Pres. Trump and VP Vance criticize Zelenskyy in Oval Office on Feb.28, 2025
People have talked about disruption as if it was some kind of virtue. Disruption is like a kitchen knife. It is neither good nor bad. It depends on our purpose. It could be part of our plan to make a family meal or part of a plan to harm another person. Similarly, disruption could be used to break up malign nests in our administrative state, or it could turn friends and allies into enemies and enemies into friends. Such is the foreign policy of the second Trump circus.
Imagine it, the Republican Party is the party of George McGovern, and the Democrats sound like Ronald Reagan (see Democrat Sen. Michael Bennet’s speech below). Can “disruption” get any crazier? Democrats invoke Reagan, and the Trump foreign policy is run as if Jane Fonda and her 1972 consort, Tom Hayden, are in charge.
Tom Hayden and Jane Fonda speak to press upon return from North Vietnam in 1972Jane Fonda at North Vietnamese antiaircraft gun during 1972 visit to North Vietnam
The whole of MAGA world follows in lockstep. It is as if the 1960s peace movement, fresh from their maligning of returning Vietnam War vets at San Francisco airport, had a political transgender moment five decades later and discovered their inner MAGA. Trump cannot find anything negative to say about Ho (Chi Minh) . . . er, Putin. After Ho . . . er, Putin . . . rejected making any serious counteroffer to the one Trump coerced out of the Ukrainians, Trump responded in his now usual Putin smiley-face way (see #1): “Based on the statements he made today, they were pretty positive, I think.”
Fox News plays an outsized role in the camp of the MAGA chattering classes. Andrew Napolitano, MAGA’s Jane Fonda/Tom Hayden, came back from Hanoi . . . er, Moscow . . . with a glowing report of the latest brutalitarian Shangri La. He visited Hanoi . . . er, Moscow . . . on invitation from his friend, Le Duc Tho, North Vietnamese Foreign Minister . . . er, Sergei Lavrov, Putin’s Foreign Minister.
Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov’s interview to the US bloggers Mario Nawfal, Larry C. Johnson and Andrew Napolitano, Moscow, March 12, 2025
It did not take long for Fonda/Hayden . . . er, Napolitano . . . to appear on Fox News to parrot Ho . . . er, Putin . . . propaganda. In an updated version of the old “Who are you going to believe, me or your lyn’ eyes?”, the Ukraine War according to Napoliano (or Fonda/Hayden, you choose) did not begin when Putin seized Crimea in 2014 or the 2022 invasion to capture Kyiv and the east and south of the country. Instead, Fonda/Hayden . . . er, Napolitano . . . blamed us. According to Napolitano, it “started in 2014 with a coup against a popularly elected president [Putin stooge Viktor Yanukovych] who sought neutrality for Ukraine. . . orchestrated by the U.S. State Department in conjunction with the CIA and British MI6.” In actuality, Yanukovych was corruptly elected and popularly deposed by millions of Ukrainians who hit the streets to protest his delivery of them into the arms of Putin. Yanukovych skedaddled to Moscow.
But do not let facts get in the way of a good smear on Ukraine. The sixties radical Left took over the Democratic Party, and with them they brought their peace-at-any-price plank which was part-and-parcel of their condemnation of western civilization. Do you remember “Hey, hey, ho, ho, western civ has to go”? Move over Democrats, now it is the Republicans with their own theatrical variant, “Hey, hey, ho, ho, Ukraine has to go.” The sixties Left smeared the U.S. and then moved into the teaching profession and soon into the commanding heights of the culture. The Trump Right got bit by the same rabid animal and took over today’s GOP. The oval office scene of February 28 is what would have happened if President Tom Hayden and VP Jane Fonda had a meeting with South Vietnamese President Nguyen Van Thieu.
The sixties Left aped Ho’s propaganda and the Trump Right apes Putin’s. It is “de ja vu all over again”. Maybe we should not be surprised. Read Ecclesiastes 1:9:
“What has been will be again,
what has been done will be done again;
there is nothing new under the sun.”
Please watch Sen. Bennet’s speech in the Senate.
RogerG
Sources:
1. Thanks to Jim Geraghty for his insights in “Putin Flips Trump’s Cease-Fire the Bird”, National Review, 3/14/2025, at https://www.nationalreview.com/the-morning-jolt/putin-flips-trumps-cease-fire-the-bird/
“A person may cause evil to others not only by his actions but by his inaction, and in either case he is justly accountable to them for the injury.” —- John Stuart Mill
The picture (below) captures my loyalties. If you will notice, I have flown both the flag of Israel and now Ukraine, both being beset by existential threats. I can do none other and remain true to my most fundamental convictions, something many Republican officeholders have abandoned (Mssrs. JD Vance, Josh Hawley, Tom Cotton, Tommy Tuberville, et al). I will not surrender mine to the Trump family or anybody else pursuing unGodly ends.
No, the issue is much more than Ukraine. It lies much deeper. Ukraine’s struggle represents the ages old struggle between the monstrous and the decent. If we cannot see the situation on the southeast European Plain in that light, we come close to being as corrupted as the people committing the crime. We are no different than the disinterested bystander during a rape who sets about to negotiate a settlement between the criminal and the ravaged victim in real time. This is transactionalism gone mad.
