel, government buildings, politicians.”

In May, the Base created a new Telegram channel announcing the launch of "Project White Phoenix," described as an effort "to create a white ethnostate in the Carpathian Mountains of Ukraine.” Appealing to Ukrainians, the post announcing the project called for capturing territory "for the future of the all whites in the brewing chaos. Mountains and borders in the region are a force multiplier making guerilla warfare possible and inevitable."

Such efforts in Ukraine align with Russian objectives, Rai notes.

“At a minimum, the Base’s activities may divert Ukraine’s attention away from countering Russian aggression,” the ISD report says.

“More nefariously, the Base could be part of Russia’s hybrid warfare tactics, which employ a mixture of conventional military forces, clandestine operatives and unwitting agents to sow chaos.”

Emails from Raw Story to two addresses associated with the Base went unreturned.

Nazzaro has consistently denied that he is an agent of the Russian state.

"This accusation is a lie," Nazzaro said on Telegram in May. "I have never had contact with Russian security services."

Nazzaro also said financing for the Ukraine campaign "comes from crowdfunding donations not from me personally."

Zakarpattia Oblast has previously been targeted by a Russian influence campaign.

In 2018, three members of the pro-Russian neo-Nazi group Falanga were arrested and charged in connection with an arson attack on a Hungarian cultural center in the city of Uzhorod.

Polish prosecutors ultimately claimed that the attack constituted an act of terrorism intended to “publicly incite hatred between Ukrainians and Hungarians” and cause “disruption of the political system.”

Witnesses implicated Manuel Ochsenreiter, a pro-Russia member of the far-right Alternative for Germany party. Ochsenreiter fled to Moscow, where he died of a heart attack in 2021, aged 45.

Looking for a U.S. leader

While Ukraine appears to be the Base’s current focus, the group has shown a resurgence in the U.S. and Western Europe.

The ISD reports that Europol coordinated arrests of five Base members in six European countries in November 2023, followed by arrests in the Netherlands and Italy in 2024, and in the U.K. earlier this year.

Last summer, Nazzaro posted on his personal Telegram account that he was looking for a U.S leader at a salary of up to $1,200 a month, The Guardian reported.

During the 2024 U.S. presidential election, the Base posted a video on Telegram celebrating an arson attack on a ballot box.

Earlier this year, the Base made an appeal for financial support to pay for a paramilitary training exercise in the U.S. Since the beginning of the year, the group has posted photos of members in the U.S. carrying firearms and wearing tactical gear.

It is unclear if the training exercise took place or if the Base appointed a U.S. leader.

The Trump Achilles heel that threatens to damn world democracy

Could Trump’s weakness and the GOP’s cowardice mean the end of democracy around the world? Could his part in the Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell scandal be the proverbial horseshoe nail that brings down majority rule and representative government worldwide?

The world’s first modern major confrontation between authoritarianism (in this case, a kingdom) and democracy was the American Revolution in 1776. Outside of tribal societies, democracy had been largely dormant all over the world for the previous two thousand years, but we installed an early version of liberal democracy here in 1789.

Our first president, George Washington, not only fought the fascist forces of King George III, but he was also a fanatic proponent of democracy itself, to the point that he refused to serve a third term in office so as not to set a “king-like” precedent.

But 80 years later, America faced her second major confrontation with fascists who wanted to end our democracy and replace it with a strongman autocracy.

By the 1860s there were only a handful of democratic nations in the world when the second major war between democracy and fascism happened. The southern US states — taken over by morbidly rich plantation owners who ended democracy in the South by the mid-1850s — attacked the United States itself in an effort to end our democratic system.

But we had a fierce democracy advocate for president in Abraham Lincoln so, after almost 700,000 people died in the Civil War, we managed to preserve democracy in America and thus for much of the rest of the world.

Eighty years after that, America faced her third major war against fascist forces, this time the attack coming from Germany, Italy, Spain, and Japan. While America “only” lost an estimated 413,000 men and women in WWII, the blood price the world paid was far more massive as an estimated 75 to 80 million people perished in that conflict.

