news – Democracy Warrior

Trump is desperate as midterms near

Donald Trump is increasingly desperate for a way to forestall the reckoning that he knows will begin when the 120th Congress is seated in about 11 months, and it appears that for him the solution is somehow to defuse the Republican-destroying grenade that is the midterm congressional elections coming up in November.

Despite the fervent desire of Trump and the efforts he is making, I expect that in January 2027, Democrats will be decisively in the majority in the House of Representatives. That Democratic majority will energetically undertake the task of holding President Trump and the rest of the executive branch accountable for administration policies and arbitrary presidential actions that have gone unchallenged under the Republican majority led by Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) in the 119th Congress.

I think the president has long recognized that the voters of this country will quickly sicken of him once his chaotic policies start to cause them pain and even embarrassment, so, like most of the dictator-minded around the world, he sees elections simply as an entryway that must be barricaded behind him as soon as he is safely inside the citadel. He tried to wall himself inside in his first term, but he did not act quickly enough and was frustrated by what he called “the deep state” but what I call the blessed institutions of our democracy.

Having persuaded a majority of voters to give him a new term in office, he is wielding some of his old tricks and deploying new ones to try to neuter this year’s midterms, but these elections are going to be a really hard nut to crack. So, what are his old tricks? Basically lying brazenly about a nonexistent problem of substantial electoral fraud in certain states — majority-Democratic states, of course. This approach leads us to his new tricks: a multi-pronged assault on the system of congressional elections.

That assault began with Trump’s persuading the hardly reluctant majority-Republican legislature in Texas to execute an outside-the-schedule redrawing of that state’s congressional maps to make an additional five or so of Texas’ seats in the U.S. House predictably Republican. The president has encouraged legislatures in other red states to do the same, and some have completed that process or are attempting it. Naturally, legislatures in some blue states have responded to this mid-decade redrawing of congressional voting maps by doing or attempting the same maneuver in their jurisdictions. (Here is an easily read breakdown from the National Conference of State Legislatures on how that effort stands across the country.)

The U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., on Monday, Feb. 2, 2026, viewed from Pennsylvania Avenue NW and with fresh snow coating the landscape. Photo by Gilbert Dunkley

And Trump’s FBI on Jan. 28 searched the elections agency in Fulton County, Ga., and carted away information including ballots and other records pertaining to the 2020 presidential election. You may recall that after he lost Georgia to Joe Biden in that election, Trump tried to persuade Georgia’s secretary of state, a Republican, to “find” a specific number of votes to overturn Biden’s victory in the state. That official, Brad Raffensperger, quite correctly refused to commit a crime to help the president stay in office.

The raid executed last week by the FBI is part of the president’s persistent lying about the 2020 election. But with the midterms just nine months away, the FBI intervention has the real potential of interfering with the voting process in Fulton County, which is home to Atlanta and has the largest bloc of voters in the state of Georgia.

Further to that FBI raid, why was Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, present on the ground during the operation? She runs the agencies that are concerned with foreign intelligence, and the FBI is definitely not within her remit but falls under Attorney General Pam Bondi at the Department of Justice. And why did Gabbard patch Trump through on speaker phone to say encouraging words to FBI agents involved in the search of the elections office? Her presence and his direct interest are further indication to me that he is committed to monkeying with the midterm elections.

Two posters placed in the wealthy D.C. suburb of Chevy Chase, Md., by the nonpartisan Nuclear Threat Initiative were seen on Sunday, Feb. 1, 2026, to have been adulterated and incorporated into a tableau denouncing President Trump’s authoritarian bent and the aggressive enforcement posture of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and defending immigrants targeted by ICE. The president is largely reviled in D.C.’s liberal suburbs in Maryland and Northern Virginia.
Photo by Gilbert Dunkley

Then there is Trump’s call in recent days for Republicans in Congress to “nationalize” the congressional elections. In our system, elections are administered by the states. The Constitution says in Article I Section 4 that it is to be so:
The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations, …

As you can see, Section 4 also says that “the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations.” It is this provision that Trump apparently wishes to exploit to bring all elections for national office under the control of the federal government. With elections to Congress managed by a central federal authority, Trump and his crooked minions could simply declare whatever results were favorable to Trump. They could also disqualify inconvenient state or district results as being fraudulent. But, praise God, the framers of our Constitution had the nous to anticipate the emergence of someone like the Dear Leader. Thus, our voting system, jurisdictionally fractured by state, territory and district, is a shield against a single corrupting hand.

Remarkably, in response to Trump’s urging that congressional Republicans nationalize congressional elections in 15 states, Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) said a firm no.

“I’m supportive of only citizens voting and showing ID at polling places. I think that makes sense. … But I’m not in favor of federalizing elections, no. I think that’s a constitutional issue,” Thune told reporters, according to the publication The Hill.

This was a remarkably assertive piece of resistance to a Trump proposal by a congressional Republican leader, given that such folk have been largely asleep insofar as holding Trump to account during the entire first year of his second term. The fact is that states are highly possessive about the rights that the U.S. Constitution accords them, and the states’ individual right to organize their own elections is deeply cherished. So, I cannot see more than a handful of representatives and senators — if any at all — coming out in favor of Trump’s call for congressional elections to be federally run in a particular set of states. That idea is just a nonstarter. Ain’t gonna happen.

But the administration is employing multiple tools in its search for a way to meddle with the midterms and head off the Democratic Party rampage that is seen as imminent. For instance, as Michael Waldman of the Brennan Center for Justice wrote in a Jan. 27 essay, “(Attorney General Pam) Bondi’s Justice Department has demanded access to the voter records of 44 states and Washington, DC, and it has sued more than 20 states for not complying. Two courts have already ruled on the side of the states.”

And then there is, potentially, the military option.

We all know that Trump has conjured publicly with the idea of turning the regular U.S. military loose in majority-Democratic parts of the country. He has, in fact, deployed or has tried to deploy National Guard troops in various Democrat-heavy areas, including California and here in Washington, D.C. What began as a Guard deployment last summer to bolster law enforcement during a one-month crime emergency that the president declared in D.C. has become a troop presence on the streets of the nation’s capital that will stretch at least until after the midterm elections in November.

When you consider, in addition, that the White House security perimeter has been enlarged by the use of crowd-control fencing to include Lafayette Park adjacent to the White House grounds, one suspects that Trump and his nearest sycophants are hedging against a popular rising of the people this year in response to some anti-democratic provocation emanating from the White House.