And a rape it is, or as close as one nation can perpetrate on another. One inescapable fact remains. One authoritarian regime invaded another popularly sovereign nation. Either they get away with it or they do not. The assumption of moral parity itself is a felony. The pretention of hiding behind “realities” is an insult to reality.
However, another reality lurks behind the actions of these compromised Republicans. Neo-isolationism permeates Trump world. That world is the cognitive eco-system that produces the rationales for the movement. Out of this seedy underworld of the MAGA chattering classes comes an acceptance of Putin propaganda as the factual baseline. Right off the bat, they joined the dark side – or at least decided to swim in it.
Source: New York Times
Putin is busy rebuilding the Soviet Empire. Putin is desperate for a legacy worthy of remembrance as is Trump for the few remaining years of his presidency. Thus, Trump’s frenzy for “wins”. Trump could possibly be angling for a Nobel Peace Prize. Der Fuehrer wanted his Third Reich to be firmly established in his lifetime. So are Putin and Trump ambitious for their own places in the history books. Trump has even less time to accomplish the feat.
For his part, Putin contrived an excuse to deny Ukraine’s right to exist in July 2021 before his invasion (see #4). Putin declared that Ukraine is not a nation deserving of an independent status. The muddled thinking is the well-worn cover for many of history’s aggressions. Poland faced extinction under it from 1772 to 1793 and again as part of the Ribbentrop-Stalin Pact of 1939. Hitler had a loathing for Czechs and Poles. So did Stalin. By Putin logic, Britian would have a right to reclaim Maine to Georgia.
Of course, it is nonsense, because a nation is not limited to a grouping traceable to prehistory. Russia and Ukraine developed along different paths and experiences. The desire for a separate identity stems from these past happenings. The word Ukraine stands for “borderlands” in the same manner as the 13 colonies and Canada were for Great Britain, giving rise to the aphorism, “Britain and America are two nations divided by a common language.” Revolutions and acts of genocide (Holodomor) power the evolution of national distinctiveness.
Ukraine’s separate identity was obvious to everybody, even Putin’s Soviet ancestors. Lenin and Stalin drew borders for them. Stalin was aware of them enough to try to eradicate their unique identity in collectivization and a genocidal famine, outlawing the Ukrainian language and any other vestiges of Ukrainian culture, and an intense Russification campaign – a form of replacement theory. General Secretary Khrushchev was responsible for drawing the country’s current boundaries. What were all of them doing if not recognizing the existence of a unique people in that spot on the Eurasian plain?
If the Putin storyline does not prove persuasive, Putin sycophants in the Republican Party turn to another pretext in Putin’s playbook. Ukraine is responsible for the war. Get this, the rape victim is at fault for the rape. Go figure, but it sells to the brain-addled in the party.
This new angle heaps blame on Zelenskyy and Ukrainian leaders for rejecting “promising” Putin peace offers. How dare Ukraine’s leaders reject Putin’s demands for Ukraine to accept the conquests of parts of their country, disarm, not seek allies to help defend itself, and grant to Russia a veto on Ukraine’s longing for security (see #1). The whole disgrace took place from February to April 2022 at the infamous Istanbul conference. Putin spin dominates the thinking of many in the party and explains how a mentally compromised president (yes, we elected another one) can disgrace himself in calling Zelenskyy a “dictator” while ignoring an unquestionable one.
Circulating the rounds of the party’s brain-addled is pure Putin propaganda. The mental miasma reaches high and low. Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R, Ala.) expounds on Twitter, now X, in February 2024 (see #5), “Last night’s @TuckerCarlson’s interview with Putin shows that Russia is open to a peace agreement, while it is DC warmongers who want to prolong the war.”
Not sure if this is due to propaganda but it certainly reflects a ham-fisted disregard for strategic reasoning on the part of Sen. J.D. Vance, now VP, when he said to Steve Bannon in 2022 (see #6), “I gotta be honest with you, I don’t really care what happens to Ukraine one way or the other.” While groping for the defense of the incomprehensible, sometimes a person can forget that we are a superpower. Somehow, and inconceivable so, the idea persists that a superpower cannot control its borders and have a foreign policy at the same time. Is that the nature of superpowers? The party leaders range from the gullible to the simply dumb.
Not everyone in the party agrees with the stupid caucus. Occasionally, and bravely, one or another will step forward and say the obvious. Rep. Mike Turner (R, Oh.), former chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, recognized Putin propaganda penetrating the Republican congressional caucus, “We see directly coming from Russia … communications that are anti-Ukraine and pro-Russia messages, some of which we even hear being uttered on the House floor.” Rep. Michael McCaul (R, Tx.) put it more bluntly (see #7), “I think Russian propaganda has made its way into the United States, unfortunately, and it’s infected a good chunk of my party’s base.”
The same corruption of some officeholders seeps right into the base. Just attend a MAGA rally (see #8). A sample of Putin apologia will include, “Putin killed thousands of people, that’s fine by me”; “I don’t think Putin is the problem, Zelenskyy is the problem”; or “Putin is trying to save his country”. No wonder we have a president who thinks Zelenskyy is a “dictator”, and not the real dictator. It is in the aquifer and air of MAGA world. This part of the base is as looney as the stupid caucus.
