Politics – Page 2 – Democracy Warrior

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.

Kirk’s death and the continuing struggle

The assassination of Charlie Kirk is a dreadful crime, and the killer is likely to be executed for what he has done. But no one who opposes President Donald Trump for his anti-democratic excesses should ease up for even a moment in the campaign to spotlight and denounce those transgressions.

If you are pointing out dangerous actions and behaviors in reasonable words and are not encouraging the use of violence, you should consider yourself to be in the clear and should press on with speaking truth to this corrupt power.

Keep challenging Trump’s overreach and the GOP-led Congress’s cowardly dereliction of its duty to be a check on the executive branch. Continue telling that same Congress that we are watching for it to rouse itself and hypocritically rediscover its voice when the next Democratic president takes office and tries to effect his or her agenda. Keep telling Congress that the executive excesses on which it is silent today are establishing precedents that tomorrow’s presidents — Republican and Democrat — will be able employ to constrain disapproving voices, throttle the courts and to stifle the inconvenient rights of the sovereign people.

Keep pointing out that under Trump, the executive branch is, more than ever, a center of power pursuing the interests of the occupant of the Oval Office to the detriment of the common good.

Trump’s supporters seem to have calculated that they will be safe because Trump is their man and they are his people, that he will forever focus on the enemy. But who is enemy and who friend in Trump’s eyes, and for how long? Supporters of aspiring authoritarians have erred fatally in this calculation repeatedly throughout history, failing to recognize that the dictator is a pathological personality who views even his supporters and allies as tools and will turn on them the moment this becomes convenient for him.

Suddenly, they, who were the heroic people in the authoritarian’s telling yesterday, become the enemies of the people. This pattern is already plain to see in Trump’s behavior since his first term. Who can count the number of people he has embraced as the finest to serve him in government and elsewhere, only to turn on them and attack them as villainous and incompetent, even treasonous, because they have indulged in independent thinking? Who can forget his attacks on his own supporters for wanting greater transparency in the Jeffrey Epstein sex crimes case, a matter on which Trump has exhibited an interesting level of touchiness?

All those immigrant groups that supported him in the election? They fancied themselves to be among the elect. They were wrong. They found out in his immigration enforcement sweeps.

Let us deplore the killing of Charlie Kirk and commiserate with his wife and children and the wider community that loved him. But let us not be diverted from our principal purpose by noises such as Trump’s linking of Kirk’s assassination to violent rhetoric on the left. Absolutely no one in American public political discourse of the past decade has unleashed more violent and incendiary rhetoric than Donald Trump has from his perch on the extreme right of American politics.

Since he declared for the presidency in June 2015, he has demolished the guardrails of self-restraint and decency and has dragged this country’s political culture toward levels of physical confrontation not seen since the civil rights struggles of the post-World War II era.

A 22-year-old man may have fired the shot that killed Charlie Kirk in Utah, but when 79-year-old Trump looks in the mirror here in Washington, D.C., he will see someone who bears part of the blame for that heinous assassination. His supporters should wake up and see who is leading them, and to where.

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.

Shameful U.S. silence on the genocide in Gaza

A nation that was born as a rebuke to genocide is now guilty of committing genocide to preserve its own existence.

That is a broad-strokes painting of where Israel finds itself today. But between today and the end of World War II — during which Nazi Germany tried to extirpate Europe’s Jews — lies a tormented and bloodstained narrative of colonial highhandedness, ineptitude and bankrupt assumptions; betrayals; usurpations; religious and secular warfare; deep hatreds; land grabs; displacements; massacres; terroristic murder; apartheid; and so much else, all for control of what the American author Aaron David Miller has called “the much too promised land.”

This is how the United Nations defines genocide: acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.

And the U.N. lists acts that constitute genocide:

Killing members of the group;
Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

With the exception of the final item in the list, I think all of the conditions for genocide exist in the Gaza Strip. But what is the proximate context and background to what is happening in Gaza?

On Oct. 7, 2023, the terrorist group Hamas, which controls the Gaza Strip, led a shock assault out of Gaza into southern Israel, attacking multiple small civilian communities, Israeli military posts and a music festival underway in the desert near the Israel-Gaza frontier. The assault force included fighters representing multiple groups that are pretty much universally committed to the eradication of the state of Israel: Hamas’s al-Qassam Brigades; Palestinian Islamic Jihad’s al-Quds Brigades; the Popular Resistance Committees’ al-Nasser Salah al-Deen Brigades; and, of course, al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades among a handful of other militant anti-Israel groups.