National Guard troops wait to cross a street in Washington, D.C., on Monday, Feb. 2, 2026. Since the shooting of two West Virginia National Guard soldiers near the White House on Nov. 26, 2025, with one dying and the other left gravely injured, Guard troops patrolling D.C. in a deployment ordered by President Trump have adopted a far more alert stance when in a static position. As seen in this image reflected in a vehicle wing mirror, they face outward to be able to spot a threat approaching from any direction.
Photo by Gilbert Dunkley

I do not know how Donald Trump plans to interfere with the midterm elections, but the evidence of my eyes and ears tells me that he is furiously casting about for some way to stop the blue wave that is rolling toward Capitol Hill. That wave will wash away the compliant Congress that he has so far enjoyed in his second term and replace it with a legislature with backbone and a bad attitude toward him. This prospect fills him with dread. Because he is a walking, talking, certifiable lunatic, I do not rule out any rash act of self-preservation on his part.

Thus I say to all my fellow democracy-loving Americans: “Screw your courage to the sticking place.” Get your marching shoes ready! Our country might face a crisis this year from which only we, in the streets in our numbers, can extract it and set it back on the straight and narrow.

Guess who’s coming to dinner

It’s the Butcher of Riyad. Tomorrow — Tuesday, Nov. 18, 2025 — Donald Trump will commit one of his most audacious assaults on decency when he breaks bread at the White House with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, a man I like to call the Butcher of Riyad.

Trump commits an assault on decency simply by rising from his slumber each morning, but his insult against the moral universe tomorrow evening will be particularly egregious.

This man Mohammed is one of the world’s most bloodstained tyrants, but you would not know it from looking at the battalions of international celebrities who have murdered their consciences in order to accept millions of dollars of Saudi money. They are golfers, soccer players, Hollywood actors and actresses, comedians, singers. You name a profession, and I or someone else can show you the high-profile Westerners — and they need to be Westerners (most are Americans), and preferably white — who have been bought by Saudi Arabia to give the regime’s image the Persilschein.

Critics generally speak of “sports-washing” and “art-washing” being practiced by the Saudi government, but regardless of what a particular observer calls the practice, its aim is always the same: to draw the world’s eyes away from Saudi Arabia’s appalling human rights record and to give the kingdom a nice, acceptable global appearance.

The Saudi record of human rights violations is broad and bloody, but that record is particularly ugly in the area of the death penalty. To be clear, the Saudis are not the global leader in absolute number of executions by a national government in any given year; China is the champion there. Expert observers of the judicial system in China estimate that thousands of people are executed in that country annually. China does not, however, reveal the number of people its criminal justice system kills, so the expert observers can provide estimates only.

But Saudi Arabia, with a population of about 34 million vs. China’s 1.3 billion, is among the world’s busiest execution countries by its rate of official killing. And as a state run by a harsh and absolutist monarchy backed by a pitiless religious establishment, Saudi Arabia’s executions are very much the royal court’s affair to moderate or accelerate. Yes, I know that MBS is not yet king, but he is that in all but name; his father is 89 and ailing and is largely absent from the arena. King Salman is just quietly waiting for death to call his name. Thus MBS is large and in charge. And Trump certainly is sweet on him.

Many Saudis have lost their lives to the executioner’s sword or the firing squad so that MBS and the rest of the Saudi establishment — religious and secular — may live in their vision of tranquility without the nuisance of internal criticism or domestic political challenge.

This matter is addressed in a Human Rights Watch news release dated Aug. 11 of this year:

Saudi authorities have been carrying out an unprecedented surge in executions in 2025 without apparent due process, Human Rights Watch and the Middle East Democracy Center said today. The June 14 execution of Turki al-Jasser, a journalist known for exposing corruption within the Saudi royal family, raises concerns that the Saudi government is using the death penalty to crush peaceful dissent.

Saudi authorities had executed at least 241 people in 2025 as of August 5, with 22 executions in the previous week alone, according to the international human rights organization Reprieve. Reprieve reported that the number of executions in 2025 would exceed all prior records if executions continue at the same rate.

“Saudi authorities have weaponized the country’s justice system to carry out a terrifying number of executions in 2025,” said Joey Shea, researcher for Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates at Human Rights Watch. “The surge in executions is just the latest evidence of the brutally autocratic rule of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.”

By now you might be asking yourself: Wasn’t there some sort of international outrage in recent years concerning someone named Khashoggi? Yes, but let me give you a little history before we touch on the case that is tickling your brain. For people of my vintage and older, the name Khashoggi might more readily bring to mind someone from an earlier time. That would be Adnan Khashoggi, who died in London in 2017 at age 81. Adnan had been a Saudi insider of such sterling connections that in addition to being an international weapons dealer, he was a broker in many of the Saudi government’s military purchases on the world market. He was rich, he was influential, and he was cemented into the national and regional establishments. And so was his wider family, naturally.

Here is an example: Adnan Khoshoggi’s sister Samira married an Egyptian businessman known to the world as Mohamed al-Fayed. These two were the parents of a man named Dodi al-Fayed, who was romantically linked to Princess Diana and was fatally injured alongside her in that high-speed car crash in a road tunnel in Paris in August 1997.

Dodi al-Fayed had a cousin and Adnan Khashoggi a nephew by the name of Jamal Khashoggi.

Jamal Khashoggi was lured into the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul on Oct. 2, 2018, by Saudi security agents on the pretext that consular officials wished to finish up some paperwork he was seeking to be able to marry again. He was not seen to emerge from the consulate, and no trace of his body has ever been found, despite extensive searches in Turkey, including in forests, as part of the investigation that followed his disappearance. Investigations concluded that he had been murdered and his body dismembered inside the consulate. And the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency concluded that Mohammed bin Salman, the very guest for tomorrow’s White House dinner, had personally ordered that Khashoggi be killed.

Why was Jamal Khashoggi killed? He was a critic of the Saudi royal leadership who spoke up for human rights, including women’s rights, and argued for a system in Saudi Arabia that would more closely match Turkey’s, in which the religious establishment is far less dominant and secular society is far more in control and is more permissive. And Khashoggi laid out all of these views as a contributing columnist for The Washington Post. In other words, he was very public with his criticisms. That was enough to get him killed by a Saudi leadership that is malignantly averse to seeing its sharpest domestic critics continuing to draw breath.

The spectacular murder of Jamal Khashoggi happened about midway through the first Trump administration, but the heinous act barely disturbed the bromance between Trump and MBS. As we all know by now, Trump does not allow any pronouncements or assessments by U.S. intelligence agencies to disturb his plans. Whatever Trumpy wants to do, Trumpy gets to do.

And by now, in Trump’s mind, the ghastly business with Khashoggi at the consulate is old news, and possibly even fake news. The present is what matters. There’s his own ego to be burnished by a royal visitor no doubt bearing valuable gifts and copious praises; there’s a coldblooded authoritarian to be cozied up to; and the dagger that Trump has sunk deep into the heart of American decency is there to be given another savage twist.

