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❗

Vladimir Putin may have been a formidable spy but proving to be inept as a military strategist- Ukraine Resists!

Maine Wroter: Donald Trump hardly mentioned the Ukraine during his long and boring "State of Delusion" speech to Congress on February 24, 2026. *See my note below.

Maybe a literate person in the White House can read this excellent essay to Donald Trump and also explain who Winston Churchill was.....just sayin'.:😟😧😠  "A Bitter Winter in Ukraine" by Tom Judah published in The New York Review of Books.

In August 2014, I went to see the Ukrainian novelist Andrey Kurkov in Kyiv. Ukraine was emerging from the pro-Europe Maidan Revolution the previous winter; Russia had seized Crimea and was aiding and abetting pro-Russian rebels in the east of the country. Kurkov had just published Ukraine Diaries: Dispatches from Kiev,
in which he imagined digging up potatoes at his country house in September, “regardless of the military situation,” and asked:

Where will I be❓ Where will my wife and children be in September❓ I want to believe we will be at home in Kiev, going to our country house every weekend like we usually do—grilling shashlik, gathering the harvest, making apple jam and spending the evenings in the summerhouse with a glass of wine, talking about the future.

He added, “It’s funny, but the future we talk about never seems to come.”

On the night of February 23, 2022, Kurkov invited me to dinner with friends at home in Kyiv. “I will cook borscht,” he said. The atmosphere was febrile. We made toasts “to victory” but had no idea of what was about to happen. A few hours later the Russians began their full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

For a while Kurkov set aside fiction. He wrote essays about the war, and last year he published Three Years on Fire: The Destruction of Ukraine, his fourth nonfiction book chronicling the revolution and then the war. The essays in Three Years on Fire accurately reflect the atmosphere of the Ukraine I know and have been reporting from for many years. In one he writes about a soldier who campaigned against the country’s predatory gambling industry—in the last few years gambling addiction has become a serious problem among soldiers who place bets on their phones—until he was killed in battle. In another essay we learn about the owner of the tropical fruit farm close to Kyiv who developed miniature banana trees that Ukrainians have been buying. At the beginning of the war, shelling cut the gas and electricity that kept his greenhouses warm, but he found that the trees were frost-resistant. Kurkov comments, “You could say the astonishing survival of these trees mirrors the unexpected staunchness with which Ukrainians are facing adversity.”

In January I was back in Kyiv. Kurkov and his wife had just returned from their country house. “Does the future still not come❓” I asked. Well, he said, reflecting a common feeling of resignation, “the future is just too far away. We live every day only in reality and we wait for the next morning and then we take that as reality.”

In the first part of the war in 2014–2015, it was easy for people in Kyiv to think of the fighting in the east as very far away, but four years into this second part it is anything but. In 2022 the Russians reached the outskirts of Kyiv before being driven back. 

Now Vladimir Putin and the Russians are trying to freeze Ukrainians into submission by relentlessly attacking the country’s energy grid. For much of the day there is no electricity in Kyiv or most of the rest of the country. Some 60 percent of Ukrainians get their heat and hot water from power stations, which have also been under attack. Kurkov’s radiators were cold, but he said his apartment was still warm because the building was old and took a long time to cool down. However, in many districts radiators are only lukewarm even when they are on.

When Russia began the full-scale invasion in 2022, Ukrainians at first could not believe that it was launching a war to conquer the entire country rather than a more limited operation in the Donbas region in the east. Then came fear, followed by euphoria, as the Russians were driven back that summer and winter. Many in the West admired the Ukrainians’ resilience—so many volunteered to fight that the armed forces had to turn people away, and civilians mobilized in huge numbers to help their soldiers and refugees. Later came admiration for the drone technology Ukrainians have developed, which has transformed warfare. Now things are different again. “People are changing,” said Kurkov. “Attitudes are changing, dreams and hopes are changing.”

In Kyiv it was −17 degrees Celsius (roughly 1 degree Fahrenheit), and the trees, with their bare branches coated in glistening ice, looked as if they had been turned to glass. 

Streetlights were on in some places, but others were completely dark. Kurkov described the mood as “like when you get an overdose of bad news. You stop reacting, you just accept it.” He said he had stopped counting the children of friends who had been killed in the fighting and people he knew who had died after they had stopped seeking care when they were ill, “because they think that doctors should be paying attention to wounded soldiers, not to civilians.” The nation, he said, was living through amassive nervous breakdown because people don’t see the exit from this situation. People don’t understand how it can end. And they can imagine only a very bad ending to this story, because you cannot stop the war. I mean that is not up to Ukraine.

One night, in the southeastern city of Dnipro, I was in bed working on my laptop when I heard explosions. At first I ignored them, and then I sent a WhatsApp message to my Ukrainian colleague Taras Semenyuk: “Did you hear that❓❗” He replied:

Yes- News reporting about Shaheds
It’s a massive attack going on

Shaheds are Iranian-designed drones that are now produced in Russia and are much more sophisticated, powerful, and destructive than earlier models. I checked local Dnipro channels that report where drones are and where they are heading and replied:

Yes, I can see on Telegram.  Strange my air alert did not go off.

And that was it. I went on working. For the first two years of the full-scale war Semenyuk, like many Ukrainians, was extremely anxious and always went to a shelter when there was an attack. That was not surprising. In the first weeks of the war, his apartment in Kyiv had been destroyed by a missile aimed at a nearby heating plant. It was only by chance that he was not there, and his wife and child had already left for Poland. But now, like millions of others, he just shrugs. This is not to say that people are not frightened by major drone, cruise, and ballistic missile attacks but simply that the chance of being killed or injured in one is actually quite small. According to the UN, in government-controlled territory in 2025, 2,395 civilians were killed and 11,751 injured, but 63 percent of all civilian casualties on both sides were in frontline areas. The attacks in Dnipro that night were aimed at energy facilities, and the next day there was no electricity in the city.