The worship of Trump has led to the denigration of other guideposts, such as Ronald Reagan. Trump boosters disparage Reagan’s influence by calling it zombie Reaganism when Reagan’s well-documented beliefs and practices stand athwart Trump’s attacks on the America-led world order. Well, the absence of rational thought typical of zombies is abundantly evident among the ranks of Trump acolytes. Listen to them, watch them. Welcome to zombie Trumpism.
My party, the GOP, is no longer grand. Trump and his followers have eviscerated it. For those of you incensed by the sight of the flag of Ukraine flying from my house, I ask you, “What is the difference between Ukraine and Israel?” Both are in an existential fight against this current axis of evil. I am consistent. I support both. What about you?
RogerG
Sources:
1. “Ukraine Never Turned Down a Survivable Deal”, Dan McLaughlin, National Review, 3/13/2025, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2025/03/ukraine-never-turned-down-a-survivable-deal/
2. “Trump Is Offering Putin Another Munich: Hitler didn’t want a peace deal, and neither does Putin.”, Robert Kagan, The Atlantic, 3/7/2025, at https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2025/03/putin-hitler-munich-parallel/681973/
3. “Fact-checking Putin’s claims that Ukraine and Russia are ‘one people’”, Sandra Knipsel interview of Matthew Lenoe, professor of history, University of Rodchester, 3/3/2022, at https://www.rochester.edu/newscenter/ukraine-history-fact-checking-putin-513812/
4. “On The Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians”, Valdimir Putin, Wikisource, July 2021, at https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/On_the_Historical_Unity_of_Russians_and_Ukrainians
5. Sen. Tommy Tuberville on X, formerly Twitter, at https://x.com/SenTuberville/status/1756051756763521291?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1756051756763521291%7Ctwgr%5E7e627a2a2cf39149118ebec1706d60484e07641a%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nationalreview.com%2Fcorner%2Fkremlin-propaganda-and-us%2F
6. “JD Vance gets his long-awaited moment to admonish Ukraine’s Zelenskyy”, Julie Carr Smyth, AP, 2/28/2024, at https://apnews.com/article/jd-vance-zelenskyy-ukraine-854b13006d0601223e5ac8d955b08a8b
7. “Mike Turner claims Russian propaganda has seeped onto House floor”, Annabella Rosciglione, Washington Examiner, 4/7/2024, at https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/other/mike-turner-claims-russian-propaganda-has-seeped-onto-house-floor/ar-BB1ldKxf
8. Watch and listen to these remarks by Trump rally attendees in February 2024 on X, @teoyaomiquu (Constantine, former Ukrainian soldier, supplier of drones and other military equipment to Ukraine) at https://x.com/Teoyaomiquu/status/1762648758217548156?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1762648758217548156%7Ctwgr%5E7e627a2a2cf39149118ebec1706d60484e07641a%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nationalreview.com%2Fcorner%2Fkremlin-propaganda-and-us%2F
9. “Kremlin Propaganda and Us”, Jay Nordlinger, National Review, 4/8/2024, at https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/kremlin-propaganda-and-us/
I am starting to be convinced that DOGE should investigate public education, and many of the private schools to boot. Results are abysmal. We rank at the bottom of international educational measures for developed countries.
Falsehoods originating long before our birth are allowed to persist uncorrected. If education is enlightenment, then what we do is far from it. Misconceptions are understandable regarding policies and programs whose history is only weakly discerned. At this point, the falsehoods take on a life of their own and stretches into folklore.
No better example can be found than the folklore surrounding Social Security. It is assumed to be like a regular pension with contributions, investments, later payouts, and a cash-out option. I follow on social media “The Other 98%” page and found this rip-roaring delusion:
“Repeat after me: Social Security is our money, that we earned by working and paying into the fund – EACH paycheck and not an ‘entitlement’!”
But repeat after me: No, it is not treated as your money, and it is an “entitlement”. Fact.
Try this experiment: go into your local Social Security office and request the return of your contributions. It is an option with any other pension, like a teacher’s pension. After initial puzzlement, the clerk will inform you that it is impossible. Why? Your contributions have already passed into the checks of current retirees. The only way for you to receive any money from the program is to qualify and then wait for your monthly allotment to arrive in your bank account like any recipient.
The requirement of qualifying is what makes it an “entitlement”. You collect benefits when you meet the law’s qualifications. In other words, you are “entitled”, entitled by law.
Now, what about the claim that it is your money? Yes, it once was, till your employer, as required by law, took it away to be combined with his in the form of FICA, in like manner as income tax withholding. It is recorded by the Social Security Administration and then shipped off to a retiree. See, a Social Security pension operates on a pay-as-you-go basis. Yes, pay-as-you-go. Money goes in, money goes out. Like any tax, money that was once yours is now owned by the government (the Social Security Administration) and delivered into the possession of a qualifying recipient.
Pay-as-you-go explains the befuddlement of the government employee and the reason that it was once your money but not now. A retiree during your work life can now pay rent. The same opportunity will present itself to you when you qualify for the entitlement. Current workers pay for current retirees.
That was the nature of the program from the beginning. The Social Security Act passed in 1935, the collection of taxes began in 1937, and the receipt of benefits started in 1940. The first generation of recipients paid at most 3 years of taxes before qualifying, which is too little time for them to be just “getting their money back”. The pattern was set from this point on. Nobody is getting their money back. They are getting somebody else’s money.
