Month: March 2025

Since Trump took office he has:

1. told Ukraine that it cannot expect to regain any territory or ever join NATO
2. he ends the isolation that western leadership ave had Russia in since the invasion saying he’s going to meet him and invites him back in the G7
3. Trump had the US vote against a resolution in the UN calling for a just and lasting peace in Ukraine because it contained the true statement that Russia had invaded Ukraine. He voted with North Korea, Russia, Iran and Belarus.
4. He called Zelensky a dictator
5. has ordered the cyber command to stop any planning toward Russia

Putin is just sitting back letting Trump make concession after concession without giving anything in return. It’s a huge win.

Trump’s very upset that Zelensky isn’t on board with the sell-out, particularly because he’s refusing to kiss Putin’s ass the way Republicans kiss his. On the tarmac yesterday he said:

“He’s gotta say, ‘I want to make peace.’ He doesn’t have to stand there and say ‘Putin this, Putin that.’ All negative things. His people are dying.”

Putin invaded his country and has lost tens of thousands of soldiers. One might expect that Trump would be saying instead:

Putin’s gotta say “I want to make peace.” He doesn’t have to keep bombarding Ukrainian cities, even Chernobyl, all negative things if he wants to make a peace deal. Tens of thousands of Russians have died in this war.

Why is he not doing that? I think we know, don’t we?

Jonathan Chait writes today about Trump’s affinity for Putin. When asked if he thought Putin would keep his word:

Reporter: "What if Russia breaks the cease-fire?"

Trump: "What if a bomb drops on your head right now?" pic.twitter.com/J0c3J3Qrwq

— The Bulwark (@BulwarkOnline) February 28, 2025

“They respect me. Let me tell you, Putin went through a hell of a lot with me. He went through a phony witch hunt, where they used him and Russia. Russia, Russia, Russia, you ever hear of that deal? … It was a phony Democrat scam. He had to go through it. And he did go through it.”

Trump seems to genuinely feel that he and Vladimir Putin forged a personal bond through the shared trauma of being persecuted by the Democratic Party. Trump is known for his cold-eyed, transactional approach, and yet here he was, displaying affection and loyalty. (At another point, Trump complained that Zelensky has “tremendous hatred” toward Putin and insisted, “It’s very tough for me to make a deal with that kind of hate.”) He was not explaining why a deal with Russia would advance America’s interests, or why honoring it would advance Russia’s. He was defending Russia’s integrity by vouching for Putin’s character.

In recent years, the kinship between Trump and Putin has become somewhat unfashionable to point out. After Robert Mueller disappointed liberals by failing to prove a criminal conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia, conventional wisdom on much of the center and left of the political spectrum came to treat the scandal as overblown. But even the facts Mueller was able to produce, despite noncooperation from Trump’s top lieutenants, were astonishing. Putin dangled a Moscow building deal in front of the Trump Organization worth hundreds of millions of dollars, and Trump lied about it, giving Putin leverage over him. Trump’s campaign chair, Paul Manafort, was in business with a Russian intelligence officer. Russia published hacked Democratic emails at a time when they were maximally useful to Trump’s campaign, and made another hacking attempt after he asked it on television to find missing emails from Hillary Clinton. The pattern of cooperation between Trump and Putin may not have been provably criminal, but it was extraordinarily damning.

[…]

Trump does admire dictators. He does instinctively side with bullies over victims. He does lack any values-based framework for American foreign policy. But … in addition to his generalized amorality, Trump exhibits a particular affection for Putin and Russia.

[…]

Trump has been regurgitating Russian propaganda, not only regarding Ukraine, since before Zelensky even assumed office. In 2018, the year preceding Zelensky’s election, he defended Russia’s seizure of Crimea; he has repeatedly refused to acknowledge Russian guilt for various murders; and he has even stuck to Russian talking points on such idiosyncratic topics as the Soviets’ supposedly defensive rationale for invading Afghanistan in 1979 and their fear that an “aggressive” Montenegro would attack Russia, dragging NATO into war.

