Donald Trump and JD Vance berate Zelenskyy, 2/28/2025
I voted for Trump three times. I’m no Never-Trumper. Today is the last straw.
Make no mistake about it, Trump has enunciated America First becoming America Alone. Please read my post “The American Grievance Party on the Right” for it describes what America has in store for itself under Donald Trump.
As proof, watch the reaction in Europe to the appalling behavior of J.D. Vance and Donald Trump in their meeting today with Volodymyr Zelenskyy. My sincere hope is that Ukraine succeeds in pushing Trump and America out of the way and for Europe to rise to the occasion. Trump’s moral equivalence crusade is shocking the free world.
Social media posts by Putin’s cronies are ecstatic. Ukrainians are crying, possibly seeing a U.S. abandonment of their country in the midst of a brutal invasion. America has forsaken its leadership of the free world.
For me, barring a Trump reversal, I will not display my American flag till Trump leaves office. I’m too ashamed. And I’m getting a flag of Ukraine, displaying it instead. Two flags will don my house: Israel’s and Ukraine’s. Will you do the same?
Zelenskyy, Trump, Vance in a White Houe meeting, 2/28/2025
*Please read the prior post. It’s primer on this appalling scene in the White House today, written before this blowup. Don’t let Trump apologists explain away this shameful behavior on the part of our president and vice president.
Please watch the scene in the White House of today. It’s shocking behavior . . . on the part of Trump and Vance. Some will put the blame on Zelensky. It’s nonsense. Trump and Vance are not the adults in the room. The bullying of the leader of a country, that was mercilessly invaded, bombed, and raped, by two U.S. leaders who behaved more like thugs, shouting and interrupting the man, piles shame on our country. Putin is dancing a jig, as Brezhnev would have been if Reagan and Schultz had piled on Helmut Kohl, chancellor of Germany.
This is a disgrace by Trump and Vance. It needs to be called out as such. Shame on you, Trump and Vance. Americans should be appalled.
Our president is not a grand thinker. He is, however, the head of a movement dominating the Republican Party. Its platform is grievance. Ironically, now, grievance has become the core of both the Right and the Left. For Trump and his MAGA, the rest of the world is screwing us. The outlook is mixed with some truths, a slew of exaggerations and falsehoods, and absent self-examination. The unintended aftershocks of this political rush could be an America increasingly without partners on our continent, in our hemisphere, and in Europe and Asia. Adjustments will be made by our former partners in the face of an increasingly erratic, unreliable, and at times hostile America, an America that cares a whole lot less about common interests with other nations. Do not expect this to end well.
Trump’s chief complaint is that America is not “Great” because we are patsies. Just Monday (2/24/2025), he stood before the press and announced his tariffs in a verbal cascade of victimhood (see #1),
“We’ve been mistreated badly by many countries . . . . We were taken advantage of. We were led by, in some cases, fools, because anybody that would sign documents like they signed, where they were able to take advantage of the American people, which happened over the last long period of time, except for a little four-year period that took place four years ago. But anybody that would agree to allow this to happen to our country should be ashamed of themselves.”
Per Trump, shame on you, Americans, for preferring Toyotas to Chevies.
His incoherence is glaring when he talks about the glories of tariffs. But what is foreign trade, the thing to be tariffed, taxed? It is an exchange of a foreign producer’s goods and services for a country’s currency (paper). So, a U.S. trade deficit is our possession of their valuable things, and their accumulation of our paper. Conversely, as Trump seems to prefer, a surplus is our reverse accumulation of their paper in return for our valuable things. At root, Trump’s talk is nonsense, but it is soothing syrup to a crowd addled by a sense of victimhood.
Though, his tariffs – for Trump, “the most beautiful word in the dictionary” – will torpedo his campaign promise to reduce inflation. Any tax hikes, like tariffs on business, any business, foreign and domestic, passes through to the consumer. It works like this: raise taxes (like tariffs), increase business costs, raise prices, reduce consumption and production. A bad deal all around. The price floor rises for all goods and services, both foreign and domestic. So much for “the most beautiful word in the dictionary”. So much for ending inflation.
A better understanding of trade would be helpful. The flow of goods and currencies passes through a foreign trade infrastructure. GATT (General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade), currency foreign exchange agreements (FEA), and the adjudication of FEA disputes in the Convention on the Recognition and Enforcement of Foreign Arbitral Awards (New York Convention) work to ease the flow of trade so the foreign paper (currency) can be made valuable to its possessor. In other words, a trade deficit (more goods, less paper) or surplus (more paper, less goods) or “balance” (the value of the paper and goods in equal measure) is not as important as Trump thinks. But the superficial language of trade, absent clarifications, lends itself to demagoguery.
