All posts tagged "vladimir putin"

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.

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.

With this Putin-inspired attack, Trump crossed a line no president ever dared touch

On Monday, Donald Trump crossed another line that no president in our history has ever dared to touch. With the echo of Vladimir Putin’s whisper in his ear, in front of President Volodymyr Zelensky and seven other European leaders, Trump announced he’s preparing an executive order to ban mail-in ballots and even outlaw voting machines across America ahead of the 2026 midterm elections.

Sitting in front of the Chancellor of Germany and the Prime Minister of Great Britain — both nations that allow and even encourage mail-in voting — Trump said:

“Mail-in ballots are corrupt mail-in ballots. You can never have a real democracy with mail-in ballots, and we as a Republican Party are gonna do everything possible that we get rid of mail-in ballots. We're gonna start with an executive order that’s being written right now by the best lawyers in the country to end mail-in ballots because they’re corrupt. And, you know that we’re the only country in the world, I believe, I may be wrong, but just about the only country in the world that uses it because of what’s happened.”

This is not just a partisan maneuver. It’s an open assault on the Constitution, a grotesque power grab, and a direct threat to the foundation of democracy itself. And it’s happening in real time, in broad daylight, with a criminally compliant Republican Party cheering him on.

Republicans hate mail-in voting for multiple reasons.

  • First, for people who’re paid by the hour, mail-in voting increases participation because they can fill out their ballots at the kitchen table after work. Republicans don’t want people to vote, and have introduced more than 400 pieces of legislation in the past three years nationwide to make voting more difficult.
  • Second, mail-in voting makes voters better informed and less vulnerable to sound-byte TV ads because, while perusing that ballot at the kitchen table, they can look up candidates on their laptops and get more detail and information. Republicans hate informed voters and rely heavily on often-dishonest advertisements to swing voters.
  • Third, mail-in ballots — because they arrive in the mail weeks before the election — give voters an early chance to discover if they’ve been the victim of Republican voter-roll purges, one of their favorite tactics to pre-rig elections.
  • Fourth, mail-in ballots end the GOP trick of understaffing and under-resourcing polling places in minority neighborhoods, leading to hours-long lines. Hispanic voters generally wait 150 percent longer than white voters, and Black voters must endure a 200 percent longer wait; mail-in ballots put an end to this favorite of the GOP’s voter suppression efforts.

Trump, knowing all this, couldn’t help himself yesterday, finally blurting out his real reason for wanting to end mail-in voting in America:

“We got to stop mail-in voting, and the Republicans have to lead the charge. The Democrats want it because they have horrible policy. If you [don’t] have mail-in voting, you’re not gonna have many Democrats get elected. That’s bigger than anything having to do with redistricting, believe me.”

Once again, Trump is ignoring the law and the Constitution, which explicitly delegates the administration of elections to the states and Congress, not presidential executive orders.

That’s not some vague norm or debatable tradition: it’s written into the very DNA of our system of government. States set the rules, unless Congress — not the president — overrides them. States decide how their citizens vote, as the Constitution’s Article I, Section 4, Clause 1 dictates:

“The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations, except as to the Places of chusing Senators.”

Yet here we have a president declaring that he alone will dictate the terms of elections nationwide, in direct violation of two centuries of law and precedent. This is not only unconstitutional, it’s tyrannical.

When a president asserts powers he does not have, with the full knowledge that they aren’t his to wield, he’s announcing to the country that the rule of law no longer constrains him. That’s the definition of dictatorship.

And what makes this even more obscene is the source of Trump’s inspiration. According to multiple reports, Trump’s sudden rant on mail-in ballots followed a private conversation with Putin, who reportedly told Trump that mail-in voting was the reason he lost in 2020.

The man occupying the Oval Office is now taking advice about how to rig American elections from the very dictator who has spent his career poisoning journalists, jailing opponents, and staging sham referendums to annex entire countries.

It’s bad enough that Trump has always been Putin’s toady, but now we see the Kremlin effectively writing U.S. election law. If Jefferson, Madison, or Lincoln were alive to hear this, they would spit.