The assault was a horror. About 1,200 people, mostly Israelis, were slaughtered in civilian settings and at military posts. The terrorists butchered people in unspeakable ways, and about 250 people, also mostly Israelis, were kidnapped and hauled across the frontier into Gaza to be held hostage for bargaining purposes. Israel responded with a furious assault on Gaza to destroy Hamas and its allied forces and to free the hostages.

Today, about 50 of the hostages are thought still to be in Gaza, but it is now feared that most of those are corpses. To minimize its own troop losses, Israel has taken the sledgehammer approach to killing militants. And so Gaza lies in absolute ruin because of the pounding that it has taken from Israeli artillery fire and airstrikes, Israel’s preferred method of attack.

More important, an estimated over 60,000 Palestinians in Gaza have been killed in the bombardments. How many of those are non-combatants is unclear, because the Hamas authorities in Gaza obviously will not issue numbers distinguishing between fighters and civilians. But there is no doubt that the vast majority of the victims of the war have been Palestinian civilians, people trapped in Gaza with no way to escape the fighting between Israel and the Hamas coalition.

Remind yourself that the Gaza Strip is, indeed, a strip of land, just 25 miles deep and about seven miles at its widest point, bounded to the south by Egypt’s North Sinai Governorate, to the west by the Mediterranean Sea, and to the east and north by Israeli territory. Israel holds the sea and the surrounding land except for that south of Gaza, which is Egypt’s.

Gaza is, in effect, a prison holding about 2 million suffering people. Most of them have been displaced multiple times, chased from their homes by fighting or directly ordered by Israeli forces to leave parts of Gaza to make way for military operations.

As Israel has pressed its campaign, its military has repeatedly targeted journalists working in Gaza, killing scores so far, no doubt to cut off the outward flow of information about the atrocious spectacle unfolding in Gaza. And with the repeated killings of aid workers, medical rescue personnel and civilians just trying to get food at aid distribution points, no one should doubt that the Israeli military is acting with naked malice toward Palestinians in Gaza.

Palestinian civilians have repeatedly been herded in every direction within that tiny territory. Their homes have been leveled. All the normal structures of civic life have been shattered. Their hospitals have been repeatedly attacked and are mostly out of use — and not just because Israel has wanted to destroy them: Hamas does embed itself in civilian facilities, as the Israeli forces say, because Hamas cares nothing about how many Palestinian civilians it causes to be slaughtered as it pursues its own interests. If it cared at all, the conflict would not have come to this.

And what it has come to is famine.

A single dry sentence just issued in a United Nations report should shock us all: “As of 15 August 2025, Famine (IPC Phase 5)—with reasonable evidence—is confirmed in Gaza Governorate.”

Those words are the essence of a “snapshot report” on the hunger situation in the Gaza Strip, whose lifelines have been exclusively in Israeli hands for many months now. The next two sentences of the snapshot are no less grim: “After 22 months of relentless conflict, over half a million people in the Gaza Strip are facing catastrophic conditions characterised by starvation, destitution and death. Another 1.07 million people (54 percent) are in Emergency (IPC Phase 4), and 396,000 people (20 percent) are in Crisis (IPC Phase 3).”

The Israeli government declares that there is no starvation in Gaza.

But that is a lie.

Israel has repeatedly cut off or sharply restricted the entry of food and medicines into Gaza in order to force Hamas to give up the remaining hostages, employing the illegal tactic of collective punishment. But we also know that Israel has another design on Gaza. It wants to possess all of that land, but without Palestinians on it. And the Israeli government under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is busily scheming with the barbarian Donald Trump to cleanse the Gaza Strip of its people and turn the place into a gleaming Mediterranean resort for the world’s unscrupulous rich. They are planning ethnic cleansing, lest anyone be confused about what is in the works.

And it is because Donald Trump, the chief executive of the United States, is a part of this dirty plan that the U.S. government is silent on the genocide that is unfolding in Gaza. How did the great United States of America sink to such infamy? When your nation is led by a thug, thuggish things will be done in your nation’s name.

But what about Congress, our independent legislature and a check on the executive branch of government led by Trump as president? Ah, poor Congress. So cowardly, so feckless. It is in the hands of Republicans, and almost to a person, they are moral midgets. They remain silent in the face of multiple outrages being committed by the Trump administration.

Why will members of the Republican majority that controls Congress not rouse themselves to say something about the enormous crime being committed in Gaza? They have an obligation to do so, because we, the United States, are the ultimate guarantors of Israel’s security. As such, the Israeli government’s crimes are our crimes. Israel’s infamy is our infamy.

The genocide that Israel is committing in Gaza is being armed and underwritten by us. This is intolerable.