Admittedly, the trade numbers are relevant for national security, social, and political reasons. By themselves, they are more than sufficient to support more domestic production of physical goods. But why aren’t we more of a manufacturing powerhouse? Certainly, we came to face renewed competition from our formerly WWII-ravaged economic rivals.
The resulting challenge exposed our self-inflicted inefficiencies, thus the need for some self-examination; something buried in the rhetoric. Our appetite for New Deal tax and regulatory schemes, and bloated business bureaucracies, proved to be a hindrance under competitive pressures. Furthermore, we exposed our manufacturing to the vast expansion of the regulatory straitjacket in the 1970s due to manufacturing’s many impacts on the natural environment. Land use controls, the expansion of the eco-superstate, their spread and expansion at all levels of government, and a labyrinth of empowered NIMBYs, mandates, permits, and hearings wreaked carnage on the sector.
(Image credit: Rick Gershon/Getty Images)
The air in the LA basin is cleaner due to the subsequent flight of physical production. They continue to flee. California declared war on affordable energy and the Philips/Conoco refinery in Wilmington is closing, the latest manufacturer to skedaddle the hyper eco-state. Much of the Chevron complex now resides in Houston. Adjacently, the regulatory war on housing will make the rebuild of Pacific Palisades, Malibu, and Altadena a nightmare. Cleaner air (except for the fires), combustible landscapes, Hiroshima devastation, and bankrupting energy are the new realities of the eco-Leviathan.
Manufacturing – the physical production of any kind – began a slide into the snake pit of our predatory unions, litigious culture, voracious “civil rights” lobbies, and taxes, more taxes, regulation, and more regulation. The split between the permission economy (physical production, manufacturing, construction, timber harvesting, et al) vs. permissionless economy (initially small-scale innovation that becomes capitalized into Apple, Google, Microsoft, Intel, Nividia, et al) is the main feature of this new hyper-regulated economy (see #2). Traditional manufacturing is relegated to being the red-headed stepchild.
Jones and Laughlin Steel Pittsburgh, 1950sThe Googleplex, Mountain View, Ca.Climate activists protest the Richmond refinery in California, 2017
Without addressing this problem, Trump’s tariffs are foolhardy. They will jack up prices, raise the cost of business inputs, threaten employment, and pull the only available ladder out of the snake pit that America has made of itself. American economic activity, and particularly manufacturing, cries out to be something other than survival in a snake pit.
DJT should address the pit before he tries to sell the narcotic of tariffs to the public. If not, trade relations will be disrupted as our friends scramble to protect themselves and their nascent industries. New trade arrangements will arise with America seen as just another economic belligerent.
To make the tariff scheme palatable to the public, the jargon of “reciprocity” is employed to hide the real purpose of tariffs. The prime directive of tariffs is to punish domestic consumers for preferring a foreign-made product. I am skeptical of their use as a bargaining chip since the tariff prime directive remains, even if reciprocity agreements are temporarily achieved. The political pressure by the snakes in our pit will make a hash of the “reciprocity”.
What Trump is doing to international trade, he promises for our foreign policy. Already, an undertow of cynicism infects our relationship with our allies (see #4). Trump sees our national security as another arena to apply the same approach as he would with a supplier of pipe. For instance, Trump has introduced a cushy deal for rare earths as a part of a survival package for Ukraine. To him, it is like demanding from the supplier the free gratis addition of brass fittings to the order. Trump has made extortion an element for a relationship with the United States.
For Trump, it is not enough to stand athwart a thug’s subjugation of another country on a continent already made jittery by two previous 20th-century world wars totaling over 100 million deaths and the USSR enslavement over half of it. Not surprisingly, eyebrows are raised in European capitals by Trump’s Belgian Congo-style treatment of Ukraine. Trump’s America comes close to being the reincarnation of the British East India Company.
It is not as if Ukraine has a realistic alternative to Trump’s USA. The situation has a key role to play in Trump’s Art of the Deal for international affairs. If you are dependent on him, you are at his mercy. It results in the odd abuse of friends with whom he can control, and odd praise of enemies with whom he does not. Trump recently declared that Putin is smart and strong and Zelensky is a dictator (I kid you not) and stands accused of starting the war (I kid you not). He gets away with it because he has leverage on Zelensky that he does not have on Putin, thus the pandering to a thug and the defamation of Zelensky. It is negotiations by shakedown in threats, insults, and extortion. For Trump, it must be like extracting concessions out of his favorite pipe supplier. The unrestrained nature of international affairs presents a playground for Trump’s baser instincts.
Trump’s Ukraine/Putin stage act reminds our friends and allies of the danger of getting too close to America. Post-WWII, South Vietnam’s existence was placed at the mercy of American domestic politics and resulted in the collapse of South Vietnam and the rest of Southeast Asia. Leaping forward to 2020, American domestic politics reared its ugly head over Afghanistan with the rise of Trump and his subsequent Doha Accords with the Taliban. Trump and his people repeated the Nixon/Kissinger tactic of negotiating the future of our friend and ally without them being in the room. Timetables for an American withdrawal were set only to be inflamed by more American domestic politics with calamitous effects for Afghans. Afghanistan descended into a dark age at our bidding.
The fall of Saigon, 1975, and evacuations from the roof of the American embassy.Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo meeting with Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, now the Taliban’s de facto political leader, in Doha, Qatar, in September 2020. (Photo: U.S. Department of State/Handout/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)Thousands of people are trying to flee Afghanistan as the Taliban strengthens its grip on the country. Some people chased a U.S. air force plane down the tarmac, while others tried to force their way onto planes at the Kabul airport. (photo: screen shot, Axios)
Can you blame any potential international partner for wariness in getting too close to the USA? They have alternatives. They could cut their own deals with our common enemies turning America First into America Alone. Appeasement might sound more appealing than laying yourself open to America First and an insane Democratic Party.
They could expand their defense capabilities and magnify their efforts in coalitions without a troublesome USA. Trump’s America First becomes America Problematic. Such arrangements will not have our interests at heart. America First, now known as America Alone, will be an unreliable, isolated nation with an expanded dependence on an even greater military buildup than is possible given our current domestic politics. Are you prepared to slash entitlements? Our crazy Democrats went bonkers over George W. Bush’s 2005 nibbling at Social Security’s edges (see #3). What makes you think that Democrats would not seek to ride the hysteria to more political fame and fortune this time around? Bottom line, America Alone becomes America Weaker.
This is our “master of 4-D chess” at work. We are not prepared for the consequences. The “most beautiful word in the dictionary” only disguises our deep-seated economic problems. America First will cause our friends to run for the exits. Any “peace” deal over Ukraine will come at the expense of more screw-tightening on the victim. America needs to address what we have done to ourselves before we scapegoat our friends and allies. Welcome to the world of America First.
The rabble-rousing has the advantage of feeding popular prejudices. Grievance has proven to be a political winner. The Right has discovered its inner victim in the same manner as the Left for over a century. The world should be leery of an America united in grievance.
RogerG
Sources:
1. “Trump: ‘Tariffs Are Going Forward On Time, ‘We’ve Been ‘Led By Fools”, Tim Hains, Real Clear Politics, 2/24/2025, at https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2025/02/24/trump_tariffs_are_going_forward_on_time_weve_been_led_by_fools.html
2. “The Future of Innovation in the United States: Permissionless or Regulated?”, Mohamed Mutii, Econlib, 10/14/2023, at https://www.econlib.org/the-future-of-innovation-in-the-united-states-permissionless-or-regulated/
3. “How George W. Bush Lost Personal Accounts For Social Security”, Peter Ferrera, Forbes, 4/7/2011, at https://www.forbes.com/sites/peterferrara/2011/04/07/how-george-w-bush-lost-personal-accounts-for-social-security/
4. For an American public uninterested in the foreign discussion about America, tune into this podcast, “Can German centrists keep ignoring the hard right AfD?”, The Daily Telegraph, 2/24/2025, at https://youtu.be/LiLEeFlbfHk?si=eOveyaQX98wuaumb . It covers more than the results of the German election. Toward the end of the interview, a major German parliamentary leader expresses major skepticism of a Trump-led America.
No, I’m not schizophrenic in praising President Trump in one post and criticizing him in another. I compliment him when it’s possible, but can’t in good conscience when it’s impossible.
By now, we should have grown accustomed to the erection of façades around our leaders. Today, it seems more necessary than ever. A veil, an army of handlers and eager media apologists, and a well-staffed cleanup department is erected to shield the public from the reality. Sounds like Biden. I’m convinced Biden’s basement campaign of 2020 had much to do with his mental and physical frailty. After four years, it metastasized and the shield became a howler of lies, clear to anyone with functioning eyes and ears.