Mail-in voting is not a scam. It’s not a trick. It’s how tens of millions of Americans — Republicans, Democrats, independents — exercise their right to vote.

Seniors rely on it. People with disabilities rely on it. Military service members overseas rely on it. Hourly workers who can’t take a day off rely on it. Parents with young children rely on it. Rural voters, who often live miles from polling places, rely on it.

And every study, every audit, every bipartisan commission has found mail-in voting to be secure, safe, and reliable. Five states do it exclusively; we’ve had it more than two decades here in Oregon with nary a single scandal or problem. To call it fraudulent is a lie. To ban it is voter suppression on a scale this country has never seen.

And voting machines? Trump is openly declaring that he’ll return us to mind-numbingly slow hand-counting of ballots, a tactic straight from the authoritarian playbook designed to create chaos, delays, and endless opportunities to dispute the results in 2026 and 2028.

I’ve had concerns about voting machines and Windows-based tabulators for decades, but my solution isn’t to end them. Instead, we should use machines owned by the government itself, generating paper ballots and operating transparently on open-source software with every election subject to sample audits.

Instead of trying to make elections more secure, Trump’s laying the groundwork for election theft in plain sight. This isn’t subtle: it’s the loud declaration of a man preparing to overturn the will of the voters, with the blessing of a foreign adversary, and with a Republican Party too craven to object.

If Trump succeeds in outlawing mail-in ballots and voting machines, millions of Americans will simply not be able to vote. Seniors in nursing homes, service members abroad, people with disabilities, single parents, rural citizens: they will all be disenfranchised overnight. And make no mistake: that’s the point.

This is not about integrity. This is not about security. This is about shrinking the electorate to a size that Republicans believe will guarantee them victory forever.

Republicans know they can’t win free and fair elections in much of America. They know their policies are unpopular. They know their agenda is toxic.

So they cheat. They gerrymander districts into grotesque shapes that make a mockery of representative government. They purge voters from the rolls. They criminalize voter registration drives. They intimidate voters at the polls.

And now, at Trump’s command and Putin’s urging, they want to ban the very methods by which millions of Americans vote. This is not politics as usual. This is the slow-motion strangulation of democracy.

Every American who believes in self-government must rise up against this. Governors must prepare to defy such an executive order in court and in practice. State legislatures must assert their constitutional authority.

Attorneys general must be ready to sue. And ordinary citizens must take to the streets, the phones, the ballot box, and every civic space available to declare that this will not stand. Because if it does, we’ll have surrendered the very essence of the American experiment.

We’ve been here before in spirit if not in form.

Ronald Reagan’s campaign cut a deal with the Iranian Ayatollahs to hang onto the hostages until after the election. Richard Nixon tried to sabotage our democracy by killing Lyndon Johnson's peace negotiations with Vietnam and followed-up with burglaries and cover-ups when he thought Democrats were onto him. He was forced to resign. George W. Bush and the GOP stopped the counting of votes in Florida and handed the presidency to themselves. That assault has scarred our politics for decades.

But never — not once in 250 years — has a president openly declared that he will strip states of their constitutional right to run elections, end mail-in voting, and ban voting machines altogether. This is unprecedented, authoritarian, and it must be stopped.

It’s also just one in a broad spectrum of attacks Republicans have launched against your right to vote, with the SAVE Act — which will prevent women from voting if their birth certificate and drivers’ license have different names on them and they’ve never had an official change-of-name in the courts — teed up in the US Senate. All while millions are being purged from the voting rolls as you read these words.

This is the moment when the American people must decide whether they still believe in democracy. If we shrug, if we accept this as just more noise from a corrupt and broken con man, we will lose it. If we wait for someone else to act, we will lose it. If we tell ourselves the courts will save us, we may be bitterly disappointed.

The survival of democracy has never been guaranteed. It has always required vigilance, courage, and action. Now it requires all three from each of us.

Trump’s promised executive order is not just a legal maneuver. It’s a declaration of war against the American people. It’s the dream of every tyrant: to control who votes and who does not, to dictate the rules of elections so that the outcome is predetermined.

What Putin and Trump are proposing is not democracy. It’s not freedom. It’s not America.