And here we are, exactly 80 years after the end of that war against fascism, and America again faces the test: will we defend and preserve democracy for ourselves and the world, or will we let the new Axis that’s forming this week in China take over the planet as Trump reshapes America into a police state and realigns us with the world’s fascist nations?

For the first time — in the fourth of these 80-year cycles of assaults against democracy — America has a president who openly and explicitly disdains the idea, embracing instead the world’s most notorious autocrats and their neofascist forms of government.

And, even if he was inclined to defend democracy, Trump is terribly weak and unpopular, which only adds to the danger that this time we could see a worldwide revolution against the form of government our Founders and Framers were willing to die to establish.

On Wednesday, as 10 of the victims of Trump’s “closest friend” Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell were telling their stories in front of the Capitol, Trump ordered a deafening fly-over by military jets, ostensibly to “honor” a Polish pilot. Many saw it as the president’s way of saying, “This is how much power I command; you’d better be quiet about me.”

Trump’s also threatening Congressional Republicans, with a White House source saying that anybody signing onto Ro Khanna and Tom Massey’s discharge petition (calling for the full release of the Epstein files and related info) were committing a “hostile act.”

House Speaker “Little Mike” Johnson piled on, telling the victims as he lied to their faces that he was committed to “transparency” and “justice” and then leaving the meeting to whip against the vote to release those very documents.

Putin’s clearly reading the tea leaves: he’s launched these past few days the largest, most massive, and most deadly air raids against Ukraine of the entire three-year war. Over 500 drones and two dozen ballistic missiles hit the democratic nation overnight Tuesday, most focusing on its energy grid.

Lev Parnas, once close to Trump, says this is the new Trump/Putin strategy: destroy Ukraine’s power grid and then, when winter sets in and people are freezing to death, Trump will swoop in and “negotiate peace” that screws Ukraine and gives Putin whatever he wants.

Meanwhile, China’s President Xi Jinping said on Wednesday — using code words that every diplomat in the world heard with ringing clarity — that he’s going to take Taiwan.

Xi stood with the presidents or rulers of Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Cambodia, Congo, Cuba, India, Indonesia, Iran, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Laos, Malaysia, Maldives, Mongolia, Myanmar, Nepal, Pakistan, Russia, Serbia, Slovakia, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Vietnam, and Zimbabwe. That’s a significant Axis to take on the Alliance of NATO and other democratic nations.

These world leaders know what appears obvious to most Americans: if Trump were innocent of participating in Epstein’s and Maxwell’s crimes he’d have made all the records public. The sustained ferocity of his coverup not only appears to demonstrate guilt, but also reflects the weakness he’s brought to the office with his long history of criminal and grifting behavior.

And that weakness may well be exactly what will motivate those fascist leaders to move soon to end the pesky democracies around the planet and, finally after 249 years, again make the world safe for autocrats.

So, what do we do?

In 1937, President Franklin D. Roosevelt said, in his “Quarantine Speech” calling for the democratic nations of the world to essentially quarantine the fascist nations:

“Without a declaration of war and without warning or justification of any kind, civilians, including vast numbers of women and children, are being ruthlessly murdered with bombs from the air. In times of so-called peace, ships are being attacked and sunk by submarines without cause or notice. Nations are fomenting and taking sides in civil warfare in nations that have never done them any harm. Nations claiming freedom for themselves deny it to others.

“Innocent peoples, innocent nations, are being cruelly sacrificed to a greed for power and supremacy which is devoid of all sense of justice and humane considerations.”

We are there again. Roosevelt wasn’t able to stop the inexorable metastasis of fascism across the planet that erupts every four generations, and now, 80 years later, Trump is unlikely to succeed at preventing another world war where FDR failed.

Nonetheless, we all need to do everything we can to restore decency and democracy to America — including exposing Trump’s crimes, so he can no longer be threatened or blackmailed by Putin, et al — and stand against this new Axis of Tyrants. There really is no other option.

This Trump surrender was the worst yet

Lindsay Graham says he believes Donald Trump is ready to “crush” the Russian economy if that country’s leader, Vladimir Putin, doesn’t agree to peace talks with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.

“Trump believes that if Putin doesn’t do his part, that he’s going to have to crush his economy,” the US senator told reporters in South Carolina last week. “Because you’ve got to mean what you say.”

