Zelenskyy White House Humiliation, February 28th
Donald: There Is No Nobel APeasement Prize!
Can Putin Finally Put a Solid Wedge Between Europe & the United States?
"There’s a lot of talk about Biden’s son, that Biden stopped the prosecution and a lot of people want to find out about that, so whatever you can do with the attorney general would be great.”
Trump, July 25, 2019, in phone call to Ukraine President Zelenskyy, requesting a full investigation of the Biden family’s dealings in Ukraine, a call that resulted in one of two votes of Trump’s impeachment.
Sometimes I think a very dead Jeffrey Epstein and a very alive Vladimir Putin are setting both our foreign and domestic priorities and policies. On August 15th at the Anchorage summit, Putin declared that vote-by-mail ensures voter fraud (echoing an unproven GOP mantra) and directly reinforced Trump’s vision that the 2020 election was rigged against him. Trump smiled at those words. After the weekend, following years of no meaningful evidence that mail-in ballots are prone to fraud, “President Donald Trump said he will issue an executive order to end the use of mail-in ballots and voting machines ahead of the 2026 midterm elections, a move that would spark legal challenges by states.” Newsweek, August 18th.
Good to know that the Russian dictator, not exactly an expert on how to make democracy work but very knowledgeable in manipulating Donald Trump, is Trump’s inspiration for American elections… the same elections our own intelligence experts have uniformly stated, based on hard evidence, that Russian operatives have “repeatedly interfered with.” And yes, as with so many of Trump’s Executive Orders, this too flies in the face of the US Constitution. Indeed, Article I, Section 4, Clause 1, referred to as the Elections Clause, contemplates that state legislatures will establish the times, places, and manner of holding elections for the House of Representatives and the Senate, subject to Congress making or altering such state regulations (except as to the place of choosing Senators), which has been permitted to prevent real election fraud.
As Congressional hearings began (8/18) interviews of highly-placed government officials with possible knowledge of Jeffrey Epstein’s “connections” to earlier administrations (from Bill Clinton to Trump’s AG, Bill Barr), Trump needed to amp up additional distractions and deflections to keep his MAGA base from refocusing on his seeming betrayal of the inquiry into the “deep state” of high-level pedophiles, an inquiry which Trump seems to have suppressed once it was clear his name was all over those Epstein files. Many believe that Trump’s meeting with Putin and his takeover of Washington, DC based a violent “crime” wave “emergency” (notwithstanding Trump’s own FBI statistics showed a 26% reduction in such DC crimes) were primarily motivated as additional distractions to shift the focus of his own MAGA followers away from that Epstein scandal. That effort seemed to be working.
To make matters so much worse, Trump seems to have ignited a new red state “invasion” of the nation’s capital by inviting hundreds of armed federalized National Guard troops (ordered through red state governors from Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, West Virginia and Ohio) to join in support of the federal officers, already oversupplied, against DC crime and homelessness. The Republican governor of Vermont did not supply his National Guard troops to DC as he failed to see the requisite “emergency.” As Trump uttered his list of potential targets for his future use of federal and federalized troops against “crime and homelessness,” nary a red state city or state was mentioned. It was just a litany of the bluest cities and states.
The addition of red state troops almost seemed like a stage one launch of a “civil war” invasion of Confederate troops into Union cities. Trump views the federal police forces, particularly ICE, and the military as his personal enforcers. After a failed effort, the Department of Justice has already accepted that under the relevant “home rule” statutes for DC, the DOJ cannot directly take over the local police. The DC mayor and the chief of police have also accepted that they can “coordinate” with the federal government to work further to reduce crime in the nation’s capital, even lower than its already-reduced rate.
Meanwhile, apparently trying to avoid the gang-bang embarrassment inflicted on Volodymyr Zelenskyy by Donald Trump and his senior advisors on February 28th (at the White House, pictured left above), European heads of state (German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer, French President Emmanuel Macron, Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, Finnish President Alexander Stubb and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen) fortified Zelenskyy’s August 18th White House meeting (above right), notably inspired by Trump’s apparent reversion to his Putin-adoration as witnessed from his August 15th meeting in Anchorage. Having pledged “severe consequences” if Putin did not accept an immediate ceasefire, Trump fawned over the Russian dictator during that August 15th meeting. No ceasefire. No severe consequences. European leaders were shocked at Trump’s return to his early pro-Putin bias and immediately insisted on joining the White House meeting scheduled for August 18th.
Zelenskyy has drawn Trump’s animosity ever since Trump demanded that the Ukraine President investigate the Biden family, which recorded phone call led to one of two Trump impeachments. After understanding that Putin was not interested in a ceasefire or even an end to his Ukraine war unless Russia totally resumed control of the country he invaded… including major territorial concessions effectively ceding control of 20% of Ukraine’s land mass to Russia… Trump fell prey to Putin’s manipulation… again. On August 17th, a White House phone call to Zelensky pressured the Ukraine President to accept Russian territorial demands, in violation of the Ukraine Constitution and wildly unpopular with the Ukrainian people, to effect peace.
Given Russia’s abominable history of broken treaties, the notion of security guarantees to protect a post-war Ukraine from another wave of Russian aggression is complicated. In 1994, one of many examples, in exchange for relinquishing its Soviet era weapons to Russia and Ukraine’s agreeing not to keep or develop nuclear weapons, in what has become known as the Budapest Memorandum, Russia, the U.S. and the U.K. pledged to “respect the independence and sovereignty and the existing borders of Ukraine.” In 2014, Russia invaded and annexed Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula, and three and a half years ago crossed the border in an effort to take the rest of Ukraine. So much for that treaty.
On August 18th, as Zelenskyy and the European leaders gathered with Trump in the East Room of the White House, Trump faced the reality that if he continued to champion Putin’s absurd demands for peace (which Putin now stated had to precede any ceasefire), Trump well might become the cause of a failed effort to end the war… and he subtlety walked back the Putin-fawning the world has just witnessed. With the possibility of a Section 5-like security guarantee (the NATO provision that if any NATO member were attacked, it would be treated as an attack on all of NATO) lurking in the background, the leaders retired for short period of additional discussions before returning to their home countries. Meanwhile, Putin continued to pound Ukrainian civilian targets, presumably to show his manliness. What will happen? I am not optimistic.
I’m Peter Dekom, and while a sustainable peace to the Russo-Ukraine war still seemed remote, there was a micro-glimmer of hope.
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