Donald Trump and maga Republicans must be reminded about how January 6th 2020 was treason

Echo essay reported in The Atlantic by Jeffrey Goldberg

Donald Trump's Indecency: At 1:42 a.m. on December 19, 2020, Donald Trump—disturbed, humiliated, livid—posted the following message on Twitter: “Statistically impossible to have lost the 2020 Election. Big protest in D.C. on January 6th. Be there, will be wild!”

In California, David Nicholas Dempsey, a 33-year-old man-child with multiple felony convictions and a profound affection for the president, answered the call. On January 6, wearing a tactical vest and an American-flag gaiter, Dempsey came to the Capitol. Shortly before he assaulted several police officers, he shared his perspectives in an interview given while standing near a gallows. 

The gallows was erected as a reminder to Vice President Mike Pence to do, in Trump’s words, “the right thing.”

Them worthless fucking shitholes like fucking Jerry Nadler, fucking Pelosi, Clapper, Comey, fucking all those pieces of garbage, you know, Obama, all these dudes, Clinton, fuck all these pieces of shit,” Dempsey said. “They don’t need a jail cell. They need to hang from these motherfuckers while everybody videotapes it and fucking spreads it on YouTube.”

Dempsey was not an organizer of the siege, but he was one of its most energetic participants. He assaulted Metropolitan Police Detective Phuson Nguyen with pepper spray. Nguyen was certain in that moment that he was “going to die,” he later testified. Dempsey assaulted another police officer with a metal crutch, cracking his protective shield and cutting his head. Dempsey, who was heard yelling “Fuck you, bitch-ass cops!,” assaulted other officers with broken pieces of furniture, crutches, and a flagpole. Prosecutors would later argue that “Dempsey’s violence reached such extremes that, at one point, he attacked a fellow rioter who was trying to disarm him.” 

All told, more than 140 police officers were injured in the riot, many seriously.

I attended the January 6 rally on the Ellipse, at which Trump told his supporters, “If you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.” Then I walked with the crowd to the Capitol. One woman, a QAnon adherent dressed in a cat costume, told me, “We’re going to stop the steal. If Pence isn’t going to stop it, we have to.”

What I remember very well about that day was my own failure of imagination. I did not, to my knowledge, see Dempsey—he had positioned himself at the vanguard of the assault, and I had stayed near the White House, to listen to Trump—but I did come across at least a dozen or more protesters dressed in similar tactical gear or wearing body armor, many of them carrying flex-cuffs. I particularly remember those plastic cuffs, but I understood them only as a performance of zealous commitment. 

Later we would learn that these men—some of whom were Proud Boys —believed that they would actually be arresting members of Congress in defense of the Constitution. I interviewed one of them. “It’s all in the Bible,” he said. “Everything is predicted. Donald Trump is in the Bible.” Grifters could not exist, of course, without a population primed to be grifted.

After the riot, Dempsey returned to California, where he was eventually arrested. In early 2024, he pleaded guilty to two felony counts of assaulting an officer with a dangerous weapon. He was sentenced to 20 years in prison.

Six months later, in the summer of 2024, Trump, who would come to describe the January 6 insurrection as a “day of love,” said that, if reelected, he would pardon rioters, but only “if they’re innocent.” Dempsey was not innocent, but on January 20, 2025, shortly after being inaugurated, Trump pardoned him and roughly 1,500 others charged with or convicted of offenses related to the Capitol insurrection. (Fourteen people, mainly senior figures in the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys🤢 movements, saw their sentences commuted but did not receive pardons.)

Of the 1,500 or so offenders who received pardons, roughly 600 had been charged with assaulting or obstructing police officers, and 170 had been accused of using deadly weapons in the siege. Among those pardoned were Peter Schwartz, who had received a 14-year sentence for throwing a chair at police officers and repeatedly attacking them with pepper spray; Daniel Joseph Rodriguez, who was sentenced to 12.5 years for conspiracy and assaulting an officer with a stun gun (he sent a text message to a friend, “Tazzzzed the fuck out of the blue”); and Andrew Taake, who received a six-year sentence for attacking officers with bear spray and a metal whip.

A day after the pardons were announced, Trump said in a press conference, “I am a friend of police, more than any president who’s been in office.” He went on to describe the rioters. “These were people that actually love our country, so we thought a pardon would be appropriate.”

Trump had something else to say during that first press conference of his new term: “I think we’re going to do things that people will be shocked at.” This would turn out to be true, but unfortunately, shock does not last. Here is the emblematic inner struggle of our age: to preserve the ability to be shocked. “Man grows used to everything, the scoundrel!” Dostoyevsky wrote. A blessing that is also a curse.

I understand that a review—even a short and partial review—of the past year might seem dismally repetitive (Oh no, no is not at all repetitive, it is first person reporting from the scene and must be told again). But repetition ensures that we remember, and perhaps even experience shock anew. 😢

So, in brief: Trump dismantled America’s foreign-aid infrastructure and gutted a program, built by an earlier Republican president, that saved the lives of Africans infected with HIV; he encouraged the United States military to commit war crimes; he has instituted radical cuts to U.S. science and medical funding and abetted a crusade against vaccines; he has appointed conspiracists, alcoholics, and idiots to key positions in his administration; he has destroyed the independence of the Justice Department; he has waged pitiless war on prosecutors, FBI agents, and others who previously investigated him, his family, and his friends; he has cast near-fatal doubt on America’s willingness to fulfill its treaty obligations to its democratic allies; he has applauded Vladimir Putin for his barbarism and castigated Ukraine for its unwillingness to commit suicide; he has led racist attacks on various groups of immigrants; he has employed unusually cruel tactics in pursuit of undocumented immigrants, most of whom have committed only one crime—illegally seeking refuge in a country that they believed represented the dream of a better life. Those are some of the actions Trump has taken. Here are a few of the things he has said since returning to office: He has referred to immigrants as “garbage”; he has called a female reporter “piggy” and other reporters “ugly,” “stupid,” “terrible,” and “nasty”; he has suggested that the murder of a Saudi journalist by his country’s government was justified; he has labeled a sitting governor “seriously retarded”; he has blamed the murder of Rob Reiner on the director’s anti-Trump politics; he has called the Democrats the party of “evil.”