This is an amazing thing to say.

Just three days prior, Trump met with Putin in Alaska for three hours. Beforehand, he said there would be “severe consequences” if Putin didn’t agree to a ceasefire in the war in Ukraine. Trump said he “solved six wars in six months,” implying that this one would be no different.

Then he choked.

His demands melted into the air. He was all smiles, all handshakes, all deference verging on reverence. The leader of the world’s most powerful military emerged from his meeting with a cut-rate tyrant as if he’d been dogwalked. It was so bad even a Fox reporter had to admit it looked like “Putin came in and steamrolled, got right into what he wanted to say and got his photo next to the president and then left.”

The Washington Post’s George Will, who is not a liberal, also saw the plain truth.

“The former KGB agent currently indicted for war crimes felt no need to negotiate with the man-child,” Will said (my stress). “The president’s thunderous demands — a 50-day deadline, a 10-day deadline, 'severe consequences,' a ceasefire before negotiations — all were just noise."

So yes. Senator Graham is right. You’ve got to mean what you say. Trump doesn’t. Indeed, he never does. That’s why he choked.

Because of that, he and other Trump allies have spent their time in the days after that disastrous “summit” trying to rewrite history in order to protect the president from the consequences of his own weakness.

Graham now says Trump is ready to “crush” the Russian economy, as if Trump really were the big strong man he portrays himself to be, rather than the milksop who actually called Putin “the boss” and later phoned him during a meeting with European leaders, as if getting permission.

But Graham isn’t alone.

“The president has this uncanny ability to bend people to his sensible way of thinking,” US envoy Steve Witkoff told Sean Hannity last night.

“He does it each and every time,” he said. “I've never seen anything quite like it and I've been around some master dealmakers. He is the legend as far as I'm concerned. His policy prescriptions are so pragmatic and so sensible and in a distorted world, he’s recalibrating it all. It’s simply remarkable. And every single leader that I have met in my travels, they say the same things I do. Every single one of them.”

Witkoff is the envoy who Anne Applebaum said was “an amateur out of his depth” who “misunderstood his last meeting with Putin in Moscow if he thought that the Alaska summit was going to be successful.”

On Fox, noted international relations expert Montana Congressman Ryan Zinke said: “President Trump has done an unbelievable job against long odds,” before speculating, oddly, that “it'll end up probably with a land bridge between the Crimean peninsula and Russia.”

He also said that Trump “hasn’t changed where his mission focus is. It’s peace.”

Peace through surrender.

Isn’t that the most striking thing? The US is unrivaled in its military and diplomatic might. We could end this war, now. As Applebaum said, “arm Ukraine, expand sanctions, stop the lethal drone swarms, break the Russian economy, and win the war. Then there will be peace.”

But Trump chooses weakness.

He chooses to look strong, not be strong.

And no matter what his Republican allies in the Congress do to cover up that fact, they themselves cannot make him. They, too, are weak.

Graham said the clock is ticking and that Trump must “impose steep tariffs on countries that are fueling Russia’s invasion of Ukraine by buying its oil, gas, uranium, and other exports,” according to the AP, and such threats might push Putin to the negotiating table.

“If we don’t have this thing moving in the right direction by the time we get back, then I think that plan B needs to kick in,” Graham told the AP.

Plan B would be Congress acting without Trump.

Which means there is no plan B.

The Republicans are weak, because they surrendered their power, first to the rightwing media apparatus, then to Trump, who surrendered his power to Putin, who dominates the rightwing media apparatus.

And has for a decade.

We can speculate about the dirt Putin has on Trump, but fact is, he could mortally wound the president by turning the world’s biggest firehose of disinformation away from his “woke” enemies and toward him. Trump’s base is already confused by his refusal to release “the Epstein files.” Russian propaganda could be deployed to savagely widen the already broad gap between him and the MAGA faithful.

More likely, though, the Kremlin could sow doubt about Trump’s alleged strength. He’s all talk, no walk. We saw it. Russian state media brags about it. Echoes are now bouncing around mainstream media.