And the Republicans who are enabling this treachery are as guilty as Trump himself. They’re betraying their oaths, their constituents, and our country. History will remember them not as conservatives or patriots, but as the gravediggers of our Republic.

This is the line. This is the moment. We cannot let Trump and his cronies bulldoze democracy into the ground at Putin’s command. Every patriot, every progressive, every independent, every honest conservative who still believes in the Constitution must join together and say no.

No to dictatorship. No to disenfranchisement. No to treason.

If we fail now, there may not be another chance.

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

This secret greedy deal proves Trump's summit is a cynical farce

This is what happens when cynical, greedy, amoral billionaires and psychopaths run a country.

The Times of London (Murdoch-owned) is reporting that billionaire Steve Witkoff, billionaire Donald Trump, and billionaire Vladimir Putin have worked out a model behind the scenes to solve the Ukraine problem: just make it like Gaza.

They’re planning, according to this reporting, to fully respect the borders of Ukraine and the country’s sovereignty, but with one catch. Just like Israel did with Gaza, Ukraine can “self-govern” but all political and economic decisions will be made or approved by Moscow, all funds flowing through Moscow, just like the governments of Gaza and the West Bank are subservient to the whims of Netanyahu and the Israeli Knesset.

It's essentially a plan to return Ukraine to the subordinate status it had when it was part of the old Soviet Union, which Putin appears committed to reestablishing, country by country.

Trump’s Senior Director for Counterterrorism, former Sinclair Broadcasting commentator Sebastian Gorka, went all “peace for our time” Neville Chamberlain with his apparent endorsement of the idea:

“We recognize the reality on the ground and we have one priority above all else, whether it’s the Middle East or whether it’s Ukraine. It’s to stop the bloodshed. Everything else comes after the bloodshed has been halted.”

Meanwhile, NBC News reports that Netanyahu is now moving to Stage Two of his apparent Gaza plan: shipping the citizens of Gaza, who’ve lived there for millennia, to the hellhole of South Sudan.

I say “hellhole” from personal experience. I was working in South Sudan about a decade ago with an international relief organization, 15 miles from the Darfur border, distributing food, medicine, and tents to refugees fleeing the Janjaweed murderers.

We could see the villages burning on the horizon as desperate people — nearly all women, children and the elderly, as the military-age men had all been killed — flooded into the region. Here’s an excerpt from the diary I kept during that trip:

“The land here in South Sudan is vast and flat. The 45,000 people around me share one single hand-pumped well (drilled a decade ago by the United Nations), and no other infrastructure beyond that. No buildings, no roads, no septic or sewage, no schools, no clinics or hospitals, no stores or even storehouses, nothing. Most live on a patch of hard-packed reddish dirt about ten feet square with a few of their possessions marking the perimeters of their ‘home,’ sleeping on the dirt, or on a ragged piece of cloth or, the lucky few, a piece of salvaged tarp from some previous relief mission. Stick-thin women and children with bellies swollen by malnutrition outnumber the men, whose peers were murdered by the Janjaweed or taken as slaves to the north.

“The air is so hot and dry that even smells of body odor vanish. My nose is encrusted with dust. The land is barren of any vegetation at all other than the occasional large tree with roots deep enough to reach into the water table thirty or so feet below us. Dust devils blow up and around, tiny cyclones that seem to erupt from nowhere amidst air that is so hot and dry it feels as if we’ve been wrapped in glass wool insulation and tossed into a furnace’s heating duct.

“One relief worker I met on the way here, who was leaving the Darfur area via Juba (the capital city with only three short paved streets) on the same small plane that brought us in, said, ‘If there is a hell, it is much like South Sudan.’

“This being a refugee community, it is thick with disease, as refugees not only bring diseases with them but are among the most vulnerable of all populations to disease. There’s Buruli ulcer, a flesh-eating and incurable (other than by surgery) disease caused by a bacteria related to leprosy: I saw a case of it yesterday in a little girl who had just arrived from Darfur. She had a hole in the side of her shin that was about four inches long, two inches wide, and three-quarters of an inch deep, nearly down to the bone.

