Putin photo, Rustam Minnikhanov. Trump photo Gage Skidmore. Wiki Commons
Putin photo, Rustam Minnikhanov. Trump photo Gage Skidmore. Wiki Commons
Trump is backing Putin to a degree no one could have predicted, unfettering him financially to continue to try to crush Ukraine. And right before the Midterms?
According to the New York Times, Trump signed an executive order exempting Russia from a tougher sanctions law just passed by Congress and which he had already signed into law.
If this sounds more than a little crazy to anyone, you’re not off the mark. But even crazier is the fact that this action was apparently legal. A president can exempt a country, entity or person from sanctions if he chooses. The real question is why would he?
Thinking Americans have long wondered about the appearance of undue favor and support Trump has granted Putin. And other the past few days this support has become more and more obvious. The slowdown of Starlink satellite data to Ukrainian forces was another gift to Putin. Apparently this slowdown was magical in that neither Trump nor Elon Musk would own it. It’s like the $10 million dollars in Florida that magically moved from state funds to a Casey DeSantis-run charity and then to a political campaign. The money moved but “nobody” did it. Ukraine’s satellite-dependent military operations were sabotaged but nobody did it. The fact that Trump claims not to know how it happened makes it more likely that he ordered it, given his long track record of “honesty.”
We are a few weeks out from the Midterms which Trump knows could lead to a premature end to his administration. And yet he is pulling out the stops to try and tip the scales against the one country that is actually protecting Europe from Russian domination. If you are scratching a hole in your head to make sense of it, don’t bother.
Dictators thrive on chaos, confusion and misdirection. Coincidentally, so do criminals. Criminals also like to stick together because other crooks are the only people to whom they can relate. The rest of society they just see as marks, suckers and losers. We don’t have to be those marks, suckers and losers.
Today marks the next No Kings Day protests across the country. The theme is to get people out to vote in numbers that can never been considered ambiguous. This will demonstrate for Trump that the one thing he craves the most, adoration, is eluding him more every day.
Agreement establishes reality. This country was founded on a set of agreements—the topmost being that all men are created equal—that have endured for over 250 years. Trump seeks to undo these agreements. But he’s trying to do it with force, intimidation, coercion and lies. The funny thing is that the more one tries to undo broad group agreement with force of any kind, the more those agreements gain strength. Trump is unintentionally teaching America a lesson in how never again to be reasonable or give the benefit of the doubt to an obvious treasonous criminal.
We can’t vote Trump out on November 3rd. But we can vote out every single one of this supporters in Congress and in state governments. Then the cascade of removal and recovery processes can begin. Trump will protest, whine, complain about unfairness and generally proclaim his superiority to all Mankind. But he won’t be able to undo that pesky broad agreement that he is just another crook. And he’ll never undo the stain of treason that he wears for his all-out assistance to a dictator who has happily helped other enemies kill Americans.
The United State Government belongs to us, not to Trump. He works for us and we need to get to work on firing him. That’s part of our jobs and part of the agreements he so badly wants to undo.
Marty Kassowitz is co-founder of Factkeepers. As founder of Interest Factory and View360, he brings more than 30 years experience in effective online communications, social media management, and platform development to the site. He is a writer, designer, editor and long time observer of the ill-logic demonstrated by too many members of the species known as Mankind. After a long history of somewhat private commentary on a subject he totally hates: politics, Marty was encouraged to build this site and put up his own analyses as well as curate relevant content from other sources.
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