Come to think of it, Trump has a façade mostly created for him by his supporters. They have to make sense of his ad hoc, ad hominem, episodic, and rambling pronouncements. His boosters ignore the simple prospect that he is exactly what we see: impulsive and not particularly enlightened, nor well-disposed to deliberate and deep thought – mental qualities harmful to strategy. In attempting to make sense of the verbal bursts, apologists augur, like a shaman reading bones, a coherence that doesn’t exist.
A person’s cranium is not transparent. “The cleanup on aisle 9” brigades among Trump’s people jump into action with some form of “he’s playing 4-D chess”. The assertion is unprovable, and not open to inductive reasoning any more than an insistence on reincarnation. Upon hearing the divination, the rest of the Trump fans resound in a chorus, “That’s it!”
It’s comical. Many on the formerly sensible Right twist themselves in knots to make sense of the jumble. Case in point, Hugh Hewitt. A normally calm and reasonable person with a distinguished professional and academic pedigree, he has contorted himself into an enthusiastic Trump apologist, another diviner of the Trump brain. Hewitt regularly proclaims Trump to be a masterful, Machiavellian negotiator on the basis of nothing more than the equivalent of speculation, hopes, and prayers.
Hugh Hewitt at the mic of his radio show.
As a regular Hewitt listener, I’ve noticed his metamorphosis from conservatism to Trumpism, which is a political cult with conservative tics alongside erratic impulses, many far from conservative. Hewitt steps in to impose some artificial comprehensibility to Trump’s mess. Last week, Trump puts his foot in his mouth in blasting the leader of the side that we should want to win in Ukraine while lavishing praise on a widely recognized goon, an obvious enemy in search of his own Lebensraum. Putin is only “smart” – using Trump’s word – if he’s got the guns and the FSB. “Smart” is the wrong word. Putin is a gangster. Maybe “smart gangster” works.
Hewitt’s response is to join Trump’s smear campaign against Zelensky in a desperate reach for a rationalization. He dredges up Zelensky’s 2024 U.S. visit and talks with our then-president, and Zelensky’s heated retort after Trump’s slander of him as a “dictator”. Imagine that, a repartee to a personal insult. How dare Zelensky? It’s Zelensky’s fault. Right?
Hewitt has to find some rationalization for what any sensible person would understand to be intemperate Trump remarks against our national interests. The U.S. national interest is not served by Putin’s conquests on the continent of Europe, end of story. Hewitt can’t wrap his mind around Trump ranking our national interests below his personal grudges.
One should not expect the general public to be better informed than our leaders. It could be assumed that he must be more knowledgeable, he’s president, but behaves like he isn’t – or maybe he doesn’t care. It’s equally possible that impulse control is lacking.
History is studied for what it says about human nature. Not by Trump; he doesn’t read. For people like Hewitt, they cherry-pick their evidence to match their predispositions. Hewitt is fond of reminding us of “shuttle diplomacy” to characterize Trump’s peace mission for the Ukraine War, with a comparison to the shuttle diplomacy of Kissinger in the 1970s. True, that was shuttle diplomacy, but so was Neville Chamberlain’s in 1938 to achieve peace between Hitler and Edvard Beneš, president of Czechoslovakia. The fall of Czechoslovakia and invasion of Poland soon followed. This is more than a historical cliché.
The similarities are greater with this one than Kissinger bouncing between Egypt’s Anwar Sadat and Israel’s Golda Meir. Putin is convinced of Russia’s fate to reconstitute the Soviet empire. Hitler was similarly convinced of his Lebensraum (German expansion for “living space”). The German Wehrmacht was just more successful than Putin’s cronies.
Thus, since we can’t rely on our leaders to be devotees of history, we must inform ourselves. After all, this is a citizen republic. It will require some time and effort on our part. Don’t expect it from Trump and his apologia chorus. The internet can be a wonderful thing, and on it one can find “The Rest is History” podcast with historians Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook. It is available wherever you get your podcasts: YouTube, Apple, Spotify, etc. I chose Spotify. Best of all, it’s free!
You can also go to https://therestishistory.com, or setup an account at spotify.com, for instance, and tune into episodes #528 through #532, each one about an hour long, and will carry you from the 1938 Munich agreement to the fall of Poland. This is a quick and easy way to be more enlightened than either Trump or his apologists. As you watch and listen, think of all that you’ve come to know about the Ukraine War. The parallels are stunning.
Pres. Trump and Maine Gov. Mills at the White House, 2/21/2025
Trump is our era’s Neville Chamberlain, the British prime minister who led the effort to desert Czechoslovakia in 1938. His impulsiveness and tendency to hitch national policy to personal grudges are deeply troubling.
