Donald Trump and maga Republicans make false claims about "peacmaking" while Trump he creates chaos in America

Alaskana were buzzing (with mixed reactions) when Donald Trump announced he would meet (evil 👿 ) Russian President Vladimir Putin somewhere in the state on Friday August 15, 2025. 

While expressing cautious optimism that they might reach an agreement to end the war in Ukraine, (turned out to be a failed effort👎), Sen. Dan Sullivan falsely pointed to fake efforts about how Trump has created “peace in so many other areas of the world.”❓😕😲

But, in here in America, Trump has condoned violence by his supporters while promoting intense hatred of his political opponents and immigrants who are in the country illegally.

During the interview on Alaska’s News Source, wrong minded Sullivan mentioned the peace agreement between Azerbaijan and Armenia. He correctly noted that war has been going on for decades.

In typical narcissistic fashion, Trump wanted all the credit for ending it. But he lied.🤢

“Many Leaders have tried to end the War, with no success, until now, thanks to ‘TRUMP,” he posted on social media.🤥

But as a former Commander of U.S. Army Europe, Gen. Mark Hertling (Ret.) knows the history of that war and the efforts to end it. “Conflicts end because of patience, persistence, and luck — not one man’s showmanship,” he wrote on the Bulwark.

With the war in Ukraine, Trump has been all showman since before last year’s election. He repeatedly claimed Russia wouldn’t have invaded Ukraine in 2022, if he was president then. And promised to end the war his first day in office. Trump failed.

A month after returning to the White House, he blamed Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky for starting the war. 

Now he’s prepared to accuse Zelensky of not wanting peace because he rejected the land swaps that Trump expects to part of any agreement.

Sullivan understands any land swap would be like rewarding a violent criminal. Two years ago, he insisted it’s in America’s “interest to continue to support the Ukrainians to restore their territorial integrity.”

Here at home, Trump concocted a new definition of the Russian invasion to justify the “largest domestic deportation operation in America history.” 

In a flagrant lie, he accused the prior administration of letting in “647,572 migrant criminals … to rape, pillage, plunder and kill” Americans.

But, tragically horrible, most of the illegal immigrants who have been detained by ICE had no criminal record. 

When that triggered protests in Los Angeles, Trump grossly exaggerated the violence that occurred to justify sending in the National Guard and U.S. Marines.

This week, he ordered the National Guard to take control of law enforcement in Washington, D.C. Reading from a prepared statement, he claimed it’s “been overtaken by violent gangs and bloodthirsty criminals, roving mobs of wild youth, drugged-out maniacs and homeless people.”

Nevermind that the crime rate is at a 30-year low. On his first day back in office, Trump pardoned several hundred of his supporters who violently attacked Capitol Police officers while Congress was certifying the 2020, election (which he still can’t admit he lost).

Trump rewarded Jared Wise, a former FBI agent, with a pardon and a senior adviser job in the Department of Justice. During his trial in January, bodycam footage shown to the jury revealed he yelled “Kill ‘em! Kill ‘em!” after a police officer was knocked to the ground.

And while he hails the insurrectionists as “unbelievable patriots,” he’s referred to anyone not aligned with his divisive agenda as “communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical left thugs” who “lie and steal and cheat on elections.”

Four decades ago, President Ronald Reagan took the opposite approach to matters of peace at home and abroad.

Recognizing that millions of illegal immigrants were “productive members of our society and are a basic part of our work force,” he worked with members of both parties to pass landmark immigration reform.

Putin’s invasion of Ukraine is a reminder of the Cold War conflict Reagan faced during his presidency. Unlike Trump, he countered Soviet aggression by strengthening our alliances. And led with the philosophy that “Peace is not the absence of conflict, but the ability to cope with conflict by peaceful means.”

Domestic tranquility relies on that same profound truth. But as former Secretary of Defense James Mattis said, Trump doesn’t “even pretend” he’s trying to unite Americans. He deliberately seeks to divide us.

That’s why Sullivan’s praise of Trump as a peacemaker rings hollow. And as long as he’s president, America will never be great.

• Rich Moniak is a Juneau resident and retired civil engineer with more than 25 years of experience working in the public sector. Columns, My Turns and Letters to the Editor represent the view of the author, not the view of the Juneau Empire. 

