Russia Russia Russia!

 You know, one thing I’ve always been aware of, ever since Donald Trump came down that escalator in 2015, was how he’s never had a critical word to say about Vladamir Putin.  How the Russians did him a big favour later that year, by hacking into the emails of  the Democratic party and publishing them on the internet, at the same time as Trump was under fire for making sexist remarks about grabbing women’s genitals. 

How Trump’s first campaign manager, Paul Manafort, was previously the campaign advisor for Victor Yanukovych, Putin’s pick for Ukrainian President,  who was thrown out of office by a spontaneous uprising of Ukrainians in 2014, known as the Maidan revolution, leaving Manafort without a job and in debt for a million dollars to a Russian oligarch, until he teamed up with the Trump campaign.

Or, how, when a journalist asked Trump about his support for a murderer like Putin, Trump shrugged it off, and said the U.S. was no better.  How Trump was under investigation by the FBI for his connections to the Russians (the Mueller investigation) which did not find Trump guilty of collusion, but did uncover Russian interference in the 2016 Presidential election, which Trump won, and did lead to the indictment of some of Trump’s associates for concealing Russian income - Manafort, and lying about meeting with the Russians - Flynn.

Or, in 2018 at the Helsinki Summit with Putin, when asked by a journalist if he believed his own Intelligence reports that the Russians had interfered in the 2016 Presidential election, Trump said no, instead he believed Putin, because Putin had very strongly denied the charge to him personally.

And let’s not forget that during his Presidency, Trump tried to blackmail Zelensky by threatening to withhold military aid to Ukraine if Zelensky didn’t launch a public investigation based on Trump’s Russian dis-information on his Presidential rival, Joe Biden, a crime for which Trump was impeached by the U.S. House of Representatives in 2019.

 

Or that in 2022, when Russia invaded Ukraine, Trump had complimented Putin as a “genius”, saying “Putin’s smart.’ I mean, he’s taking over a country for two dollars’ worth of sanctions,” “I’d say that’s pretty smart. He’s taking over a country – really a vast, vast location, a great piece of land with a lot of people, and just walking right in.”

So,I was angered but not surprised last week, when Trump turned on Zelensky and blamed Ukraine for Putin’s invasion, and then tried to force a manifestly unfair demand for  Ukrainian mineral rights in exchange,not for any real guarantees, but in order to pay for U.S. military aid. Is this what the United States has come to? Siding with the aggressor, Putin?  Extorting another country in a protection racket?  And then to top it off this week the United States for the first time, siding with Russia and North Korea in voting against a U.N. resolution in support of Ukraine!  Welcome to the axis of evil, America! 

There is no doubt that Trump looks up to Putin, that he admires his ruthlessness and savagery, and that he despises democracies like Ukraine and Canada.  This is a U.S. president who wants to go back to the nineteenth century, when great powers were carving up Africa and Asia, who actually wants to be on the same side of the table as Putin, letting him take Ukraine and the Baltics, so that he, Trump, can similarly physically expand the United States by taking over Canada, Greenland, and Mexico.

Trump is a moral cretin, a psychopath, who has no empathy for anyone, who sees the world entirely in terms of winners and losers.  He is incapable of understanding the vital importance of the Ukraine war for defending Western democracies against Russian aggression.   The Ukrainians have suffered the loss of millions fleeing to other countries because of Russia’s indiscriminate bombing; they’ve lost land, some of  their cities to the Russians, many soldiers killed or wounded, many citizens tortured and murdered and thousands of their children kidnapped, in Putin’s criminal invasion. But the Ukrainians are actually doing the Western world an incalculable service by holding the line against Putin’s aggression and degrading his military.  Unlike the last world war, we in the West don't have to send our soldiers, the Ukrainians are fighting for us, holding Russia back.  All we have to do is support them with weapons.  It’s a very cheap price to pay for what we are getting, and a very high sacrifice for the Ukrainians.  But if the U.S. stops supporting Ukraine and tries to force a deal favoring Putin, which it looks like Trump is about to do, and if the Ukraine were to lose this war as a result, the consequences would be catastrophic for the entire world.  We would then not have the luxury of avoiding direct involvement in the war, because, one way or another, the war would come home to us.