But the Democrats are worse. They’re crazy. They are cultural revolutionaries on a mission to force us to conform to their conceptions of the “better man [or woman, or whatever] for the better world [?]”. They refuse to define “man” or “woman”, for instance, as one part of their goal to eliminate all distinctions (look up “nihilism”) so as to create new ones of their own fancy. Consequently, women are frozen out of award ceremonies to men who imagine themselves to be women. It’s kooky beyond belief.
It’s also not surprising that it doesn’t much work the other way: a XX man robbing XY men of their track and field medals. Trump, and anyone still rooted in reality, knows this, and he’s willing to say so. Yesterday, at a meeting of governors at the White House, he confronted Maine’s Governor Janet Mills (D). Watch the clip below.
Brutal, blunt, but not wholly undeserved. Gov. Mills’s feelings are of minor concern when compared to the dashed dreams of hundreds, if not thousands, of girls – real XX girls. Their ambitions are quashed by a XY girl who just yesterday was considered a boy. Go get ‘em Trump, and every blue-state satrap that has engaged in this grotesqueness.
Trump and Zelenskyy (r)An airman attached to the 436th Aerial Port Squadron loads cargo during a Ukraine security assistance mission at Dover Air Force Base, Del., Jan. 13, 2023. (photo: DOD)
During the scare over secondhand smoke, and the flurry of smoking bans in public spaces, 60,000 annual deaths from it was frequently cited. Actually, numbers varied from 20,000 to 120,000. When it came down to it, they were numbers pulled out of a hat. Once repeated, they had a life of their own. President Trump does it too.
In yesterday’s Truth Social post, Trump blithely threw out $350 billion in aid to Ukraine. Where did the number come from? Further, where’s the source for “half of the money we sent him is ‘MISSING’”? Not the Inspector General for Ukraine Aid, not the Center for Strategic and International Studies (see #2), not the Kiel Institute which studies international aid to Ukraine. You might counter that he’s president and therefore he must know. That’s not proof; that’s an act of faith.
Going back to the U.S. inspector general of “Ukraine Oversight”, $183 billion was promised and $86.7 billion delivered (see #3). The denizens of the far-Right fever swamps have mentioned $100 billion “missing”, stolen, wasted. Applying the two known numbers, ones that can be sourced, the $100 billion is roughly the difference between what was promised and given. If true, possibly, $100 billion is “missing” because it was never delivered.
President Zelensky in an AP interview of early February cited $177 billion earmarked by the U.S. but only $75 billion sent (see #4). These might be the numbers used in a Kiel Institute study (see #5). The point is that these numbers can be sourced. Where did President Trump’s numbers originate? No source is available, leaving one to entertain the option of them bursting from DJT’s imagination, a frequent occurrence.
I suspect that the press gaggle comment from Tuesday – “You should have never started it” – and the Truth Social rant of Wednesday are connected. In the one, President Trump put his foot in his mouth, up to the ankle, and halfway down the throat. Then, he tried to repair the damage by bloviating with more inanities.
Trump doesn’t understand the first rule of holes. Stop digging!
RogerG
Sources:
1. Thanks to Jim Geraghty for the numbers and sources at “Get Ukraine into the European Union”, National Review, 2/21/2025, at https://www.nationalreview.com/the-morning-jolt/get-ukraine-into-the-european-union/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=hero&utm_content=related&utm_term=first
2. “Where Is the Missing $100 Billion in U.S. Aid for Ukraine?”, Mark F. Cancian, CSIS, 2/11/2025, at https://www.csis.org/analysis/where-missing-100-billion-us-aid-ukraine
3. “Funding”, Ukraine Oversight: Special Inspector General for Operation Atlantic Resolve, Promoting Whole of Government Oversight of the U.S. Ukraine Response; at https://www.ukraineoversight.gov/Funding/#:~:text=Fiscal%20Year%20(FY)%202022%2D,obligated%20and%20%2486.7%20billion%20disbursed.
4. AP interview of President Zelensky, “Zelenskyy: Ukraine received US$76 billion out of US$177 billion approved by America”, 2/2/2025, Reddit, at https://www.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/1igjyyl/zelenskyy_ukraine_received_us76_billion_out_of/
5. “Ukraine Support Tracker Data”, Antezza, A., et al, Kiel Institute for the World Economy, 2/20/2025, at https://www.ifw-kiel.de/publications/ukraine-support-tracker-data-20758/
Donald Trump is proof that no person is deserving of worship. Sooner or later, given enough time and opportunity, we’ll step in it. Trump is no different. The guy must have slept during his high school History classes. College wasn’t any better for him. Read this screed on Truth Social about Ukraine’s Zelenksyy. It’s mind-bogglingly stupid.