Yet, even when weighed against this stunning record of degeneracy, the pardoning by Trump of his cop-beating foot soldiers represents the lowest moment of this presidency so far, because it was an act not only of naked despotism but also of outlandish hypocrisy. 

By pardoning these criminals, he exposed a foundational lie of MAGA ideology: that it stands with the police and as a guarantor of law and order. The truth is the opposite.

The power to pardon is a vestige of America’s pre-independence past. It is an unchecked monarchical power, an awesome power, and therefore it should be bestowed only on leaders blessed with self-restraint, civic-mindedness, and, most important, basic decency.

We have been watching indecency triumph in the public sphere on and off for more than 10 years now, since the moment Trump insulted John McCain’s war record. For reasons that are quite possibly too unbearable to contemplate, a large group of American voters was not repulsed by such slander—they were actually aroused by it—and our politics have not been the same. Much has been said, including by me, about Trump’s narcissism, his autocratic inclinations, his disconnection from reality, but not nearly enough has been said about his fundamental indecency, the characteristic that undergirds everything he says and does.

In an important essay, Andrew Sullivan noted this past fall that Trump’s indecency is comprehensive in style and substance. “It is one thing to be a realist in foreign policy, to accept the morally ambiguous in an immoral world; it is simply indecent to treat a country, Ukraine, invaded by another, Russia, as the actual aggressor and force it to accept a settlement on the invader’s terms,” Sullivan wrote. “It is one thing to find and arrest illegal immigrants; it is indecent to mock and ridicule them, and send them with no due process to a foreign gulag where torture is routine. It is one thing to enforce immigration laws; it is another to use masked, anonymous men to do it. It is one thing to cut foreign aid; it is simply indecent to do so abruptly and irrationally so that tens of thousands of children will needlessly die. We have slowly adjusted to this entirely new culture from the top, perhaps in the hope that it will somehow be sated soon—but then new indecencies happen.”

The subject of Trump’s indecency came up in a conversation I had with Barack Obama in 2017. I asked him to name the most norm-defying act of his successor to date. Somewhat to my surprise, Obama mentioned Trump’s speech at the Boy Scouts’ National Jamboree earlier that year. This appearance has been largely forgotten, but it was a festival of indecency. At one point, Trump told the scouts about a wealthy friend of his who, he suggested, did unmentionable things on his yacht.

President Barack Obama, a model of dignified presidential behavior (just like nearly all of his predecessors, Democratic and Republican), understood viscerally the importance of self-restraint and adherence to long-established norms. Which is why he was so troubled by Trump’s decadent performance. “You can stand in front of tens of thousands of teenage boys and encourage them to be good citizens and be helpful to their mothers,” Obama said, “or you can go Lord of the Flies. He went Lord of the Flies.”

We are in a long Lord of the Flies moment, led by a man who, to borrow from Psalm 10, possesses a mouth “full of cursing and deceit and fraud.” For many people—government scientists seeking cures for diseases; FBI agents investigating corruption and terrorism; military leaders trying to preserve respect for the rules of warfare; and, in particular, police officers who were brutalized by Trump’s army of deluded followers—these days can seem infernal. 

Trump’s term is one-quarter over; a piece of advice often attributed to Churchill has it best: When you’re going through hell, keep going❗

Donald Trump and maga Republicans must prevent any money allocated for purchase or invasion of Greenland

Editorial published in The New York Times: 

The World Will Remember Trump’s Greenland Outburst💢

The free world exhaled on Wednesday when Donald Trump retreated from his administration’s threat to invade Greenland. 

But, that relief, however, masks the damage that Donald Trump has done to America this week. Donald Trump’s apologists once dismissed his bullying of Greenland as an attempt at humor. Instead, it has been something far darker. His immoral threats against a loyal NATO ally have escalated a crisis in U.S.-European relations, weakened one of history’s most successful alliances and hurt American interests in tangible ways.

NATO is an important force for global stability and for the democratic values that our nation champions. It has made the world safer, more prosperous and better able to work together for a common purpose. The alliance amplifies American military might, deterring Russia and adversaries around the world through the original promise that an attack on one member is an attack on all. NATO also serves nonmilitary purposes, helping present a unified front that limits the rising technological and economic influence of China and its autocratic allies.

Mr. Trump is undermining these interests with his push to take control of Greenland, a semiautonomous territory of Denmark, despite vociferous resistance from Denmark and Greenlanders themselves. He is attacking the shared values to which democracies have aspired for decades: the rule of law, recognition of national sovereignty and respect for self-determination. 

Donald Trump is causing what Prime Minister Mark Carney of Canada this week called “a rupture, not a transition” in the world order.

In normal times, the president deserves great deference in the exercise of foreign affairs, but that deference is never absolute, especially not when the president has shown himself unbound by legal and ethical constraints. When the president endangers the country or breaks its laws, other branches of government have a responsibility to intervene. Donald Trump’s repeated moves to undercut our most valuable alliance require other Americans to reaffirm our commitment to our international partners. The Republicans who control Congress cannot sit on their hands as they have done so many times in the past year. Many of them know the value of NATO. Congress should pass a bill that bars spending on any military action against Greenland or Western Europe. It should also hold up all of Mr. Trump’s nominees to national security positions until he commits to halting his attacks on the alliance.




The Supreme Court has a role to play as well. Mr. Trump’s attempt to use tariffs to coerce allies, including in the fight over Greenland, is unconstitutional. He has justified using them by declaring a national emergency on false pretenses. We are encouraged that most justices expressed skepticism of his use of tariffs during oral arguments in November. We are disappointed that the justices are about to embark on a midwinter break that will last until late February, apparently without acting on the case. They should issue an expedited ruling, given the policy’s illegality and the damage it is causing.