Harsh but true. The whole scheme relies on a generational imbalance of many more contributing workers than recipients. The number of contributing workers per recipient may have been as high as 100 in 1940. By 1945, it was down to around 40 and has fallen ever since (see attached graph). Today, it hovers between 2 and 3. The burden to support one retiree falls on 3 people instead of 40. In other words, taxes must skyrocket or the national debt balloons. One has happened (tax increases) and the other is happening (inflation of the national debt).
Just looking at one year, 2020, Social Security ran up a deficit of $65 billion. By 2030, it is estimated to be $300 billion in arrears (see attached graph). The number is much bigger than a matter of waste, fraud, abuse, and illegals. We have a birth dearth. A fertility rate of 1.7 will not cut it. And people live longer to receive benefits. A generational pay-as-you-go gambit is only sacrificing the opportunities of your grandchildren as the growing national debt absorbs the capital for their future.
Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and nutritional assistance account for 65% of the federal budget. Defense garners 13%. Since 65% of the federal budget are entitlements – qualify and you get – there is no set amount for them. Payments on the national debt add another 16%. Their spending is on autopilot.
Defense is discretionary and requires a limit. Work this out in your head. So, what is essential to government’s reason for existence is constrained by a limit, and what is not is on autopilot with no limit.
Since people will holler bloody murder if there is talk of reforming the entitlements, that will leave only two options to avoid a 1970’s Argentina-style repudiation of debt. One is to not avoid it and let the debt balloon by wallowing in folklore. The other is to gut defense and ask government employees to work for free.
The thinking of “The Other 98%” is a national suicide pact.
RogerG
Sources:
1. A great primer on the federal budget can be found in “CATO Handbook for Policymakers: Social Security”, Michael Tanner, CATO, 2022, at https://www.cato.org/cato-handbook-policymakers/cato-handbook-policymakers-9th-edition-2022/social-security
Scott Bessent, Trump’s Treasury Secretary, in 2024
All 435 members of the House of Representatives and 35 Senate seats are exposed in the 2026 midterm election. What will the political climate look like after another two years of Donald Trump? Midterms are not kind to incumbents, possibly due to the regular foot-in-mouth disease that breaks out at the dawn of a new administration. It provides additional advantages to an out-party motivated and keen to score hits. The blowback from the gaffe is compounded if it is an affront to the movement’s success in the first place.
Obama had his “… it’s not surprising … they [people in flyover country] get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren’t like them ….” He added to his list of blunders with the howler, “If you like your health care plan, you can keep it”, which the reliably left-of-center PolitiFact honored with its 2013 Lie of the Year (see #1). It is much more than gaffes, but they work to illuminate policy goofs.
No wonder the Tea Party entered history, and in the 2010 midterms Democrats surrendered their 79-seat majority in the House and 14-seat advantage in the Senate to a Republican majority of 59 seats and whittled a Democrat edge in the Senate to 4. Republicans swept into control of more statehouses and governor’s mansions during the time of the Obama wrecking ball. The mouth has consequences.
Speed forward to 2025 and Trump’s Treasury Secretary, Scott Bessent, is tasting his toes with, “Access to cheap goods is not the essence of the American dream.” Certainly, that one is easy to demagogue, and Democrats will, but it is not as if he did not take the sock off and contort himself into position. The jump in the prices of everything – and state-sponsored teenage genital mutilation, XY girls in XX girls’ sports, and the Third World moving into the country en masse without restraint – was an affront in voters’ minds November 2024.
Bessent was twisting himself in knots to justify Trump’s tariffs. When an incoherent idea meets the spoken word, get ready for the speaker to be reminded of the need to wash their feet. Tariffs have inflation written all over them, unless they are mitigated by the economic growth hormones of deregulation, tax cuts, sane energy policy, and cheaper financial capital. How much will they limit the damage? Hard to say. Timing and reactions abroad matter a lot.
Trump acknowledges in a rhetorical sleight of hand the harm of the tariff poison. In his speech to Congress, he pandered to farmers and then asked them to bear with him because he knows their exports will be the first to be targeted in retaliation. He asked the rest of the economy to bear with him as well. The foreign reaction to his tariffs was swift. Justin Trudeau of Canada announced (see #2), “Our tariffs will remain in place until the U.S. trade action is withdrawn, and should U.S. tariffs not cease, we are in active and ongoing discussions with provinces and territories to pursue several non-tariff measures.” Mexico and China responded likewise.
Markets did not react any better. The S&P 500, Dow Jones, and Nasdaq Composite fell dramatically on the news (see #2). With Trump injecting himself into trade relationships, it is bad for business, which means it is bad for workers and everyone with a retirement plan. Instability and government intervention are bad, bad.
Why must we cut Trump some slack? Price increases are on the way; that is how tariffs work. So, get ready, Trump’s chief complaint against Biden, inflation, will be magically turned into a blessing by those who flipped like a light switch on the cue of their Pied Piper.
Crony capitalism is not the answer. Government goodies in the form of handouts to highly organized special interests mean costs imposed on everybody else. Trump shovels bennies to the United Steelworkers or the United Auto Workers but nonunion competitors are left to languish, with the consumer left to scramble to balance the checkbook.
Mancur Olson
The acclaimed economist Mancur Olson staked his academic reputation to his discernment of the socio-economic physics of the naturally skewed incentives to raid the public trough because rewards are targeted but costs are diffuse (see #3). A tightly organized interest (for instance, a large business entity and its allied labor magnificos) will beat out broader and thus more scattered interests (such as competitors and business and personal consumers). Welcome to the Trump mind. He is all into it.