“Think of it, a modestly successful comedian, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, talked the United States of America into spending $350 Billion Dollars, to go into a War that couldn’t be won, that never had to start, but a War that he, without the U.S. and ‘TRUMP,’ will never be able to settle. The United States has spent $200 Billion Dollars more than Europe, and Europe’s money is guaranteed, while the United States will get nothing back. Why didn’t Sleepy Joe Biden demand Equalization, in that this War is far more important to Europe than it is to us — We have a big, beautiful Ocean as separation. On top of this, Zelenskyy admits that half of the money we sent him is ‘MISSING.’ He refuses to have Elections, is very low in Ukrainian Polls, and the only thing he was good at was playing Biden “like a fiddle.” A Dictator without Elections, Zelenskyy better move fast or he is not going to have a Country left. In the meantime, we are successfully negotiating an end to the War with Russia, something all admit only “TRUMP,” and the Trump Administration, can do. Biden never tried, Europe has failed to bring Peace, and Zelenskyy probably wants to keep the “gravy train” going. I love Ukraine, but Zelenskyy has done a terrible job, his Country is shattered, and MILLIONS have unnecessarily died – And so it continues…..”
Trump is showing that Zelensky isn’t the problem. He is! For Trump enthusiasts, drop the cultic priestly vestments and get off your knees on your prayer rugs long enough to parse the words of a nincompoop. And to think that this guy is the leader of the Free World. Amazing.
Sentence #1 is incoherent, the rantings of adolescent rationalizations. Is this genius making the case that the $350 billion should never have been spent, or that the war never had to start? Yeah, it wouldn’t have started if Putin hadn’t invaded, and without American support naked aggression would have been rewarded. Strip away the crass, ego-inflating bloviation about himself being the block to all bad things in the world, and what remains is the reality after his loss in the 2020 election. It’s 2025, not January 2021. Now, what are you going to do? Sell out the victim?
Sentence #2 is more evidence of an all-too-human businessman rampaging way outside his lane. This blinkered person behind the Resolute desk reduced all thought and considerations in foreign relations to dollars and cents. It’s the only thing he understands, or thinks he understands. By his convoluted logic, we would have remained a part of the British empire; the South would be represented in the UN as the CSA; a good portion of France, Belgium, and Russia would be part of the German Empire under the Hohenzollerns; and much of Europe and Asia would be Axis satraps. Geostrategy is reduced to an accounting ledger. It’s stupid beyond belief.
Sentence #3 is more pablum. The idiocy is crowned with “Equalization” and “a beautiful Ocean as separation”. Yeah, Europe should pay more, but that’s not as if we shouldn’t pay anything. And that’s not to mean that Europe hasn’t contributed anything – $120 billion from 2022 to 2024 (see #1). Besides, are we going to lead as the USA or hide behind an ocean? Jihadi goat-herders with box cutters on 9/11 proved that an ocean is only a geographical feature to be crossed to get at the Great Satan. DJT, this is not the age of sail anymore.
Sentence #4 is proof that Ukraine is as flawed as DJT during his bankruptcies, or DOGE is discovering that we are. But we shouldn’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good. Account for the aid, and keep it flowing. Don’t use it as an excuse to reward a thug.
Sentences #5 and #6 are evidence of Trump showing his capacity to fill the shoes of Izvestia, the newspaper organ of the old Supreme Soviet. They promiscuously applied “dictator” to Thatcher and Reagan. Trump repeats the same style of slander. Trump has lost his mind. Zelensky is more answerable to an electorate than Putin. Putin offs his opponents, both inside and outside Russia. From the streets of London to the presidential residence in Kyiv to outside the Kremlin, he has horrifically poisoned, disfigured, and assassinated opposition. The list is growing. Those surviving disappear in a reconstituted Gulag Archipelago. Trump adds his name to the long list of dictator-lovers going back to the Stalin-apologists of yesteryear. It’s as shameful today as it was then.
The rest is an embarrassment to adult reasoning. “I love Ukraine”, but only if it surrenders to Putin. You see, following the Trump thought-stream, Ukraine is ravaged by . . . Zelensky, by Ukraine itself, not Putin. In Trump’s twisted brain, Zelensky should have surrendered earlier. Thus, it’s his fault. A thug that invaded the country across three fronts without warning or provocation, in a typically mismanaged Russian blitzkrieg, is not to blame. The thinking provokes disbelief. And he is our president. Whew, what a mess.
