Trump’s Ukraine Betrayal Turns MAGA Into MAGGOT

Trump’s official portrait — a glowering MAGGOT

Since I last wrote about Ukraine two weeks ago, Trump has turned bad into worse. In my mind, he’s turned MAGA into MAGGOT.

On Feb. 28, he and JD Vance¹ attacked Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in the Oval Office in a way that — almost — makes me think of Hitler’s March 15, 1939, browbeating of Czech president Emil Hacha just hours before sending in troops to occupy what little remained of Czechoslovakia after Chamberlain’s 1938 betrayal of that country, in an attempt to appease Hitler, at Munich. (Why “almost”? No one comes close to Hitler in browbeating. He literally gave Hacha a heart attack.)

Following that, Trump …

• Ordered the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) to stop following and reporting on threats to the U.S. from Russia (until then, CISA’s primary focus) — a very Russia-friendly and, in my view, ill-advised move.
• Ended the delivery of weapons that had previously been promised to Ukraine, even halting shipments already on the way. While most West European nations are urgently trying to take up the slack, one key weapon they cannot provide is the anti-missile defense that the U.S. Patriot system has, till now, enabled Ukraine to intercept many of the ballistic missiles with which Russia is destroying Ukrainian cities. In my mind, this stains Trump’s hands with the blood of countless civilians.
• Stopped sharing intelligence with Ukraine, which has hobbled Ukraine’s ability to track and intercept incoming Russian missile and drone attacks.
• Is reported to be considering the deportation of some 240,000 — nearly a quarter million — Ukrainian refugees already legally admitted to the U.S. (It’s one thing to try to gain control of illegal immigration at the U.S. border. It’s quite another to demonize legally admitted refugees, such as the Ukrainians fleeing Russia’s invasion and relentless bombardment of their country, as well as, for example, starving Venezuelans fleeing the Maduro dictatorship and Haitians fleeing their country’s gang-fueled anarchy.)

In my view, Trump’s halt to weapons deliveries and intelligence sharing with a brutally invaded country makes the U.S. complicit in Russia’s war crimes. Russia is deliberately bombarding hospitals, markets and other civilian targets; is kidnapping of thousands of Ukrainian children and sending them deep into Russia for adoption and the erasure of their Ukrainian language and consciousness; and is committing wanton murders and atrocities against civilians in occupied areas. (Remember Bucha, where the best known atrocities took place?)

U.S. complicity in Russia’s war crimes would be a stain on our country
We must not allow this president to sully our good name and abandon our friends and allies.

Trump’s total reversal of America’s previous help to Ukraine and previous opposition to unprovoked Russian aggression is a disgusting betrayal not only of a friendly country that is counting on the support of freedom-loving nations around the globe, but of our own country’s bedrock principles and of our many European and other allies.

Imperfect though we surely are, America is viewed as a beacon of freedom and justice around the world, symbolized by the torch atop the Statue of Liberty.

• It’s not for nothing that we fought to defeat Nazi Germany, which brought occupation, terror and history’s most notorious example of genocide to almost all of Europe in the 1940s.
• It’s not for nothing that the U.S. created and led NATO, the defensive alliance that fought and won the Cold War against Soviet tyranny and expansion.

Trump’s betrayal of Ukraine is also a betrayal of America. Would his abandonment of people fighting to be free have the support of the men who kept the flame of the American Revolution alive through the terrible 1777-78 Valley Forge winter? Or those who stopped Hitler’s last gasp in the Battle of the Bulge around Christmas 1944? Or the GIs who liberated the Dachau concentration camp in April 1945?

I’ll never forget Christmas 1991, when the Soviet Union finally collapsed into “the dustbin of history,” its red flag hauled down for the last time over the Kremlin. Vladimir Putin later called it the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century. Wrong! It was one of the greatest days in human history, right alongside Germany’s May 8, 1945, unconditional surrender. In my mind, Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia were two of history’s biggest excrescences, each of them having murdered millions of innocent civilians.²

America won its independence thanks in considerable part to the support of other nations, most notably France, and to the courageous individuals who crossed the Atlantic to join our fight for freedom such as Lafayette from France, von Steuben from Germany, and Kosciuszko and Pulaski from Poland. Today, many Americans are voluntarily fighting against the Russians in Ukraine. Others are risking their lives, providing various types of humanitarian assistance. God bless them all.

On Russia’s bloody invasion of Ukraine, Trump has chosen to back the wrong side — the bad guys … the would-be reincarnation of the Evil Empire. I’ve thought since the beginning of his first term that Trump has brought a wrecking ball to the presidency. By siding with the bad guys — the utterly reprehensible side — in the Russia-Ukraine War, Trump has gone beyond the pale.

I thought he’d gone beyond the pale when he sicced a mob on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2020, in an attempt to overturn Joe Biden’s election. But in my book, backing Russia against Ukraine could be compared only to something that, thankfully, did not happen — the U.S. siding with the Nazis against Britain, which was holding out in 1940-41 against tremendous odds. It’s as though President Franklin Roosevelt might have tried to force Churchill to “make peace” with Germany on Hitler’s terms. Because that would be a good parallel to what Trump is trying to force on President Zelenskyy.

Trump keeps repeating that he just wants to end the war … to stop the killing. But that’s a lie. Because by giving concession after unreciprocated concession to Putin and withholding help from Ukraine, Trump is actually trying to force Ukraine to make peace on Putin’s terms. In other words, to surrender.³

That’s betrayal.⁴ Pure and simple. And outrageous enough to merit impeachment.

During the congressional investigation of the attack on the Capitol, former GOP Congresswoman Liz Cheney told her Republican colleagues who hoped to wish away Trump’s responsibility for that assault, “There will come a day when Donald Trump is gone, but your dishonor will remain.” In this, she echoed what Winston Churchill said to then-Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain after he caved in to Hitler’s territorial demands on Czechoslovakia at Munich in 1938: “You were given the choice between war and dishonor. You chose dishonor, and you will have war.”

Trump’s siding with Russia against Ukraine dishonors the United States and everything our nation stands for. He’s a MAGGOT, and he deserves impeachment. And Vance, that yapping lap dog, along with him.

Maggots

***

1. In case you were wondering about the vice president’s initials, I’m tempted to think they stand for Junior Dog.
2. The estimates of the total number of those the Soviet state caused to perish — by execution; deliberate, man-made famine; and purposely overworking and severely undernourishing prisoners in the gulag — vary widely. The lowest credible estimate I’ve seen is 20 million. Hitler, responsible for the murders of a “mere” 18 million innocents, including six million Jews, was an “also-ran,” following China’s Mao Zedong and Stalin.
3. Surrender would only further embolden Putin, after a few years of rest and rearmament, to try gobbling up more of the old USSR and Soviet bloc countries, endangering our European allies. Which is why they’re now rapidly mobilizing to fill the void being created by Trump’s intention to abandon Ukraine.
4. It’s rank hypocrisy too, coming from a guy who criticized Biden’s pell-mell flight from Afghanistan (set in motion by Trump’s first-term negotiations with the Taliban behind the Afghan government’s back), in which we abandoned not just the Afghani people and government, but the many nations — including Ukraine! — that had sent troops and suffered casualties in that country to support America’s fight against the Taliban for its support of al-Qaida’s 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington.