Clips of the week: Trump makes a terrible eulogist, diplomat, and doctor

President Donald Trump showed up at the United Nations this week and told world leaders that their countries were “going to hell”—and somehow, that was the least asinine thing he said. After briefly signaling support for our NATO allies, he quickly backtracked. Meanwhile, with a government shutdown looming, Trump and the GOP seem to have abandoned even the pretense of negotiation.

And it’s all on video.

'You are envy, you are hatred': Kirk memorial turns into unhinged rally

President Donald Trump used his time at the memorial service for conservative activist Charlie Kirk on Sunday to further obscure Kirk’s long record of hateful and bigoted views. He was not alone, as the procession of speakers turned what was billed as a solemn service into a fiery political rally.

Angry old man yells at the UN for an hour

Trump visited the UN this week, delivering a speech that can only be described as embarrassing.

Fox News slobbers over Trump's unhinged UN speech

Trump’s rambling, lie-filled speech to the United Nations forced Fox News into desperate spin mode, praising the moment as “raw truth” despite the cringe-worthy display.

Press secretary falls on her face defending Trump’s abuse of power

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt tied herself up into knots trying to spin the president’s descent into authoritarianism

Trump waters down major NATO promise

Trump met with world leaders, including Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, following his torturous speech to the United Nations. In a span of about two-and-a-half minutes, Trump supported NATO’s need to confront Russian military aggression and then backtracked on his support if NATO were to take such an action.

Hakeem Jeffries issues biting warning to businesses bending to Trump

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries appeared on CNN and warned companies that cut pay-to-play deals with the Trump administration that the Justice Department won't always be under Trump’s corrupt control.

For more video content, check out Daily Kos on YouTube.

Fox News promotes racist Trump shill who pushed boatloads of BS

Fox News announced Wednesday that former Trump press secretary Kayleigh McEnany will be hosting her own weekend show, “Saturday In America.” The decision comes after years of McEnany prominently lying about a dizzying array of issues, further cementing Fox’s key role as a source of disinformation and falsehoods.

McEnany has worked at the network since 2021, following her stint in the Trump administration and at the Republican National Committee. Currently, McEnany serves as an on-air pundit for Fox and one of the co-hosts of the panel discussion program “Outnumbered.”

An example of McEnany’s blatant lies is her 2012 tweet saying, “How I Met Your Brother — Never mind, forgot he’s still in that hut in Kenya. #ObamaTVShows”

The comment came at the same time that President Donald Trump was pushing the discredited, racist “birther” conspiracy falsely alleging that President Barack Obama was born in Kenya and not the United States.

Kayleigh McEnany speaks with reporters during her stint as President Donald Trump’s press secretary in 2020. 

And during a 2019 appearance on CNN, McEnany previewed her time in the spotlight by saying of Trump, “I don’t believe the president has lied.” 

At that point in his presidency, Trump already made 16,241 false or misleading claims, as catalogued by the Washington Post. 

“He doesn’t lie. The press lies,” she said in 2020. “We will not see diseases like the coronavirus come here, we will not see terrorism come here, and isn’t it refreshing when contrasting it with the awful presidency of President Obama.”  

Of course, the first COVID-19 cases had already been confirmed a month earlier.

After promising journalists at her first press briefing that she wouldn’t lie, McEnany spent almost her entire time in Trump’s administration spreading misinformation.

McEnany asserted in September 2020 that Trump “never downplayed the virus,” despite his repeated false assertions that COVID-19 had been contained, even bragging to Fox that his administration had “shut it down.” Tens of thousands of deaths followed.

Her claim was so removed from reality that the fact checking site PolitiFact rated her defense of Trump as “pants on fire.” In fact, in 10 fact checks rating her statements, the service only rated three as “mostly true” or “half true.” The remainder were categorized as “mostly false,” “false,” and “pants on fire.”

Another fact checking site, FactCheck.org, noted in May 2020 that McEnany had repeated a Russian talking point when discussing the Mueller investigation, which she claimed was a “complete and total exoneration of President Trump.” 