Add it all up and one is left to wonder, can our leaders get any more incoherent?
RogerG
Sources:
1. “Lie of the Year: ‘If you like your health care plan, you can keep it’”, PolitiFact, at https://www.politifact.com/article/2013/dec/12/lie-year-if-you-like-your-health-care-plan-keep-it/
2. “Trump trade war intensifies as tariffs go into place”, Ian Swanson, et al, The Hill, 3/4/2025, at https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/5174579-donald-trump-trade-war-intensifies/
3. Look to Mancur Olson’s seminal work, The Logic of Collective Action: Public Goods and the Theory of Groups, 1965. An exploration of the topic can be found in “The Power of Special Interests”, John Samples, CATO Institute, Fall 2010, at https://www.cato.org/regulation/fall-2010/book-review-lobbying-policy-change-case-gridlock
A good source for a sensible treatment of current issues is hard to come by these days. Major news organizations are either divided into Trump-love or Trump-hate camps. Trump-hate overwhelms the programming on MSNBC, NPR, and legacy media. Fox News and the new counter-media – Breitbart, Townhall, Tucker Carlson, Megyn Kelly, talk radio, a portion of the podcast world, etc. – carries the flag for Trump-love. So, what is really happening when everything is seen through the lens of Trump-love or Trump-hate? If one of those is your only window to the outside world, reality will be distorted because it is so tightly filtered and shaped to either worship or harm Trump.
I recommend the GoodFellows podcast of the Hoover Institute, hosted by Bill Whalen, as an antidote to this blinkered stridency of, for example, the celebrity hosts of Fox News. Whalen hosts three regular contributors, John Cochrane (economist), H.R. McMaster (national security), and Sir Niall Ferguson (historian), and a guest. In the most recent episode, “The Great X Debate, with Matt Continetti: Vance v. Ferguson, Trump Diplomacy, DOGE, and Hackman” of 2/28/2025 (below), the guest was Matthew Continetti of the American Enterprise Institute and the Commentary podcast. Please sit back and watch the 57-minute podcast. It takes commentary and analysis out of the cage-fighting arenas.
This latest installment mostly focused on the Zelenskyy-Trump/Vance dustup on Friday, 2/28. These are just a few of my takeaways with all not in agreement and from a variety of perspectives:
• The Ukraine War is unwinnable for Ukraine. False. The weaknesses of the Russian military were borne out in the fighting. The combined forces of the U.S. and our NATO allies could stop Rusia in weeks if we had the will.
• The economies of Russia, China, and Iran are in a troubled state.
• The U.S. is weak, no longer capable of worldwide predominance. False. McMaster and Cochrane rebut this banality on the Trump Right (Laura Ingraham, et al). The fallacy is used by sectors of the Right to support neo-isolationistic retrenchment.
• The Trump of term #1 is different from the Trump of term #2. This time around, the people who surround him are more likely to feed and accept his ill-founded propensities. Most advisors are neo-isolationists from the MAGA eco-system. The foreign policy and trade issues will likely be viewed through this prism. Ferguson says Trump wants to be a trade-war president, not a war president.
More can be gleaned.
The podcast is a soothing alternative to the partisan bombast of the more popular but compromised outlets. You may not agree with them, but you will come out with the mental gears turning. You may discover a whole world outside the celebrity pundits of talk radio, MSNBC, and Fox News.
Pres. Trump at his 2025 State of the Union Address with VP Vance and Speaker Mike Johnson behind
I watched President Trump’s State of the Union speech last night (3/4/2025) on the Fox News feed. After came the commentary. Brit Hume, the dean of the Fox News commentariat, normally incisive and spot-on, said the speech was one of the best, in so many words. I do not know what he was watching, but I saw a classroom nearly out of control. We have a coming together of a provocative and prickly president and an extremist, disruptive, and disrespectful opposition party. This outcome should be expected when both parties fear and are driven by the mercurial activists in their midst. The result is a scene that comes close to anarchy.
The solemnity of the event is gone. Trump’s speech, inspiring at moments, quickly descended into a MAGA rally with his usual personal invective. Frankly, I think that he was incensed by Democrat behavior in the audience with their interruptions, jargonized protest placards held aloft, and the necessary removal of one among their ranks for defiance of simple adult norms. All of it was reminiscent of the radical-Left, antisemitic student disruptions of guest lecturers on college campuses. How did we get to this state of affairs, even among the governing class, people who should know better?
Democrat representatives hold protest placard aloft in disruption of the State of the Union address
The scene is a sign of the powerful influence of high-strung activists in the bases of both parties. For Republicans, their activist base was in search of a walking middle finger. Policy matters less than a demonstrative display of striking back at so-called “elites”, an in-your-face approach to politics and governance.
Thus, you get a guy who will take you down avenues that you might not want to go. Did people who pulled the lever for Trump vote for tariffs, the ritual humiliation of friends and allies, a foreign and trade policy of America Alone? Or was it an electoral majority gathering around a reversal of the chaos of gender confusion, prices gone amok, crowds of foreigners jumping the border and flooding the interior of the country, crime and nasty public spaces, extremist eco-crusades that are turning people’s lives upside down, identity-mongering at the expense of merit, and humiliations abroad? Trump promises to end the worst of it, but brings in tow a penchant for isolationism, protectionism, gaudy exhibitionism in matters of minor import like the renaming of places, territorial expansion, and schoolyard bullying. Did voters call for the hooking of this caboose to their train?
The flashy replaces practical policy. For the excitable, Trump is the ticket.
If this was poker, the Democrats see you and raise ten-fold. Their activist base is crazy. Their base’s prescription for the country is national suicide. Maybe that is because they have bought into the basic Marxist premise of a systemically corrupted society that can only be cleansed root and branch. They are in a revolutionary mood to overturn all relations between the sexes, between buyers and sellers, workers and employers, the person and his or her hopes for their spouses and children, and the control of individual choices in the minutest detail. The revolution is a disaster and people can see it, and are revolted by it. But this is what the donkey party’s activist base demands. The excessive and shrill overtake moderation and feet firmly planted on the ground.
The parties’ leadership, confronting the task of governance, cringe in fear of the strident in their midst. The party leadership is either weak in the face of this mob or panders to it for power, fame, and fortune. Do not be surprised that a deafening, raucous activism produces activistic leaders, people who are habituated to the superficial, irrelevant, and operationally dopey. Trump certainly presents that peril. Democrats have actually delivered the horror.
California’s Los Angeles is a classic in activist-driven misgovernance. Its mayor Karen Bass won the mayoral brass ring for reasons unrelated to an understanding of the practical aspects of managing a city. Her résumé is limited to “community activism” and time in the state legislature and Congress, places where activism prospers. While in Congress, she authored in 2020 the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act. It reified in law the Democrat groundswell to defund the police, or reshape public safety into therapy. So, not surprisingly, she gallivants to Accra, Ghana, without a thought devoted to the forecasted 80-mph Santa Ana winds coursing down an environmentalist-protected and overgrown fire-climax watershed waiting for a spark. Down-to-earth experience in dealing with running large-scale enterprises would have come in handy.
View of the January 2025 LA fires
The superficial attributes flow down to her appointments on the city’s fire commission, all known for their union activism and DEI qualities. Kristen Crowley, Bass’s appointed fire chief due to her gender and sexuality, ignored standard fire practice and ceased the monitoring of an earlier fire that was probably the origin of the cataclysm (see #3). Bass chose Janisse Quinones to run the Dept. of Water and Power to “prioritize” “vulnerable communities” and swear to “the goal of 100 percent renewable energy by 2035” (see #3). And a reservoir above Pacific Palisades remained empty to fight the fire. There is no room for more incompetence. Bass exhausted the supply.
The apex of the city’s cultural pyramid is equally dismissive of practicalities. The Los Angeles Times’s endorsement of Bass lauds her “holistic vision” as they pan her opponent, Rick Caruso, for his “luxury malls” and the millions that he contributed to his campaign. After the incineration of parts of the city, a poll conducted in late January shows Caruso besting Bass by 7%, 43% to 36%. As for Bass’s handling of the fires, she is underwater by 17%, 54% to 37% (see #1).
The poll is interesting but still mystifying. For a significant chunk of the LA electorate, apocalyptic fires, intensified by colossal incompetence, still cannot bring them to vote center-right or center anywhere. I suspect that it is because, in the California/LA context, center-Left actually means Left, hard Left anywhere else. And the extremism is not limited to “elites”. It is a populist thing seeping into huge demographies in the state and its urban centers. The shock of the fires will wear off as media come to her defense by catering to the leftist prejudices of this governing supermajority.
Already, streaming platforms are airing stories of the greedy rich, like the Resnicks, seizing water for themselves and leaving LA high and dry (see #2). False, but it appeals. You see, so they say, the hydrants went dry in Pacific Palisades due to the scheming water robber barons of their imagination. California has a deep preference for activists who check the right identity boxes instead of somebody who has a history of successfully making the trains run on time. Give it time and LA and California will revert to its preferred mean of incompetence.
On the activist Right, Trump bashes Zelenskyy and mouths moral equivalence platitudes that would be met with jeers if expressed by Obama, while many in the party lather themselves in hypocrisy as their prior hawkishness evaporates into appeasement. It is “peace through strength” so long as it accords with Trump’s latest outburst. Whatever he says and does, they nod in agreement and rush to the microphones to grovel in worship. It is disgusting.
For many on both sides, the chief motivator appears to be fear of their base. Talk radio hosts craft issues and messages to the talk radio audience under a cloud of anxieties about losing their Trump-crazed listeners. It would be commercial suicide to counter the insanity. Leftist politicians refuse to condemn the worst barbarity, or they divert attention away from the murder of babies, children, men and woman, young and old, the healthy and infirmed, to generate sympathy for those who aided and abetted the savagery. It is stupefyingly breathtaking.
Activism and its activists are making a shambles of our republic. This is what populism looks like. It is the “populism” of the most vocal. In ancient Rome, tyrants and other degenerates in purple were of the populares (Caesar, Caligula, Commodus), the party of the common people (plebes) and in opposition to “elites” (patricians). Populism guaranteed their power. Caligula did all he could to humiliate “elites” such as Senators because it was entertaining to the street. For instance, he commanded the attendance of Senators and their wives to a bacchanalia so he could eye the prettiest women, have his way with them, return to the drinkfest, and boast of the conquests in front of their husbands (according to Suetonius in The Twelve Caesars). Populism elevates the most popular, not the most fit.