Russian drones and missiles are often inaccurate, says the military analyst Ivan Stupak. Between 60 and 80 percent of them are shot down, though falling debris from them also causes damage, as do Ukrainian antiaircraft misfires. For civilians it is often hard to know what hit their building. Stupak says it is possible that 10 percent of attacks target residential blocks in order to strike terror, which has the intended effect. “I don’t want to pretend we are all Rambos❗”

From Dnipro, Semenyuk and I went to Zaporizhzhia, a major industrial city on the Dnieper River. In 2022 the Russians seized roughly 75 percent of Zaporizhzhia province, including its nuclear power plant, which is the largest in Europe. It used to supply about one fifth of Ukraine’s electricity and is now shut down. The Russians failed, however, to take the city of Zaporizhzhia. Many of its people fled, but they were replaced by refugees from occupied areas. Like all big cities it has been subjected to missile and Shahed attacks, and now the Russians are creeping closer from the south. In November a southern district of the city was hit by its first FPV (first-person-view) drone attack. These are short-range drones with a video feed that are controlled by a pilot using a screen or goggles and that can chase and target individuals, unlike Shaheds and other long-range drones whose target is preset.

The telltale sign that you are within range of FPVs is netting, which snarls drones that fly into it. We drove to the village of Balabyne, a few minutes south of the outskirts of Zaporizhzhia, and found that a net tunnel had been erected to protect the entire main street. People were beginning to leave, we were told by Tetiana, who works in a local shop. The drones attack civilians and their cars for no reason, she said. There is a reason, of course: to terrorize. On social media there are endless films from FPV drones released by both Russian and Ukrainian military units that like to show off their prowess. You see the drones carefully maneuvering through windows and buildings and zeroing in on soldiers who see them and run or try to bat them off. The last image is someone’s face a split second before the drone explodes and kills them.

In towns in the east of Ukraine from which I have reported, FPV drones are an increasing menace. In Kramatorsk, which was held by pro-Russian rebels in 2014 for almost three months, people have begun to leave because of them. After Bakhmut fell in 2023 and then Avdiivka nine months later, then Pokrovsk was next. As the Russians crept closer the drones made ordinary life impossible, and now it has all but fallen. Kostyantynivka, another town I have reported from but did not name because the unit I was with did not want me to identify their location, has now become part of the drone-terrorized zone and is gradually being reduced to rubble.

Anti-drone netting protecting the main road from the Kharkiv provincial border to Sloviansk, Ukraine on January 6, 2026.

The center of Izium, southeast of Kharkiv, has also been netted up to protect people. Much of the twenty-eight miles of road from the Kharkiv provincial border southeast to Sloviansk and neighboring Kramatorsk has been turned into a net tunnel.

It is wise to take other precautions as well. Just over a year ago I wrote about traveling with soldiers with a drone detector.
That was the first time I had seen one. Now they are commonplace. The Journalists’ Solidarity Center of Kharkiv, organized by Ukraine’s journalists’ union, loaned us one. It was handheld and the screen fizzed like an old-fashioned television with no reception. If it suddenly came to life with a picture, though, that meant it had locked on to a nearby drone and we could see what its pilot was seeing. It could, of course, be flying somewhere else, but if it was flying toward us, we would have just a minute or two to find cover. At the checkpoint-cum-junction where the net tunnel between Izium and Sloviansk begins, some cars, like ours, drove straight on while others, including delivery trucks, turned off to take a detour out of Russian FPV drone range.

All these towns, except for Izium and Kharkiv, are in the Donbas, which has become a major point of contention in the peace talks among Ukraine, the US, and Russia. Vladimir Putin wants this entire rust belt region, which consists of the provinces of Luhansk and Donetsk. In the military campaigns of 2014–2015 and 2022, Russia took 99 percent of Luhansk, and it now occupies about 75 percent of Donetsk. Taking the rest is Putin’s “minimum plan,” said Major Viacheslav Shutenko, the commander of the Legion North drone battalion of Ukraine’s 44th Mechanized Brigade, as he showed me the massive fortifications of razor wire, anti-infantry wire, and anti-tank ditches and berms that snake as far as the eye can see around Kramatorsk and Sloviansk. Putin desperately needs an achievement to show off to Russians, he said. After all, in the time it took the Soviet Union to recover from its initial defeats by the Germans in World War II and its men to raise their flag above the Reichstag in Berlin, Putin’s troops have failed to retake even little Kramatorsk.

Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, has resisted ceding this territory to Russia, and there has been vague talk of turning it into a “free economic zone” and of “demilitarization.” Since the biggest local industries have always been mining and old-fashioned heavy manufacturing, it is hard from here to see why anyone would invest in the Donbas in the future, although clearly things look different from Mar-a-Lago. Yet it is obvious why handing it over to the Russians or demilitarizing it without rock-solid security guarantees is a trap. Major Shutenko and I stood on the crest of a hill from which, beyond this so-called fortress belt, Ukraine is as flat as a pancake for more than six hundred miles, all the way to the Polish border. The Dnieper, which flows from the north down to the Black Sea, divides all of Ukraine, including Kyiv, into two parts and is the only natural barrier after these soft, rolling hills.

No one I have met in Ukraine believes that a cease-fire will come this year or would be anything other than a limited truce, as the one in 2015 was, rather than part of a full peace deal. If Ukraine were forced to accept a truce that included handing over to Russia the last bit of the Donbas that Ukraine controls, which is what the US has been reported to have demanded, it would be akin to Czechoslovakia being forced by France and Britain to hand over the Sudetenland to Germany in 1938, despite the fortifications it had built in those border areas. As a result the Czechoslovaks could not defend themselves when Hitler proceeded to take over the rest of the country a few months later. Yevhen Hlibovytsky, the director of the Frontier Institute, says, “Russia won’t want a deal unless it becomes really vulnerable, and if it does, then Ukraine won’t want one.”

Hlibovytsky may be right, but Ukrainians are struggling to survive the slow erosion of their economic and military capabilities. They lack men, they lack energy, and their economy is being ground down. The Russians are advancing very slowly and tens of thousands of them are dying in the process, but there is no evidence that Putin cares. Apart from the energy grid, says Stupak, the Russians are now choosing high-value targets like ballistic and cruise missile plants rather than trying to take out the hundreds of small drone companies. Although such matters are a tightly guarded secret, it is likely that the Russians have caused significant damage to military production, but thus far he has not heard of any disruption of drone and ammunition deliveries to the front. And the Russians have not broken Ukrainian morale.