“Ebola was first discovered here and in nearby Zaire. Eighty percent of the world’s cases of Guinea Worm disease are here in Southern Sudan: the microscopic eggs are in the guts of tiny, almost invisible sand fleas that infest food and water, and about three months after eating one, the worms hatch. Over the course of the next year they grow throughout the body, often boring out through the skin causing an ulcer that can take months before the worm fully emerges, causing dreadful and incapacitating pain. There is no cure.

“In South Sudan sleeping sickness — caused by a parasite named trypanosoma that’s transmitted by the bite of local flies — kills more people than AIDS. This is also the world epicenter of onchocerciasis — another worm that grows more than 1 1/2 feet long inside the body and spreads thousands of eggs to all the organs — soon to become more worms — over the decade or so it takes to kill a person. Sometimes the smaller worms work their way into the cornea, causing blindness which gives this parasite its common name: ‘River Blindness.’

“There’s also visceral leishmaniasis, tuberculosis, leprosy, yellow fever, dengue fever, various bacteria and mycoplasma that cause severe and deadly forms of pneumonia, and many, many of the people in this village are infected with malaria (a particularly nasty, drug-resistant, and usually fatal form, P. falciparum, is the most common here in Southern Sudan).”

Following Netanyahu’s advice, Trump is also negotiating with South Sudan to take in America’s “illegals” in exchange for cash. They’ve already taken in eight people — none of them even Africans — who Trump shipped over there last month.

Nice guys, those two leaders of Israel and America. Along with Putin, “the three caballeros” show what happens when countries are run by entirely self-interested and morbidly rich sociopaths.

Forget about commitments, duty, or loyalty: Trump has never, in his entire life, been big on keeping a promise; just ask his three wives or the thousands of small businesses, workers, and customers he’s screwed.

So, it makes perfect sense that he and his billionaire land developer buddy Witkoff, who’s now negotiating with Putin and Netanyahu even though he has zero diplomatic experience, would go along with Putin’s Great New Idea to Gaza-ize Ukraine.

In fact, in 1994 the US, Ukraine, Great Britain, and Russia signed the Budapest Accord, an agreement that promised America and Britain would defend Ukraine’s borders in exchange for them giving up to Russia what was then the third-largest nuclear weapons arsenal in the world, left over from the old Soviet Union. Putin violated it when he took Ukraine’s Crimea region, and Obama doubled down on the betrayal by largely ignoring the annexation. Biden only reluctantly gave Ukraine aid, and Trump has blocked US military aid for eight months now.

Thus, for the first time since Germany invaded Poland and kicked off World War II in 1939, one European nation has invaded another, seized territory, and claimed it as their own.

This violation of international law and national sovereignty clearly doesn’t bother Trump or his Republican toadies; just look at his talk about annexing Greenland or making Canada the 51st state in a dime-store imitation of Hitler and Putin.

Neither Trump nor the GOP that enables him have any moral compass or core values beyond reestablishing white supremacy, enriching the morbidly rich, and moving women, racial and religious minorities, and the queer community into second-class status subordinate to white “Christian” men.

How else could you explain their behavior?

I get it that Trump’s former lawyer just this week acknowledged that Katie Johnson had alleged Trump raped her when she was only 13 years old, and he helped deep-six the case. As an adult, she gave sworn testimony in multiple court cases, one transcript published by Politico:

“Defendant Trump initiated sexual contact with Plaintiff at four different parties. On the fourth and final sexual encounter with Defendant Trump, Defendant Trump tied Plaintiff to a bed, exposed himself to Plaintiff, and then proceeded to forcibly rape Plaintiff. During the course of this savage sexual attack, Plaintiff loudly pleaded with Defendant Trump to stop but with no effect. Defendant Trump responded to Plaintiff’s pleas by violently striking Plaintiff in the face with his open hand and screaming that he would do whatever he wanted.

“Immediately following this rape, Defendant Trump threatened Plaintiff that, were she ever to reveal any of the details of the sexual and physical abuse of her by Defendant Trump, Plaintiff and her family would be physically harmed if not killed.”