The report, which specifically said that the investigation “does not exonerate him,” later formed the basis for many of the charges in Trump’s first impeachment.

During the 2020 election season, McEnany carried water for Trump by regurgitating his false attacks on mail-in voting, but it was later revealed that McEnany—like Trump—had voted by mail multiple times since 2010.

As results came in showing that Trump was losing the election to President Joe Biden, McEnany pushed false narratives, prematurely claiming that Trump won Pennsylvania, which he ultimately lost. She also falsely argued that there were “very real claims” of voter fraud being pursued by the Trump campaign and even promoted a bogus analysis alleging that it was improbable that Biden won four of the swing states that he did in fact win.

And McEnany continued her deception at Fox, where she claimed that nobody in Trump’s orbit brought up Vice President Kamala Harris’ race—something that Trump himself did. She also said that Trump didn’t put in place a Muslim ban during his presidency—which he infamously did. She even claimed that “you didn’t see crisis after crisis” during Trump’s presidency.

In May, as part of her pro-Trump advocacy McEnany said that CBS reporter Scott Pelley should have been arrested after criticizing Trump’s authoritarian stances during a commencement speech.

Fox has long positioned itself as a primary source of lies and dishonesty within the conservative movement. With the elevation of a serial liar like McEnany, the network continues to cement its reputation of spreading falsehoods.

Trump’s Fox News addiction is reportedly behind Iran attacks

Over the weekend, on orders from President Donald Trump, the U.S. attacked three Iranian nuclear sites, inserting itself into Israel’s conflict with that nation.

Leaders like Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York quickly noted that the military action was done without the authorization of Congress, called it a “grave violation of the Constitution,” and said it was grounds for his impeachment. (Trump has already been impeached twice, more than any president in history.)

The incident is the latest in a long line of Republican leaders pushing bombing campaigns on shaky legal and moral ground.

A B-2 bomber arrives at Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri on June 22.

Now new reporting indicates that what appears to have pushed Trump into attacking Iran was his most influential adviser: Fox News.

The New York Times reports from sources close to Trump that in the days leading up the action he was glued to Fox. “The president was closely monitoring Fox News, which was airing wall-to-wall praise of Israel’s military operation and featuring guests urging Mr. Trump to get more involved,” the outlet noted.

Since Israel’s latest attacks on Iran, Fox News has gone into pro-war overdrive. For instance, on last Tuesday’s edition of “Fox & Friends,” which is known to be Trump’s favorite show on the network, co-host Lawrence Jones baselessly claimed, “If we ever even got into a conflict with Iran, it would be over within two days, if that.”

Similarly, a delegation of hawkish activists pushing for U.S. military intervention in Iran visited Trump at the White House on June 4. They were led by conspiracy theorist Mark Levin, host of the Fox News weekend show “Life, Liberty & Levin.”

Fox News was one of the major sources of propaganda in favor of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003. The network hyped then-President George W. Bush’s administration’s falsehoods about Iraq possessing weapons of mass destruction and links to the 9/11 attacks. In the aftermath, the war killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians and thousands of American military service members. There were no weapons of mass destruction.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, a former Fox News host, shown on June 22.

Trump is obsessed with Fox News and has hired at least 23 former Fox staffers to be in his administration. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who has been out in front on the Iranian bombing campaign, is the most prominent former Fox host in the Trump Cabinet. Other figures, like Attorney General Pam Bondi and Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, were also Fox News talking heads.

Fox was also instrumental in Trump becoming a major political figure. When President Barack Obama was in office, Fox frequently hosted Trump to promote the racist “birther” conspiracy theory that falsely claimed Obama was not a native-born American citizen.

The feedback loop between Fox and Trump is consistent. The network even had to pay out a $787 million legal settlement to Dominion Voting Systems after Fox pushed Trump’s lies that he had won the 2020 presidential election, which he lost to former President Joe Biden.

Now Trump has pushed America into military strikes, seemingly based on the skewed coverage and baiting of Fox News, with more death and destruction likely to follow.