At the front both Ukraine and Russia have been making up for flagging numbers by recruiting thousands of foreigners. Ukraine does this because its mobilization system is inefficient, nontransparent, and sometimes corrupt. Clips on social media of men being chased, caught, and bundled into vans by recruitment officers are a boon for Russian propaganda, and grabbing people off the streets who don’t want to fight is a poor way of replenishing the ranks. Putin, meanwhile, does not want to risk unpopularity by drafting people rather than offering recruits huge salaries compared with what they can earn in their often far-flung and poor provincial regions. Today 30 percent of Russian troops captured or surrendering to Ukrainian forces may be Africans and other foreigners, depending on the location. On the Ukrainian side, one of the largest contingents of foreigners fighting for money is from Colombia.

Ugandans and other Africans, who are derided on social media as “disposables” by Russians filming them, are unlikely to change the course of the war, though North Koreans did help eject the Ukrainians from Russia’s Kursk region, which they had briefly occupied in the summer of 2024. In any case, Putin now seems to be counting on the winter to swing things in his favor, just as it helped Russia defeat Hitler and Napoleon before him. But Ukrainians are used to winter combat, so the result may be different this time.

Just before the full-scale invasion started, Ukraine had 33.7 gigawatts of electrical generation capacity; in early January it had only fourteen gigawatts, and if the winter remains as exceptionally cold as it has been, it will need seventeen gigawatts to keep electricity flowing 24/7. Not all the loss of generation capacity can be attributed to destruction. The Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant, which has been another point of dispute in the peace talks, used to provide six gigawatts and could again.

In the past Ukraine produced more electricity than it needed and even exported some. Now its surplus capacity has been destroyed, and its energy officials are scouring the rest of Europe and farther afield for replacement equipment. Russia, meanwhile, is changing its tactics. Previously it concentrated its attacks on large power plants that had relatively good air defenses. Now it has switched to targeting some 3,500 smaller substations that are the essential links between the power plants and consumers.

From the news coverage, one might have the impression that all Ukrainians are hapless victims freezing in the dark. In fact, extremely difficult though this winter is proving to be, four years into the war most Ukrainians have made some sort of preparations to help them get through power outages, especially if they have some money. Power companies publish schedules showing when districts will have power, which allows people to plan their days, although in mid-January this system broke down in Kyiv, and on January 20 many in the capital woke up to find that temporarily they had no water either.

Shops have generators, small industries have invested in battery capacity, and larger companies have installed their own electricity production facilities using natural gas. Everyone has power banks, rechargeable lamps are common, and those who can afford them have bought large portable batteries commonly known as EcoFlows, after the best-known brand. In apartment buildings residents have often joined together to buy generators to keep elevators and heat pumps working. Getting stuck on higher floors is a real problem for the elderly and families with small children.

“We are holding on, but people are getting angrier and angrier,” said Valentina, a kindergarten teacher I met, along with her five-year-old daughter, as she was charging her phone and power banks in a well-heated orange tent erected by the emergency services in Rusanivka, a neighborhood of Kyiv. In the next tent I met a couple of cheerful pensioners who told me it was only 13 degrees Celsius (around 55 degrees Fahrenheit) in their apartments. When I asked why there were not many people in the tents trying to keep warm, they said it was not necessary because everyone in the area had gas stoves and if you kept them on then you could at least keep your kitchen warm.

Ukrainians might be resilient, but attacks on the energy system and other targets are harming the economy. According to Andrii Dligach, who heads a coalition of business associations, attacks and power outages shaved 0.6 percent off Ukraine’s GDP in the last quarter of 2025. When sirens sound in the center of Kyiv, for example, McDonald’s loses business, as does the Globus Mall next door, because its scores of shops and cafés close. Many other shops and restaurants stay open, though. The McDonald’s at the Lukianivska metro station opposite the Artem defense complex, which has been targeted several times, has installed shatterproof windows. The plate glass windows of the metro, long since blown out, have just been boarded up. Dmytro, the owner of a chain of shoe shops, said that all his colleagues agree that the last few months have been the hardest since the full-scale invasion began: “When it is cold at home and when you have no power, you are just not in the mood to go shopping.”

Some are also not in the mood to stay in the country. Dmytro said that in the last few weeks two of his shop assistants had decided to leave. One was going because her entire family was already abroad, and another was taking her twenty-two-year-old son out of Ukraine. Since the beginning of the full-scale invasion men age eighteen to sixty have not been allowed to travel abroad without an exemption. In August the lower limit was changed to twenty-three. Men can be mobilized at the age of twenty-five. While I was writing this in Lviv, in Ukraine’s west, I was asked to give a talk to journalism students at the city’s Ukrainian Catholic University. Journalism courses have always attracted more girls than boys there, I was told, but among the twenty students in the room, there was not a single boy. The last few had left when the travel age limit changed. Tens of thousands of young men are estimated to have gone since August.

An opinion poll published at the end of January found that 65 percent of Ukrainians were willing “to endure the war” for “as long as it takes.” But Ukraine cannot fight alone. The US is no longer supplying much equipment directly; instead it is selling it to NATO countries, which then pass it on to Ukraine. “The war costs us nothing,” boasted Donald Trump in an interview with The New York Times in early January. “We make money with the war now.” What the US does continue to supply, though, is satellite military intelligence. It is crucial for the guidance of Ukraine’s deep-strike drones, which are inflicting heavy damage on Russia’s oil installations.

Still, Ukraine could become collateral damage from utterly unrelated events. On January 9 Trump provoked the worst crisis in transatlantic relations in our time by insisting that if the US could not acquire Greenland “the easy way,” it would have to get it “the hard way.” On January 21 he said he would not use force, but his demands helped accelerate the loss of the Europeans’ trust in the US as an ally. In the preceding weeks Britain and France thought they had received assurances from Washington that it would participate in security guarantees for Ukraine in the event of a cease-fire, though it would not send troops. Kurkov remarked of Trump that “nobody believes he is willing to do anything” about Ukraine because he was trying to “copycat [Putin] by going into Venezuela and with his desire to take over Greenland.”

