334 -Putin's Poodle Pursues Perdition, and Other Senseless and Apocalyptic News from Inner Washington

President Reagan railed against the Soviet "evil empire." Nothing has changed. Putin has Stalinesque pretensions, as his invasion and daily bombings of Ukraine demonstrate. It is exactly three years since Putin attempted to seize Kyiv and re-establish a new Russian evil empire. Why has Trump (and Vance, Rubio, and Hegseth, plus others) become Putin's enabler? Is he just a useful idiot or should we listen to those who believe in the unfolding of a deep conspiracy?

An American president in the twenty-first century blaming the democratically elected president of Ukraine for starting the war with Russia and then uttering nonsensical notions exempting Putin from personally ordering the pummeling of Ukraine must rank among the lowest ever moments of American presidencies. But it is likely soon to get much worse, more perverse.

A Russian expert in Germany said that Putin's false narrative about Zelensky, echoed and amplified by Trump, is a critical "tool" that Russia uses to seek to "destroy Ukraine as a state." That Trump now repeats Putin's words is beyond worrisome as it conforms to Putin's attempt to sideline Zelensky and make a takeover of Ukraine easier.

Already, within mere weeks of becoming president again, Trump has obliterated the trust that lies at the very heart of NATO, opening the door to possible attacks on Poland and Moldova, conceivably Bulgaria and Romania, and imperiling Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania when and if Ukraine is sold out. An attack on NATO would now not immediately engage the U.S. in an Article 5 response that could stop Putin in his tracks. Ukraine's very survival is threatened by Trump rolling over and playing poodle to Putin.

Germany’s electoral victor, likely soon to be anointed Chancellor Friedrich Merz, last night bemoaned Trump’s refusal to stand with Europe against Russia and called it an abandonment of everything that has been sacred and important for global peace since World War II.

Trump has never liked President Volodymyr Zelensky. After all, Zelensky hesitated to do Trump's bidding against Vice-President Biden in 2016. Moreover, Zelensky is an authentic hero whose charismatic leadership of war-afflicted Ukraine stands out as exemplary and principled. Or maybe Trump is just expressing an underlying anti-Semitism.

Whatever tortured passions and psychological contortions drive Trump in his eighth decade, it is totally upside down to call Zelensky names and bully him. Trump may want the rare earths and other metals that Ukraine could exploit, but that could hardly explain his animus and his lies and fanciful distortions. And why would an American president in this day and age parrot Putin's fabricated falsifications when the whole world knows that they are false?

Zelensky no more provoked Putin to invade than Trump won the 2020 election. Nor does it make even stretched out sense to say that Zelensky is illegal and that he has but days to get things right. Who invents these inversions and even forces acolytes who surely know better to repeat them? But I suppose such calamitous calumnies come naturally to a man that seeks to be called king.

"This is the same man who tried to extort Ukraine in 2019, orchestrated an insurrection in 2021, and now openly embraces authoritarian rule. He has shown us exactly who he is," words from Congressman Eugene Vindman, who called Trump to account in 2019 and lost his national security job for being honest.

Does Putin have some hidden hold over Trump that goes beyond Trump's long admiration for potentates and dictators? Is there a secret understanding that no one has yet discovered and that was extended by a 90-minute telephone conversation with a real dictator and a real enemy of the U.S.?

Nearly everything Trump has done in his first month in office gives advantages to Putin and China's Xi Jinping. Scrubbing USAID lets China and Russia benefit by devaluing the word and deed of the U.S., by ending our vaunted soft power globally, and by adding to the suspicions everywhere that the latest American administration is anti-third world, anti-developing world, and no longer interested in combatting tyranny, battling communism, and standing strong for freedom and democracy. Cancelling the National Endowment for Democracy, a Reagan anti-communism creation, and thus stopping grants to worthwhile institutions like the International Republican Institute and the US Institute of Peace, only compound the immediate and long-term damage to our influence in the international arena. None of these operations is by any measure "woke;" nor are the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and other Washington fixtures now being deprived of traditional funding. We (all Americans and world citizens) will be vastly the poorer for such misguided and wanton destruction of non-ideological and nevertheless pro-American greatness, endeavors.

By suddenly and arbitrarily firing literally thousands of probationary employees (about 30,000 so far) of such once functional institutions like the Internal Revenue Service, the Fish and Game Service, the Census Bureau, the FDA, the FAA, FEMA, the NIH, the National Park Service, and the Social Security Administration, Trump and Musk have managed to save perhaps 0.06 percent of the federal budget while catastrophically worsening services delivered to the American people. What is the sense? Doing so also weakens the U.S. in comparison to other nations and reduces our ability to stand up to Putin and Xi. Is that the point? Is Trump really Putin's poodle?

Trunp has also fired the very people in the FBI and CIA who ferreted out Putin's propagandistic interference in the 2016 elections and who have been responsible for disclosing and protecting U.S. social media from more Russian falsities. Cutting into the CIA sells out to China and Russia, and weakens U.S. defenses profoundly.

The excuse that Musk uses is that he is trimming waste and fraud, but there is no evidence that he and Trump are doing anything more than removing low hanging fruit in order to show that they are powerful. Massacring talent in this way only makes the U.S. less able to look after its people well and diminishes our standing in the world. Moreover, by attacking the FAA we make our air transportation less secure. By laying off thousands in the IRS in tax season we shoot ourselves in both knees simultaneously. The undermining of American greatness only benefits our enemies. Xi and Putin chortle.

So, certainly, does the firing of the chief of our general staff who, just by the way, happens to be black, Trump obviously wants a military chief who will be loyal to him and not to the constitution, just in case he wants to try to declare an insurrection so that he can rule arbitrarily. But in the sacking of General Charles Q. Brown, Navy chief Admiral Lisa Franchetti, the head of the air force, and three key Pentagon legal counsels, Trump drives penetrating stakes into our looming constitutional crisis and makes it more and more likely that Trump is serious about his monarchical ambitions. Removing the lawyers gets him that much closer to playing king and bossing around Brown's replacement, a little known retired three-star air force general whom Trump met in Iraq. Flags should go up, even red flags because Putin could benefit.

That would also go along with antagonizing our allies in Canada, Mexico, and Europe, attacking Zelensky, picking a fight with South Africa, and buttering up Putin. He may try to do something similar with China. Is he really trying to sell out the United States' primacy in the world? Why would he and his puppet cabinet ministers give up every shred of negotiating leverage against Russia and China, destroy America at home, demoralize our armed forces, and pay no attention to the enormous need to build more ships and drones, buttress our cyberwar capabilities, and revive the recruitment of troops?

Another key question is where is Congress? Key Republican senators have fallen fully on their swords. Republic representatives are pusillanimous. The Democratics are too few. The courts are too slow and the Supreme Court will like connive with Trump. But we cannot wait for 2026; there is too much at stake for us and the world as Trump relentlessly carries Putin's water.