Donald Trump and Republicans kidnapping innocent people for the politial purpose of increasing illegal deportations

Echo opinion letter published in Juneau Empire news, in Alaska:

Liberty is dead. In the first few months since January 20, 2025, the federal government has kidnapped hundreds of people and sent them to a foreign prison to serve an indefinite sentence, even though they were never charged with a crime.

I have seen these kidnappings referred to as “deportations,” but using that language lends an air of legality that the feds do not deserve. These kidnappings don’t follow settled United States law on deportations or anything else. At no point has the Trump administration offered legal justification for giving these individuals a life sentence in a foreign prison — something the United States has never ❗done before.

To anyone who questions them, the feds repeat until they are blue in the face that these men are “illegal alien terrorist gang members.” That’s a nice combination of scary words, but since when did the land of liberty hand out life sentences just because some feds say a magic incantation of scary words? This administration is testing the American people to see if we will let them use the Constitution as toilet paper.

So far it seems that millions of my fellow Americans are content to shrug it off and see no issue with giving a life sentence to individuals who have never been charged with a crime — so long as those individuals are brown-skinned and the prison is in another country. 

Yes, I understand folks may be tired of hearing politicians called Nazis or fascists, but what else do you call this?

From David Fure in Juneau Alaska

Donald Trump is selling out American institutions and safeguards

Echo opinion letter published in the Alaska Juneau Empire newspaper: Disintegration of America’s democracy

Trump is oblivious to the consequences of any of his statements or actions.

As a 70-year-old Alaskan, I reminisce about my junior high school civics class where I was proud to learn that our country, founded 244 years ago, is populated by citizens who are granted equal status under our constitution. There is no privileged class or privileged individual. Intentionally, our government was designed to spread power among three equal branches, each with unique responsibilities and each acts as a check on the other two branches.

Imagine my dismay in observing in my lifetime the disintegration and “selling out” of a growing list of our institutions and safeguards written into our Constitution.

Every American now knows, except for those who choose sources of information which shield them from the truth, that our president initiated and directed an extortion campaign over a very vulnerable ally engaged in active combat with our preeminent adversary, Russia.

That act of extortion was clear to everyone involved to be predicated on the objective of coercing this ally, engaged in an existential struggle to free itself from a history of corruption, to commit a corrupt act by producing almost certainly manufactured evidence of unlawful and corrupt behavior of President Donald Trump’s expected political opponent. This is no stretch of the imagination for American citizens. This clearly is the man we now know Trump to be — of course he would feel uninhibited in this kind of corrupt behavior to further his personal advantage using the power of his office and illegally withholding funds appropriated by Congress to an ally in the throes of war.

Now, we American citizens have the added insult, that the Congress is complicit in this flagrant violation of the principles and high standards that have always made the United States of America a living example of democracy that peoples all over the globe want to emulate.

We have always proudly believed that our Congress would safeguard the institutions and founding principles of our democracy by rooting-out wrongdoing and corruption in our government and holding offenders accountable, even the president. We are no longer that shining example for other struggling democracies.

Trump has denigrated law enforcement officials, our national security professionals, and our diplomatic corps, favoring and promoting what National Security Council specialist Fiona Hill described as a “a fictional narrative that has been perpetrated and propagated by the Russian security services themselves.” This is serious business; a matter concerning our own national security. Trump is oblivious to the consequences of any of his statements or actions, rather focusing only on how it might benefit his personal interests.

Now Congress has failed to call-out the president’s corrupt behavior. Surely, Congress could have at least censured the president’s corrupt acts. Some Senators have foolishly imagined that Trump has learned his lesson, but immediately he is on the war path weeding out any member of his administration who fails to be sufficiently subservient to his personal interests.

Today we learn that the president has coerced Attorney General William Barr to intervene in the lawful prosecution of Trump’s stooge and self-avowed dirty tricks operative, Roger Stone, to reduce his prison sentence. The Justice Department is apparently no longer a politically independent institution of justice for the American people, but a tool of the President.

Step-by-step we are sliding into an authoritarian form of government in which the president’s political adversaries (essentially 60% of our population) are labeled “very bad people” and “scum.”

More frighteningly, Trump has adopted the dictators’ trope of calling our news media an “enemy of the people” aligning Trump with Stalin, Mao and the Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels; a chilling disintegration of Constitutionally guaranteed principles.

How far must our situation deteriorate before Congress takes a principled stand to safeguard our country’s constitutionally promised heritage?

• Alexander Hoke resides in Juneau.