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Team Trump runs to friendly media to spin damaging war plan leak scandal

Donald Trump, senior members of his administration, and his congressional Republican allies are struggling to contain the political fallout from the leaked war plan chat scandal

In multiple media appearances on friendly right-wing media outlets, they offered multiple excuses to spin what happened and promoted an unsubstantiated conspiracy theory for how Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic was able to get access to the chat.

Appearing on Newsmax Tuesday, Trump inaccurately referred to the text chain as a “call” and professed ignorance as to how the leak occurred.

“What it was, we believe, is somebody that was on the line with permission, somebody that worked with Mike Waltz at a lower level, had Goldberg's number or call through the app, and somehow this guy ended up on the call,” he told host Greg Kelly.

“I can only go by what I’ve been told—I wasn’t involved in it,” Trump added.

Meanwhile, Vice President JD Vance tried to dismiss the scandal altogether, claiming on social media it was “very clear Goldberg oversold what he had.”

Fox News devoted the opening segment of all three of its prime-time shows on Tuesday night—“Hannity,” “The Ingraham Angle,” and “Jesse Watters Primetime”—to hosting Republican officials to spin the story.

Speaking to Laura Ingraham, national security adviser Mike Waltz, who invited The Atlantic’s editor-in-chief to the chat, saw a sinister motive behind Goldberg’s reporting.

“I’m not a conspiracy theorist,” he said, “but of all the people out there, somehow this guy who has lied about the president, who has lied to Gold Star families, lied to their attorneys, and gone to Russia hoax, gone to just all kinds of lengths to lie and smear the president of the United States, and he’s the one that somehow gets on somebody’s contacts and then gets sucked into this group.”

Trump has attacked Goldberg over many years for reporting that Trump called deceased military veterans “suckers” and “losers,” but Trump’s own former chief of staff John Kelly from his first administration verified that story.

Waltz also claimed to Ingraham that he has enlisted multibillionaire Trump financier Elon Musk to investigate the leak.

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt, led on by host Jesse Watters, echoed Waltz’s conspiracy theory that Goldberg had done something "mischievous" to end up in the secret text chain to which he was invited by Waltz. 

She also compared Democratic anger about the leak to the Russia “hoax”—which was not a hoax and led to Trump’s first impeachment.

“The Democrats, there’s nothing that they’re better at than spinning a sensationalist story out of a basic set of facts,” Leavitt said.

Oklahoma Sen. Markwayne Mullin, a Trump ally, led off the opening segment of “Hannity” by praising chat participants for speaking “just like they do to the American people.” Mullin then argued that Democrats were raising the issue to distract from “disastrous decisions that the Democrat (sic) Party is having.”

The Trump administration’s argument—that Goldberg or some other outside actor had done something devious to access the chat—wasn’t far off from pro-Trump conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, who argued on his Infowars site that the leak to Goldberg was a “CIA Vault 7 style operation.” Vault 7 was a leak of classified CIA documents to the WikiLeaks site in 2018.

The full-throated defense and attempt to spread disinformation surrounding the story across multiple outlets raises doubts about the administration’s claim that the leak was not a big deal. In fact, the high-level spin raises more questions about the chat and what the administration may be hiding as it refuses to be more forthcoming about what occurred. 

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Fox News host’s description of Jan. 6 rioters will make your blood boil

Fox News host Rachel Campos-Duffy described the insurrectionists who violently attacked the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, as “political dissidents” during a rant about federal law enforcement on Friday.

Campos-Duffy, who is perhaps best known for appearing on MTV’s “The Real World” in the 1990s, made her claim during an appearance on “Fox & Friends.”

“We have an FBI, a DOD, and a Homeland Security that has given us zero confidence. They've said nothing with a border open and terrorists flowing over the borders. They've been directing agents to go after political dissidents from J6, from January 6, instead of going after terrorists,” Duffy said while commenting on the New Orleans attacker who was reported to be inspired by ISIS.