(After her testimony, Johnson received a series of death threats from Trump supporters and has since vanished.)

But will sabotaging Ukraine with a Gaza-like deal (and possible eventual resettlement to South Sudan) be enough to get us to stop talking about the possibility that the current President of the United States is a child rapist? Or is Trump just selling out Ukraine to get another billion-dollar real estate deal, this time one in Moscow and St. Petersburg?

With this administration and the entire Republican Party having lost any semblance of a moral core, commitment to democracy, or respect for the rule of law, the responsibility for the preservation of American values falls to us and the Democratic Party.

Join your local Democrats to shift the Party toward activism, join Indivisible, and any other groups dedicated to restoring democracy to the United States and defending our allies, including Ukraine.

Get out in the streets this Saturday.

And let your elected officials know where you stand (the Congressional switchboard number is 202-224-3121).

Tag, you’re it!

Even Trump's top toady is warning this appalling move risks disaster

Something treacherous looms today on the Alaskan horizon.

As Presidents Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin meet to hammer out their version of a Ukrainian-Russian “peace” plan, it could portend one of the darkest chapters in the history of American foreign policy. That’s not hyperbole.

I don’t pretend to have the chops to analyze a matter so grave. So I’ll be turning to an expert in this space.

But first, let’s review the basics. Trump’s friendship with Putin is warm and longstanding, most revealed — speaking of dark chapters — by his shocking statement in 2018 at Helsinki that he trusted Putin more than 18 intelligence agencies of his own administration.

We also know of Trump’s bitter history with our courageous ally, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. In 2019 — just a year after Helsinki — Trump attempted to extort dirt about political rival Joe Biden in exchange for release of military assistance desperately needed by Ukraine. He was impeached for that.

Trump more recently scolded and attempted to humiliate Zelensky in a shameful scene that defiled the Oval Office. It’s an indictment of our times that it did not receive more universal condemnation.

But that’s just the common knowledge piece of the story. To do full justice to the background about Putin, Trump, Ukraine and American foreign policy, I’ve decided to call upon a real expert.

His deliberate words provide clear context to why summitry between Trump and Putin poses such a grave danger to the world:

Vladimir Putin is a thug. He is a murderer. He is not someone to be admired. He is someone who has jailed and killed journalists, political opponents. He bombed a schoolhouse full of children. This is not a leader, this is a gangster.

There is no moral equivalence between the United States of America and Russia. I don’t understand people who say, well, America’s not perfect, so who are we to criticize Putin? We are not in the same category.

When you give someone like Vladimir Putin a propaganda win by standing next to him and treating him like an equal, you empower every anti-democratic movement across the globe. You demoralize our allies and you send the worst possible message to the world.

Russia is not just another country. It is an active adversary of the United States. It interfered in our elections, it continues to attack our institutions, it backs brutal dictators like Assad, and it has invaded and illegally occupied parts of Ukraine and Georgia.

When leaders in our own country excuse or even praise Putin, it tells our allies they can’t count on us — and it tells our enemies they can walk all over us.

Donald Trump is a con artist … It’s time to pull off his mask so people can see what we are dealing with here. We must not hand the nuclear codes of the United States to an erratic individual.

We cannot have a president who looks at Vladimir Putin and sees a role model. This is someone who poisons his political opponents, assassinates defectors on foreign soil, and jails dissidents.

Some people say, well, Putin’s strong. He’s decisive. That’s like admiring the mafia for its discipline. The question isn’t whether he’s effective. The question is: What is he effective at doing? The answer is crushing freedom and destabilizing the world.

We know Putin lies. We know he manipulates. And we know that when you stand next to him and suggest he’s telling the truth over our own intelligence agencies, it does enormous damage. It weakens our democracy.
The people of Ukraine are fighting and dying to resist Putin’s imperial ambitions. If we abandon them now, we won’t just be betraying an ally — we’ll be inviting more aggression, more chaos, and more suffering around the globe.
Supporting Ukraine isn’t charity. It’s in our national interest. If Russia can invade and conquer its neighbors without consequence, what message does that send to China? To Iran? To North Korea?