But I have this to say to Trump: Before you and your butcher friend sit down to your fine meal tomorrow evening, you should know that hundreds of uninvited guests will be present. You and your friend the Butcher of Riyad might not see the unwelcome multitude standing shoulder to shoulder, hovering silently over you, your honored guest and all the others present for the feast, but they will be there as a standing accusation. I have to believe that if there will not be some sort of moral justice soon for you, your enablers and your guest the butcher, it will come one day. I leave you with this quote from the venerable Archbishop Desmond Tutu of South Africa:
“[T]he past … doesn’t go and lie down quietly and behave or disappear. It has this uncanny characteristic of returning to haunt us.”

Trump runs wild as Congress sleeps

Congress is a co-equal branch of the U.S. government and is designed in the Constitution to be a check on the power of the executive branch, the president’s part of the government. But you couldn’t tell that from the posture of the legislature as that body is constituted today. Congress under the control of the Republican Party has shamefully abdicated its sacred duty to defend the Constitution, instead cravenly prostrating itself at the feet of a president who is hostile to the Constitution itself and is otherwise unbound by norms, decency and the law.

So the man who would be king of the United States has been allowed to run amok. He is seizing for himself powers that clearly are Congress’s to exercise. He is trampling the law at will and running a campaign of self-aggrandizement and persecution because of an enormous ego that is papered over with an exceptionally thin skin.

This is President Trump. This is how a fascist-minded president behaves. Abetted by people like the fawning Attorney General Pam Bondi and the desperate-to-survive FBI Director Kash Patel, the president uses the federal legal machinery to hound those by whom he feels wronged or significantly opposed (think James Comey, Letitia James, John Bolton, Lisa Cook). A fascist-minded president puts the military in the streets of disfavored cities with the goal of intimidating the populace and mythologizing himself as a strongman.

National Guard troops in the U Street Corridor of D.C. on Friday, Oct. 31, 2025, as part of President Trump’s deployment of military personnel to Democratic-led cities. Recent reports suggest that the troops will remain in D.C. into 2026. Photo by Gilbert Dunkley

A fascist-minded president is telling other people how to think, using taxpayers’ money to blackmail universities into toeing his ideological line. This fascist-minded president says that media coverage that is critical of his policies is “illegal,” the First Amendment of the Constitution be damned. This, by the way, is the same president who suggested during his first term in office that parts of the Constitution should be suspended.

As for our wounded democracy, I think Trump would like to put it out of its misery by creating permanent Republican control of Congress. To that end, at his urging, multiple GOP-controlled state legislatures are undertaking irregular re-drawings of congressional district maps to cement a higher number of Republican representatives in the U.S. House and achieve a permanent GOP majority. Congressional maps are normally adjusted after the once-a-decade U.S. Census reveals how states’ populations have changed.

No Kings day in D.C., Saturday, Oct. 18, 2025. Photo by Gilbert Dunkley

The present GOP redistricting is gerrymandering that will give us the fiction of fair elections with the certainty of indefinite Republican control, surely an insult to democracy. What may not be obvious to some people is that this is an essential part of the greater right-wing plan to cement white-supremacist control of the levers of national power. Some Democratic-controlled state legislatures are also redistricting, in an attempt to neutralize the GOP’s national power grab, but this arms race is unsustainable. It just makes our bitterly adversarial political system redder in tooth and claw. And we can thank Donald Trump for that.

This fascist-minded president is following the authoritarian’s playbook in manifold ways. He grifts shamelessly, hawking cryptocurrency and access to the executive’s power. He peddles vulgar trinkets to the gullible. What a disgrace! He embraces blood-soaked dictators like Vladimir Putin (at the expense of valiant Ukraine) and Mohammed bin Salman Al Saud. Indeed, he is about to roll out the red carpet here in Washington for the said Mohammed, one of his most beloved cutthroats.

This fascist-minded president transgressively glorifies himself by interfering with the arts and building monuments to his ego. A decent U.S. president recognizes that the enormous powers of his office have companion duties of discretion and restraint. Not so with Trump. He ousted the board of the storied and sacred John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and had himself elected chairman of the institution by the sycophants he appointed in place of the previous nonpartisan directors. This is like an illiterate buying himself a vast and important library because he has come into money but never bothering to invest in learning to read. Trump is a barbarian, and a barbarian with the trappings of refinement is still a barbarian. His brutishness remains obvious. And his touch is like the kiss of death. The Washington Post reports, “Kennedy Center ticket sales have plummeted since Trump takeover.”

Dictators through the ages have built monuments to their inflated egos. Think of Hitler with his showpiece New Reich Chancellery in Berlin; Saddam Hussein with his vast edifices, statues, public portraits and monuments across Iraq; Syria’s Assads and their monumental self-hagiography; and the current absolute rulers in the Arab Persian Gulf with their enormous public portraits.

Trump, too, now has an enormous public portrait in Washington; his particular image hangs on the façade of the headquarters building of the Labor Department downtown. And Trump is building a ballroom fit for an empire on the east end of the White House. Predictably, in keeping with his personal style, the design shows a structure that profanes the actual White House: This ballroom will be 90,000 square feet against the 55,000 square feet of the core executive mansion. The East Wing (which was extra to the core White House) is no more, having been demolished last month. And if you wonder, can the president just do this? Yes, if he ignores the law, and especially since he has fired the members of the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts, a body established in 1910 to review and approve construction of or alterations to public and private structures in defined historical areas of D.C. that include the White House. (If you are a betting person, I dare you to wager that Trump will not name the ballroom after himself.) By this maneuver, Trump gets to blight the people’s house in perpetuity by attaching his name to it — permanently, I am sure he hopes.

A great triumphal arch is also among Trump’s plans. Supposedly, private donations will pay for all of it, but this is merely part of Trump’s grift: He gets lavish monuments to his ego, and the underwriters will get U.S. government contracts and legislation that is favorable to their narrow interests. Nothing to see here; it’s just Trump being his usual self-dealing self.

Abroad, Trump is desperate to be accorded acclaim and pomp, and he gets these little treats essentially by blackmailing other countries with tariffs and other U.S. power. Basically, he is running an international shakedown.

Trump is an old man, with not many years left in him. (On behalf of all humanity, thanks be to Almighty God for this particular mercy. And for the sake of the country, that gratitude of mine to the Almighty stands even if Trump should outlive me.) In his old age, instead of becoming reflective and restrained in light of his well-shortened mortal horizon, Trump is in full gallop to establish himself as a modern-day Ozymandias. But Percy Shelley’s great poem of the same name is a warning that power is fleeting and that monuments eventually crumble to dust and rust. For my money, Trump’s works are likely to live on mostly in infamy and as a stain upon his children and their children’s children, for generation unto generation. The word “Trump” will be a byword for government by venality, tackiness, greed and cruelty. It will stand wretchedly beside “kakistocracy.”

For the democratic-minded in this country, all is not lost, though. Trump’s folly and the systemic rot he is causing can be stopped. But that requires the Republicans who control Congress to rise from their slumber, grow a collective spine and reacquaint themselves with the oath that each of them swore when taking office. They swore to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic.” They did not swear fealty to any president or to any party.