After the Greenland crisis erupted, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said, (in a not so well veiled threat).... “The European leaders will come around…. What would happen in Ukraine if the US pulled its support out❓ The whole thing would collapse.” 

No. In fact, Ukraine would probably not collapse, but defending it and shoring up its economy, military, and morale would certainly become harder, and anti-Western sentiment there would grow if defeats were ascribed to a stab in the back by the US and weak Europeans.

As the Arctic crisis unfolded, the glee in the Russian press about Trump’s demands and the damage done to NATO could hardly be contained. But Hlibovytsky said that Ukrainians do not have the luxury of worrying about all that: “We accept these things the same way we accept the weather.” Then he cautioned:

There is an error in the calculus of many Western politicians that the alternative to not helping Ukraine is the status quo and that if they don’t help then everything stays the same. No, it doesn’t. If they don’t help Ukraine, the hidden cost that they will have to face is so tremendous that if their societies would be aware of that cost, they would probably wish that the governments of the Western countries did more.

Those hidden costs could include, for example, open Russian attacks on NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) countries such as the Baltics and Poland.

In gas stations across Ukraine you can buy the Ukrainian translation of former British prime minister Boris Johnson’s biography of Winston Churchill. It does not take much imagination to connect the historical dots. After the Czechoslovaks were betrayed in 1938, Churchill famously told Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, “You were given the choice between war and dishonour. You chose dishonour and you will have war.” When you stand on a hill in the Donbas it is very easy to see that, as Mark Twain is reputed to have said, history doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.

—February 11, 2026

*Pope Leo XIV sent 80 generators to Ukraine to help citizens battle the freezing temperatures, according to Vatican News. The Pope responded to appeals from several bishops, with temperatures dropping to -15C and some families having to find warmth in heated shelters with the help of generators. Feb 13, 2026

Donald Trump and maga Republicans must push back against the Nazi Nick Fuentes while Tucker Carlson stokes his antisemitism

Echo opinion published in The New York Times by Bret Stephens

Meet the New Antisemites, Same as the Old Antisemites- Tucker Carlson reaches to find journalist relevance by creating his own news.

😡The good news from the recent donnybrook over Tucker Carlson’s (dangerous⚠️) interview with Nick Fuentes, the Hitler fanboy with a sizable❗❓ social-media 💢😡 following, is that it has at last forced conservatives to reckon with the sewer pipe of antisemitism bursting through their walls.

Better news: Many have risen to the occasion. That includes Senator Ted Cruz, who called out his fellow Republicans for being too timid to condemn Carlson; The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board, which denounced “this poison in their own ranks”; and Heritage Foundation people who resigned in disgust after Kevin Roberts, the organization’s president, offered a lickspittle apologia for Carlson. Even Roberts felt compelled to disavow his own performance, though he persisted in describing Carlson as “my friend.”

(Maine Writer- IMO Carlson has become a media grabbing opportunist. He does not know how to regain his jounalistic footing after he was fired by Rupert Murdoch and his son Lachlan Murdoch.)

The bad news is that none of this is going away anytime soon. If ever.
Antisemitism was supposedly banished twice from the conservative universe: first in the 1950s, when William F. Buckley Jr. decreed that nobody on the masthead of the antisemitic American Mercury would appear in the pages of his own National Review; second in the 1990s, when he said it was “impossible to defend” Pat Buchanan from charges of antisemitism.

Such was Buckley’s prestige on the right that none other than Carlson issued his own denunciation of Buchanan: “I’m not hysterical on the subject,” he said on C-SPAN’s “Washington Journal” in 1999, “but I do believe that there is a pattern with Pat Buchanan of needling the Jews.”

Now the Heritage Foundation and various conservative publications are pressing the Trump administration to award an unrepentant Buchanan the Presidential Medal of Freedom. (So,❓ let me get this❓: Donald Trump awarded the late Charlie Kirk the Freedom medal after the man's tragic assassination in Utah, but there was no merit in this presentation. Mr. Kirk spoke in "Trumpian tongues", but he did it with a smile, while he caused discrimination against homosexuals, transgender people and innocent immigrants. Now, Trumpzi he is looking to award the Freedom medal to Pat Buchannan❓ There is obvioulsy no bottom to Donald Trump's low morals.)

The notion that Winston Churchill, not the German Führer, was the villain in World War II — another of Buchanan’s hobbyhorses — is again gaining ground on the right.

Buchanan’s obsessive loathing of Israel, along with his conviction that the pro-Israel lobby dictates U.S. foreign policy, is also gaining ground — a mirror image of the views of the anti-Israel left and a reminder of the French aphorism “Les extrêmes se touchent.” Extremes meet.

How did this happen❓ Cynicism is one reason. “The fact that antisemitism is the socialism of fools is an argument not against, but for, antisemitism; given the fact that there is such an abundance of fools, why should one not steal that very profitable thunder?” Leo Strauss, the philosopher, observed in 1962. 

Bluntly, his point was that a bigotry for morons — a.k.a., “The Jews did it” — will always be political gold in a world of morons. Candace Owens, the right-wing podcaster, gets this: Her popularity has soared as her Jew-hatred has become more overt.

A second factor is the forced merger of Christianity with conservatism.

Mainstream American conservatives used to believe our sacred texts were the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution; “Reflections on the Revolution in France” and “The Road to Serfdom.” 

Now it’s the New Testament. We once thought that religious convictions should be a little more respected in our secular Republic. Now this is supposed to be a Christian regime that tolerates Jews. (Others, not so much.) 

When Carlson, speaking at Charlie Kirk’s memorial service, compared the slain conservative to Christ brought down by “a bunch of guys sitting around eating hummus thinking about, ‘What do we do about this guy telling the truth about us❓’”😡🤢 the inference could have been lost on nobody. Among conservatives, he paid virtually no price for it.

Then there’s political ideology. The MAGA movement is not antisemitic. But many of its core convictions are antisemitic-adjacent — that is, they have a habit of leading in an anti-Jewish direction.