Donald Trump has always been an undisciplined and unprincipled politician, but the shambolic and sometimes illegal nature of his foreign policy moves of the past few weeks has been unusually harmful.

After months of blowing up boats in the Caribbean, without giving the victims any chance to defend themselves, he ordered a military operation to capture Venezuela’s dictator — and has since allowed the dictator’s corrupt deputies to continue ruling the country. Mr. Trump encouraged Iranians to rise up against their brutal government, saying “help is on the way,” and abandoned the protesters to a crackdown that reportedly killed thousands of them and imprisoned thousands more. 

And his confrontation with NATO crossed a new line: threatening the territory of a longtime ally. The notion that the United States might invade Greenland would sound like satire under any other modern-day president.

Yet, it fits with Donald Trump’s escalating and caustic attacks against NATO. During the 2016, presidential campaign, he called the alliance obsolete. In his first term, he reportedly considered withdrawing from it. During the 2024, campaign, he said he would encourage Russian leaders to “do whatever the hell they want” with NATO allies if the allies did not increase their military spending. The threat was chilling to Russia’s Baltic neighbors, like Latvia and Estonia, given Vladimir Putin’s slaughter of civilians in Ukraine.

As is often the case, Donald Trump has blended a reasonable policy critique with blatant falsehoods and extreme behavior. In this instance, the reasonable critique is that most European countries have long spent too little on their defense, relying on the United States to protect them. President Barack Obama understandably complained in 2016 that they were behaving as “free riders.” Donald Trump deserves some credit for pressuring Europe to increase military spending, in both his first and second terms.  Nevertheless, that success does not give him credibility or any valid reason to threaten invasion or annexation to promote American interests.

American Catholics support Pope Leo XIV and the world views him as an antidote to poisonous Donald Trump evilism

Since his election in May as the first American pope, Leo XIV has become a political and temperamental counterweight to an incendiary American president. Echo opinion published in The New York Times by David Gibson. 

Pope Leo draws extraordinary large crowds of the faithful

A face-off between the two most prominent Americans on the world stage was inevitable, if only for the contrast between Donald Trump’s blustery inconstancy and Pope Leo’s soft-spoken yet firm dignity. The Pope is “neither quiet nor shy — if he has something to say, he will say it,” in the words of his eldest brother, Louis Prevost. 

Indeed, after Trump sent forces to seize the Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro, the pope declared that Venezuela’s “sovereignty” must be guaranteed along with “the rule of law enshrined in its Constitution.” Leo had already urged the United States not to follow through on threats against Venezuela and criticized the administration’s military buildup in the Caribbean. He also repeatedly lamented the treatment of immigrants by U.S. authorities and called on American clergy members to be vocal and active on the issue, which they have been.

But rather than viewing Pope Leo’s statements as one half of a mano-a-mano between pope and president, they may be better seen as the articulation of a post-Trump global order, one informed by universal values and institutional norms rather than tribal and individual self-interest. Leo is not looking for a fight with Trump; he is looking past him. When he challenges the president’s policies, he does so as an American-born pope recalling the American-inspired system that Trump is dismantling — one that values statesmanship over gamesmanship, the common good over national conquest and common decency over jingoist (over the top patriotism❗💢) bullying.

In early December, Pope Leo met with President Volodymyr Zelensky

leader of the Ukraine and said he would like to visit the country, which has suffered a years long assault from Russia. 

Hours later, he criticized the Trump administration’s peace plan: “Trying to reach a peace agreement without including Europe in the discussions is not realistic,” he said. “The war is in Europe.”

Soon after, in remarks that could have been aimed at the MAGA movement, Pope Leo told European politicians on the center-right that “the mark of any civilized society is that differences are debated with courtesy and respect.” 

Later, the Pope told diplomats that honesty is the greatest virtue in “an international context plagued by prevarications and conflict” and he blasted the “war of words armed with lies, propaganda and hypocrisy.”

Throughout the Christmas season and into the new year, Pope Leo continued to call for a world based on old ideals, pushing for “the strengthening of supranational institutions, not their delegitimization.” He lectured civic leaders on how to be responsible public servants. On Christmas he urged world leaders to pursue peace through dialogue — even as Trump was launching military strikes on Islamic militias in Nigeria, ostensibly to protect Christians.

In his state of the world address to the diplomatic corps at the Vatican on Friday, Leo delivered his most thoroughgoing defense of postwar multilateralism, calling the rule of law “the foundation of all peaceful civil coexistence.”

“A diplomacy that promotes dialogue and seeks consensus among all parties is being replaced by a diplomacy based on force,” the pope said. “The principle established after the Second World War, which prohibited nations from using force to violate the borders of others, has been completely undermined.”

The Catholic Church, it is said, thinks in centuries, and Pope Leo is unlikely to worry about such pushback. He is a fit 70-year-old who could potentially set a papal record as the oldest pope to die in office, outlasting another Leo, his predecessor Leo XIII, who was 93 at his death in 1903. Donald Trump, who turns 80 on June 14, has three years left in his (terrible❗ chaotic 💥) second term and faces political headwinds that has conservatives talking about a post-MAGA vision for the Republican Party. 

Of course, even three more years of Trump could do incalculable damage not only to the United States but to the global commonwealth.

When Leo was elected, there were regular references to the first pope to take that name, Leo the Great, who served in the fifth century amid the declining Roman Empire. As barbarian armies swept across Europe, that first Pope Leo led a delegation to northern Italy to meet Attila the Hun and his invading forces. Leo’s holiness and diplomacy (perhaps aided by a menacing vision Attila was said to have had of SS. Peter and Paul brandishing swords) is credited with persuading Attila to turn back and spare the Italian peninsula.

But a more apt parallel for our current circumstances might be the legend of Leo’s meeting three years later, in 455, with Gaiseric the Vandal outside Rome. On that occasion, it is said, Leo was able to persuade the barbarian king only to spare several large churches so that thousands of Romans could find sanctuary from the ensuing devastation. In the aftermath, Pope Leo and his successors were able to rebuild city and society.