Most of the Republicans in the U.S. House and Senate have violated their oaths by enabling Donald Trump’s obscene excesses, either by active complicity or by passive, cowardly silence. Congress has a duty to act to contain the president. The courts alone cannot do it. And as Congress abandons its moral obligations, it is putting the judiciary, that other branch of government, in the grim position of taking on matters that belong squarely in the political and legislative realm.

Because Congress is shirking its responsibility to be a check on the executive branch, the federal courts will end up losing their credibility. Congress has already squandered its own credibility through fecklessness, and the country is closer to losing its way in consequence. In the trending climate, disunion is the ultimate danger. Such thinking is not farfetched. Remember the Civil War? Remember the Civil War!

The whole state of affairs tends to be deeply dispiriting. The forces of reaction appear ascendant. But the hopeful opposition is determined to be a bulwark against the growing darkness of authoritarianism and white supremacy. For a theory of hope, let us look to the general trend line of progressivism in this country since its founding.

The trend line began with a hopeful upward leap. The colonies freed themselves from England’s stifling control. They had been vexed and exhausted beyond tolerance by “a long train of abuses and usurpations” committed by the Parliament and the king back in England. From across an ocean, the colonists’ commerce was taxed without their interests being expressed by any representatives from among them. They simply did not have such representatives in England. And here in the colonies, the king’s troops were eating them out of house and home and strangling their liberty (abuses that gave rise to the Third Amendment of the Constitution).

The colonists reached a breaking point, severed the grip of the monarchy and established a nation, deeply flawed, yes, but something that came to be known as the venerable American experiment. Our Declaration of Independence, which one finds with every copy of the U.S. Constitution, is a warning that the people of this country collectively have license to throw off tyranny and build democracy anew. It is a clear warning to Donald Trump, to the likes of Florida’s Ron DeSantis, who is carefully angling to be Trump’s successor, and to the rest of the far right in this country that there can come a breaking point.

They all should take heed.

The peace, the grift and the vendetta

President Trump is justly celebrating the apparent end of the war in the Gaza Strip in a peace agreement that his administration brokered. Just over a week past the second anniversary of the horrific attack from Gaza into Israel that triggered this war, Hamas and its allied fighting groups in that part of Palestine have largely been defeated — although not yet eliminated — by the Israeli military. After tens of thousands of civilian casualties in Gaza and the razing of much of the territory’s built environment, the Palestinian survivors there can begin piecing together something resembling a recovery.

Next to come: the stabilization and redevelopment of Gaza under a 20-point Trump plan to be overseen by the “Board of Peace” (read “Board of Grift”) which Trump, of course, will lead. The stabilization and redevelopment plan is beautifully explained by the New York-based Council on Foreign Relations.

But a great danger remains. The seeds of further conflict lie in the Trump peace plan and in the ruins of Gaza. The plan calls for an “International Stabilization Force” drawn from Arab and other supportive countries gradually to take over security in Gaza as Israel withdraws its troops in stages. The plan also calls for the disarming of Hamas and the other Palestinian fighting groups in Gaza and for the destruction of their weaponry. But Hamas does not agree to be disarmed and disbanded. And it views the Board of Peace as a neocolonialist structure.

The rumps of Hamas and the other fighting groups remain embedded in Gaza, and all kinds of weaponry, including explosives, remain cached all over the territory. Will the International Stabilization Force, or ISF, become the new enemy and target of Gaza’s militants? That remains to be seen, but it seems to me to be highly likely. If the remnants of these groups do fight on, little progress will be possible in Gaza beyond the trucking in of emergency food and medical aid. Obviously, the absence of fighting is a requirement for large-scale reconstruction to occur.

But if Gaza’s fighting groups do finally agree to stand down and disarm, watch for a Trump-facilitated grift in Gaza on a scale “like nobody’s seen before,” to borrow one of the grifter in chief’s favorite hyperbolic formulations. We already know from Trump’s own mouth that he has his eyes on Gaza as a Mediterranean resort destination. (He seems to have dropped, at least for the present, the mad idea of clearing Gaza of its Palestinian population.) In his dual role as U.S. president and head of the Board of Grift, Trump will be able to steer redevelopment work and other moneymaking opportunities in the new Gaza to his friends and political donors. And you can be sure that the Trump family will be dipping its beak into the river of money that will be flowing into the rebuilding of Gaza’s housing stock, roads, hospitals, clinics, bakeries, shops, water supply systems and sewage plants.

The new resort-flavored Gaza will need a specific type of seafront profile. It will need corniches and marinas and luxury hotels (the Trump family’s special area, lest we forget).

Who will sit on the Board of Peace alongside Trump to make all of this come to pass has not been announced beyond the lamentable Tony Blair. And his participation now seems in doubt after Trump said over the weekend that it was unclear whether Blair would be acceptable to all others involved with the board. Trump’s announcement of Blair’s name at the announcement of the Board of Peace drew an intense backlash. Blair has been severely out of favor for backing the falsely grounded 2003 invasion of Iraq when he was British prime minister.

But who are the others to sit on the Board of Peace? Trump will be looking for certain kinds of people to be with him, because he will need those people to be onboard with the entity’s alter ego, the Board of Grift. This much we can take for granted: He will have no use for people who are likely to raise awkward concerns about fiscal transparency, accountability and fairness, because transparency, accountability and fairness are anathema to any enterprise in which Trump is involved.

Meanwhile, on the home front, the great peacemaker is making war on his chosen targets via the U.S. military and the Department of Justice. National Guard troops are being sent into large, Democrat-run cities, which of course did not support Trump in the election, to intimidate them on the pretext of crime emergencies in those jurisdictions. Although National Guard troops are still to be seen roaming aimlessly in D.C. after Trump inanely declared the city to be totally crime-free, the president has shifted his attention elsewhere, and cowing Chicago seems to be his present obsession. Expect him to resume his domestic aggression as soon as he has finished making peace overseas.

With the fanatical compliance of U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi, Trump has sicced a handpicked federal prosecutor on former FBI director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James. And Bondi’s Justice Department is investigating Lisa Cook, a member of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors whom Trump is trying to fire. Her alleged crime is mortgage fraud. So is Letitia James’. Comey’s is allegedly lying to the Senate Judiciary Committee during testimony in September 2020 about leaks from the FBI to news media concerning FBI investigations.

But these three people’s real crimes are that they have either resisted Trump or have had some hand in legal cases against him.

Lisa Cook: Trump wants to appoint a lackey to the traditionally independent Federal Reserve Board of Governors, and one of his other lackeys, Bill Pulte, the director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, came up with accusation that Cook had committed mortgage fraud. Trump declared her fired on that basis; she resisted and sued him and the Fed itself, for good measure. For now, the Supreme Court is allowing her to remain a Fed governor. But Pam Bondi’s Justice Department is beavering away at making a criminal case against Cook.