There are leaders in the world today who do not believe in freedom. They do not believe in elections. They believe in power, fear, and control. Vladimir Putin is one of them. We should never make the mistake of treating him as anything else.

When our own leaders parrot Russian propaganda or downplay Russia’s crimes, they’re not just being naive. They’re helping our enemies.

The minute you stop defending truth, the minute you decide it’s acceptable to ignore facts or excuse tyrants because it suits your politics, you’re no longer leading. You’re enabling.

In these perilous times, I hope every American takes these powerful words to heart from a man who today is a leading voice on U.S. foreign policy.

That would be Secretary of State Marco Rubio.

Every word above is a direct quote from Rubio’s past public commentary over a 15-year period. He spoke them forcefully during his tenure as a U.S. Senator from 2011 through 2024, as well as his 2015-16 run for the Republican presidential nomination.

Now? Not so much.

Little Marco, as Trump called him during that campaign, has shrunken in stature to the sniveling, groveling member of Trump’s cabinet that we see today rendering a tragic parody of North Korean President Kim Jong-un’s sycophants. Rubio has sold his soul — in plain view of the world — to a degree that’s arguably unprecedented.

Now Rubio prattles about Trump being the peace president. He speaks with great restraint about Putin. The old Rubio fire applies now only to Zelensky.

But Marco Rubio’s real beliefs — his real words — cannot be erased by Trumpian revisionist history.

Unlike their author, they continue to stand for something important.

This sick charade will show us Trump's true master

On Friday, on American soil, Donald Trump will entertain a brutal war criminal whose critics are poisoned, imprisoned, or dropped from high story windows. As Vladimir Putin continues reducing Ukraine to rubble, Trump will generate headlines with no grasp of the underlying history at issue.

In 1991, the dissolution of the Soviet Union led to the formation of 15 states, including Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus. In the process, Ukraine was left with an outsize stockpile of nuclear weapons, including 1,700 nuclear warheads, 176 intercontinental ballistic missiles and 44 strategic bombers, which put Ukraine in possession of the third largest nuclear arsenal in the world.

In 1994, in exchange for Ukraine’s agreement to move these weapons into Russia, the US, the UK, and Russia agreed, jointly and severally, to protect Ukraine and to secure its borders. This was consistent with the US’ global efforts to control nuclear proliferation through diplomatic, legal, and operational channels. The terms of Ukraine’s disarmament were hammered out in the 1994 Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurances.

The US, UK, and Russia gave their security assurances to Ukraine in an express exchange under which Ukraine gave up the weapons, joined the Nuclear Non-Proliferation pact, and became a non-nuclear state.

Ukraine, to its peril, kept up its end of the deal. Russia did not.

Because we effectively disarmed Ukraine three decades ago, the US has a continuing obligation to help defend it against Russian aggression, but more crucially, US military aid is prophylactic. Before Trump, the US upheld democratic values and international order, including respect for sovereignty and existing borders, as a matter of self-preservation. Last year the U.S. Department of Defense described Ukraine’s fate as a battle between freedom and tyranny, and a defense of the rules-based international order. U.S. officials shared the EU’s belief that supporting Ukraine advanced global stability and thereby U.S. national security by strengthening NATO, and perhaps most importantly, by deterring future Russian aggression.

Dangerous alliance

Enter Trump, who promised to end the Russian-Ukraine war on “Day One” of his presidency, a promise he now calls “sarcasm.”

Rejecting NATO’s interests, and dismissing military alliances that have kept America safe since WWII, Trump has instead consistently advanced Putin’s interests. Since Trump returned to the White House in January, Russia has more than doubled the number of drones and missiles fired at Ukraine; recorded aerial attacks from Moscow have now reached their highest levels since the invasion began.

Trump has paved Putin’s way, by:

There’s little doubt that Trump has nursed deep, personal animus toward Zelensky ever since Trump was caught trying to condition military aid on an “investigation” into Joe Biden’s son, which Zelensky never did. There’s also little doubt that Trump is openly protecting Putin’s interest. The question is, why?