Catholicism has a knack for preserving the best of the past to help seed a better future. Today’s Pope Leo may be the surest guardian of a legacy that America, and the world, will desperately need.

Donald Trump and maga Republicans must stop illegal invasions and making threats against sovereign countries!

Echo opinion published in the Baltimore Sun:

Understandably, Americans are more concerned with their job security and the challenging ability to meet weekly expenses than they are about international issues. (Maine Writer opinion, although Trump will use our tax money like his own personal checkbook because the Supreme Court said he can do and get away with anything❗)

But, what Donald Trump is doing on the international stage is so crazy and so dangerous that it demands our attention (“Trump meets with oil executives at the White House on Friday, seeking investments in Venezuela,” Jan. 9).

Trump argues that the capture of Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela was merely the arrest of an indicted criminal. Whether that authorizes him to bomb a foreign country and forcibly change that country’s leadership without authorization from Congress is highly questionable. In defending Trump’s action, Sen. Lindsey Graham compares the arrest of Maduro to the arrest of the leader of Panama, Manuel Noriega, in 1990. But, we did not thereafter intend to “run” Panama like Trump stated we intend to run Venezuela. That Maduro is a cruel dictator is clear; that Trump intends more than just his arrest (such as taking Venezuelan oil) is equally clear. That explains why the Senate, with the votes of five Republicans, just moved forward a bill to restrict the president from taking further military action against Venezuela.

Moreover, what this administration is saying about Greenland is even crazier. The White House made clear it does not reject the possibility of using military force to take over an autonomous territory belonging to our NATO ally Denmark. I don’t think even Trump would suggest that the prime minister of Denmark is a narco terrorist, a term he has used for Maduro. Take a step back for a moment and reflect on the fact that the president of the United States is not ruling out the use of force against a NATO ally for no apparent reason other than a claim that it would help American security to possess Greenland.

Aside from how just plain wrong this is, consider how China could use Trump’s rationale for the use of force and continued occupation of Venezuela and Greenland with regard to actions it might take against Taiwan or anywhere else where its national security could be enhanced by taking over parts of another country. Surely, we lose the moral authority to scold Russia for its brutal attack on Ukraine.

At this point, I don’t care about the hypocrisy and inconsistency Trump demonstrates daily (you’ll remember during his campaign how he warned against foreign interventions), but at some point, enough has to be enough.

From Steven P. Grossman, in Baltimore, Maryland

Donald Trump and maga Republicans must stand with European allies to support Ukraine

Thanks to the Philadelphia Inquirer for publishing this article. Main stream media (MSM) are neglecting this important story about the Ukranian resistance against Russian aggression. 

Echo report published in the Philadelphia Inquirer by Trudy Rubin and an appendix by David Remnick*: 

Elite units from Ukraine’s intelligence agencies hit key Russian sites

Ukrainians have had to innovate to strike back at the military sites from which Russia launches its attacks.

EASTERN UKRAINE — Slava’s appearance had changed dramatically from a year ago when we last met in Kyiv. His eyes were weary, and his deep black beard was now grizzled with gray.

The Ukranian 43-year-old former commercial director and journalist had volunteered early in the war, and now commanded an elite drone unit for HUR, the Ukrainian Defense Ministry’s military intelligence service. His unit conducts some of the country’s most dangerous missions. And those missions never end.

Operating from the zero line, his men are called in to launch long-range drones that attack sites deep inside Russia. Their goal is to destroy Russian military logistics at the source.

Before an assignment, they return to home base, pack up every conceivable drone and piece of equipment they may need, and head for the front lines to reinforce or assault.

“We do R&D in the trenches when we find a problem we didn’t expect,” he tells me.

The United States never gave the green light for Kyiv to use its longest-range U.S.-made ATACMS missiles to target Russian aerodromes or military production sites, so the Ukrainians have had to innovate to strike back at the specific locations from which Russia launches bombs, missiles, and Shahed drones.

Drones can’t substitute for ATACMS, which can cover a huge area and pack a much more powerful explosive payload than unmanned aerial vehicles, as Slava told me while we bumped along over a dirt road to a HUR testing site, somewhere heading east. “You need 20 to 30 drones to cover the same area as one of the missile systems,” he continued, “but in terms of the economics of war, the drones are much cheaper than a missile.”

The most stunning drone success story was Operation Spiderweb, which destroyed or damaged around 40 Russian warplanes, including supersonic bombers, worth billions of dollars. It was conducted by Ukraine’s chief internal intelligence agency, and HUR’s friendly rival, the SBU.

Two days later, an SBU sea drone hit the base of the Kerch Bridge from Russia to Crimea, which can no longer handle heavy trucks or rail traffic because of a previous Ukrainian strike.

“The main task is to make Crimea a big burden so army logistics can’t work, because for the Russians as well as us, logistics is crucial,” said Slava. “They reconstruct quickly, but even spotty hits increase the difficulty for them.”

“Sea drones pushed out the whole Russian fleet from the Black Sea,” he recalled with relish. Sea drones (which look like large covered rowboats) with hidden missiles shot down two Russian helicopters and a warplane in a single day.

In new developments, drones are starting to hit the Iranian-designed Shaheds, he told me, and, of key importance, “anti-Shahed interceptors are almost ready.” In another breakthrough, hitting a swarm of 30 FPV drones is now “nothing at all,” when last year the technology for that was just emerging.

The June attack, at five different military airports, was done with 117 cheap FPV drones smuggled deep inside Russia within wooden containers on commercial flatbed trucks driven by unwitting Russians.

Less noticed in the West, however, on the very same day as Spiderweb, ❗HUR (aka Ukraine Intelligence) hit two trains and a newly built part of a railway in the occupied Donbas region that “blew up a whole Russian logistical supply chain.”

“But the Russians learning quickly,” he added. “We always have to create new technology. Every three months, technology becomes obsolete.”