Letitia James: The attorney general of New York state had the temerity to sue Trump’s company for business fraud and win a judgment requiring the disgorgement of hundreds of millions of dollars of ill-gotten money. Trump declared that she should be prosecuted, and so she is being prosecuted.

James Comey: In March 2017, when Comey was director of the FBI and Trump was just settling into his first term as president, the agency began investigating whether members of Trump’s presidential campaign had colluded with Russia to influence the 2016 election in Trump’s favor. Trump was outraged, of course, and Comey was the target of his ire. Trump fired Comey in May 2017, citing a loss of confidence in the director. Trump has held that grudge like an heirloom, and when he recently declared — for the umpteenth time — that Comey should be prosecuted, the deed was all but done.

The U.S. attorney who is prosecuting Comey and James is Lindsey Halligan, a former personal lawyer to Donald Trump who was hastily appointed on an interim basis to the Justice Department’s Eastern District of Virginia, the famous “rocket docket.” She has had no previous prosecutorial experience. Her background is in insurance law, and she worked for a law firm before joining the Trump White House, from which perch she was sent to take charge of the very serious Eastern District, one of the most prestigious of the Justice Department’s districts and a preferred venue for terrorism and other national security cases.

Halligan was appointed specifically to secure an indictment of Comey because her predecessor, Trump-appointee Erik Siebert, had declined to take that action on the grounds that the case was inadequate and was then forced out by Trump. After securing the Comey indictment, Halligan got one for James, the New York attorney general. If anyone wonders why she was able to indict whereas her predecessor would not act, just remember the famous declaration by former New York Court of Appeals chief judge Solomon Wachtler: any prosecutor can get a grand jury to “indict a ham sandwich.” The prosecutor simply feeds the grand jury cherry-picked evidence to get the desired outcome.

So as Trump wraps up his whirlwind peace mission in the Middle East and heads back to the home front, he will be wringing the neck of the white dove and burning the olive branch.

He is coming home to cast off the mantle of peace and snatch up the sword that he dropped when he set off abroad. But we want no dictators or kings here in these United States, so he is returning to meet his match in that segment of the American populace that sees him for what he is and has righteously decided that he will not have his way here.

***

The next No Kings day is this Saturday, Oct. 18, 2025. Find D.C.-area events here. National website here.

Democrats, stand firm on shutdown!

As of midnight, we have been in a partial shutdown of the federal government because of an impasse in the U.S Senate over a continuing resolution to fund the government until Nov. 21. The measure cleared the Republican-controlled House on Sept. 19 on a vote of 217 to 212. In the Senate, under that chamber’s special rules, the measure needed 60 votes to pass, but Republicans do not have that number in their own conference and so need Democratic votes to pass the measure. Competing Republican and Democratic versions failed in the final hours before the shutdown deadline of midnight on Sept. 30, the end of the fiscal year.

What’s the holdup? Changes to Medicaid are involved, but the main issue is that Democrats insist that an extension of expiring subsidies for Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) health insurance premiums be included in the continuing resolution. Republicans promised to engage in a discussion of the ACA premium subsidies and other health-care-related matters at a later date. Democrats held out. No continuing resolution was passed by the deadline of midnight Tuesday looking into Wednesday, and now, on Wednesday, we’re in a partial government shutdown that could drag on.

Bravo, Senate Democrats! Do not give an inch in this fight; the outcome here is crucial to the health of about 24 million Americans.

The federal subsidies for premiums on health insurance purchased through the ACA marketplace were to have expired several years ago, but these subsidies were twice extended via major bills passed in Congress during the Biden administration. To be clear, these subsidies are funded by taxpayer money, and some critics of the program loudly disparage the subsidies as socialism. But they are no more socialistic than the federal government subsidies that are included in every Farm Bill to help keep American agriculture in business. Nor are they any more socialistic than the $28 billion fund set up during the first Trump administration to help farmers who lost export sales as a direct consequence of the tariff wars that Trump started.

As far as I am concerned, the federal subsidies for ACA health insurance premiums are a righteous use of public money.

And as for Republicans’ saying they are willing to discuss ACA subsidies at a later date but not now, that is a crock. The emergency is now. Annual open enrollment for health insurance begins on Nov. 1, but in a matter of days from now, health insurers will be sending their customers notifications about the premiums those companies will charge for coverage in 2026. To set their pricing plans for 2026, the companies need certainty now, not in two weeks or later.

The question of ACA premium subsidies must be resolved now, not later. If no extension of subsidies is passed in the short-term spending bill — or continuing resolution (so named because it continues federal funding at existing levels in the absence of a proper appropriations bill) — health insurance premiums for the approximately 24 million Americans now covered via the ACA will rise steeply. The consequence will be that millions of Americans will no longer be able to afford health insurance and will drop out of coverage.

One cannot reasonably forecast how many people now covered by insurance purchased through the ACA would give up the coverage because they decided they just could no longer afford it, but surely the number would be in the multiple millions. The great danger, of course, is that people with chronic ailments such as heart disease, diabetes, high blood pressure, respiratory diseases and various mental illnesses will suddenly stop taking their maintenance medications. Use your imagination. No good can possibly come of such a situation.

But despite the public harm caused unaffordable health insurance premiums, Republicans would have made progress on one of their cherished objectives: destroying the Affordable Care Act. You may recall the Republican reaction to the legislation when it was signed into law by President Barack Obama in March 2010, with then-Vice President Joe Biden being caught on a hot microphone telling Obama, “This is a big fucking deal!” Republicans were dead set against it, and I always thought that their opposition was in large measure rooted in racism.

The right-wing white Republican establishment despised Obama — not just for himself but also for what his election signaled about the future direction of the country — and that establishment recognized that a program that would help millions and millions of uninsured Americans to afford health coverage would be a legacy achievement for the nation’s first black president. The very thought of it incensed those Republicans no end, and they set out to destroy what was by then well known as “Obamacare.”

Enter this appalling man by the name of Donald Trump. In addition to his regular 2016 campaign boast that he would build a southern border wall for whose construction Mexico would pay, he repeatedly pledged to repeal the Affordable Care Act and replace it with something better. I do not recall that he ever clearly articulated what was wrong with the ACA, but he would produce something better than it, he declared.

When this malignant racist became president in January 2017, he began his legislative assault on the ACA, the proudest domestic work of his black predecessor, via his pet Republican conferences in the House and Senate. He failed, most spectacularly when Sen. John McCain — a Republican, we should remember — gave that famous thumbs-down on the Senate floor in July 2018, driving the fatal stake into the heart of the GOP’s best attempt at repealing Obamacare.