Opposition to free trade, or to a welcoming immigration policy, or to international law that crimps national sovereignty, are legitimate, if often wrongheaded, political positions. 

Nevertheless, they have a way of creating and melding with hoary stereotypes, about “the International Jew” working across borders against the interests of so-called real Americans. 

You can be sure that, somewhere on social media, someone will respond to this column by pointing out that my Kishinev-born grandfather changed his name from Ehrlich to Stephens — evidence, supposedly, of sneakiness in my DNA. (Both of Stephens' parents were secular Jews. His mother was born in Italy at the start of World War II to Jewish parents who had fled Nazi Germany.)

Unfortunately, it's the type of right-wing identity politics you inevitably get where the question of where you are from matters more than the question of where you are trying to go.

Finally, it bears reminding that antisemitism isn’t merely a prejudice. It’s a conspiracy theory about Jews. Who actually killed Christ? Or brought on the bubonic plague? Or got America embroiled in unnecessary wars in the Middle East? Or replaces American workers with cheap immigrant labor? The idea that modern politics amounts to a malicious scheme organized by an insidious cabal of deep-state insiders and globalists at the expense of ordinary people is now received wisdom on the right, paralleling far-left convictions about the purported evils of Zionists and their billionaire backers.

Jews don’t have the luxury of being indifferent to either threat. The tsunami of progressive antisemitism that hit after October 7, is being followed by another wave, just as tall.😥✡️

Those who ignore history are doomed to fail and repeat - Trump and Neville Chamberlain

An echo essay published in The Brunswick News, in Georgia:

September 30, 1938

Hitler made inflammatory speeches demanding that Germans in Czechoslovakia be reunited with their homeland, war seemed imminent. Neither France nor Britain felt prepared to defend Czechoslovakia.

On Friday, Donald Trump and President Zelenskyy proved that diplomacy, like laws and sausages, should never be made in public. 

Similar negotiations between the leaders of the United States, Russia and Great Britain were difficult during World War II. Still, more reasoned minds conducted deliberations behind closed doors and then joined together with a unified message. As a result, they won WWII. The United States and Ukraine should do the same.

Is President Zelenskyy right to push for a just and lasting peace, one defined by security guarantees? Yes. To do otherwise, to weakly engage with Vladimir Putin, would not bode well for Western Europe, the United States or Ukraine. This is not a case of holding on to the stereotypes of the Cold War. Any serious student should realize that the Russian people are people of vast contrasts and contradictions. However, the Ukrainian conflict is not one with the Russian people. It is the product of a three-year rape of a peaceful nation by one man, Vladimir Putin, who, as a former KGB Colonel, is an artifact of the Soviet era and desires to remain so.

In his book The Gathering Storm, Winston Churchill described his predecessor Neville Chamberlain as “an upright, competent, well-meaning man,” while not ignoring the fact that he was also a leader sadly deceived by overconfidence, lacking both foresight and experience in diplomacy. Churchill’s analysis was well-founded, for Chamberlain was greatly responsible for the ill-fated Munich Agreement, which allowed Nazi Germany to annex part of Czechoslovakia, a betrayal of the first order. 

Chamberlain hoped this humiliating sacrifice inflicted on part of a country he did not lead would finally satisfy what Adolf Hitler referred to as his last major territorial demand, thereby avoiding a larger war. He was wrong, for Hitler quickly annexed the remainder of Czechoslovakia and then invaded Poland, continuing his conquest of Europe.

If President Zelenskyy or his successor is forced to sign an unfair agreement with Vladimir Putin — especially one without adequate security arrangements protecting Ukraine’s sovereignty — peace may be achieved, but at what price and for how long? 

President Zelenskyy has every right to be skeptical of Mr. Putin, who, like Adolf Hitler, has certainly demonstrated no evidence of peaceful behavior as Ukraine has previously signed several agreements with Russia that Moscow conveniently broke.

Former U.S. President Ronald Reagan fully understood this dynamic and openly supported those who desired freedom over oppression. Reagan believed that peace should not be bought “by committing an immorality.” He understood that “every lesson of history tells us that the greater risk lies in appeasement” and that appeasement ultimately “gives no choice between peace and war, only between fight or surrender.” Reagan would have embraced the approximately 800,000 Ukrainian military service members who have valiantly struggled against the Russian invaders rather than a brutal totalitarian autocrat, one who, unprovoked and in violation of international law, invaded a sovereign nation, causing the largest military and refugee crisis in Europe since WWII.

Ukraine isn’t Trump’s to give away, but it is certainly his to lose. Making false statements about the Ukrainian leader, such as being a “dictator without elections” and that Ukraine “should have never started the war,” certainly does not advance the process. It is my prayer that our president will remain strong, not by appeasement but by proceeding honorably in support of Ukraine. If not, the United States can no longer claim that it is the last best hope for freedom in the world, for we will have sacrificed our global standing by taking a knee before an international criminal and one of our country’s biggest adversaries.

Alex Atwood (BS, MA, JD, L.LM.) has served in many roles, including as a Marine officer, in the judiciary, three terms in the Georgia General Assembly, and as a state commissioner in the Kemp Administration. Mr. Atwood now writes and teaches in the School of Business and Public Management at the College of Coastal Georgia. He can be reached at: jatwood@ccga.edu. Mr. Atwood’s views are his own and may not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of College of Coastal Georgia, faculty or administrators.

Republicans against Trump are voting to protect democracy against Trumpziism

Echo opinion by David French* published in The New York Times:

Labor weekend in Chicago, America’s greatest summer city. on a Sunday afternoon was glorious. The temperatures were moderate, the skies were clear and the tourist sections of the city were teeming with happy Pearl Jam fans who’d just attended Saturday’s concert at Wrigley Field. My wife and I took our grandchildren to Navy Pier to visit the Chicago Children’s Museum, and as we walked back toward Michigan Avenue we saw the same (hideous 👺❗) sight we see every time we visit Chicago — an invasive towering skyscraper with the name “Trump” emblazoned in immense letters across the building’s facade.

I was reminded once again that Donald Trump is a singular figure in American politics. There is no one like him, and that means that no one can replace him. 

