ukraine – Democracy Warrior

The rise and fall of Marjorie Taylor Greene

A rupture has occurred in the space-farce political continuum. MAGA majorette Marjorie Taylor Greene is now a MAGA castoff. She came into Congress like a lion and is leaving like lamb kabob, well-done. After a dramatic breakup with President Donald Trump in the past week-plus, MTG announced that she would resign from Congress in January instead of seeking reelection next year as she had intended.

You know of whom I speak: The turbulent Republican representative of Georgia’s 14th Congressional District. For the edification of the few who may not know her history, here are three useful paragraphs from the Wikipedia entry on her:

Greene has promoted Islamophobic, antisemitic, and white supremacist views including the white genocide conspiracy theory, as well as QAnon, and Pizzagate. She has amplified conspiracy theories that allege government involvement in mass shootings in the United States, implicate the Clinton family in murder, and suggest the attacks of 9/11 were a hoax. Before running for Congress, Greene supported calls to execute prominent Democratic Party politicians, including Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. As a congresswoman, she equated the Democratic Party with Nazis, and compared COVID-19 safety measures to the persecution of Jews during the Holocaust, later apologizing for this comparison. During the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Greene promoted Russian propaganda and praised its president Vladimir Putin. Greene identifies as a Christian nationalist.

A vocal advocate of President Donald Trump during his first presidency, Greene aided and supported Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 U.S. presidential election and has promoted Trump’s false claims of a stolen election. She called for the results of the 2020 U.S. presidential election in Georgia to be decertified, and was part of a group of Republican legislators who unsuccessfully challenged votes for Joe Biden during the 2021 United States Electoral College vote count, even though federal agencies and courts overseeing the election found no evidence of electoral fraud. Days after Biden’s inauguration, Greene filed articles of impeachment alleging abuse of power.

The U.S. House of Representatives voted to remove Greene from all committee roles on February 4, 2021, in response to her endorsements of political violence. Eleven Republicans joined unanimous Democrats in the vote. Greene was appointed to new committee roles in January 2023. In June 2023, Greene was expelled from the conservative House Freedom Caucus after insulting fellow caucus member Congresswoman Lauren Boebert. Greene unsuccessfully attempted to oust Mike Johnson from his role as Speaker of the House of Representatives on May 8, 2024.

In 2021 when Greene was stripped of her House committee assignments over her endorsement of political violence, she delivered a peculiar pseudo-apology on the House floor in which she made this remarkable assertion: “I was allowed to believe things that weren’t true.”

Who but she herself could have “allowed” her to believe the appalling ideas to which she gave voice or otherwise endorsed? How could she not have known better? She was, after all, a grown woman, and a mother at that. That attempt at evasion of responsibility for personal conduct has been typical of verbal bomb throwers at both ends of our political spectrum. But in the case of Greene, the behavior was so extreme as to suggest some sort of unwellness.

For much of her time in Congress, Greene was a determined climber of the slippery political pole. When Republican Kevin McCarthy of California was House speaker, she attached herself to him like a limpet. And she was an embarrassingly frequent presence at the side of Donald Trump at his various properties during his first term and in the interregnum. She was all in on the MAGA crazy. And in the House, she was an aggressive warrior for the cause of the unhinged far right.

Greene constantly sought attention by acting up in public, even heckling President Joe Biden during his State of the Union speech to Congress in March 2024, shouting a demand that he say the name of Laken Riley, a 22-year-old university student in Georgia who, while out on a run in broad daylight in February 2024, was ambushed and murdered by a Venezuelan man who was illegally in the U.S. (That man has been sentenced to life in prison with no possibility of parole.)

Greene also became a bully to the most liberal female members of the House, and in one notorious confrontation with Democratic Rep. Jasmine Crockett of Texas, the Georgian came out epically on the short end.

Greene, who had by then been returned to service on House committees, took a personal dig at Crockett during a hearing of the House Oversight and Accountability Committee in May 2024. “I think your fake eyelashes are messing up what you’re reading,” Greene sniped.

According to The Hill, this happened subsequently:

Later in the hearing, Crockett asked what she described as a hypothetical question about what might violate congressional protocol.

“I’m just curious, just to better understand your ruling,” Crockett said, referring to a decision made by Chair James Comer (R-Ky.).

“If someone on this committee then starts talking about somebody’s bleach blonde bad built butch body, that would not be engaging in personalities, correct?” Crockett said, in a veiled barb aimed at Greene.

Crockett’s “clapback” immediately entered the realm of political legend.

***

Once Kevin McCarthy had been driven from the House speakership for the unforgivable crime of making legislative deals with the enemy — that is, President Biden and House Democrats — Greene seemed to be somewhat adrift, like a limpet whose fierce grip on a piling has been broken, with the unhappy gastropod cast into the waves beating against the dock.