While Graham was shielding Trump from his weakness, the UK’s biggest conservative paper ran this hed and dek: “European rearmament is pushing Trump into irrelevance on Ukraine. This vain, vacillating, gullible US president no longer commands the West.”

The importance of the rightwing media apparatus to the Republicans is evident in their efforts at damage control. Trump showed his whole ass. Now it’s up to allies to persuade his supporters that they did not see what they saw or if they did, it was the most amazing thing ever.

They have a lot of work to do. The Economist reported that Americans have a -14 approval rating of his handling of foreign policy. The public knows next to nothing about global affairs, but we know what fear looks like. After meeting Putin, Trump looked scared. And I think he looked scared, because Putin reminded him of something important.

He who can destroy a thing controls it.

So Trump chooses weakness.

And the rest of his party follows.

'There is no chance of winning!' Trump makes grim declaration about Russia's Ukraine war

President Donald Trump fired off at former President Joe Biden Thursday for his handling of the Russo-Ukraine War, alleging that Biden “would not let Ukraine fight back, only defend,” despite history saying otherwise.

“Crooked and grossly incompetent Joe Biden would not let Ukraine fight back, only defend,” Trump wrote in an online post on his social media platform Truth Social. “How did that work out? Regardless, this is a war that would have never happened if I were president — zero chance. Interesting times ahead!”

Trump’s allegation, however, flies in the face of years’ worth of Biden’s policy on Ukraine.

While the Biden administration was initially hesitant to send Ukraine offensive weapons, those hesitations were soon caved on as Biden walked back previous positions in sending the Eastern European nation increasingly-powerful weapons like tanks, F-16 fighter jets and long-range missiles.

Biden’s willingness to provide Ukraine with offensive weapons was so pronounced that even some of Trump’s most loyal allies began to criticize the administration for its provocation, such as Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-AL).

“If they don’t quit what they’re doing, they’re going to force us into a third world war,” Tuberville said back in 2023 to Alabama Daily News, speaking on Biden approving increasingly-powerful offensive weapons to be shipped to Ukraine.

Nevertheless, Trump insisted that Biden had only permitted Ukraine to act defensively against Russia, and in an unclear comparison, likened the Biden policy on Ukraine to illegal immigration in the United States.

“It is very hard, if not impossible, to win a war without attacking an invaders country,” Trump wrote. “It’s like a great team in sports that has a fantastic defense, but is not allowed to play offense. There is no chance of winning! It is like that with Ukraine and Russia.”

This groveling surrender to Trump might be the worst of all

Let’s start here today: Our legacy media is dead.

For some, this pronouncement is long overdue, and might be best labeled “old news.” For people like me, who spent their professional life in a newsroom as part of a team that turned around timely content called “real news” to their readers, while also calling power into account, this declaration officially wipes out everything I once believed in and held dear.

Watching our old, tired legacy media like The New York Times and The Washington Post cover this Russia charade, mislabeled a “summit,” and Trump's meeting with European leaders in Washington this week has completely knocked me over the edge. I’ll let you tell me how badly the gushing toothies on TV are botching this up, because I quit watching their 24/7 screeching with any regularity years ago.

We have reached the point where these incompetents can’t even get the nut of the story right. It’s no longer news that the nuclear-powered narcissist, Donald Trump, is posturing to get every spotlight turned in his direction no matter how big or small a story. Yet the media comes running with their hair on fire every time he beckons.

However … It IS news — URGENT NEWS — when European prime ministers and presidents drop everything they are doing and fly into the United States with their hair on fire to oppose the actions of its unstable, authoritarian leader, and back the man who is fighting for his life and his country’s democracy, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.

It’s news because THAT HAS NEVER HAPPENED BEFORE.

Yet, in their breathless play-by-play coverage you never saw it reported that way. Instead, here is what we got all day Monday and into Tuesday as these incompetent morons, who dare to call themselves “journalists” were led around by their noses, which are always in the general vicinity of Trump’s two-ton ass:

"Trump just said this!"
"Now Trump said that!"
“Trump is doing this!”
“And now Trump is doing that!”
"What will Trump do next????”