Campos-Duffy’s sympathetic description of the insurrections echoes that of Donald Trump, who has floated the idea of pardoning them and has referred to the armed attack as a “day of love.”

In reality, the attackers violently forced their way into the U.S. Capitol in an attempt to prevent Congress from fulfilling one of its longest-running and most important functions: certifying the presidential election results.

At least seven people died as a result of the Jan. 6 attack, a direct contradiction to the casual language that Campos-Duffy used to describe the rioters. More than 1,200 people have been arrested and charged in connection with the insurrection, with some charges including sedition against the United States. In fact, Trump was also charged—and even impeached—for his role in inciting the attack.

Campos-Duffy’s underlying argument that the U.S. government fails to go after terrorists is also faulty. Under President Joe Biden, the U.S. military executed a drone strike in 2022 that killed Ayman al-Zawahiri, who, alongside Osama bin Laden, led the terrorist group Al Qaeda and assisted in the planning of the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

The drone strike was a continuation of policy from Trump’s predecessor President Barack Obama, who ordered the operation that successfully killed bin Laden in 2011.

Looks like the latest Fox News rant was just that—a rant.

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Fox News hosts suggest ‘death penalty’ for Trump legal foes

On Thursday, Fox News host Dana Perino suggested the “death penalty” as a course of action for lawyers who have gone after Donald Trump on legal grounds in the past few years.

The remark occurred during a discussion on the network’s panel show, “The Five.”

Co-host Greg Gutfeld asked her if the lawyers involved in these cases require therapy following Trump’s successful campaign.

“Yes, they definitely need therapy, and maybe also the death penalty,” Perino responded. 

Gutfeld agreed, adding, “Yes, I think the death penalty.”

Perino went on to argue that she believes Trump won the race because of the cases filed against him, rejecting the notion that they were a negative to many voters.

Both pundits made their remarks using a light tone—odd for speaking about an execution—but the rhetoric reflects the fascist tone of Trump and the conservative movement. Fox frequently reflects and amplifies this world view in their consistent role throughout the years as a promoter and amplifier of Trump’s outlook.

The outcome of the legal cases that Fox derided proved in the court of law the extent of Trump’s corruption.

A New York court fined Trump $355 million after it agreed that he lied about his finances while securing loans and business deals in the state. A jury of his peers in New York found him guilty on 34 felony counts for payments made related to silencing adult film star Stormy Daniels.

While the federal cases against Trump on mishandling classified documents and attempting to subvert the 2020 election are now being wound down, he was nonetheless impeached—for a second time—for inciting the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

Going forward, the feedback loop between Trump and Fox News is sure to continue—he feeds them rhetoric and attacks, they amplify those attacks and give him fodder for more fury—and casual talk about death for legal officials doing their jobs will further be normalized.

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Men, please don’t take Fox News’ toxic dating advice

Fox News’ Jesse Watters took a break from his election and political propagandizing to give men some dating advice. 

Please don’t listen. 

The chyron reading “Kamala might sink with Biden’s ship” was stupid enough. It’s not the vice president who has consistently trailed in most of the key polling the entire election, with Trump struggling to even hit 46% nationally. For someone who says cringey things every single day on the air, this bit with Trump senior adviser Stephen Miller and Watters is among the worst:

Watters: We are getting a lot of texts from women about Stephen Miller. Our audience believes you are some sort of sexual matador.  Miller: Some advice to any young man out there. If you are a young man who's looking to impress the ladies, to be attractive.. the best thing you… pic.twitter.com/PMwMO3Voz1

— Acyn (@Acyn) October 9, 2024

Watters: We just have to address the elephant in the room. We are getting a lot of texts from women about [Stephen] Miller about his appearances, about his appearance. Our audience on Primetime believes you are some sort of sexual matador. What do you have to say for yourself?  

Miller: Some advice to any young man that’s out there. ... If you are a young man who's looking to impress the ladies, to be the alpha, to be attractive, the best thing you can do is wear your Trump support on your sleeve. Show that you are a real man. Show that you are not a beta. Be a proud and loud Trump supporter and your dating life will be fantastic.