Today’s populists can be traced back to them. The rise to the top rung of power was through pandering, demagoguery, and feeding the mob’s desires. In today’s context, the bread and circuses are delivered in the form of DEI favoritism, looting the rich, tariffs that protect my job at the expense of everybody else’s, hosing benefits to your constituents through bankrupting entitlements, eco-extremism to cater to the passions of white-collar urban professionals, unrestrained abortion and a lavish child-care public infrastructure to indulge the lifestyle of single college-educated women, expanding the civil rights state to advance teenage genital mutilation and public school indoctrination and the destruction of the family, etc., etc.
Left populism, Right populism, and activists of both stripes are producing mediocrities, the ineffectual, and failures in public office. We suffer, but we had a hand in choosing them. Where are the adults? There are not any because they cannot survive the activist gauntlet. We are living the consequences of activism gone mad. Enjoy.
RogerG
Sources:
1. “Poll: Bass Flops Handling of Wildfires; Caruso Should Be mayor”, Isegura, 810 KSFO, 1/24/2025, at https://www.ksfo.com/2025/01/24/poll-bass-flops-handling-of-wildfires-caruso-should-be-mayor/
2. There’s a host of class warfare videos on YouTube, such as “California’s Water Mismanagement: Billionaire Resnicks Plunder California’s Precious Water! Fire!”, at https://youtu.be/2ryi893yIP8?si=YvDE5a9Nun7JgQ8Y
3. “Wildfire of the Vanities”, Will Swaim of the California Policy Center, National Review Magazine, March 2025, at https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2025/03/wildfire-of-the-vanities-californias-political-model-has-failed/
“I can only imagine what the political prisoners and dissidents in Russian jails are feeling today [2/21/2025]. Only a year ago Alexei Navalny was killed by Putin in one of his prisons. Before he died, Navalny wrote me a few letters in which he said that what he saw in Russia’s prisons was the same world that I once experienced as a prisoner in the Soviet Union.
. . . I think that in some ways it is worse for the political prisoners in Russia today. We had the advantage of knowing that President Reagan was on our side. But what should the hundreds sent to Russian prisons for many years for daring to call out Putin’s aggression feel today?”
—- Natan Sharanksy, eminent Soviet dissident now living in Israel, after Trump’s comment calling Zelenskyy a “dictator” and accusing Ukraine for “starting the war”, in the Free Press on 2/21/2025 (see #1)
Natan Sharansky
America is morally unmoored. There is nothing “grand” in Trump’s Grand Old Party. The party of Lincoln, the party that staked its existence on slavery’s abolition, is appeasing, if not siding with, a savage tyrant. So much for being “on the side of the angels”. Trump has signed us up for the Satanic host. On this, there can be no question.
To be clear, both political parties are unhinged. The Democrats lunged into neo-Marxism and hate Donald Trump down to his DNA. Conversely, a sizeable chunk of Republicans is enraptured by him. They treat him as their messianic north star. Trump dislikes Zelenskyy and has little use for Ukraine, and now so do they. In lockstep, they come to Trump’s defense no matter what he says and does. They clap like trained seals, or like Putin’s political ancestors during a speech by Stalin to the Communist Party Congress of the USSR.
Loyalty is one thing, obsequiousness another. It is disgraceful. But both parties are disgraceful. We are in an age of bipartisan disgrace.
Has Trump signed the country up for the Satanic host, or are we merely adjacent? Either way, it seems disgustingly so. The shameful abandonment of a beleaguered and desperate people is beginning. A headline from Washington reads “Hegseth Orders Pentagon to Stop Cyberoperations Against Russia” (see #2). Another headline: “State Department terminates U.S. support of Ukraine energy grid restoration” (see #3). These are probably the first of many steps to cut Ukraine adrift, adrift into the maw of Putin’s regenerated Soviet Union, a nation that has inflicted multiple holocausts on millions of Ukrainians. Are we now an abettor, if not an ally, of the new Axis of Evil? Did you sign up for this when you voted for Donald Trump?
J.D. Vance is making himself particularly loathsome. He has been for quite some time. The “dictator” smear, his castigation of the closing of Putin’s Russian Orthodox Church in the country suffering from a Putin invasion, the undocumented charges of waste and corruption, the demands for surrender under the guise of “peace”, heaping blame on NATO, and opposition to aid to the besieged country has been part of his stump spiel for the last couple of years. It is as if Copperheads won the 1864 presidential election. Trump, Vance, and the rest of the trained seals in the cabinet are Putin Copperheads. The converts to the Copperhead caucus in the right-leaning media have joined the abasement.
“It is impossible to live in Russia, but dying is possible.” — Dmitry Merezhkovsky, died in exile in 1941.
So, who is Putin, this person who enjoys the indulgence of Trump and Vance? Sharansky lays it out. He should know. Putin’s regime operates as if the Soviet Union was reanimated, something very familiar to Sharansky. Opposition is killed and jailed. Mariana Katzarova, the UN’s special rapporteur on the human rights situation in Russia, estimates the number of currently jailed political dissidents at over 2,000 (see #4). It is hard to say with any precision given Putin’s death grip on news and information in the country. One of the most reliable outlets, Memorial, was shut down by Putin in 2022.