What kompromat or career-ending evidence might Putin have over Trump? Perhaps Putin is holding proof of steps he took to assure Trump’s electoral wins, and threatening to go public if Trump crosses him. Perhaps Trump really was Russian agent Krasnov in the 1980s, as many believe. Or perhaps Trump is neck-deep in Russian money laundering schemes, including the financing of Trump Tower, going back to the 1990s.

The only thing that’s certain is that Trump’s on again, off again efforts to look like he’s “pressuring” Putin somehow never materialize. Trump last week “declared” that peace between Russia and Ukraine would involve “some swapping of territories,” parroting Russia's demands for territorial concessions from Ukraine. He then invited Putin to a personal Ukraine “summit” in Alaska, as if carving up nations after a meal were a game of monopoly.

Elevating a war criminal

By inviting Putin to meet on US soil, Trump is conferring legitimacy onto a mass murderer credibly accused of war crimes by the International Criminal Court (ICC).

Putin has been isolated since 2023, when the ICC issued arrest warrants for him and several advisors for crimes against humanity. Putin has been unable to travel outside Russia, because many of the ICC’s 125 member states have agreed to arrest and detain him if he sets foot on their territory.

The crimes for which the ICC issued the warrants include well documented abductions of over 19,000 Ukrainian children aged four months to 17 years. The Yale Humanitarian Research Lab is tracking Russia’s systematic campaign to kidnap Ukrainian children and move them to Russia where they are issued new identities and advertised for adoption after they undergo “re-education” to erase their emotional connection to their families, language and heritage. Putin has set up an online “catalog of Ukrainian children,” a photo database searchable by personal characteristics such as size and hair color, as Ukrainian parents wail.

The Alaska “summit” will be Putin’s first international trip since the warrants. European leaders question the invitation while Russians crow over it as a national coup, since Trump’s invitation came without any concessions from Putin.

A King’s College professor of Russian history said, “The symbolism of holding the Trump-Putin summit in Alaska is horrendous — as though designed to demonstrate that borders can change, land can be bought and sold.”

No one knows what the outcome will be, but it’s a safe bet that Trump will issue platitudes that sound tough on Russia while delivering Putin’s ultimate goal: cementing his territorial gains in Ukraine, thereby rewarding Russia for its aggression.

Zelensky will reject the plan, Trump will demand the Nobel peace prize, and pundits will continue to wonder if Putin’s get out of jail free card is a product of blackmail.

  • Sabrina Haake is a columnist and 25+ year federal trial attorney specializing in 1st and 14th A defense. Her Substack, The Haake Take, is free

Dear America: How Trump's bizarre ramblings might roll from his mind

THE WHITE HOUSE

Sunday, August 10, 2025, 4:11 a.m.

Dear Americans who need my incredible strength even more than I do right now,

After the terrific and fanatical success of the Very Important Letter that I wrote to you exclusively using only my right hand last week, I was urged by Stephen Miller and those who are almost as close to me in my family, to write another letter to you this week.

You are welcome in advance for accepting the request, even if I would rather be on the golf course tackling our nation’s most distressing problems with an 8-iron.

Just so you know, I will be using my right hand to write this ponderous, beautiful letter again this week, even though I am very anti-dextrous and easily could have written it with my left hand.

Thank you for your understanding, and you are welcome in advance for being allowed to think about this breathtaking issue I am facing.

Before I write about incredibly important things today, I want to clear something up so that there is no confusion in the future — that is, if there even is a future …

Many of you contacted me to ask why I didn’t use my right hand to write “Thank you for your attention to this matter” in my Very Important Letter last week. Well, I only write “Thank you for your attention to this matter” when I am writing inconceivable warnings on my Truth Social account, which is free to everybody who agrees with me on everything.

I hope this clears up all the confusion, and you never ask me about this again, because I have enough on my plates.

So let’s get right down to what I know has been on your minds as we come off a week which saw everybody getting richer thanks to my implausible tariffs, gasoline dropping to 99 sense a gallon, and horrible dog and cat eating colored people being rounded up by the brave men of ICE to keep you all safe in your quiet suburbs.

No wonder I was just informed by Stephen that my sensational approvals just reached an unheard of 80 percent. Not even George Jefferson had ratings that high and he was the father of our country.