Clarification: The assertion that fighters from Gaza who attacked Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, committed rapes is a highly disputed issue, and an assertion that rapes were committed that day has been removed from this post. It is to be noted, however, that on Aug. 14, 2025, the U.N. secretary general’s special representative on sexual violence in conflict issued a news release that includes the following passage:
With respect to the situation in Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territory, Hamas is listed in the annex of the report on the basis of information verified by the United Nations in 2024, indicating reasonable grounds to believe that some hostages taken to Gaza were subjected to different forms of sexual violence during their time in captivity, and clear and convincing information that sexual violence also occurred during the attacks of 7 October 2023 in at least six locations.

The actual report can be seen here.

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.

Trump’s white-supremacist plan

What do you get when you arm an astoundingly malicious and narcissistic personality with nearly limitless power? Many bad outcomes, including a Donald Trump as U.S. president using the power of the federal government to pursue a white-supremacist agenda. But that is not all. Trump has populated his administration with battalions of bootlicking enablers, many of them shockingly unsuited for the offices they hold, but all of them dangerous as facilitators of his ultimate plan.

Then there is the Republican-controlled legislature. Congress should be a check on the power of the presidency, or so it is suggested in a quaint document called the U.S. Constitution, but today’s controlling factions in the U.S. House and Senate are a world-class collection of invertebrates, not just useless to the country but dangerous to it in their uselessness.

The courts and the citizens who are loyal to constitutional order appear to be the final bulwarks against tyranny.

Yes, my fellow Americans. This is where we are.

Some Americans, I know, are delighted by what is unfolding. Obviously, those are the people of Trump’s camp. Some support the white-supremacist vision and eagerly await what they think it has in store for the country and for them personally. But some who voted for Trump did not think past the price of eggs in deciding to whom they would give their votes. More’s the pity.

What do we see unfolding in the country under Trump 2.0?

Science is being attacked, disparaged and dismantled. After liberal democracy itself, the science conducted in the United States is arguably the largest contributor to this country’s global status as “great,” and the endurance of American science, made possible in large part by the work of numberless immigrants, has sustained that greatness.

But Trump cannot perceive that. For reasons beyond normal comprehension, he sees science as a threat: in climatology; in disease prevention; in energy-efficiency. Science even took care of him when he came down with the coronavirus, and science makes Truth Social function so that he can use it to disseminate his lies about the 2020 election, attack anyone who disagrees with him on any issue and trumpet his supposed greatness.

American Democracy itself is under assault, but expressly in service of a white-supremacist design. Trump won the presidency in 2016 and found the outcome satisfactory. He lost in 2020 and launched a campaign of dangerous lies about having been robbed of a supposed victory. The result was that an army of his supporters attacked the Congress at his instigation and provocation on Jan. 6, 2021, as that body was certifying Joe Biden’s victory in the election held in November 2020. This man who was and is again president has proved himself to be an enemy of American democracy.

The rule of law is being twisted and perverted by a felon — 34 times guilty, lest we forget — to advance his dishonest purposes. Is there anything more ridiculous than Donald Trump’s braying night and day about the odious criminals blemishing the image and safety of the country’s great cities. Has he lately looked into a mirror with any discernment? If he has, he will have seen the felon who pardoned well over 1,000 people accused or convicted in connection with that disgraceful attack on the Congress and on our democracy. He will have seen a shameless hypocrite who always works to put himself and his allies above the law while insisting that people he dislikes abide by it, even be victimized by it.

This country’s commitment to international law and ideals — a fidelity that historically has not been all that much to celebrate — now sits squarely atop “that great dust heap called history.” For reasons that may be known only to God, to Trump and to Vladimir Putin, Trump cannot see the war between Russia and Ukraine in plain terms: Russia under Putin invaded its smaller neighbor without provocation. Yet Trump seems determined to find a way to stab Ukraine in the back to gratify some bizarre libido that Putin obviously excites in him.

Religion, too, is being perverted. U.S. Christian nationalism is marching side by side with white supremacy and cheering it on so that together they can effect a takeover of the country’s command posts: federal, state and municipal; civic and martial. And Trump’s pose as a Christian is just farcical. Consider his oft-repeated declaration that the Bible is his favorite book. He can tell that story to those two Corinthians of his. In fact, I am quite certain that his favorite book is the particular ghostwritten fiction about his life that has taken money out of the pockets of the largest number of suckers. Trump is no more Christian than Satan is.