First of all, no, it’s doubtful Fox News is getting “lots of texts from women” about Miller being “some sort of sexual matador.”

But maybe they got one weird-ass message. There are, after all, some pretty deranged people in the world. So Watters sees this message, or maybe not even that, and they decide to do a whole bit on it. 

This wasn’t extemporaneous. Miller had his answers queued up and ready to go. And in the script, Watters thought calling a top Trump surrogate a “sexual matador” was the way to go. 

Eww. 

But then it all gets worse, because Miller sits there with that stupid grin, and decides he’s going to lecture the poor saps watching the show about being “alpha” and not being “beta.” 

And the incels watching are being told that their dating fortunes can be turned around if only they hump Donald Trump harder, something that has consistently been shown to destroy men’s dating lives. Who wants to date men who are drawn to Andrew Tate’s toxic brand of misogyny

As Tate says, “Females don’t have independent thought. They don’t come up with anything. They’re just empty vessels, waiting for someone to install the programming.” 

Is it any wonder that as the electoral gender gap continues to widen to a chasm, then a gulf, into interstellar space, conservatives now argue that women shouldn’t even have the right to vote? 

Christian nationalist Douglas Wilson continues to gripe over women having the right to vote: "The net effect of women's suffrage was not an advance in women's rights but rather part of a push to replace covenanted entities, like families, with raw individualism." pic.twitter.com/wpLMvkcyAu

— Right Wing Watch (@RightWingWatch) October 8, 2024

Conservative attacks on the 19th Amendment have picked up steam lately, like John Gibbs, a Trump-backed Michigan congressional candidate who defeated an impeachment-voting incumbent Republican. As a student in the 2000s, he argued that women did not “posess (sic) the characteristics necessary to govern” and said that men were smarter than women because they “think logically about broad and abstract ideas in order to deduce a suitable conclusion, without relying upon emotional reasoning.” He also claimed that the patriarchy is “the best model for the continued success of a society.”

If you’re wondering how much luck Gibbs has had with the ladies, well, the Muskegon Republican Party website has an interview with him that answers that question: “He has never been married, as he believes it has been God's will, but believes it will be in his future.”

Maybe Miller doesn’t actually have the best dating advice for men.

For Republicans, it’s now ‘Trump First, Putin Second, America Third’

From a domestic perspective, the Republican Party’s embarrassing failure to follow through on its Fox News-goaded attempt to impeach Homeland Security chief Alejandro Mayorkas proved to be a blessing. It was wholly performative theater, without any legitimacy. The party’s abrupt, equally embarrassing turnabout on immigration—an issue that Republicans had planned on wielding against Democrats going into 2024—was just more evidence of the GOP’s terminal dysfunction. 

As schadenfreude-y as it may have been for Democrats to watch as the Republicans immolated themselves on the altar of immigration, the rest of the world was far more concerned about how the U.S. would follow through on its prior strategic commitments to Ukraine and Israel. By Wednesday morning, aid packages to both nations were hopelessly consigned to the quicksand of GOP intransigence and finger-pointing. Since aid to those countries was tied—at Republicans’ insistence—to border legislation, the Republicans’ pathetic submission of their much-vaunted immigration concerns to Donald Trump’s electoral whims may have doomed the prospects of further aid to Ukraine and Israel for the remainder of the fiscal year.

(Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer is now crafting separate packages, without immigration reform included, but their likelihood of success appears murky.) 

From the perspective of our allies, however, what occurred this week is seen less as habitual Republican dysfunction and more as the total abandonment of American resolve. In a week’s time, we have proved ourselves, as Anne Applebaum presciently warned last month in The Atlantic, worse than an unreliable ally: We’ve become “a silly ally”—one that can no longer be taken seriously by the rest of the world.

Applebaum isn’t alone in that assessment. Tom Friedman’s Tuesday opinion piece in The New York Times, acidly titled “The G.O.P. Bumper Sticker: Trump First. Putin Second. America Third,” explains just how damaging and consequential the Republicans’ actions this week have been to the nation.