There was literally no fact-checking, nor important context. They just repeated his endless bullshit that was all designed to go absolutely nowhere, because the most important person in these negotiations wasn’t even on location. And why should he have been? Russian President Vladimir Putin had already emasculated the President of the United States after getting red-carpet treatment in Alaska on Friday, and had gone home to Russia to resume bombing the bejesus out of Ukraine.

So Trump did what he does best, and spoke on behalf of Putin, while arguing against everybody else.

It was appalling.

But there was our legacy media, who somehow thought reporting all that bullshit in real time was some sort of journalistic feat, when in reality they just come off like a bunch of drunken parrots.

Things are no better than they were on Thursday, when it comes to Russia’s inhumane, illegal attack on Ukraine, they are miles worse. Because God only knows what the two most dangerous leaders in the world talked about while the cameras were mercifully shut off during their dangerous, private meetings the past five days.

I can guess it sounded something like this:

PUTIN: “Never forget who put you in office, Donald.”
TRUMP: “No worries there, sir. I got everybody, but mostly the idiots in the media, eating out of my hand.”

Here is the vitally important context I didn’t read ONCE in all the legacy media’s atrocious coverage of this sh–– show the past 24 hours:

“Putin, who Trump actually asked for help in the 2016 campaign …”

Or

“Putin, who Trump has repeatedly fawned over, even calling the murderous dictator among other things ‘a genius' …’”

Or

“Putin, who Trump surrendered to in Helsinki in 2018, when pressed if there was Russia interference into the 2016 election, when his own Republican Party had determined there was …”

Or

“Putin, who after winning the 2007 Time Magazine Man of the Year Award, received a letter from Trump that gushed: “As you probably have heard, I’m a big fan of yours!”

Or

“Putin, who allowed Trump to host his Miss Universe beauty pageant in Moscow in 2013, and received yet another note from Trump which read: “Will you become my new best friend?”

I could go on and on here, but you get the point, even if the dangerous dummies in our legacy media don’t: Any relationship Trump has with his BFF Putin is at best suspect, but most likely is completely compromised.

Shouldn’t readers and viewers be aware of this right off the top and reminded of it repeatedly?

And what of the 50-plus times Trump said on the 2024 campaign trail that he would end Russia's attack on Ukraine during his first 24 hours in office. I read scores of stories in the legacy media Monday, and this was never reported even ONCE. Further, he was not asked about this even ONCE in those weird sit-downs with the press in that grotesque, golden room, where his tie drags on the floor and he does that weird accordion thing with his hands.

They aren't even bothering to try to hold this lying SOB accountable anymore.

And what about that lying? Because it is all this blabbering loudmouth does.

In just the last 10 days he’s told preposterous lies about Russia, the 2020 election, Jeffrey Epstein, jobs, crime, inflation, Project 2025, Joe Biden, Barack Obama, and mail-in voting.

Add this to the tens of thousands of times he has lied in his professional life about all things big and small, and you’d think he would have lost ALL benefit of the doubt 10 years ago.

Instead, our legacy media still hangs on his every word.

It is ABSURD.

They don’t even make lying a small feature of the story, when in fact all his lying IS THE DAMN STORY.

There is not one report or story about about Trump that should make it past the third paragraph without this being inserted for context:

“Trump, who has a long history of lying about <insert subject> …”

WHY isn’t this being done?

Here is the thing that should keep us all awake at night: If Trump, a convicted felon, can wipe out the truth — and he is well on his way — he can wipe out everything this country was founded on, and begin working to wipe us out, and everything we once stood for.

This is exactly what Putin, and every other fascist leader on earth wants.

It can never stop being headline news that Trump is the most notorious liar in the history of the United States.

It should have never become headline news that our legacy media decided to quit reporting that.

But here we are, and neither one should ever be trusted again.


Trump exposed this startling truth — and it got America steamrolled

I don’t know why, but few are saying what’s plainly obvious about the president’s “summit” with his Russian counterpart. He’s afraid of him.

Donald Trump made all kinds of noise about “severe consequences” that Vladimir Putin would face if he did not agree to a ceasefire with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in the war in Ukraine.

Trump created conditions, however feeble they may have seemed, in which he appeared to negotiate from a position of strength. “I’ve solved six wars in the last six months,” he said before the trip — all lies.