While it’s always perilous to make predictions about American politics — or anything else about the future — here’s one that I’m almost certain is correct: If Donald Trump (please God ♰ willing) loses in 2024, MAGA will fade. He is the irreplaceable key to its success.

Last month, I wrote a column that generated intense blowback on the right because I argued that as a pro-life conservative I am voting for Kamala Harris. 

That was controversial enough to the MAGA cult, but what really seemed to make people angry was one of my stated motivations: that I am voting for Harris to try to save conservatism from MAGA. Defeating Trump, I said, gives conservative Americans a chance to “build something decent from the ruins of a party that was once a force for genuine good in American life.”

The MAGA response was, in essence, you’re fooling yourself. Trump or no Trump, we own the party now.

In fact, this argument is one way that MAGA keeps other (wrongminded) Republicans in line. Like it or not, they say, this is the modern Republican Party. You can choose it, or you can choose the Democrats, but don’t think for a moment that a different party is possible.

But is that correct❓ We’re nine years into the Trump era of the Republican Party, and we can see a different reality: attempts to mimic Trump succeed in Republican primaries and deep red jurisdictions, but they fail in swing states and purple districts. 

Trump is MAGA’s most popular figure, and if he loses, then MAGA has nowhere to go but down.

Let’s look at the electoral record. The 2022, election should have been a red Republican wave. Inflation was close to its post-pandemic high, the withdrawal from Afghanistan was a bloody disaster, and Russia had invaded Ukraine. High costs and global chaos are usually a recipe for an electoral catastrophe for the incumbent party.

But MAGA snatched defeat from the jaws of victory. In swing state after swing state, Republicans nominated hard-core MAGA candidates, a collection of cranks and conspiracy theorists who went on to lose race after race. Most notably, Kari Lake lost her race for governor of Arizona; the Georgia football hero Herschel Walker lost his Senate race; and the Democratic candidate in the Pennsylvania race for governor, Josh Shapiro, crushed the MAGA-fied Republican, Doug Mastriano, by almost 15 points.

What makes those MAGA losses even more notable is the success of more conventional establishment Republicans. Brian Kemp substantially outperformed Walker in Georgia, winning his race for governor by more than seven points against a very capable opponent in Stacey Abrams. 

In Ohio, hyper-MAGA JD Vance won his Senate race, but he underperformed Gov. Mike DeWine, an establishment Republican, by almost 19 points. Vance won his race by slightly more than six points; DeWine won by 25.

If the early polling numbers are any indication, this trend will continue in 2024. The race between Trump and Kamala Harris is too close to call in each of the seven swing states. At the same time, however, other MAGA figures underperform. In North Carolina, 538 gives Trump a very narrow lead, but the polls show hyper-MAGA Mark Robinson, the Republican nominee for governor, trailing by between four and 11 points. In Arizona, Trump also has a very narrow lead, but most polls show Lake trailing her Democratic opponent for the Senate, Ruben Gallego, by a decisive margin.

Trump is peak MAGA, and even peak MAGA hasn’t been able to achieve Mitt Romney’s share of the 2012, popular vote. 

Stronger turnout masked this reality, but Trump has never achieved even 47 percent of the total votes cast.

If Trump loses, there is no ready heir to his MAGA crown. Vance, Trump’s vice-presidential nominee, would be saddled with at least partial responsibility for Trump’s loss, and the American people already view him unfavorably. Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida seemed poised to offer a perfected version of MAGA to Republicans — all of the Trump culture war and none of the Trump corruption (and he actually substantially outperformed Trump’s 2020 Florida margin in his 2022 re-election). But he’s a diminished figure after his disastrous presidential primary performance.

It turns out that Republican primary voters deemed MAGA as already perfected, in the person of Donald Trump.

The rest of MAGA is a weird, scandalous mess. Just last week, Tucker Carlson — arguably the most popular media figure in MAGA America — interviewed a fringe right-wing history podcaster who claims that Winston Churchill is “a chief villain” of World War II, which led to days of debate in the online right about — believe it or not — the relative merits of Winston Churchill and Adolf Hitler.😡👽💀😈❗

The Department of Justice released an indictment of two employees of RT, a Russian state-controlled media outlet (Russia Today), charging RT and its employees with having paid millions of dollars to an American company, identified by news outlets as Tenet Media, with the intent of spreading the Russian government’s messaging.

Tenet Media’s website, which is a platform for content creators, lists popular right-wing influencers, including Tim Pool and Benny Johnson, as its “talent.” Pool, Johnson and the other purported beneficiaries of Russian largess pleaded ignorance, but even the most cursory review of their content indicates why Russia would want to amplify their voices. Pool, for example, recently proclaimed that “we should apologize to Russia” for supporting Ukraine, and that Ukraine is “the enemy of this country.”

In August, MAGA celebrated Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s endorsement of Trump, yet R.F.K. Jr. is popular with only a tiny fringe, and he might be one of the more bizarre politicians in American public life. This is a man, after all, who dumped a dead bear cub in Central Park. That’s one of his strangest scandals, but hardly his most consequential. 

JFKjr is a veritable font of dangerous ⚠medical misinformation and may well be America’s most influential anti-vaccine activist, attacking not just the (highly effective❗) Covid vaccine 💉but also the common childhood vaccines that have also saved countless lives.

And let’s not forget, if Trump loses, he’s highly likely to face federal juries in both Washington and in South Florida. (If he wins, he can order the Department of Justice to drop the cases.) If he loses one of those trials (much less both), then MAGA’s central figure won’t be able to mount a fourth run for the presidency. He’ll almost certainly be in prison. The rule of law will have done its work.

I know very well that Trump is just as scandalous and corrupt as many of the people I just talked about, but he succeeds where they fail in part because of the very thing I highlighted in the first paragraph. Before he was a politician, he was a monumental celebrity who built his brand on the notion that he was one of the most successful, astute and entertaining executives in the United States.

We know Trump's actual business record is less sterling than his reputation once suggested. He has too many bankruptcies and too many failures to be treated with the reverence we saw on “The Apprentice,” but Trump’s pre-existing celebrity was indispensable to his success.