As Friedman wrote, even before the immigration and foreign aid bill collapsed under the weight of Republican cowardice:

There are hinges in history, and this is one of them. What Washington does — or does not do — this year to support its allies and secure our border will say so much about our approach to security and stability in this new post-post-Cold War era. Will America carry the red, white and blue flag into the future or just a white flag? Given the pessimistic talk coming out of the Capitol, it is looking more and more like the white flag, autographed by Donald Trump.

There is no serious doubt that House Republicans rejected the Senate’s painstakingly crafted immigration legislation, which satisfied nearly all prior GOP demands for border enforcement, at the behest of Donald Trump. Trump prefers to do nothing, effectively maintaining the status quo at the border for another full year so he can use it as a campaign talking point, assuming he's still eligible to hold public office

Fearing Trump's wrath, House Republicans swiftly pronounced the immigration and foreign aid package "dead on arrival" before most had even read it. Meanwhile, Republican senators began to quaver at the prospect of being primaried by Trump-chosen challengers for the audacity of trying to actually pass meaningful legislation. Faced with Trump’s continued vise-like grip on their party, upper chamber Republicans opted to jettison the legislation altogether. 

But, as Friedman observes, there’s another key player in the mix: Vladimir Putin. Putin is well-aware that Trump will abandon Ukraine—and likely NATO—the instant he returns to power. Friedman recognizes that Trump’s interests—and thus the interests of a supine Republican Party intent on enabling Trump’s dictatorial ambitions—now necessarily dovetail with Putin’s.

After Ukraine inflicted a terrible defeat on the Russian Army — thanks to U.S. and NATO funding and weapons — without costing a single American soldier’s life, Putin now has to be licking his chops at the thought that we will walk away from Ukraine, leaving him surely counting the days until Kyiv’s missile stocks run out and he will own the skies. Then it’s bombs away.

This week, one of Putin’s primary assets, the propagandist and “useful idiot” Tucker Carlson, is purportedly being wined and dined in Moscow so he can provide cover for Republicans to gut Ukrainian aid. Carlson’s paywalled, one-on-one interview with Putin, and how it might enable the murderous dictator’s “outreach” to Republicans, is already the talk of Russian state television.

As reported Wednesday by The Washington Post’s Robyn Dixon and Natalia Abbakumova:

State television propagandist Vladimir Solovyov, one of the Kremlin’s anti-Western attack dogs, seemed to suggest that Carlson’s interview would torpedo any last hope for approval of new American military aid for Ukraine.

Solovyov said Carlson’s visit came “at the worst possible time for the West,” and he begged Carlson to join the Russian Union of Journalists, which Solovyov heads.

As Friedman points out, this eagerness of Republicans to betray American strategic interests in order to satisfy both Trump and Putin transforms America’s credibility with our allies into a mere afterthought.

If this is the future and our friends from Europe to the Middle East to Asia sense that we are going into hibernation, they will all start to cut deals — European allies with Putin, Arab allies with Iran, Asian allies with China. We won’t feel the change overnight, but, unless we pass this bill or something close to it, we will feel it over time.

America’s ability to assemble alliances against the probes of Russia, China and Iran will gradually be diminished. Our ability to sustain sanctions on pariah nations like North Korea will erode. The rules governing trade, banking and the sanctity of borders being violated by force — rules that America set, enforced and benefited from since World War II — will increasingly be set by others and by their interests.

The saddest fact is that no one should really be surprised by Republicans’ behavior. For a substantial segment of their caucus, their order of loyalty really is “Trump first, Putin second, America third.” Evidently they feel that the risk of betraying their own constituents on the immigration issue is well worth the effort and impact, if it means pleasing their two masters. And if they have so small a regard for their own constituents, there’s little doubt they feel even less toward the American republic writ large.

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Nikki Haley suddenly has a problem with Trump’s love of dictators

With the South Carolina Republican primary approaching, Nikki Haley is revving up her attacks on presumptive nominee Donald Trump. 