By degrees during Donald Trump’s second term as president, Greene has appeared to lose her MAGA fealty. But it was in relation to the Jeffrey Epstein sex-crimes scandal that she most clearly broke with Trump. She was one of just four House Republicans who put their names on a discharge petition to force a floor vote on a demand that the Department of Justice release all of the files in its possession concerning the late Jeffrey Epstein. The idea was to reveal the names of powerful people who had made nice with Epstein the sex trafficker. Trump had long opposed and attacked the “Epstein hoax.” He had been close with Epstein, and speculation that the files might implicate him in dreadful acts has been rife.

As the push for a House vote on the Epstein records came to a head in the past two weeks, Greene criticized Trump for resisting the release of the records and as neglecting his domestic agenda to focus on matters abroad.

Trump reversed himself on the Epstein files, suddenly urging Republicans in Congress to vote to release the records. (Events may yet prove, though, that his about-face is part of another, more elaborate, effort to conceal the records.) But soon after his reversal on the Epstein vote, Trump also announced that he was withdrawing his support from Greene and attacked her in the personal way to which his targets are accustomed. She then announced that she would leave Congress.

When Greene departs from Congress in January, we may not have heard the last of her politically. It is not for nothing that cynics say that formaldehyde is the only cure for the strain of Potomac River fever that infects politicians who come to serve in Washington.

Greene says that Trump’s latest treatment of her is intended to cow the rest of the Republican conference in Congress. Well, yes. But Trump is a bully, so he has always succeeded by abusing and cowing others. The real lesson in this latest rupture between him and one of his former sycophants is a repeat lesson: Trump is faithless and is never to be trusted. Marjorie Taylor Greene, of all people, should have known better, since she and he are two peas in a pod.

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.

On Ukraine, Trump is an obstacle

President Trump’s constant self-reversals on the war in Ukraine must be a great comfort to Russian President Vladimir Putin, who can see clearly that although Trump occasionally talks tough about punishing Putin for the war that he voluntarily started in Ukraine, the U.S. president’s heart is just not in the business of opposing the Russian.

Trump’s record speaks for itself.

On the eve of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, as Russian military forces were massed on Ukraine’s border with Russia to the east and on the frontier with Belarus in the north, candidate Trump praised as “genius” Vladimir Putin’s declaration two days earlier that the Donetsk and Luhansk regions of eastern Ukraine were “independent” of Ukraine. Putin was “savvy” because he was going to go into Ukraine to keep the peace. What?

Pro-Russian separatists had for a decade been fighting the Ukrainian military with the goal of tearing a huge part of eastern Ukraine away from the national territory and aligning it with Russia. And from 2014, the separatists in Ukraine had the assistance of Putin’s “little green men” — Russian troops operating on Ukrainian soil but wearing military uniforms without identifying markings. Putin’s declaration on Luhansk and Donetsk, made on Feb. 21, 2022, was his way of cementing independence declarations made by pro-Russian separatists in the two regions in 2014. The proclamations purported to establish a Donetsk People’s Republic and a Luhansk People’s Republic, both occupying Ukrainian land.

You may recall that before the 2022 invasion, Putin had threatened to resort to a “military-technical solution” in Ukraine if he did not receive from NATO an assurance that Ukraine would never join the alliance and if certain other demands about NATO’s posture were not met. NATO, including the United States, rejected Putin’s demands, and so we have a war.

On Feb. 24, 2022, Putin’s forces rolled west out of Russia and south out of Belarus in an operation that the Kremlin thought would have vanquished Ukraine in a matter of days, but the war has been raging from that day to this. Ukraine, reinforced by arms flowing in from Europe and the U.S., has proved a hard nut for Russia to crack.

The Russia-Ukraine war was just another trigger for candidate Trump to tout his imagined greatness as a deal-maker and settler of conflicts. On dozens of occasions during his third presidential campaign, he declared publicly and loudly that he would end the Ukraine war before even starting his new presidency or would do it on Day One. He won the election last November and took office on Jan. 20 of this year, and we are nearing the end of October with the war no closer to being ended.

In April, Time magazine asked Trump about his unfulfilled promise to have ended the war already, and he replied:
“Well, I said that figuratively, and I said that as an exaggeration, because to make a point, and you know, it gets, of course, by the fake news [unintelligible]. Obviously, people know that when I said that, it was said in jest, but it was also said that it will be ended.”