Nevertheless, like every drone expert I met with, he believes U.S. war doctrine hasn’t caught up with the new era of drone warfare, which demands military decentralization and bottom-up initiative.

“The Russians are learning from us, but the U.S. is still based on old doctrines of war,” he said. “You should be more flexible. What America needs to understand is the need for decentralization. Not the generals’ world vision.”

In direct conflict with Russia today, the U.S. would be in trouble, Slava said. “If not speaking of deep strikes, but in direct contact, they could do nothing. Their tanks, armor, all would be hit by drones because their doctrine of war is obsolete. The reason we weren’t seized in first three days of the war is because Russian doctrine was still like in WWII.”

Europe, he said, grasps the shift because it sees Russian aggression up close.

“The Europeans are not just open, but ready to do whatever they can to learn from us. They are afraid, because they fear the future. The Poles have a fresh experience of war, transferred from generation to generation. They understand that if the Russians come, they will kill them just for the fact they aren’t Russians.

“The Europeans have plenty of training centers and invite our specialists to come there. War is constantly changing so they need to invite us to share our experience because we don’t have anything stable. Everything is constantly changing here.”

But Slava too bemoans the lack of resources that prevent Ukraine from pushing new technologies much further and faster. “Holding Russians back is a function of money for R&D. Either we get certain technology or someone sitting in the trenches.”

And either the Pentagon pays attention to Ukraine’s drone advances, or it falls behind Russia in hands-on knowledge of how to fight new wars to come.

*Appendix echo published in The New Yorker by David Remnick:

Since the end of the Cold War, most Americans have taken U.S. military supremacy for granted. We can no longer afford to do so, according to reporting by the staff writer Dexter Filkins. China has developed advanced weapons that rival or surpass America’s; and at the same time, drone warfare has fundamentally changed calculations of the battlefield. 

Ukraine’s ability to hold off the massive Russian Army depends largely on a startup industry that has provided millions of drones—small, highly accurate, and as cheap as five hundred dollars each—to inflict enormous casualties on invading forces. In some other conflict, could the U.S. be in the position of Russia? “The nightmare scenario” at the Pentagon, Filkins tells David Remnick, is, “we’ve got an eighteen-billion-dollar aircraft carrier steaming its way toward the western Pacific, and [an enemy could] fire drones at these things, and they’re highly, highly accurate, and they move at incredible speeds. . . . To give [Secretary of Defense Pete] Hegseth credit, and the people around him . . . they say, ‘O.K., we get it. We’re going to change the Pentagon procurement process,’ ” spending less on aircraft carriers and more on small technology like drones. But “the Pentagon is so slow, and people have been talking about these things for years. . . . Nobody has been able to do it.”

















New Yorker Favorites

Donald Trump cannot assume international diplomacy is like one of his sleazy real estate deals

Echo opinion letter published in the Los Angeles Times

To the editor: “If your only tool is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.”

Donald Trump was a sleazy real estate developer, so every negotiation looks like a property deal, thus his insistence on a land swap to end the war (“After welcoming Putin, Trump appears to adopt his goal, agreeing to cede land for peace,” Aug. 16). 

Thus. Trump apparantly sees international diplomacy as just another golf course deal, but bigger. He doesn’t appreciate that there are actual people on this property for whom it is not only their home, but also their nation. Do they get traded to Russia along with the land like serfs, or deported like inconvenient residents, in his own country❓

Brave Ukrainians

What’s worse than being in over your head ❓ Not even being aware that you’re in over your head. I weep for what this incompetence is about to do to the brave Ukrainians who have sacrificed so much.

From Robert Huber,  in Yorba Linda, California

President Zelenskyy recognized as a military strategic leader who "showed his Trump cards"

Huffington Post (HuffPost) echo report by Ron Dicker: Following theUkraine's highly successful military attack inside Russia, the Fox News pundit taunts Trump about his now exposed stupid claim to Volodymyr Zelenskyy about the Ukrainians having "no cards".  #BritHume

In fact, prominent pundit for the conservative channel didn't forget what Trump said to the Ukrainian leader, and he zinged him for it.

Fox News’ Brit Hume scorched President Donald Trump on Monday for previously telling Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy that he had no cards to play against Russia.

Shannon Bream asked the conservative channel’s chief political analyst about the embarrassment and losses that Ukraine inflicted on Russia, whose unprovoked invasion began the war more than three years ago.

“It certainly does establish that this country, whose president was being told at the White House that he didn’t have any cards to play, that he apparently has quite a few cards to play, including this daring attack,” Hume said on “Special Report.”

Back in February, Trump attempted to browbeat Zelenskyy into giving mineral rights to the U.S. for more support. “You’re not in a good position,” Trump lectured at the time in a heated exchange. “You don’t have the cards. With us, you have cards. But without us, you don’t have any cards.” Zelenskyy left the White House an hour later.

Hume praised the operation for wiping out a reported “30% to 40% of Russia’s strategic bombing force.”

“That’s a major setback for Russia,” he continued. “It is an embarrassing intelligence failure and an embarrassing defense failure. And who knows what else the Ukrainians, who have proved pretty ingenious, may have up their sleeves.”

Donald Trump: How to destroy democracy in 100 days! Republican cult followers are enabling incompetence

Echo opinion published in The New York Times by Ben Rhodes: 100 Days❗ That’s All It Took to Sever America From the World.

In 1941, as President Franklin D. Roosevelt marshaled support for the fight against fascism, his chief antagonists were isolationists at home. “What I seek to convey,” he said at the beginning of an address to Congress, “is the historic truth that the United States as a nation has at all times maintained clear, definite opposition to any attempt to lock us in behind an ancient Chinese wall while the procession of civilization went past.” Roosevelt prevailed, and that victory expanded America’s relationship with the world in ways that remade both.

Eighty-four years later, Donald Trump is systematically severing America from the globe. This is not simply a shift in foreign policy. It is a divorce so comprehensive that it makes Britain’s exit from the European Union look modest by comparison.