On Monday, Haley repeatedly referred to Trump as a “New York City liberal” who donated to Kamala Harris. She followed that up by posting a clip of Trump’s interview with Fox News’ Maria Bartoromo where he effused about China’s President Xi Jinping, with this bold take: “Praising dictators is not normal. Make America normal again.”

Newsflash: Trump has something of a preoccupation with dictators. Maybe you think you didn’t read that right. Yes, the twice-impeached former president goes all fanboy for dictators and his history of praising tyrants like the Philippines’ Rodrigo Duterte goes way back. 

There was the time Trump described himself as a “big fan” of Turkey’s strongman autocrat Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. Trump has called Hungarian Prime Minister (and authoritarian racist) Viktor Orban “his friend.” In fact, Trump has been throwing around Orban’s name so much that he’s mixed him up with Erdoğan.

Even when Trump’s Fox News buddy Sean Hannity attempted to help Trump walk back his praise of dictators like Vladimir Putin, Trump couldn’t help but to boast about how well he gets along with authoritarian monsters.

The good news here is that while Haley isn’t going to beat Trump and there is very little in the way of facts or logic that can seemingly penetrate the MAGA-brainscape these days, she can continue to remind independent voters of why they don’t want another round of Trump as president.

Enjoy Trump going gaga over China’s Xi Jinping.

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Republicans’ betrayal of Ukraine is about one thing: Pleasing Donald Trump

The pathetic capitulation of the Republican Party to Donald Trump may turn out to be the singular political phenomenon of the 21st century, possibly eclipsing even the 9/11 terrorist attacks in sheer scope and impact—not just on American society, but ultimately the rest of the world. What began as simply crass political opportunism on the part of one of the major political parties has by now morphed into a movement that embraces something profoundly worse and far more damaging. This strain of reflexive strongman-worship now threatens to eradicate the American democracy experiment altogether, and could take the rest of the world’s free societies down with it. 

Clear warning signs were all visible at the outset, well before Trump descended his golden escalator to the oohs and aahs of a fawning, fascinated media: The GOP was a party inherently susceptible to authoritarianism and disdain for the egalitarian nature of democracy. It comprised a shrinking demographic of aggrieved white males and white evangelicals facing unfamiliar, threatening cultural shifts and engendering a groundswell of racism and misogyny, all waiting to be galvanized by the cynical machinations of a golden demagogue appearing at just the right moment to exploit them. 

Those factors certainly combined to create the phenomenon we are witnessing today. But as David Frum convincingly explains in a new essay for The Atlantic, what has pushed Republicans irrevocably over the edge is the same thing you see in any totalitarian dictatorship: an irresistible, mandated compulsion to demonstrate fealty, over and over again, to the Great Leader. 

The latest, most glaring example of this imperative can be seen in congressional Republicans’ refusal to provide continued military aid to Ukraine. As Frum observes, fear of Donald Trump’s disapproval coupled with the frantic desire to please him have completely transformed many Republicans’ attitudes about supporting Ukraine. These attitudes were directly cultivated by Trump, based on his own sycophantic relationship to Vladimir Putin. Over a period of just a few years, these attitudes were amplified by Trump himself and by pro-Putin mouthpieces on Fox News and other right-wing media.

They are now so deeply embedded in the GOP that in the event Trump is reelected in 2024, this country will likely abandon not only Ukraine but also the European NATO allies with whom we have worked for 75 years to preserve peace not just in Europe, but at home.

It might be decades before we know the real reasons for Donald Trump’s slavish admiration of a dictator like Putin. The most benign explanation, perverse as it is, is that he is simply enamored with the idea of absolute power, wielded cruelly and ruthlessly. There may be a more prosaic and insidious reason involving Trump’s convoluted history of shady business dealings with Russia that have intersected and overlapped with the Russian dictator’s strategic goals. It’s also entirely possible—as has long been theorized—that Trump himself is compromised or somehow beholden to Putin, who certainly has the capacity, motivation, and wherewithal to engage in blackmail.