Republicans have not given up on their hope of seeing the death of Obamacare. What they have given up on is any pretense that they intend to offer an alternative. They never had one in the days of Trump 1.0 when they were pretending that they had such a plan; and there is no longer any talk of producing something better. Under Trump 2.0, the Republican agenda across the federal government is simply to dismantle and destroy, and nothing is being created that is not a tribute to the diseased ego of Mad King Trump.

So we return to the present test facing congressional Democrats. For leverage in the standoff, Trump has threatened to fire vast numbers of federal workers rather than furlough them during the shutdown, as would be normal. Democrats should ignore this threat. The ACA question is a red line from which they must not retreat. If they fold here, they will surrender any credibility and usefulness they could have had in the necessary resistance to the madman.

Jimmy Kimmel’s comeback

I applaud the Walt Disney Company’s decision to reinstate “Jimmy Kimmel Live!,” starting on Tuesday, after Disney-0wned ABC suspended it indefinitely last week because of uncharitable remarks that Kimmel made about the Sept. 10 assassination of the conservative lightning rod Charlie Kirk.

Disney had issued the suspension in response to a conservative backlash that included ABC-affiliated Sinclair and Nexstar declaring that they would no longer carry Kimmel’s show on their many stations around the country. Behind much of everything, of course, lies money: These large television and entertainment companies almost always have business underway that needs federal government approval, and they have to be careful to present the correct posture before the highly vindictive Trump administration. It was almost natural, therefore, that Disney and its affiliates would do a bit of virtue signaling by dropping the hammer on Kimmel.

To be clear, the argument over Kimmel’s show is not a First Amendment matter. Disney is a private entity, not a government agency, so it cannot be accused of violating Kimmel’s constitutional right to free speech, because Kimmel has no such claim in respect of a private corporation. Disney is at liberty to terminate any presenter’s contract over speech that Disney does not like. But the public that pays Disney for the entertainment it provides also is entitled to withdraw its money from Disney products and spend it elsewhere, or just sit on it, if it does not like Disney’s decisions.

Disney immediately faced a different backlash for benching Kimmel. This one came broadly from the left in the form of loud and harsh criticism of the Kimmel suspension as corporate cowardice in the face of a Trump administration that is demonstrably committed to quashing criticism of federal government policy as well as of the font of federal policy, the stable genius that is President Donald Trump himself.

And the new backlash also took the important form of canceled subscriptions; Disney was frightened about losing money. After all, money rules. So the corporation again adjusted its calculations and decided that it was better that Kimmel and his program be restored.

Or, if I am to be charitable and optimistic in my outlook, it could be that the powers atop Disney genuinely decided that it was more important that media corporations begin to grow some backbone under the repressive pressure the federal government is exerting.

Whatever its real motivations, Disney did a good thing today in restoring Kimmel’s show. And I will now renew the Disney subscription that I canceled over the Kimmel suspension.

To the glory of Trump — enemy of labor

If you go to the headquarters of the U.S. Department of Labor here in Washington and stand well back across from the building in that mini park on Constitution Avenue to get a panoramic view of the edifice, you will see two enormous banners honoring American workers for the nation’s 250th anniversary next year. Each banner also bears the image of a U.S. president: on the left is Donald Trump; on the right is Theodore Roosevelt.

Roosevelt was a labor reformer even before he became governor of New York, and before he would become U.S. president. But before that, as a member of the New York State Assembly, he was at first a reliable anti-union vote. Then he had an epiphany when he began learning about ordinary people’s working conditions. His education included visiting workplaces and seeing firsthand the appalling conditions that prevailed.

Here is a description of Roosevelt’s work in labor reform, taken from a blog at the Theodore Roosevelt Center that credits a report at the Library of Congress as its ultimate source:
“As Governor of New York, Roosevelt further pushed for labor reform, especially through enforcement of existing legislation. He pushed for the passage of employers’ liability and sweatshop laws, essentially a continuation of the crusade he had picked up from his meetings with [the union leader] Samuel Gompers. Although he could not get [those] passed, he was able to sign a number of individual bills regulating tenement house manufacturing. Other bills he signed regulated the labor of women and children, as well as that of teachers and municipal employees. Finally, and perhaps most significantly, he passed and strictly enforced an eight-hour law.”

Under President Theodore Roosevelt in 1903, a Department of Commerce and Labor was formed. In 1913, under President William Howard Taft, the separate Department of Labor was formed, and the original “Commerce and Labor” entity continued as the singular Department of Commerce. The Department of Labor, to which Roosevelt could rightly claim parentage, says this about itself:
“The Department of Labor (DOL) administers federal labor laws to guarantee workers’ rights to fair, safe, and healthy working conditions, including minimum hourly wage and overtime pay, protection against employment discrimination, and unemployment insurance.”

President Theodore Roosevelt has a highly positive legacy in relation to labor. But what about Trump? What does the record show so far of his attitude to labor?

President Donald Trump is featured on a banner at the headquarters of the U.S. Department of Labor, Washington, D.C., on Friday, Aug. 29, 2025. A corresponding banner out of the frame to the right shows President Theodore Roosevelt. A Department of Commerce and Labor was established under Roosevelt in 1903. The Department of Labor was established as a separate Cabinet-level entity in 1913. Photo by Gilbert Dunkley

In a word: enmity.

It is rich that his face is plastered on a banner at the Labor Department building honoring the American worker. Trump has a bad history with labor, starting in his business life, where he was sued by individuals and by small contractors who alleged that he stiffed them by refusing to pay for work they had completed. In his first term as president, he attacked the labor unions representing federal employees and also treated those employees — essentially his own workers — as enemies of the American people. The courts helped to restrain him that time around.

In his second term, he came loaded for bear. He returned to Washington accompanied by Elon Musk as his hatchet man. Musk set about sacking tens of thousands of federal workers. There is a civilized way to reduce headcount, and the abrupt and cruel way it has been done in a matter of months this year by the Trump administration is not it. The result has been lives upended and multiple government agencies thrown into chaos, their work undercut and their remaining employees feeling terrorized.

And Trump’s tariffs are coming for the American private-sector worker. Watch what tariff-induced inflation will do to consumer demand, the profitability of companies, the cost of living, and, ultimately, the level of unemployment.

Trump is no friend of American workers. He is a fool flailing about pretending to be doing work when in fact he is causing destructive chaos. That his face appears on a banner honoring this country’s workers for the nation’s 250th anniversary is an insult to American labor.

Look for Trump’s image to continue to occupy top billing as the celebration of the nation’s 250th anniversary advances. For him, the event is not about the country’s endurance as an experiment in democracy. It is simply about the glory of Donald Trump.

Hating Trump in D.C. over the years #1

Photos by Gilbert Dunkley

Part of a protest encampment outside Union Station in Washington, D.C., seen on Tuesday, Aug. 26, 2025.