There is a crazy Right, and Trump is their messiah. He is deified. Everything he says and writes is worshipped as holy script. I’m surprised that they aren’t printed in red. Watch as longstanding pundits of the Right eat their past words. Watch as they morph from Kremlin skeptics to Putin apologists in the span of a short decade, because their god says so.
One question for Hugh Hewitt: What happened to Mike Pompeo? He’s gone into your memory hole. At one time praised to high heaven; now, nothing. He seems to have descended into nothingness like Bill Barr, John Bolton, and anyone who will not make the appropriate sacrifices at the altar.
Hugh Hewitt at the mic of his radio show.
Please, people on the Right, get off your prayer rugs long enough to notice that your Prophet wears no clothes. Reality is uglier than your illusions.
RogerG
Sources:
1. An assessment of European contributions to the defense of Ukraine can be found at “Ranking of European countries by aid provided to Ukraine between January 2022 and August 2024, by type of aid”, Statista, 10/29/2024, at https://www.statista.com/statistics/1499394/european-aid-to-ukraine-by-country/
British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain (left) and German Fuehrer Adolf Hitler shake hands in this composite photograph at the 1938 Munich Conference in which Chamberlain agreed to allow Nazi Germany to annex the Sudetenland. (photo: The Daily Mail)Presidents Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin shake hands at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation leaders’ summit in Da Nang, Vietnam, 2017.
The prophet Jeremiah warned the people of Jerusalem of their impending doom, and included an admonishment that rings through the ages.
“From the least to the greatest,
All [people of Jerusalem] are greedy for gain;
prophets and priests alike,
all practice deceit.
They dress the wound of my people
as though it were not serious.
‘Peace, peace,’ they say,
when there is no peace.”
(Jeremiah 6:13-14)
Then, here’s President Trump at Mar-A-Lago on Tuesday (2/18): “Today I heard [from Ukraine], ‘Oh, well, we weren’t invited.’ Well, you’ve been there for three years. You should have never started it. You could have made a deal.” (See #1) “You should have never started it.” What?!! A slip of the tongue? I didn’t realize that it was Ukraine that invaded Russia. The inverted logic is absolutely dumfounding, stunning.
It’s the logic of a businessman, not a statesman, who is practiced at cutting deals in the good ol’ USA, in the protective cradle of our rule of law. Deals in business frequently aren’t moral matters. Both sides make proposals and meet in the middle. In the arena of international relations, there is no rule of law, despite what Geneva and the ICC have to say about it. So, President Trump treats the bloody aggressor as the moral equivalent of the bloodied victim. It’s beyond foolish; it’s stupid; it’s dangerous.
“‘Peace, peace,’ they say, when there is no peace.” Is a real and enduring peace a possibility under this mental deformity? “Peace” becomes the pause between the hungry wolf and the sheep with nowhere to run.
Peace, at this juncture, occurs without moral judgment. “Peace” merely becomes the bridge of moral equivalence between evil and innocence. The wolf is still hungry. Into the fray of the Ukraine War has entered President Trump and his people. Shuttle diplomacy is commencing between the wolf and his dinner. Separate meetings with Putin’s people are taking place in Saudi Arabia, then the scene will shift to Ukraine’s Zelensky. Trump’s negotiators are the “honest broker” between the wolf and his victim. This isn’t the first time for these purveyors of a morally monstrous “peace”. History lends many examples, and the results are disturbing, as usual.
It’s the kind of “peace” strictly defined as an absence of war, till the next time. Appeasement is the means to achieve a “peace” that does not deter, that does not matter. It was tried numerous times in the ancient world, such as during the campaign of Philip II of Macedon to unite the Greece under his rule (in the 350s to 330s BC), much like Putin’s ambition to reconstitute the Soviet empire. After the Battle of Crocus Field (352 BC), Athenians negotiated the Peace of Philocrates with Philip which made Athens a Macedonian ally and relinquished territory to him. The “peace” ended in 338 BC in the last-ditch Battle of Chaeronea and Philip’s final subjugation of Greece.
Moving forward in time to the late 20th century, a form of appeasement with no real “peace” came out of the Vietnam War’s Paris Peace Accords of January 1973, negotiated by Nixon and Kissinger. The result was a withdrawal of U.S. forces without a commensurate one for North Vietnamese forces in the South. Within two years, the communist North conquered the South and the red flag of the hammer and sickle flew over Southeast Asia.