Consider the breadth of this effort. Allies have been treated like adversaries. The United States has withdrawn from international agreements on fundamental issues like health and climate change. A “nation of immigrants” now deports people without due process, bans refugees and is trying to end birthright citizenship. Trump’s tariffs have upended the system of international trade, throwing up new barriers to doing business with every country on Earth. 

Sadly, foreign assistance has largely been terminated. So has support for democracy abroad. Research cuts have rolled back global scientific research and cooperation. The State Department is downsizing. Exchange programs are on the chopping block. Global research institutions like the U.S. Institute of Peace and the Wilson Center have been effectively shut down. And, of course, the United States is building a wall along its southern border. (Pope Frances: Build bridges not walls")

Other countries are under no obligation to help a 78-year-old American president fulfill a fanciful vision of making America great again. Already a Gaza cease-fire has unraveled, Russia continues its war on Ukraine, Europe is turning away from America, Canadians are boycotting our goods and a Chinese Communist Party that endured the Great Famine and the Cultural Revolution seems prepared to weather a few years of tariffs. Travel to the United States is down 12 percent compared with last March, as tourists recoil from America’s authoritarian turn.

The ideologues driving Trump’s agenda defend their actions by pointing to the excesses of American foreign policy, globalization and migration. There is, of course, much to lament there. 

Yet, Trump’s ability to campaign on these problems doesn’t solve them in government. Indeed, his remedies will do far more harm to the people he claims to represent than to the global elites that his MAGA movement attacks.
Start with the 💲economic impact. If the current reduction in travel to the United States continues, it could cost up to $90 billion this year alone, along with tens of thousands of jobs. 

Tariffs will drive up prices and productivity will slow if mass deportations come for the farm workers who pick our food, the construction workers who build our homes and the care workers who look after children and the elderly. International students pay to attend American universities; their demonization and dehumanization could imperil the $44 billion they put into our economy each year and threaten a sector with a greater trade surplus than our civilian
aircraft sector.

Moreover, the economic outlook gets worse with time. Why would other countries choose to invest in a country where the president roils global markets through social media posts, profits from crypto schemes that fleece ordinary people and undermines the rule of law upon which commerce depends❓ It’s far more likely that nations will make trade deals and forge supply

 chains without the United States while China and its growing list of partners accelerate a movement away from the dollar as the world’s reserve currency.

In the short term, treating international relations like a protection racket could yield some bilateral transactions. Yet, something more fundamental is being lost: trust. An America that, for all its mistakes abroad, guaranteed the security of its allies. An America that, for all its nativism, took in refugees and educated countless world leaders through its universities and exchange programs. 

An America that, for all its hubris, responded to humanitarian crises and showcased an appealing cultural openness. An America that people around the world liked more than its government.

Frankly, the destruction of that trust will hurt us more than the rest of the world. This was certainly the case with Brexit, a project animated
by the same blend of nationalism and nostalgia that has propelled Trump. Nearly a decade after voting to divorce Europe, Britain finds itself wrestling with a predictable incapacity to generate growth, a diminished position in its own region and a growing factionalism in its politics. Less than a third of Britons now believe they made the right decision.

We are following that course on a global scale. After 250 years of growing more diverse and more connected to the world, Trump and his cohort are imposing the staid (sedate 🥱😌😒) insularity of self-imposed decline. The draining of democratic values from our national identity will leave America defined by its size, power and quixotic lust for profit: a place, not an idea. 

Roosevelt left us the inheritance of believing we were the good guys. But, Trump is eviscerating that pretense as cuts to U.S.A.I.D. have almost certainly caused more civilian deaths than Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

So, here is at least some good news: A nation’s relationship with the world is not defined solely by its government, particularly one as big and multifaceted as the United States.

In the first Trump term, state and local governments remained committed to combating climate change, welcoming immigrants, protecting higher education and sustaining global ties. All those efforts will be harder in our new Trumpzi reality, but that only makes them more important. 

As the Republicans often remind us, we live in a federal republic, and communities that maintain connections to the world will be better positioned to succeed than those that choose to follow Trump down the rabbit hole of isolationism.

Our institutions also have a choice. Part of what has shocked the world about their capitulation to the Trump administration is the failure to grasp that the moral choice is the best path to self-preservation. Law firms can choose to care more about the law than whether a callous competitor will pick up some of their business. Universities can build credibility within an interconnected world instead of validating the lie that a few students chanting “Free Palestine” is more dangerous than afar-right takeover of academic freedom. The entertainment sector can tell compelling stories about a consequential era instead of algorithmically designed superhero junk. Billionaires can spend money on STEM education for girls instead of financing celebrity trips into a higher part of the atmosphere.

At a more individual level, Americans can demonstrate that they don’t want to be defined by Mr. Trump’s xenophobia. There are international students who fear for their safety; defend their right to be here. There are colleagues and customers around the world; American businesses should engage them in new ways. 

There are enormous shortfalls in humanitarian assistance; American philanthropy should fill as much as it can. There are Republican members of Congress whose constituents will be devastated by  Trump’s policies; make them more afraid of losing their voters than the threats of a lame-duck president. (Uhg😟😰.....Maine Writer:  Impeach Trump NOW❗)

But, he wrong way to respond to our current emergency is to promise, as President Joe Biden did, that America will be “back.” That ignores the enormous mistakes elites made over the last three decades and the political context that allowed Trump to return to power with the mind-set of an arsonist. We’re not coming back, and that’s OK. Indeed, it’s an opportunity.

Instead, our intention should be to return to the world as a different country. That requires something that Americans have not always done well: listening. We have much to learn. And ironically, we now have more in common with people in other countries living under corruption, autocracy and oligarchy. 

Perhaps this chapter in our national experience can be a moment when we find a new kind of solidarity with others who have been through versions of what we are now experiencing.

Indeed, the United States will never be a normal country, if there is such aa thing. Like China and Russia, it is too big, too shaped by a revolutionary and imperial past, too rived by traumas that it has inflicted and absorbed. 