I could add another little nugget: when Trump and Kim Jong Un were making love, Trump was on the horn with Putin who told him it would be smart to pull American troops out of South Korea and Trump canceled the annual military maneuvers on his advice. I’d imagine there are plenty of other examples. We know what we saw in Helsinki.

Chait doesn’t have an explanation as to why Trump loves Putin so much. It’s obviously not that they were both persecuted by the Democrats since he held these ideas long before the Russia investigation. Maybe he’s literally a Russian asset as has long been suspected. Maybe he just particularly likes the thoroughly unlikeable cold fish for some reason. It would be weird since he usually only likes people who suck his toes and Putin certainly does not do that. In fact, Putin treats him like one of his lackeys and he seems to eat it up.

I obviously don’t know if there’s more than meets the eye about this. But one thought that has entered my mind is that because he is stuck in the 1950s, he still sees Russia as a great power and saw Putin is some kind of strongman like Kruschev and wanted to be like him. (Recall that he used to lie and say he knew him when he’d never met him — “we were stablemates.”) But once he started getting blowback for the sloppy campaign engagement with Russia in 2016 his oppositional defiant disorder kicked in and he doubled down.

Since Trump is the leader of the most powerful nation on earth and not a child, I don’t know if any of those responses will work with him. But I do know that whenever someone says he shouldn’t do something he decides that’s exactly what he’s going to do. And in this case, that means siding with the dictator. (I’m sorry to say that it might also mean that he’s double down on Musk as well.)

If he thinks siding with Putin makes him strong,he’s wrong. Putin thinks he’s a fool and a dupe and is laughing at his idiocy. But if he and that psychopath JD Vance did what they did yesterday just to make the rest of the world recoil in horror, he got what he wanted. He enjoyed himself very much.

Those are all statements of support from world leaders and politician, left and right.

Trump’s allies:

Dmitry Medvedev, Putin’s deputy on the security council and former president, called the exchange “a brutal dressing-down in the Oval Office”.

He wrote: “Trump told the … clown [Zelenskyy] the truth to his face: the Kyiv regime is playing with the third world war … This is useful. But it’s not enough – we need to stop military support [to Ukraine].”

“How Trump and Vance held back from hitting that scumbag is a miracle of restraint,” wrote Maria Zakharova, Russia’s foreign ministry spokesperson, on Telegram.

There has been no comment so far from Putin, who has instead taken a backseat, likely watching the fallout unfold with satisfaction. “Putin doesn’t have to say much right now,” said a source familiar with the Kremlin’s thinking.

“It’s clear that he enjoyed the show and now believes he can push for even greater demands in Ukraine. That meeting was a bigger victory for Putin than any of his military battles since the start of the war.”

The source predicted that Putin is likely to call Trump in the coming days to argue that Zelenskyy is not someone who can be reasoned with and must be replaced – a sentiment already echoed by some in Moscow as well as Washington.

“The White House will now start looking more closely at other candidates for Ukraine’s presidency,” wrote Alexey Pushkov, a member of the upper house of the Russian parliament, on Telegram.

Awesome.

Imagine that.

WTF. Trump points at Zelensky: “You see the hatred he’s got for Putin. He’s got tremendous hatred”

PUTIN INVADED HIS COUNTRY AND KILLED 50,000 PEOPLE.

pic.twitter.com/IKzQo86Dxr

— CALL TO ACTIVISM (@CalltoActivism) February 28, 2025

In case you didn’t see the whole thing yesterday:

And inevitable

A Bulwark column by Will Selber (“retired spook”) takes on the Trump administration’s frenzied effort to purge the military of the miniscule number of transgender persons in the services. A casual observer might think it the greatest problem facing the Pentagon.

As a commander, Selber had to deal with a lot of personnel issues from vaccine refusal to sexual assault charges. But his training provided little guidance for how to counsel an airman who wanted to transition. Still, his primary responsibility was to ensure his unit “was in tip-top shape at all times.”

I asked, “You sure you want to do this?” The answer was yes. I must admit, I had some reservations. For old men like me, transgenderism is a foreign concept. So I read up on it. However, what really convinced me to approve the airman’s request was the airman. Imagine how much courage it took to come into a commander’s office and request such a procedure. That’s courage. And we need more of that in the military.

If these team members were otherwise met standards for service, so what if they identify as transgender? Sure their presence was awkward at first for some other unit members, Selber explains. “However, at the end of the day, despite a few quips, they were integrated into the team.”

good piece. I think the perspective of this guy–feeling awkward and uncomfortable with trans issues but coming around when meeting them personally–describes a lot of people www.thebulwark.com/p/transgende…

— ryan cooper (@ryanlcooper.com) 2025-02-28T19:39:43.444Z

It’s not as if Americans are lining up to serve their country in the military these days. Patriotism for many consists of waving flags and collecting guns. Why would the Air Force drum out members and their families over their transgender identities? Selber believes “they deserved better than being summarily separated after being promised steady employment if they swore to uphold and defend the Constitution.”

Hell, the “draft-dodging felon” giving the orders doesn’t do that.

Selber admits he never fully grasped “all the ins and outs of LGBTQ culture.” But then as a man could he (or I) understand what it is to be a woman? What mattered most was that LGBTQ airmen were proud to serve their country.

Adaptation to change takes time. It’s awkward. It was awkward for some to integrate schools or to integrate women into combat roles. But it’s done. Mostly.

I’m reminded of a retort by comedian John Fugelsang to people’s squeamishness about others’ sexual preference and identity. Roughly: In America, your right not to feel icky does not cancel others’ right to love who they love or be who they are.

I reflect regularly on a Hugo- and Nebula-winning science fiction novel I read in high school. For those unfamiliar with The Left Hand of Darkness:

The novel follows the story of Genly Ai, a human native of Terra, who is sent to the planet of Gethen as an envoy of the Ekumen, a loose confederation of planets. Ai’s mission is to persuade the nations of Gethen to join the Ekumen, but he is stymied by a lack of understanding of their culture. Individuals on Gethen are ambisexual, with no fixed sex; this has a strong influence on the culture of the planet, and creates a barrier of understanding for Ai.

Do Genthians make a Terran feel somewhat icky? Get over it. Or at least try.

This passage from the novel’s opening is the one that has stuck with me all these years:

“The Gethenians do not see one another as men or women. This is almost impossible for our imaginations to accept. After all, what is the first question we ask about a newborn baby? ….there is no division of humanity into strong and weak halves, protected/ protective. One is respected and judged only as a human being. You cannot cast a Gethnian in the role of Man or Woman, while adopting towards ‘him’ a corresponding role dependant on your expectations of the interactions between persons of the same or oppositve sex. It is an appalling experience for a Terran ”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness

So feel icky, if you must. Then adapt.

* * * * *

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“The United States has changed teams”

Russian dissident Gary Kasparov spoke at the Principles First conference in Washington last weekend, writes Michael Tomasky. Kasparov “uttered a very simple line that chilled the thousand or so people in the room: ‘The United States has changed teams.’ ”

The hell it has. I resent being told the United States of America switched sides because the White House is in the grip of a band of lawless sociopaths.

Donald Trump’s country-wreckers have changed teams, certainly. Most of the Republican upper echelons has. Many MAGA foot soldiers have as well. How many have aligned with Vladimir Putin’s “might makes right” geopolitics simply because Trump has is unclear. How many would snap out of it after he’s gone is even less clear.

The lean toward Russia on the Christian right comes from the ludicrous proposition that there people live under biblical law because the nation is heavily white and Putin is hostile to LGBT people. One conservative Christian couple from Canada moved to Russia to be free from “LGBT ideology” and quickly found themselves free from being free.

What is clear after yesterday’s world-shaking, Oval Office shouting match is that Trump and J.D. Vance are all in on Vladimir Putin’s brand of autocracy. “[W]elcome to the Putinization of America, comrade!” Kasparov wrote in The Atlantic Friday morning before the fireworks:

Imitation and servility aren’t the same thing. Trump and Musk could attempt to undermine American democracy and create a Russian-style power vertical without kowtowing to Putin or abandoning Ukraine. But they haven’t. And while imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, affinity and envy aren’t enough to explain the abruptness and totality of the Trump administration’s adoption of every Russian position. On Monday, the anniversary of Russia’s all-out invasion, the United States even joined Russia in voting against a United Nations resolution condemning Russia’s war against Ukraine.

Yesterday’s “appalling spectacle” [timestamp 9:03] did not arrive out of thin air.

Tomasky writes:

If anyone doubted that before this horrifying exchange Friday, it surely can’t be doubted now. You had the president of Ukraine who, whatever his flaws, was representing a democracy—a struggling and imperfect democracy, for sure, but one that was invaded by a gangster regime; a country of 38 million people ravaged by a country of 144 million. He came to Washington willing to meet with a president whom he knows to be hostile but ready to sign a totally one-sided deal giving that president control over his country’s mineral rights. That he decided not to sit there in silence as lies were being told about him and the nature of Putin’s invasion was renamed impertinence. And in that moment, about three minutes and change into the tape linked to above, the United States of America symbolically and visibly switched from being the leader of the free world to being a partner of the global authoritarian axis.

The New York Times’ reliably wrong Peter Baker described the “verbal brawl in the Oval Office” as Trump coming to Putin’s defense over Zelensky’s lack of diplomatic finesse:

But what was particularly striking in their exchange was how much Mr. Trump seemed insulted on Mr. Putin’s behalf. He has long been an open admirer of Mr. Putin and has rarely offered any criticism of his own. Just this week, he called Mr. Putin “smart” and “cunning,” and declined to call him a dictator even after calling Mr. Zelensky that.

“You want me to say really terrible things about Putin and then say, ‘Hi, Vladimir, how are we doing on the deal?’” Mr. Trump told Mr. Zelensky on Friday. “It doesn’t work that way.”

He did not explain why it was OK to say terrible things to Mr. Zelensky while pursuing a deal. Instead, he portrayed the Ukrainian leader as unreasonably distrustful of Mr. Putin, who has broken multiple agreements guaranteeing Ukrainian sovereignty and calling for cease-fires and now faces an international arrest warrant for war crimes.

Asked by a reporter what he would do if Putin breaks a ceasefire, Trump haughtily replied that it had happened in the past because Putin didn’t respect the U.S. president. Then came this weird ramble:

They broke it with Biden because Biden, they didn’t respect him, they didn’t respect Obama. They respect me. Let me tell you, Putin went through a hell of a lot with me. He went through a phony witch hunt where they used him and Russia—Russia, Russia, Russia, you ever hear of that deal? That was a phony—that was a phony Hunter Biden, Joe Biden scam. Hillary Clinton, shifty Adam Schiff, it was a Democrat scam. And he had to go through that. And he did go through it and we didn’t end up in a war. He went through it, he was accused of all that stuff—he had nothing to do with it. It came out of Hunter Biden’s bathroom. It came out of Hunter Biden’s bedroom. It was disgusting. And then they said, ‘Oh, oh, the laptop from hell was made by Russia.’ The 51 agents, the whole thing was a scam, and he had to put up with that. He was being accused of all that stuff.

Trump taking offense on Putin’s behalf, as Baker sees it, appear more pathological from where I sit. Trump identifies with Putin. He looks up to Putin. The coward fantasizes about being like Putin: a strongman. He wants to be accepted in the exclusive club of world autocrats who wouldn’t have an easily manipulated whiner like him as a member.

The wrongs Trump rattled off as done to Putin were done to Trump himself. Trump was not taking offense on Putin’s behalf. Trump saw Zelensky’s listing of Putin’s crimes as an attack on himself. Because in Trump’s fractured mind, he and his BFF are one in the same. Inseparable.

We are in the grip of a madman. Madmen, to be accurate. Sociopaths, megalomaniacs, career grifters, and anti-democracy tech oligarchs. How we purge ourselves of them and heal our alliances, I don’t know.

But I cannot believe real Real Americans™ have gone autocrat or worse. There are more of us than there are of them. We’d best start acting like it. In numbers.

* * * * *

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