You’re welcome.

Anyway, incredibly average citizens, the rumors are true, I will be sitting down with Vlad in Alaska this week, and most likely Friday, though this could change, depending on what happens with the Epstein Files which never seem to go away.

In fact, forget I even mentioned that. There are no Epstein Files. Well, maybe a few, but I had nothing to do with them or Epstein, and never met him except for once or twice, or maybe three times.

Four times max.

When he started stealing my girls, I put my incredibly big, size 15 left foot down, and kicked him out of my spa at Mar-a-Lago, home to the thinnest broads and fattest steaks in America. That was the last I saw of him or my girls. And that’s the last thing I will say about the Epstein Files.

Now where was I?

Oh yeah, up on the White House roof. Actually, that was the other day, so forget about that, too. Nobody knows why I was up there screaming at people from that roof except for me, which makes it top secret and irrefutable. The view is really something, though.

So let’s talk about this meeting I may or may not have with Vlad on Friday or one of the other five days of the week, depending on what happens with the Epstein Files, which I really won’t be mentioning anymore in this Very Important Letter.

But why won’t they JUST GO AWAY????? WHY CAN’T SOMEBODY LIKE BILL BARR JUST KILL THEM????

Sorry, I lost my exposure … But as you know all this has been very, very unfair to me. How am I supposed to keep colored people out of the suburbs, and bring down the prices of everything when I am being hounded about something I already forgot about, and had nothing to do with?!

OK, that really is the last I’ll say about this, even though I have a lot more to say about this. And just so you know, those girls weren’t THAT young. Anybody could make a mistake … Ivanka always looked a lot older than she really was. I blame her first mother for that, whatever her name was — the old blonde we buried underneath the first hole of my beloved golf course in that safe. Anyway, Ivanka. But I mean look at her now. All grown up … blonde … legs that seem to go on forever …

Anyway, forget I mentioned that, too, if it’s possible.

Now let’s focus on Alaska.

Even though my vital intelligence tells me Vlad wants Alaska back, I fully intend to hold onto it no matter how much pressure he puts on me to give it up. That’s why I invited him to Alaska in the first place, so I can stand there like a powerful iceberg and defend it.

Even if I’m not sure I really want to ...

It has always surprised me that no other president has used any of our states as bargaining chips. I mean, who really needs 50 states? Do we need three Dakotas and four Carolinas? What if I was to trade him Alaska for Germany? Think of this. We’d get Volkswagens and strudels, and he’d get a bunch of Eskimos, Lisa Murkowski, and snow.

Again, I am not going to do this, but you’d have to be crazy not to at least entertain the terrific idea.

And because I’m a master-state chess player, I also imagine Ukraine might just come up in these powerful discussions. You never know with Vlad. He’s very clever, but I’ll be ready for that, too.

Now king me.

You have my ironclad promise I will not be trading Alaska for Ukraine. I’d like to hold onto both, unless maybe I can get him to throw in France. So he gets Alaska and we get France, Germany and the Ukraine, which I really don’t even want. You have to admit, that would be quite a deal, folks.

But we’ll see how it goes.

Friday is a long way off, and I have many, many things I want to accomplish before then, like redecorating the master bedroom in the White House. As you know, I have already gotten rid of the roses in that stupid garden RFKJ’s family planted. I have installed a patio on top of them just like we have at Mar-a-Lago. We are currently offering gold-plated crypto memberships to the new patio to the first 10 billionaires who apply. But these are going quickly so please act now.

And speaking of RFKJ, how about that incredible work he did this week getting rid of those terrible vaccines and saving me $500 million that I can now spend on renovating the White House?

Just more terrific things that were accomplished while I was wandering around on the roof hollering at people and admiring that memorial. You never know what’s going to happen each day while I’m running America. I can tell you, I certainly don’t.

But you’re welcome for all of it.

Well, now I need to give my righthand a rest. Please wish me God’s energy and strength while I prepare for my meeting with Vlad that may or may not happen depending on whether anybody keeps talking about Epstein or not.

Sending you sincere welcomes,

DONALD J. TRUMP

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