The approach of Nixon and Kissinger in 1973 is eerily similar to Trump’s. In Trump’s Doha Accords of 2020 with the Taliban, the Afghan government had no direct involvement. Nixon and Kissinger were agreeable to freezing South Vietnam out of the talks as were Trump’s people the Afghan government. In both cases, the victims were “consulted”, and they even protested, but the U.S. decided their fate in isolated talks with their enemies. The U.S. agreed to a withdrawal from Afghanistan of our and NATO forces as well as restrictions on air strikes in support of our Afghan allies. In an Afghan army trained in the tactics of American combined arms, the hampering of air support would prove dispiriting and catastrophic.
Trump gave us the opportunity to relive ’75 Saigon. Biden carried it out, only this time it was Kabul. Biden crammed down Afghan throats Trump’s Peace of Doha like he jammed eco-fanaticism, transgenderism, and floods of illegal immigrants down our throats.
It happened to South Vietnam and Afghanistan, so what lies in store for Ukraine? The common ingredient is an antsy eagerness to leave which sets the stage for abandonment. I saved the most egregious example of disgrace for last.
The 1938 Munich agreement with Herr Hitler, der Fuhrer, screams at us. “Munich”, like “Hitler”, is worn from overuse. That doesn’t mean that it isn’t relevant when the parallels are too numerous to ignore. Let’s see, in 1938 Czechoslovakia was the next dish in Hitler’s buffet after the shredding of the Versailles Treaty, rearmament, the Rhineland, and the Anschluss. Next is defeat of the West and Lebensraum (living space in the East) and the immortal Third Reich.
Conquest is Putin’s forte as well. He gained power in 1999 and soon launched the Second Chechen War over Dagestan. He leveled Grozny like Hitler did Warsaw. An independent Chechnya is no more. And soon to follow was Georgia in 2008. Reaching deeper into the North Caucasus, he ripped off a couple of provinces. All this sets the stage for Ukraine in much the same manner as Hitler eyed Czechoslovakia. 1935-9 parallels 2014-present.
For both Hitler and Putin, expansion is the goal, but standing in the way are the victim and her allies. These allies, however, had their valor stripped by previous wars. They were anxious to cut a deal in Trump’s Art of the Deal. Britian’s Chamberlain and France’s Daladier joined Hitler and Mussolini at Munich to construct “peace with honor”. Czechoslovakia’s friends were much more eager for a deal (remember Trump’s Art of the Deal) than either the Czechs and Slovaks, and the wolf. Without support and now isolated, the victim was forced to accept the dismemberment of their country with the loss of the country’s defenses abutting the lair of the wolf, the mountainous Sudetenland. Soon after marching into the Sudetenland, by March of 1939, the wolf had the whole enchilada. No more Czechoslovakia.
Standing athwart Putin is the U.S. and NATO, and the moxie of the Ukrainians. America’s Chamberlain, Donald Trump, has sent his reps to Saudi Arabia to cut a deal (remember the Art of the Deal), absent the Ukrainians. Picture this: the bloody seizure of Crimea, followed by the Donbas, with the aid of proxies (like Hitler used Konrad Henlein and his Sudeten German Party), and then a full-scale invasion.
Putin reads history books. Trump rereads his Art of the Deal.
“You should have never started it.” Can you believe that it came out of the mouth of a U.S. president? Trump has a problem distinguishing the rapist from the victim. The U.S. met three rapes of the same victim with relative passivity and only decided to provide real assistance after the serial rapist tried to seize every inch of the woman’s body for his own. In steps Trump with a counteroffer: we’ll allow you to take an arm and six toes. After all, it’s the Art of the Deal, and the two sides meeting in the middle. It’s beyond disreputable. It’s disgusting.
In one final note, Putin cheerleaders on the Right bellow that they’re tired of the war. Tired? Not one drop of American blood has fallen in Ukraine. These mental midgets can’t be referring to American body bags. There aren’t any. The victim is only asking for the guns to stop the attack. In Trump’s twisted universe, the girl is at fault for exposing too much skin in her prom dress. How else can you get to, “You should have never started it”?
This is shameful, shameful, but it’s not as if we haven’t been here before.
RogerG
Sources:
1. “’You should have never started it’: Trump seems to blame Kyiv for war”, Reuters, 2/19/2025, at https://www.yahoo.com/news/never-started-trump-seems-blame-075955974.html
2. A summary of Putin’s history of aggression can be read at “Vladimir Putin’s history of conflict with former Soviet nations: the timeline and human cost”, Stacker, 2/19/2025, at https://stacker.com/stories/world/vladimir-putins-history-conflict-former-soviet-nations-timeline-and-human-cost