A protester in front of Union Station in Washington, D.C., on Thursday, Aug. 21, 2025, demands the elimination of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The D.C. region’s Metrorail and the intercity rail service Amtrak are among the bus and rail services using Union Station. President Trump has sent National Guard troops to Union Station as part of what he has called a crackdown on crime in the nation’s capital. On Aug. 27, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy announced that the federal government was taking control of the management of Union Station from the nonprofit Union Station Redevelopment Corp.

A protest encampment outside Union Station, a major transportation hub in Washington, D.C., on Thursday, Aug. 21, 2025.

A denunciation of President Donald Trump’s federal intervention in the local governance of Washington, D.C., hangs from a balcony at an apartment building in downtown Washington, D.C, on Tuesday, Aug. 26, 2025.

The north side of the White House in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday, Aug. 26, 2025. Visible in the picture are the two towering flagpoles that President Donald Trump had erected on the White House grounds on June 18, 2025, one on the North Lawn (foreground), the other on the South Lawn, on the Ellipse side of the mansion.

A sign at a permanent protest post maintained in the pedestrian plaza on the north side of the White House in Washington, D.C., as seen on Tuesday, Aug. 26, 2025.

A view of a permanent protest post outside the White House on Tuesday, Aug. 26, 2025.

In Lafayette Square, just north of the White House, on Tuesday, Aug. 26, 2025.

Outside the White House on Tuesday, Aug. 26, 2025.

Seen outside the White House on Tuesday, Aug. 26, 2025.

An anti-Trump sticker on a street sign in the Dupont Circle neighborhood of Washington, D.C., on Friday, Aug. 22, 2025.

Large street display near Dupont Circle in Northwest Washington in 2025 before Donald Trump and Elon Musk fell out.

An anti-Trump sticker seen in Northwest Washington on March 9, 2018.

The origins of Trump’s coup attempt

A new American Revolution formally introduced itself to the country on the night of Nov. 4, 2008, with the election of Democratic Sen. Barack Obama to the presidency. That night, at Grant Park in Chicago, Obama spoke in lofty terms about hope and opportunity and the possibility of positive change in our country. The enormous and jubilant crowd he addressed was very much a reflection of the country’s racial variety.

Also that night, some 1,500 miles away in Phoenix, Obama’s defeated Republican rival in the election, Sen. John McCain of Arizona, delivered a concession speech that seems impossibly gracious by the standards of President Donald Trump’s America in 2025.

McCain’s address to his supporters included these words:

“Sen. Obama and I have had and argued our differences, and he has prevailed. No doubt many of those differences remain. These are difficult times for our country, and I pledge to him tonight to do all in my power to help him lead us through the many challenges we face. … I wish Godspeed to the man who was my former opponent and will be my president. And I call on all Americans, as I have often in this campaign, to not despair of our present difficulties but to believe always in the promise and greatness of America.”

But I noted something about McCain’s crowd that night: It was overwhelmingly white, and it was angry, although parts of his chivalrous rhetoric did draw applause. Mostly, though, that very white crowd listened to him in bitter silence. I took that as a warning.

That night was born the reactionary fightback, the effort to swing the country back toward a state of absolute white control at the federal level. That effort gave us the radical right-wing tea party movement and its campaign to foil and bring down Obama, who nonetheless won a second term in office. His second victory, in 2012, was proof to the right that extreme measures might be needed, even an upending of the country’s democratic order, since American democracy no longer was a guarantor of white electoral dominance.

American democracy was unassailable gospel while it served to elevate the correct sort of people to public office. But when, by demographic change, our electoral processes began opening doors for all sorts of nonwhite, non-right people, American democracy started to lose its status as unimpeachable gospel in the conservative establishment. After all, it was now enabling the wrong people to share power, and God alone knew where that would all end.

The new power gospel is white supremacy, which has a traveling companion in Christian nationalism. This collaboration reminds me of the Saudi system, in which the absolute monarchy of the House of Saud is validated and buttressed by the Islamic establishment, largely embodied in one family, the descendants of Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab.

The fightback that began with Obama’s election needed a leader, an unreconstructed and committed racist who would not be ashamed to say awful things (“He tells it like it is” is what Trump supporters have often said they like about him) and to do unpleasant things. Come the hour, come the man. In Donald Trump they found their brute, a combination of cave troll and messiah.

Trump has proved himself more than equal to the task of executing the mandate. He is profoundly dishonest. He is an unapologetic hypocrite. He is a bully. His ego is enormous. He is greedy. He is venal. And he lies. God, how he lies!

Trump’s takeover of policing in Washington, D.C., is, I believe, a rehearsal for something larger. Yes, he is using it to disguise his stepped-up hunt for undocumented immigrants in the city, but there is a bigger prize. And D.C. is the ideal testing ground. Many people outside this city do not know, I am sure, that Congress, which makes its home here, has ultimate authority over D.C.

Congress can impose any law on D.C. tha pleases a majority on Capitol Hill. It can take over the city government. Although we have what is called home rule, with an elected mayor and city council and all the other trappings of modern American city administration, Congress is our lord and master. It has ultimate authority.

Washington, District of Columbia, is a federal district whose status is specified in the U.S. Constitution, which says in Article I, Section 8:
The Congress shall have the power To … exercise exclusive Legislation in all Cases whatsoever, over such District (not exceeding ten Miles square) as may, by Cession of particular States, and the Acceptance of Congress, become the Seat of Government of the United States, and to exercise like Authority over all Places purchased by the Consent of the Legislature of the State in which the Same shall be, for the Erection of Forts, Magazines, Arsenals, dock-Yards, and other needful Buildings;

The Constitution says “Congress shall have the power To,” but because the Republican-controlled Congress, the legislative branch, is missing in action, Trump, who leads the executive branch, feels free to take control of our city police, put uniformed officers of all kinds of other law enforcement agencies on the streets of the capital and even augment their numbers with National Guard troops sent from states around the country by those states’ complicit Republican governors.

How does Trump justify this? He says his actions are necessary because crime in D.C. is out of control. Here is where being a barefaced liar is useful to an aspiring autocrat. He rejects the city’s official crime figures as bogus (remember his response to losing the 2020 election?), declares that he knows that crime is out of control in D.C., and says he is surging security personnel into the city to bring the problem under control. And Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth (that means Trump, since Hegseth is a mere cipher) has just authorized National Guard troops deployed in the city to be armed while out on the streets of the nation’s capital.

Let us be in no doubt about what is happening. Donald Trump is rehearsing a coup against the United States. He is pushing the limits further and further, and quickly, because I think he needs to have some assurance of an alternative if the midterm elections of November 2026 go badly against him. Democrats would take over in the House and that institution would rise from its slumber and begin to try to contain this runaway president. I think he is testing and testing to see how many of the states can be counted on to provide National Guard troops for an antidemocratic project, should he deem one necessary.

And he is pushing and testing to accustom the American populace to his excesses so that when he needs to pull the trigger on a spectacular assault on our democratic norms, the people will have been primed.