What Roosevelt understood is that America’s peculiarities could stir us to a more enlightened form of self-interest. As a multiracial nation connected to the world and committed to a set of freedoms core to our identity, we could never afford to follow the foolish path of America First — a slogan that amounted to capitulation to fascism.

America’s strength has always been connected to the fact that it comprises people from everywhere who chose not to be defined by a ruler or to fear the future. 

At a time when power in the world is becoming more diffuse, our shifting demographics should be seen as a strength — not something to be feared or suppressed through a reactionary politics that shuts out the world. If we continue down that path, the procession of civilization will leave us behind, in a fearful, diminished and impoverished place. If we recover our sense of agency, we can re-engage the world as a part of it — neither hegemon (i.e., "leader") nor hostile.

Ben Rhodes is a contributing Opinion writer and the author, most recently, of “After the Fall: The Rise of Authoritarianism in the World We’ve Made.”

Republicans are passengers on a runaway train with the Donald Trump chaos sending democracy over a cliff

Stock market tumble U.S Dollar loses value: Republican economic chaos caused by the kowtow cult of Donald Trumpziim. 

Echo opinion letter published in the Houston Chronicle.

Republicans are complicit in the physical act of deep bowing their heads to the ground, showing excessive deference or submissiveness toward Donald Trump.

Regarding “Dow drops swings, whiplash!  1,600 as US stocks lead worldwide sell-off after Trump’s tariffs cause a COVID-like shock,” (April 3): Our president has been busy creating chaos. 

With performative Trumpziim contempt for the rule of law, his administration has violated the First, Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, Seventh and Eight Amendments. That’s over half the Bill of Rights — the very prerequisite for states ratifying the Constitution.

People have been brutally arrested, shoved into unmarked vans (Nazi tactics❗) and shipped off to foreign prisons without probable cause or due process. 

Judges have been targeted. Law firms have been extorted. And there’s not enough ink at the Chronicle to catalog violations of the emoluments clause. 

If America were a stock, the world would be dumping it. As MAGA sanewashers try to convince everyone that coke-addled spider monkeys definitely are not flying the plane, American pain and protest are falling on deaf ears. I attended the recent town hall with Tim Walz and Beto O’Rourke and saw a lot of scared and angry constituents who felt ignored, even disdained, by their elected Republican representatives.

Four years of this is unsustainable. This administration is a runaway train on a collision course with reality — either an attack for which we have no reliable intel, an undetected pandemic, a more-likely-than-not recession — or worse. Buckle up.

Now, fresh off of Signalgate, exposing to adversaries and allies our bare-naked ineptitude for operational security, Donald Trump singlehandedly shoves the world economy off a cliff, launching a trade war against everything not Russia. In two days, the S&P 500 loses $5 trillion. Calling it a week, Trump flies off to a Saudi-backed golf tournament instead of presiding over the dignified transfer of the four U.S. soldiers who died in Lithuania.

Buckle up❗ 

From Robert Campbell, in Katy Texas

Donald Trump and JD Vance disgusting behavior in the Oval Office with President Zelensky embarrassed Americans

Echo opinion letters published in the Houston Chronicle:

"President Zelenskyy respectfully pointed out the numerous times that Vladimir Putin has blatantly violated 'signed' agreements and trusting the Russian president is a fool's game"

Dear Editor: I have never been so mortified by the behavior of an elected official than I was by the reprehensible display by our president and vice president. They made a mockery of their public meeting with Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. 

President Zelenskyy is a true statesman acting with zeal, honor and humility in valiantly fighting Russia to a virtual standstill for three years. He has rallied his people and the civilized nations of the world in the defense of Ukraine in the face of unspeakable atrocities. He has unified the NATO alliance nations in a hitherto common goal of stopping the unbridled aggression and lust for conquest of Vladimir Putin. Zelenskyy should've been honored with a hero's welcome in his visit to our country.

Instead, he was met with an outlandish display of rudeness, insults, lies and effrontery by two weak bullies who have shown themselves to be wholly unfit to represent our once proud country.

These churlish clowns tarnished the good name of the United States. Zelenskyy did nothing to provoke the onslaught and he certainly did not deserve it. I am wholly unable to even imagine any legitimate purpose in treating an ally in such deplorable fashion. For his part, Zelenskyy was a dignified gentleman, even while our president and vice president embarrassed our country on the world stage.

I am writing this with the hope that by some miracle it could reach President Zelenskyy so that I could extend my sincerest apologies. I am ashamed of what happened. I hope he could forgive the United States and know that our supposed leaders were not speaking or acting for us all.

From Tanner Garth, in Houston Texas

Dear Editor- President Zelenskyy respectfully pointed out the numerous times that Vladimir Putin has blatantly violated “signed” agreements, and trusting the Russian president is a fool's game. I can only hope that one day, and sooner rather than later, some of our gutless GOP congressional members will wake up to where Donald Trump’s infatuation with Mr. Putin and his autocratic counterparts is leading us.

Trump and Vice President JD Vance showed their true bully colors when they tag-teamed President Zelenskyy in front of the whole world. They attempted to force him into an agreement to give up Ukraine’s vast mineral resources as payment for our help in fighting Russian aggression, with no guarantee that the U.S. would hold Russia to any ceasefire agreements potentially achieved by peace talks.

Their behavior was a mirror image of the tactics used by Adolf Hitler in his first year as chancellor of Germany when he began his blitz through Europe: bully, humiliate, intimidate and, Trump's most ubiquitous tactic, lie.

We cannot continue to normalize the egregious behavior of Trump and his kangaroo court of Cabinet members. Trump and Vance will heartily give up our country for a selfie at the Kremlin.

From: Barbara Drozdowski Mackey, Houston Texas

Dear Editor  This meeting marks the end of American exceptionalism and the capitulation of an American president and vice president to the nefarious aims of Vladimir Putin's hegemony in Europe. Clearly, neither Trump nor Vance ever learned the lessons of history leading up to the Second World War. What I saw on Friday was a cheap theatrical reproduction of Neville Chamberlain's appeasement of Hitler in 1938. It paves the way for Russia's destruction of a country that bravely has stood up to Putin even while American leadership dawdled and hem-hawed. 