Trump’s MAGA imitators replicate his scandals or his pugilism (sometimes both), but not his celebrity. DeSantis is arguably MAGA’s most successful politician not named Trump, but even he couldn’t replicate (much less replace) Trump’s appeal. As Noah Millman argued Thursday in The Times, “Mr. Trump’s persona has been the essence of his appeal,” and if Trump claims that he “alone” can fix our nation, then how can he ever actually pass the baton?

I’m under no illusions that defeating Trump will resurrect Ronald Reagan’s Republican Party — or John McCain’s or Mitt Romney’s. I’m also under no illusions about the fate of Never Trumpers in a post-Trump G.O.P. Many of us are seen as traitors and won’t be welcomed back into the fold, even if the Republicans finally do turn the page on Trump.

But the personal drama of the small band of Never Trump Republicans is meaningless compared with the national necessity of a healthy Republican Party. 

A two-party democracy is inherently fragile if one party is fundamentally broken. If Trump loses, MAGA will fade. It will not go away, of course. Reactionary populism is a permanent fixture of American politics, but don’t believe MAGA’s hype. Its national success depends on one man.

*David French is an Opinion columnist, writing about law, culture, religion and armed conflict. He is a veteran of Operation Iraqi Freedom and a former constitutional litigator. 

His most recent book is “Divided We Fall: America’s Secession Threat and How to Restore Our Nation.” You can follow him on Threads (@davidfrenchjag).

American voters cannot be distracted from the threat of a fascist Trumpzi danger

Cliché for today:  The more things change the more they stay the same....warning 101....⚠️

Echo opinion published in the Boston Globe: "I can imagine Kennedy and Churchill teaming up to write an updated version of their original essays and titling this version, 'Why and While America Slept'.”

Eighty four years ago, the book version of John F. Kennedy’s senior thesis at Harvard was published. 

John F. Kennedy as a Harvard student, with a copy of his book, "Why England Slept".

Titled “Why England Slept,” it built upon a work written by Winston Churchill in 1938, titled “While England Slept.”

Both works explored why so many in Great Britain ignored the rising threat posed by German Chancellor Adolf Hitler and the Nazis, as they attacked and occupied one European country after another in the wake of Hitler becoming chancellor in 1932.

Both JFK and Churchill lamented that by the time Great Britain woke up to the threat Hitler and the Nazis posed to British democracy, it was almost too late.

I recently reread JFK’s “Why England Slept” and as I read his thesis, I couldn’t help but ask myself, “Why are so few Americans alarmed by the threat Donald Trump and his neo-fascist MAGA political enablers and cult followers pose to our constitutional republic?”

This year’s election is undoubtedly the most critically important the nation has faced since 1860, and its outcome will determine what kind of country America will be for years, perhaps generations, to come.

Yet many, if not most, people seem oblivious to the dark political clouds gathering all around us and the threats they pose to all that Americans claim to believe in and hold dear.

I can imagine Kennedy and Churchill teaming up to write an updated version of their original essays and titling this version, “Why and While America Slept.”

Let’s hope enough Americans wake up between now and Novenber 5th, to avert a political disaster the likes of which the world has not seen since Hitler became chancellor.

From Michael Cook in Gloucester, Massachusetts

Danger in Ukraine in a new phase of resistance

Opinion: The war in Ukraine is moving into a new phase. Biden and the West had better get ready.

In June 1940, Britain stood alone against a Nazi war machine that had swept across Europe. Winston Churchill had spent the month before, his first at 10 Downing Street, cycling through doomed military strategies designed to save France. But on June 18, the new prime minister traveled to the House of Commons to deliver his “finest hour” speech, warning Parliament that the war against Hitler would soon enter a dangerous new phase: “The Battle of France is over,” Churchill declared. “I expect that the Battle of Britain is about to begin.”

Shortly after noon on December 25, 1941, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill stood before a microphone-laden Senate rostrum to address a joint meeting of Congress. Churchill had come to Washington to coordinate military strategy with President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Powerful lamps lit the normally dim chamber like a Hollywood movie set. Outside the U.S. Capitol, platoons of soldiers and police provided rigid wartime security. Despite the entry of the United States into World War II on Dec. 8, the Christmas holiday had thinned the ranks of senators and representatives who were still in town. That prompted a decision by congressional leaders to move the address from the House to the Senate chamber as a way of avoiding the potential embarrassment of empty seats. In the event, lawmakers, Supreme Court justices and Cabinet officers occupied all 96 seats.

Opinion by Joe Scarborough published in The Washington Post:  

Over the past month, in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, President Biden has assembled the most impressive coalition since President George H.W. Bush’s skillful diplomatic efforts preceding the Gulf War. Biden has united a fractured NATO alliance, and Europeans have responded more forcefully than Vladimir Putin could have ever imagined. Russia’s economy has been shattered by unprecedented economic sanctions, and Putin’s military has been slowed by stalwart Ukrainian fighters making deadly use of NATO-supplied weapons, which are crossing the Polish-Ukrainian border at a dizzying rate.

But Putin’s war against Ukraine is now entering a dangerous new phase. Events are moving rapidly, and it’s time for Biden and his Western allies to adjust.

The horrors of Grozny and Aleppo are being visited upon the people of Ukraine and witnessed across the free world. Russian airstrikes kill civilians and reduce cities to rubble, as Putin targets children’s hospitals, nuclear power plants, cultural landmarks and residential buildings. These attacks are not indiscriminate; they are deliberate attempts to slaughter and terrorize.

Even more ominously, Russia has started a misinformation campaign about Ukrainian biological laboratories, parroted by useful idiots in the West, suggesting Russian forces could be preparing to use chemical weapons. We must brace ourselves for horrifying images of families choked to death by Putin’s deployment of those weapons of mass destruction. If Putin crosses that moral red line, the political pressure to respond will be overwhelming. Biden and his allies need to prepare for that now, in three ways:

1. Stop playing defense: Three weeks ago, only 1 in 4 Americans supported significant U.S. involvement in the war. European allies were wary of confronting Putin on a range of issues. That made Biden’s public assurances of avoiding a hot war against Russia politically necessary and diplomatically wise.