But immigration policy, including the mass-deportation campaign and the motives behind it, may be where Trump’s most flagrant violations of decency are to be seen. To be clear, no properly run country can allow people to stream into its territory virtually unchecked and by the millions, and the United States absolutely has a duty to straighten out this mess. It cannot countenance a shadow society comprising millions. The Democrats should have sorted this out long ago, but they have been sadly timid on that subject, as on crime (but let us save that for a separate broadside).

Trump’s behavior toward the undocumented immigrants he wants out of the country is deeply immoral. He is terrorizing brown and black immigrants, particularly, with jackboot tactics and with lies that they are “the worst of the worst.” I know many who are far finer people than Trump could ever hope to be. And his transfers of immigrants to summary imprisonment in El Salvador and to third countries to which they have absolutely no connection reveal his extraordinary depravity.

What is the real purpose of this policy? I believe that it is to reduce as far as possible the nonwhite population of this country — in service of his white-supremacist design. The infamous Fourteen Words, the Nicene Creed of white supremacy, are embedded in this policy. Don’t know what those words are? “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.”

In keeping with that perverse plan, he has imported white South Africans of the Boer stripe who he claims need to be rescued from “genocide” at the hands of black South Africans. That genocide is his own invention, of course. If he really wants to rescue a people from what seems much closer to genocide, should he not be bringing Palestinian civilians out of Gaza and into the United States to save them from the starvation and the slaughter being inflicted on them by Benjamin Netanyahu’s government and Hamas? Of course not. Palestinians are not Trump’s kind of humanity. Instead, Trump and Netanyahu want to ethnically cleanse the Gaza Strip, bundling the Palestinians out of there to foreign places and steal their little piece of land to use it to turn a profit. This is pure evil.

The independence of the United States’ great liberal universities is under attack, as is standard in the fascist playbook. And why should that be? It is because the universities are largely populated by critical thinkers who tend to be high-minded about questions of justice and are disinclined to fall for the crypto-eugenics philosophy and the other nonsense coming out of this aspiring dictator. I think it really bothers him that such people see him as little more than a clown, even if one who does possess the means to do great harm.

The Trump administration says it is going after the universities because of violations of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, to wit, antisemitism being tolerated on campuses. Antisemitism is an ancient, dangerous and disgraceful stain, and it exists, we can safely say, in every society where Jews live. But because it is an insidious pathology, it is to be found in societies and communities in which people have never even met a Jew. People with a proper knowledge of history know that antisemitism needs to be fought at every turn to be contained, but I do not believe that Donald Trump is sincere when he says he is confronting the universities over antisemitism.

This man does few things better than lying, and while he is not burdened with intelligence, in my view, he is deceitful and exceedingly crafty. He will play any card that helps him to “win,” and I believe he is playing the antisemitism-warrior card with gusto simply to humble the universities.

I end this list of Trump’s targets with the nation’s courts. In every country where a properly functioning civic system has fallen to dictatorship, the courts have been defied and intimidated, then dismantled and remade as tools of the dictator. I need not give a list of instances, but the ever-handy example of Weimar Germany’s transformation into Nazi Germany springs to mind. Accordingly, Trump and his acolytes here in Washington and across the country are assailing federal judges for even just daring to pause administration actions. Even the U.S. Supreme Court seems susceptible to defiance. After all, might as well hang for a sheep as for a lamb.

Here is the bottom line: Our country is facing a dreadful menace in the schemes of the Trump administration. And I believe that at the bottom of it all lies the objective of keeping control of the country in the hands of a radical white-right faction. For this group, demographic change has deprived it of the certainty that white will always be in control because of its numerical weight in the population. For this group, things have gotten out of hand: Not only has the country’s nonwhite citizen (read voting) population grown vastly, but large numbers of white citizen voters cannot be relied on to back the far right’s agenda. So drastic measures are called for. The whole electoral system must be rigged, by irregular electoral districting and whatever other measures will serve the overarching goal.

Electoral rigging is not guaranteed to yield the desired result, but there’s always the option of brute force. If one can bend the military to serve this particular corrupt purpose, nothing else matters.

Trump and his henchmen are quick-marching our society to a future that most of us will find deeply offensive if not personally dangerous. Stay woke, people! History is replete with horrors that befell societies whose majorities thought: Such things can never happen here; we are, after all, a civilized country.

But it can happen in the United States of America, and it is happening.

What am I going to do about all of this? I will not go quietly into some horrid future being manufactured by Trump and his extremist allies. Now freed from professional constraints on my speech, I am adding my voice to those already raising a clamor about the gathering danger. Most of us just want a quiet and peaceful life, but sometimes, to secure that pacific existence, we must be prepared to raise hell. I will be raising hell.