Republican leadership should be ashamed for standing by a display of bullying politics instead of demanding true leadership and solidarity with countries that have stood with the U.S. through thick and thin. The 2022 elections can't come soon enough for me.

From Ted Freyer, Houston Texas

I am a lifelong registered Republican, but I can’t remember the last time that I was so ashamed of my country as I watched our president and vice president essentially beating up on a man who has been struggling to try to save his country from being swallowed up by Russia. 

In fact, I was horrified to see our president and vice president vehemently castigate Zelenskyy. I grew up thinking this country was for "liberty and justice for all." It's clear to me that Putin does not need clandestine agents in this country as long as he has our president in his pocket.

From Jim Walters, in Houston Texas

Donald Trump is a failed dealmaker who had President Zelensky ready to sign an agreement but then the meeting was a disaster

Echo editorial published by The Boston Globe editorial board:
Trump’s opening gambit on Ukraine peace already a loser
No good dealmaker gives away the store from the get-go.

So the guy who literally wrote (it was ghostwritten❗ ) a book on “The Art of the Deal*” somehow thinks it’s a smart negotiating tactic to cozy up to President Vladimir Putin of Russia and insult President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, all while bombs are still landing in Kyiv.

Only in Donald Trump’s “Alice Through the Looking Glass” world, where down is up, would the week’s events make any sense. 

In Trump World, Zelensky “started” the war — which was, in fact, precipitated by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine’s sovereign territory.

Whatever Trump thinks he’s accomplishing, the US goal ought to be to bring the war to an end without rewarding Putin’s aggression. 

And there should be no concessions until then.

No further concessions, anyway. Putin, who has succeeded in playing the American president like a balalaika, has already won some — like a 90-minute phone call with Trump, a meeting in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, between Secretary of State Marco Rubio and his Russian counterpart Sergey Lavrov, and the reestablishment of embassy staffing in Washington and Moscow. All such direct contacts had rightly ended three years ago when Russia invaded Ukraine.

It was surely no accident that the Russian delegation sent to Riyadh included Kirill Dmitriev, the head of Russia’s sovereign wealth fund, who brought a list of the “total losses” — of more than $300 billion — to American business attributed to US disengagement from Russia.

Lavrov told reporters after the meeting that “there was great interest” in the room “in removing artificial barriers to the development of mutually beneficial economic cooperation” — hinting at the possibility of getting American sanctions lifted.

But even as the US-Russia talks were going on, the bombardment of Ukraine by Russian drones and missiles continued. By Wednesday Russia had once again zeroed in on Ukraine’s gas infrastructure.

So the great dealmaker has accomplished what exactly?

Or is Trump waiting for Zelensky to sign on to that deal to give up half his nation’s mineral resources to assure continued US support — or perhaps to pay for past military support? It was unclear which.

What is clear is that the war goes on — and job one for Trump and his team is to stop the fighting, the killing, and the destruction. And the way to do that isn’t to give away the store to Putin before there is a path to a cease-fire.

Trump has shown a preternatural desire for a summit with Putin — which would be a huge concession absent a cease-fire.

It is certainly not unknown to have lower-level dual track bilateral meetings — rather like the ones that ultimately led to the Israel-Hamas cease-fire — as a starting point. But the bumbling efforts thus far by Rubio in Riyadh and Keith Kellogg, the special envoy to Ukraine and Russia, seem not even close.

Rubio promised following the Riyadh meeting that there would be “engagement and consultation with Ukraine, with our partners in Europe, and others. But ultimately, the Russian side will be indispensable to this effort.”

Nevertheless, there can be no progress on long-term peace efforts until a cease-fire is in place.

Then and only then should there be any talk of easing economic sanctions on Russia — as Lavrov and Dmitriev seem intent on accomplishing.

To do otherwise is to reward Putin for continuing his war of aggression.

Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations, and Charles Kupchan argued in a 2023, essay in Foreign Affairs, that the West could “offer some limited relief from sanctions in return for Russia’s willingness to abide by a cease-fire, agree to a demilitarized zone, and participate meaningfully in peace talks.”

But, they added, “Western governments could promise to fully lift sanctions against Russia and normalize relations with it only if Moscow signed a peace agreement that was acceptable to Kyiv.”

That approach recognizes, of course, that Europe and the NATO allies — who have thus far been left out of the talks initiated by the Trump administration — would have a critical role to play. After all, they have provided about a third of the military hardware used by Ukraine to fight the war and have imposed their own sanctions on Russia — often at great sacrifice.

Already on the table and part of the discussions among Europe’s leaders is providing troops to serve as peacekeepers, policing those possible demilitarized zones, assuring the safety of civilian populations, and in the process attempting to keep Russia honest.

Such a plan also leaves the disposition of land under Russian occupation to some future agreement. And, as Trump has already indicated, if even a path to NATO membership for Ukraine is off the table, then some kind of security pact with the United States or members of the European Union, preferably both, would be critical to guarantee Ukrainian sovereignty.

And then there is the matter of the rebuilding of Ukraine, a nation shattered by war — something to which the United States and its European allies have always been committed, that is, until the Trump administration upended the diplomatic world as we know it.

This opening gambit on ending a three-year war that has brought misery to Ukraine and its people and economic privations to ordinary Russians who have paid the price for Putin’s aggression has been less than impressive.

The fake ❗dealmaker-in-chief hasn’t helped the situation in recent days with his flurry of lies and vitriol toward Ukraine. A good deal is one that will bring lasting peace — one that is fair, that doesn’t reward Russian aggression, and that guarantees Ukrainian sovereignty. Anything less will be seen for the sham that is.

*Tony Schwartz (born May 2, 1952) is an American journalist and business book author who is best known for ghostwriting Trump: The Art of the Deal. New York, New York, U.S.