Now, 3 in 4 Americans support a no-fly zone over Ukraine. European allies have flexed their military and economic might in a way not seen since World War II. These dramatic changes allow the U.S. president to respond more aggressively to the war crimes being committed against Ukrainians.

Biden should stop telling Putin what he will not do, stop alerting him to what weapons he will not send, stop saying what strategies he will not employ and stop declaring where U.S. troops will not deploy. It is also time for NATO to stop being reactive to Putin’s ever-changing definition of what constitutes an act of war.

First, Putin claimed that trigger would be acceptance of Ukraine into NATO. Then he added the introduction of peacekeeping troops into western Ukraine. Then the transfer of Polish jets across the border, and then the shipment of defensive weapons. And then he moved the line again, declaring to young flight attendants bearing flowers that even economic sanctions against Russia were tantamount to war.

It is as if Putin expects Americans to forget the body bags flown to Dover Air Force Base because of decades of Russian proxy wars fought against U.S. soldiers. Simply put, an alliance that caves to Putin’s nuclear blackmail today would be forced to respond to his chemical weapons attacks tomorrow. Enough.

2. Be disruptive: At the height of the Cold War, then-national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski observed, the Soviet Union was confined to playing a disruptive role in the world “by the nature of its one-dimensional power and by the character of nuclear weapons.” Russia upended international norms, Brzezinski noted, because it feared “being locked into the role of the junior partner in effect committed to the maintenance of the global status quo.” Almost 40 years later, little has changed. Putin threatens nuclear war, levels cities, commits war crimes and raises the specter of chemical weapons because the West rationally moves with caution to preserve the international order.

Biden should change the dynamic by employing his own disruptive tactics. The United States should move expeditiously to have the U.N. General Assembly create humanitarian safe zones in Ukraine that allow civilians to escape slaughter. Putin would be assured that the zones would not be used for military purposes; however, any force targeting civilians there would immediately become a target of U.N. peacekeepers or even NATO. While such a plan would likely cause deep discomfort inside the Biden White House, policymakers in the West may not be able to avoid such decisions for long. The only question is whether they make the move at the United Nations before or after Putin deploys chemical weapons.

3. Guard your words: Just as nothing is gained by Biden’s declarations of what the United States will not do, the same is true of U.S. officials making statements suggesting Putin has no choice but to fight to the end. While cable hosts and opinion columnists are free to call the Russian tyrant a war criminal, U.S. ambassadors to the United Nations should be more prudent. If Putin believes his future is inside a cage at The Hague, he will have no incentive to end this war. The same holds true for senior U.S. senators calling for regime change. Providing Russia’s nuclear-armed president an off-ramp from the military catastrophe he created remains the best hope for the people of Ukraine and the world.

As psychiatrist Kenneth Dekleva recently told former CIA acting director Michael Morell, “Sometimes it is better to let the bear run out of the cage back into the forest.” In the meantime, Biden should do all he can to make sure that bear cannot slaughter millions trapped inside the cage that Ukraine has become.

Allied liberation of Nazi occupied Rome - 75 years ago remembered

A glorious moment of triumph- the liberation of Rome 

An essay by Gregory Sumner,  published in the History News Network 

Amid the justifiable hoopla this week surrounding the launch of the D-Day invasion, it is important to note, too, the anniversary of an event that unfolded just two days earlier, on June 4, 1944--the Allied liberation of Rome. 

Winston Churchill  (1874-1965)

Despite Churchill's promises of quick victory in the 'soft underbelly” of Hitler's Fortress Europe, the prize was hard-won, indeed—Italy proved a “tough, old gut,” in the words of the GI's master chronicler Ernie Pyle. The Germans were intent on fighting for every inch of their southern flank.

It began in summer '43 with Sicily, a campaign famous for the race that developed between General George Patton and Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery, his British rival, to be the first into the stepping-stone to the Italian mainland, Messina. Things got no easier after Italian dictator Benito Mussolini was arrested and Italy dropped out of the war. “All roads lead to Rome,” lamented theatre commander Sir Harold Alexander, “but all the roads are mined.” 

There were landings at Salerno, then chaotic Naples, where, as if on cue, looming old Vesuvius blew its top, giving the boys from Allen Park and Kalamazoo something to write about in their V-mail to the family back home.

Twin, bloody stalemates followed over the fall and winter: at the swollen Rapido River in the Appenine Mountains south of Rome, near Cassino, and at Anzio, the seaside resort where Nero once fiddled as his eternal city burned. 

Stars and Stripes cartoonist Bill Mauldin captured the dilemma facing Yanks, Tommies, Poles and other infantry units as they struggled to overcome fierce German resistance: “(We) seemed to find itself generally looking up, not down, at the enemy.”

The breakthrough came finally in May of 1944, as advance troops pushed across the Alban Hills and then to the southern outskirts of Rome. Fearing another Stalingrad, Hitler agreed to allowing his forces to pull back to positions 150 miles north, where the war would rage on for another full year. Fifth Army chief Mark Clark's jeep convoy got lost on the Via della Conciliazione near St. Peters, until a priest from Detroit offered directions to the city center. “They didn't even let us have the headlines for one day,” Clark was heard to complain when the gaze of the press shifted, suddenly and overwhelmingly, to Normandy.

In any case, it was a glorious moment of triumph, paid for by the sacrifice of the 7,860 mostly young men who lie today buried in the American Cemetery at Nettuno, Anzio's sister-city. “My God, they bombed that, too!” a member of the 1st Special Force exclaimed as columns in olive drab marched past the Coliseum. Ex-pat Jane Scrivener recorded the sight as they moved down the posh Via Veneto, marking for Rome's citizens the end of months of brutal Nazi occupation: 

They were dusty, battle-worn and unshaven, but they smiled
and waved in response to the greetings of the crowd. They
had roses in the muzzles of their rifles and miniature Italian
flags, which had been thrown to them. They had roses stuck
in the camouflage nets of their helmets and in their shirts.

“One has read these things in books, and accepted them as fiction,” Scrivener added, “never dreaming of witnessing them as we did today.”