Then, when the moment came, nothing. Trump got nothing.

Not so for Putin.

“The extraordinary meeting at Anchorage’s Elmendorf Air Force base has ended Putin’s pariah status and brought Washington’s stance on the war closer to Moscow’s,” the Financial Times reported.

“And Putin did not need to budge an inch.”

Liberals and Democrats tend to think Trump gets along with Putin due to them being birds of a feather. Putin is a strongman. Trump is a strongman. Both love power. Both hate liberal democracy. While true, that doesn’t explain the president’s dramatic heel-turn.

But fear does.

The White House clearly believed it was important, not only for the meeting but for the president’s image at home, for him to look strong beforehand. Professor Heather Cox Richardson has the context:

“US envoy Steve Witkoff had been visiting Moscow for months to talk about a ceasefire between Russia and Ukraine when he heard through a back channel that Putin might be willing to talk to Trump in person to offer a deal. On August 6, after a meeting in Moscow, Witkoff announced that Russia was ready to retreat from some of the land it occupies in Ukraine. This apparent concession came just two days before the August 8 deadline Trump had set for severe sanctions against Russia unless it agreed to a ceasefire.”

But then, Putin said “Not gonna happen.” Moreover, Putin said Trump really got a raw deal with the 2020 election. He totally won. So unfair! And with that combo of flex and flattery, Putin “got what he wanted — to play for time and press his military advantage over Ukraine,” exiled Russian political scientist Ilya Matveyev told the Financial Times.

Here’s how it looked to Fox reporter Jacqui Heinrich: “The way that it felt in the room was not good. It did not seem like things went well. And it seemed like Putin came in and steamrolled, got right into what he wanted to say and got his photo next to the president and then left.”

She went on:

“Of course, that is only the piece of the picture we have right now and certainly President Trump, who is the host and who is the president, would not want to enable something that would make him look weak.”

Too late.

Now the president can be “safely ignored,” Anne Applebaum wrote.

“If the US is not willing to use any economic, military, or political tools to help Ukraine, if Trump will not put any diplomatic pressure on Putin or any new sanctions on Russian resources, then the US president’s fond wish to be seen as a peacemaker can be safely ignored,” she said.

She even enumerated the moments of disgrace.

“It was embarrassing for Americans to welcome a notorious wanted war criminal on their territory. It was humiliating to watch an American president act like a happy puppy upon encountering the dictator of a much poorer, much less important state, treating him as a superior. It’s excruciating to imagine how badly Trump’s diplomatic envoy … misunderstood his last meeting with Putin in Moscow if he thought that the Alaska summit was going to be successful.”

I don’t know if Putin has something on the president (kompromat). I don’t know if Trump is in Putin’s pocket. I can speculate, but I don’t know. What I do know is Trump talked a good game and choked. I know he humiliated himself and America. And I know something else.

All this is rooted in cowardice. It’s safe to attack friends, because they won’t fight back, because they’re friends, but it’s not safe to attack enemies, because they will fight back, and because they are enemies.

Trump’s MO has always been to do whatever he wants, whenever he wants, to whomever he wants, safe in the knowledge that no one has the will to stop him. That holds up as long as the “no one” in question is American or an American ally. Actual enemies, though? Nuh-uh.

A few months ago, Trump was “very tough” with Zelensky in the Oval Office. He was less “tough” with him on Monday, but Trump knows Zelensky will never fight back, as Zelensky needs America’s support to defeat an even more malicious opponent.

But Putin?

He gets smiles, handshakes, the red-carpet treatment. He gets photos of himself riding in “The Beast” with the United States president and of American troops seeming to kneel in front of his plane, all of which is for the purpose of make-believing back home that Russia is once again America’s equal and that the glory days of empire are soon to return.

All because Trump is scared.

It’s a pattern we’ve seen so often Robert Armstrong came up with an acronym to memorialize it: TACO or “Trump Always Chickens Out.”

Trump “does not have a very high tolerance for market and economic pressure, and will be quick to back off when tariffs cause pain,” Armstrong said.