Death grip is fully applicable to Putin’s Russia. Still, some of the more indecent inhumanities have been widely reported. To make you cringe, here are some examples (see #5). Trumpkins, do not avert your eyes for this is what you are signing us up for.
Makeshift memorial to Boris Nemtsov after his murder, March 2015
Aleksei Navalny, founder of Anti-Corruption Foundation, returned from exile only to be rearrested and imprisoned where he died in an Arctic prison camp on Feb. 16, 2024.
Mikhail Lesin, former Russian press minister and Putin critic, was found dead in a Washington, D.C., hotel room on Nov. 5, 2015. His death is considered by many to be “suspicious”.
Boris Nemtsov, former deputy prime minister under Boris Yeltsin and Putin critic, was shot dead on a bridge outside the Kremlin on Feb. 27, 2015. Critics with possible popular traction have shortened life spans.
Boris Berezovsky, former Putin ally turned critic, was found dead in his home in Berkshire, England, on March 23, 2013. Officially listed as a suicide, strong suspicions remain.
Sergei Magnitsky, Russian lawyer and auditor who exposed corruption that was traced to Putin, was imprisoned, suffered beatings, denied medical treatment, and died in prison on Nov. 16, 2009. Our Magnitsky Act, which sanctions Russian abusers of human rights, was named after him.
Stanislav Markelov, human rights lawyer and journalist, was assassinated in Moscow on Jan. 19, 2009, by the same killer of Anastasia Baburova (see below).
Anastasia Baburova, a journalist and human rights activist, was killed alongside Markelov on Jan. 19, 2009.
Had enough? The sources are brim full of poisonings, murders, and disappearances in Putin’s Gulag Archipelago. Inside or outside of Russia, it does not matter. On the hit list was an elected Ukrainian president, Viktor Yushchenko, who was poisoned in September 2004 during the campaign. His face was scarred from it.
Putin barbarity is most resplendent on the ground and in graves throughout Ukraine. Putin starts this war, targets civilians, commits atrocities, and Trump and his sidekick level their abuse at the president of the country resisting the crime. Now, Trump is cutting them off. America, are you going to stand still and let this mauling of our sense of decency continue?
“When you see Trump with Putin, as I have on a few occasions, he’s like the 12-year old boy that goes to high school and meets the captain of the football team. ‘My hero!’ It’s really creepy.” — Malcom Turnbull, 2015-2018 Australian Prime minister, Dec. 29, 2024 (see #6)
Why the toadying to Putin and not Hamas? Try to make sense of it. It boggles the mind unless Trump has some adolescent affection for strongmen. As for Vance, he is just young and foolish. The young establish conclusions first, then root around for a rationale. The result is a logical mishmash. Vance sounds as mature as my 10th-grade students in my high school World History class.
Trump is constructing his Kyiv, as Biden did his Kabul, and the 1975 Democratic Congress did their Saigon. All of them besmirched the reputation of our country, but more than that, they soiled us. Joining the Axis of Evil makes us no better than our co-thugs. Admiration for thugs is a dangerous thing.
RogerG
Sources:
1. “Natan Sharansky: A President’s Words Saved Me in the Gulag”, Natan Sharansk, Free Press, 2/21/2025, at https://www.thefp.com/p/natan-sharansky-a-presidents-words
2. “Hegseth Orders Pentagon to Stop Cyberoperations Against Russia”, New York Times, at https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/02/us/politics/hegseth-cyber-russia-trump-putin.html
3. “State Department terminates U.S. support of Ukraine energy grid restoration”, Vaughn Hillyard, NBC News, 2/28/2025, at https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/state-department-terminates-us-support-ukraine-energy-grid-restoration-rcna194259
4. “UN Expert Sounds Alarm on 2,000 Political Prisoners in Russia”, The Moscow Times: Independent News from Russia, 2/17/2025, at https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2025/02/17/un-expert-sounds-alarm-on-2000-political-prisoners-in-russia-a88054
5. Reportage on Putin thuggery include:
“Putin’s Opposition: Dead, Jailed Or Exiled”, AFP in Barron’s, 3/16/2024, at https://www.barrons.com/news/putin-s-opposition-dead-jailed-or-exiled-964f341b
“Most of Russia’s opposition is either dead, in exile abroad or in prison at home. What happens now?”, Emma Burrows, AP, 2/19/2024, at https://apnews.com/article/navalny-russia-opposition-putin-8554f74e229c451f96956939b05d2a99
“The List Is Long: Russians Who Have Died After Running Afoul Of The Kremlin”, Steve Gutterman, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 2/16/2024, at https://www.rferl.org/a/enemies-kremlin-deaths-prigozhin-list/32562583.html
“Full List of Putin Critics Who Have Died in Mysterious Circumstances”, Isabel van Brugen, Newsweek, 2/26/2024, at https://www.newsweek.com/putin-critics-dead-full-list-navalny-1870692
6. Malcom Turnbull’s comment can be found on X at https://x.com/highbrow_nobrow/status/1873556154556838212?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1873556154556838212%7Ctwgr%5E87a08c42098cfd7dc62d00f18c68b6d36fbf2878%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nationalreview.com%2F2025%2F03%2Fhinge-point%2F
7. Thanks to Jay Nordlinger for his contributions to this article at “Hinge Point”, National Review, 3/3/2025, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2025/03/hinge-point/
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.