He said publicly in the presidential campaign last year that once the 2024 election was out of the way, people would not have to concern themselves with future elections. He would fix everything, he said. He said that with a smile, but do you think he was joking?

Is there any good news? Yes. A resistance to Trump’s excesses is emerging. It is visible all over the country in the demonstrations, some unfortunately violent, against the cruel and heavy-handed tactics of Immigration and Customs Enforcement. It is visible here in D.C. in the barracking that D.C. residents deliver to any senior Trump administration official who shows a face in public. It is visible in the caustic and proliferating stickers, posters and graffiti around town that insult Trump in seriously profane ways. It is visible, and audible, in the pot-banging demonstrations that are emerging around the city every day at 8 p.m.

As is so often the case, however, the country’s citizenry broadly could be too slow off the mark to head off Trump’s coup and will then find itself struggling to undo a virtual fait accompli. How fragile our democratic systems are proving to be under Trump’s assault. It turns out that these systems rely for their effectiveness on the presence of honorable people in positions of trust.

Trump is not honorable, and he is profaning the nation’s ultimate position of trust. What Trump is doing could lead to widespread citizen-on-citizen violence around the country, because his supporters and his opponents are deeply entrenched in their positions.

Where is all this taking us? No one can know, not even those who think their plans are ironclad and foolproof. I think we should hope for the best but be prepared for the very worst.

Europe learns to manage Donald J. Chamberlain

When the pro-Ukraine leaders of Europe heard that President Trump had decided to have last Friday’s Ukraine-specific face-to-face meeting with the invader Vladimir Putin, those European allies must have shot out of their chairs in alarm. Knowing that Putin exercises a kind of cordyceps hold on Trump’s mind, they would rightly have worried about what might result from the American president’s inability to show to Putin the toughness required as the Russian works to dismember Ukraine.

Trump has repeatedly said that Ukraine should not expect to recover territory within its borders that Russia has seized. That means Trump expects President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and the Ukrainian people simply to turn their backs on the approximately 20 percent of Ukraine that Russia significantly controls: all of the Crimean Peninsula and, generally, the eastern region of Ukraine known as Donbas, and some additional provinces.

A significant displacement of Ukrainians began in 2014 when Russia seized Crimea after a pro-European revolution occurred in Kyiv, and the displacement accelerated with the arrival of Russia’s full-on invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022. Some 3 million Ukrainians now live under Russian authority on their own Ukrainian soil. In an ideal world, most Ukrainians would not agree to cede even an inch of their country’s territory to the Russian aggressor, but war might so exhaust and terrify them that they clamor to fold and walk away. Putin is counting on that. And Putin is counting on Trump to bring Zelenskyy to that acceptance.

Thus we have the spectacle of Trump, the president of the United States, running interference for the butcher Putin.

Our European allies have taken note.

When, after the Alaska meeting, it was announced that Zelenskyy and Trump would meet at the White House on Monday (yesterday), the European allies must have been even more alarmed. They and Zelenskyy would have recalled the disgraceful berating of the Ukrainian leader in the Oval Office in February by Trump and Vice President JD Vance. That White House meeting was an ambush against Zelenskyy.

This time around, Zelenskyy came with a posse of the willing: NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte; European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen; Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni; Finnish President Alexander Stubb; German Chancellor Friedrich Merz; French President Emmanuel Macron; and British Prime Minister Keir Starmer. They would not allow Zelenskyy to be ambushed by Trump a second time. And TACO Trump behaved himself.

While speaking on Fox by phone this morning (on the day after the meeting), Trump was asked by an interviewer how he had managed to bring so many European leaders to the Oval Office together so quickly. Well, Trump said, America is respected again. A year ago, he said, such a thing would not have happened.

He was wrong on the first point and right on the second. A year ago, such a gathering would not have occurred because it would not have been necessary. This country’s allies in Europe had respected this country enough that they fully expected that it would do right by Ukraine. On Monday, they came here to Washington, and quickly, to ensure that Trump did not abuse Zelenskyy and bully him into caving to Putin’s demands.

What happened at the White House on Monday was not a display of responsible American leadership, as the White House has been spinning it. What happened there was an intervention. Those leaders who visited knew that Trump just cannot quit Putin and that there was a risk of a second disgraceful Oval Office performance by Trump if Zelenskyy stepped into the snake pit by himself.

It has to be said that even as a doddering president with a foggy mind, Joe Biden had a mostly properly functioning moral compass. His doddering steps were nearly always pointing him in the right direction, and unerringly in the matter of Ukraine.

Not so with Trump. His inflated ego is the magnetic north that guides his moral compass. When he met with Putin on Friday, that was an exercise in self-gratification (he is desperate for a Nobel Peace Prize), and also appeasement.

The European leaders who visited us on Monday grasp the relevant history in a way that is far superior to Trump’s awareness of it. They remember Europe’s appeasement of Adolf Hitler as first he rearmed Germany in violation of post-World War I treaty limits, then remilitarized the Rhineland, then executed the annexation of Austria via the Anschluss, then purloined the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia and then invaded Czechoslovakia outright.

Next came Hitler’s triggering of the pivotal Danzig crisis, which ran through the summer of 1939 and was the last great spasm before that maniac launched what would become World War II. He wanted to retake control of Danzig, a largely ethnically German city over which Germany lost control with its defeat in WWI. But Danzig was now, by international treaty, a free city, the property of no particular nation, although it was connected administratively with its direct neighbor Poland. Germany, too, was a direct neighbor.

When Hitler signed a surprise nonaggression pact with Russia in late August 1939, providing himself security on his eastern front, France and Britain really began to panic. Britain was led by Neville Chamberlain, who in 1938 had appeasingly signed on the dotted line when Germany took the Sudentenland and Hitler gave an assurance that he had no further territorial ambitions. “Peace in our time,” Chamberlain said on his return from the now-infamous Munich Conference. How the British and the French cheered! How Hitler chortled!

A year later, the appeaser was recognizing his mistake and also stiffening his spine. But because he had earlier appeased Hitler, the tyrant did not think that his British adversary really would stand up if Germany invaded Poland. And if Britain did not stand up, neither would France, must have been Hitler’s calculation.

On Sept. 1, 1939, Germany and Russia attacked Poland. The rest is history.

It is a history that Europe remembers well. In Trump, Europe sees a new Chamberlain. The European leaders know that Ukraine is a modern Sudentenland, and they know that if Putin, a modern Hitler, is not stopped in Ukraine, Europe will end up fighting him in a wider war because he will not have been satisfied with forcing down the unpleasant meal that Ukraine has proved itself to be. Putin “hungers for sweeter meats,” to quote from “The Lord of the Rings.”

That is what Monday at the White House was really about. It was not an example of American leadership. It was an example of European leadership by intervention to head off a world-engulfing catastrophe. Thank God above that the Europeans are beginning to figure out how to handle Donald J. Chamberlain.