Same thing with foreign affairs. According to one analysis, Trump has threatened “severe consequences” 22 times against adversaries, but pulled the trigger just twice. He has chickened out even in the face of America’s weakest foes. For instance, the Taliban conceded absolutely nothing in exchange for American troops leaving the country in 2021.

Liberals and Democrats spend a lot of time thinking about the unseen. Is Trump compromised? Is he in Russian pay? And so on. But we don’t spend enough time on the seen, which is damning enough all by itself.

Trump is the biggest chicken on the planet.

Putin knows it.

If only the Democrats would come around.

Dear America, Nobody makes a deal like Trump. NOBODY

Dear Americans Who Can’t Stop Rooting For Me No Matter What,

First, I just want to say I am still a little jet logged from flying around the world and back and climbing on top of that incredible summit in Alaska with the great President Putin and looking down on people. So I hope you will bare with me, as you read this Very Important Letter today.

Thank you in advance, and you are welcome in the future.

To begin with, you should know that my oxygen levels are incredibly high, and even the Russian diplomats couldn’t believe how hot my ankles looked after that grueling meeting in which I brought peace back to Alaska, hope to Russia, and only a tiny bit of hurt to Ukraine — much, much less then anybody could have ever expected.

One of the diplomats who couldn’t stop looking at my ankles, a very pretty blonde girl may I say, said through an interrogator that they expected to see my ankles swollen up like a balloon after the press reports from our dirty, rotten, disgusting media here in the states. Instead, she told me through that interrogator that she saw a champion of a man, whose ankles looked no older than 50, and probably even less than that. And remember: She has a diploma.

I took this as a great compliment after climbing that summit, and meeting their leaders on equal footing with my incredibly trim ankles.

Right off the top, I want to inform you that I will have to keep this Very Important Letter short today, because I want to concentrate on everything I did at this grueling summit, and keep the emphasis away from what didn’t happen with Jeffrey Epstein and all those girls. I think we’ve all heard enough about that. Besides, I prefer screwing President Zelensky instead.

That’s a joke.

Or maybe not.

You can never tell with me, because I make a point of never smiling. Even though I should be happy, I see smiling as a tremendous weakness. You’ll notice that after everything I said in that terrific summit, Vlad was doing all the smiling. The last time I smiled on top of that summit was when Vlad got off the airplane.

That should tell you everything you need to know about how it went.

So I’d talk and Vlad would do all the smiling. He didn’t know what to make of it. Even when he told me that he felt sorry for me that the 2020 election was stolen, I didn’t smile. I did thank him for the sediments, but I made sure not to smile about it.

Truth is, I was happy that a man of such sensational stature and incredible power saw the election in 2020 exactly as I did. This is a man who constantly wins elections by tremendous margins, so I think he knows what he’s talking about when it comes to other people winning elections by tremendous margins like I do.

We have this and many, many other things in common. Except I am taller than him. Much, much taller, and a little bit smarter. Not a lot smarter, but a little, and I think that incinerates him.

I could tell the sexy Russian girl with the diploma, who was admiring my slim ankles felt the same way, too — I mean about the elections. This has all been so incredibly unfair to me, but I told her I am working my hardest to make sure our elections are as fair as Russia’s in the future. This brought a smile to her face, too, but I didn't blink.

On that note, when I am done with this letter, I will be talking with Governor Costello in Texas to jerrystander things there so we never lose the Senate again.

Everybody can thank me for that later.

But for now, you are welcome.

Because of national security emotions, I can’t get too much into what Vlad and I discussed for three hours at the top of that summit, but rest assured, he was smiling the whole time, because he isn’t as strong as I am. Without devolving too much here, I think it’s safe to say Zelensky won’t be smiling very much when I tell him how little of his country I want him to give to Vlad, so we can bring peace to the world, and I can win another Noble Peace Prize.

Basically, I just want him to give Vlad a little corner of Ukraine that’s no bigger than North Carolina or New Jersey. He won’t even notice it’s gone. In exchange, Vlad will agree not to attack Ukraine as long as I am in office. And given the terrific shape of my ankles that could be a very long time.

It is incredible that nobody thought of this before. Vlad couldn’t believe what a terrific deal it was. I’ve never seen him smile like that. Meantime, I just pouted, but inside I was jumping around like a man with 27-year-old ankles.