Asked what was taking so long, Trump responded:
“Well, I don’t think it’s long. I mean, look, I got here three months ago. This war has been going on for three years. It’s a war that would have never happened if I was president. It’s Biden’s war. It’s not my war. I have nothing to do with it. I would have never had this war. This war would have never happened. Putin would have never done it. This war would have never happened. Oct. 6 would have never happened. Oct. 7 would have never happened. Would have never happened. Ever.“

Also during the campaign, Trump repeatedly criticized Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky for his efforts to obtain U.S. weaponry to fight off the Russian aggression, accused him of bearing blame for the war and said that Ukraine, the victim of Russia’s aggression, probably would have to cede territory to Russia for there to be peace.

On April 14 of this year, Trump again blamed Zelensky for the war. “Listen, when you start a war, you gotta know you can win a war,” Trump said at a news conference at the White House. “You don’t start a war against somebody that’s 20 times your size and then hope that people give you some missiles.”

Trump has gone back and forth, again and again, in assigning blame for the war, even, of course, faulting Joe Biden, on whose watch as U.S. president the 2022 invasion took place. In his criticisms, Trump has been tougher on Biden and Zelensky than he has been on Putin. Remember his and Vice President JD Vance’s berating of the Ukrainian leader as ungrateful in the Oval Office on Feb. 28 of this year. Shortly after that acrimonious meeting, U.S. arms transfers to Ukraine were stopped, then quickly restarted. Trump’s pique actually figures into whether the U.S. president will support a country righteously fighting for its very life.

On Aug. 15, Trump hosted Putin in Alaska for a summit on the war. The U.S. president received the Russian graciously at an American military base, according the war-starter the courtesies appropriate for an honored guest. Putin was even allowed to lay flowers in honor of World War II Soviet pilots buried at Fort Richardson National Cemetery. The whole event was yet another instance of Trump flopping in front of Putin, who is the driving force behind a war of aggression and a man indicted by the International Criminal Court on war crimes charges.

The Alaska summit ended inconclusively, but Trump then spoke of Ukraine’s needing to give up land for a peace agreement to be realized. And here we saw, again, one of Trump’s great weaknesses: a tendency to be swayed by the disputant with whom he has most recently spoken.

On Aug. 18, just three days after the Trump-Putin summit in Alaska, Zelensky was to be at the White House again to meet with Trump. But this time, Western Europe was not going to allow Zelensky to walk into a trap as he had at the White House on Feb. 28. A delegation of NATO, European Union and other leaders from Europe rushed to Washington to support Zelensky. That meeting, too, was inconclusive.

Then came another flip. Trump and Zelensky met at the United Nations in New York in September after Trump’s address to the General Assembly. And after his meeting with Zelensky, Trump wrote on Truth Social that Ukraine could “win all of [its territory] back in its original form.”

Zelensky was back at the White House on Oct. 17, without the European posse, and that meeting did not go well, news reports say. Before the meeting, Trump had spoken of granting a request by Zelensky for Tomahawk cruise missiles to allow Ukraine to strike key targets deep inside Russia and make the war much more costly and difficult for Moscow. All seemed to be moving in Ukraine’s desired direction — until Putin called Trump before Zelensky’s visit to the White House.

Whatever Putin said to Trump moved the U.S. president’s position, and he began hedging on Tomahawk deliveries before meeting with Zelensky. The meeting proved to be inconclusive and apparently was confrontational. Immediately after, Trump was back to the line that Ukraine, the victim in the fight, needs to concede territory to Russia, the aggressor in the fight, for the war to stop. It was yet another frustrating and utterly unproductive reversal by Trump.

Our president’s principal formula for peace appears to involve Kyiv’s giving up Ukrainian land that Russia has occupied by force. That idea is a nonstarter for Zelensky. Ukraine is the victim. Russia is the aggressor. Russia should stop the war and leave Ukrainian territory. The formula is simple, and it is the most sensible for the world beyond Russia, because a Russian victory in Ukraine will embolden Putin and thereby endanger all of Europe. After all, Putin’s great dream is to reconstitute a grand Russian empire. Yet Trump just cannot seem to wrap his head around this idea.

He cannot seem to grasp the concept that it is best to stop Putin in Ukraine so that NATO minus one (the U.S.) does not end up fighting Russia after a Putin victory in Ukraine. I say “minus one” because it is not clear at all that the U.S. under Donald Trump would stand with its allies in a conflict started by an expansionist Russia. Such a scenario would have been unthinkable before Putin appeaser Donald Trump became U.S. president. Now we have Trump apparently being more enthusiastic about putting U.S. troops on the streets of American cities than he is about sending weapons to Ukraine to help it fight for its freedom.

What is this mysterious hold that Vladimir Putin has over Trump? Why won’t our leader deal with Putin as the offender that the Russian is? For the sake of world peace, I hope that sooner rather than later we get an answer to this mystery. Something is rotten in it, and it stinks dangerously.

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.