Nobody makes a deal like me. NOBODY.

I did tell Vlad that Russia could keep shooting and bombing Ukrainians until this fantastic deal is finalized, because that was only fair. You couldn’t believe how much he was smiling after that one. I even threw in attacking my own capital with armed troops as a bonus just to show him how serious I was.

At that point, I knew I had him right where I wanted him.

Well … I really do have to wrap this Very Important Letter up. My incredible stamina is running out of gas.

But before I meet Marco on the golf course, after talking with Governor Costello, I want to make sure to thank the men of our armed forces for their incredible job rolling out the red carpet for not one, but two powerful world leaders. Nobody’s ever asked our military men to do that before, but I had great confidence that as their Commander inside their Chief, that they could perform this tricky, dangerous duty.

Needless to say, this made Vlad smile, while I kept that powerful pout on my rigid military face. There’s no way Vlad expected red carpet treatments on my beautiful runway. Right then and there, I knew he would be eating out of my hands.

I still am shivering in my spine when I think of how powerful I was during this summit. While talking with Sean in front of 227 million people on Fox Friday night, I almost cracked a smile. Sean told me it would be OK if I smiled just a little, but I told him that wouldn't be appropriate given that I never let one smile out in front of Vlad, even though he deserved one.

Sean didn't know how to take that, but he never asked me one question that I couldn’t answer after that, and everybody I’ve talked to seemed pretty happy about it.

So that's it for now, average voters of America.

I hope you are as proud of me as I deserve. All I ever do is think about you, and how you can help keep me in office for as long as possible to make great deals on your behalf.

May God get around to blessing you and your families, long after he’s done blessing me.

DONALD J. TRUMP

'Pathetic and humiliating': MAGA fury erupts as world leaders unite to thwart Trump 'trap'

European world leaders united to announce they would attend a White House meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, leading MAGA supporters to complain online.

Friedrich Merz, Chancellor of Germany, is one of many European leaders who announced they would be accompanying Zelenskyy on a trip to meet Trump. A former Trump insider recently warned that the meeting was a "trap" by Putin and Trump against Zelenskyy.

"Tomorrow I will travel with President Zelenskyy and other European heads of state and government to Washington. We will exchange views with US President Trump on the status of peace efforts, security guarantees, territorial issues, and further support for Ukraine," Merz wrote.

This outraged many MAGA supporters, such as author Hans Mahncke.

"After little Volodymir’s meltdown at the last meeting he is back but this time must be chaperoned by Europe’s regional manager caste. The whole spectacle is so pathetic and humiliating," he wrote.

A conservative Christian account, @LIz77306, complained about the participation of Ursula von der Leyen, president of the EU Commission.

"Ursula, Do you think he will be respectful of our @Potus's efforts & extensive hours, planning to make this happen?" the user asked. "Or will he present in his normal T-Shirt attire & flipped, intitled attitude to our country & Chief? To be clear... We are the main catalyst in regards to monetary help & weapons. THIS IS NOT OUR WAR! YET WE/OUR CHIEF IS DIVERTING PRECIOUS TIME TO THIS THAT COULD BE SPENT ON AMERICANS. MAKE THIS HAPPEN & THE KILLING ON BOTH SIDES STOP!"

MAGA commentator Gunther Eagleman said on Sunday, "Zelensky is going to f--- this up, isn’t he?"

An account called Maga Puppy said of the Ukrainian leader's red line on giving land, "I don't think Zelensky had the clout he imagined. Even with US sanctions Russia can really ramp it up and push in even further."

Economics professor Roman Sheremeta had another take, saying, "This is the right move."

"Zelensky won’t be flying to Trump alone — he’ll be joined by European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and other top European leaders. His plane has already departed with a stop in Brussels. Media report that NATO Secretary General Rutte, French President Macron, UK Prime Minister Starmer, German Chancellor Merz, Italian Prime Minister Meloni, and Finnish President Stubb may also fly to Washington," he wrote Sunday. "More names could be added. A united front. Europe stands with Ukraine."

Akash Maniam chimed in, "Forget cards, Zelenskyy's bringing the whole deck to Washington."