But at this point in time, the reason is far less relevant than the end result. Because Trump’s grip on the Republican base is so tight, Republicans feel compelled not only to align themselves with their orange-hued leader, but to act in accordance with his wishes. Failure to do so means banishment from the party at minimum, and risks incurring the violent wrath of his legions of fanatic supporters at worst.

It’s been made clear over the last month that this fealty now includes—and ultimately requires, if Trump is reelected—cutting off military aid to Ukraine, where a Russian victory would cement and accelerate Putin’s long-term goal of intimidating and infiltrating the remaining Western democracies on the European continent. It’s obvious to those countries—or it should be—that Trump and Putin’s logical endgame would ultimately result in America’s abandonment of NATO.

Frum, the former speechwriter for George W. Bush, may be most recognized for his pithy summary of his fellow conservatives' conditional relationship to democracy and its institutions. In a 2018 essay for The Atlantic, Frum took note of the marked drift towards authoritarianism by the Republican Party as it has evolved under Trump. He famously noted, "If conservatives become convinced that they cannot win democratically, they will not abandon conservatism. They will reject democracy." 

Whatever you may think of Frum’s background or his own past culpability as a cog in the GOP machine, his statement has been thoroughly vindicated. Republicans are in fact quite demonstrably abandoning democratic institutions. Voter suppression, election denialism, and the draconian autocratic plans of the Heritage Institute—known as ”Project 2025”—are all evidence of a deliberate strategy to reshape the United States into a far more authoritarian country, one where the right to vote is diluted or otherwise manipulated—all to satisfy right-wing policy imperatives driven by white and/or Christian nationalism.

In his most recent piece in The Atlantic, Frum destroys the notion that congressional Republicans’ refusal to provide continued military aid to Ukraine stems from anything other than an abject desire to please Trump. He dispenses with Republicans’ pathetic attempt to equate providing Ukraine aid to sealing the U.S.-Mexican border. Since comprehensive immigration reform is the very last thing Republicans are actually willing to discuss, Frum believes that this comparison really only indicates that they have zero interest in helping Ukraine in the first place. The fact that Republicans have treated such aid as “barter” is more telling in and of itself.

What Republicans’ refusal to aid Ukraine in its war with Russia does indicate, however, is the complete coopting of a substantial portion of the Republican Party to Trump’s (and by extension, Putin’s) views about Ukraine. Frum explains that from 2015 to 2017, in tandem with extensive Russian efforts to secure Trump’s election, Republicans effected a remarkable turnaround on their views towards Russia and its dictator, Putin.

Pre-Trump, Republicans expressed much more hawkish views on Russia than Democrats did. Russia invaded eastern Ukraine and annexed Crimea in spring 2014. In a Pew Research survey in March of that year, 58 percent of Republicans complained that President Barack Obama’s response was “not tough enough,” compared with just 22 percent of Democrats. After the annexation, Republicans were more than twice as likely as Democrats to describe Russia as “an adversary” of the United States: 42 percent to 19 percent. As for Putin personally, his rule was condemned by overwhelming majorities of both parties. Only about 20 percent of Democrats expressed confidence in Putin in a 2015 Pew survey, and 17 percent of Republicans.

Trump changed all that—with a lot of help from pro-Putin voices on Fox News and right-wing social media.

As Frum observes, the process began with gushing tributes about Putin’s “manly” rule emanating from frustrated figures of what was then called the “New Right,” such as Pat Buchanan. If it had ended there, Frum believes, the Republican Party could have salvaged itself from the true implications of its then-nascent embrace of the Russian dictator. But as Frum explains, Russian intelligence then went to work infiltrating the party and its allied organizations in the years prior to Trump’s election.

By the mid-2010s, groups such as the National Rifle Association were susceptible to infiltration by Russian-intelligence assets. High-profile conservatives accepted free trips and speaking fees from organizations linked to the Russian government pre-Trump. A lucrative online marketplace for pro-Moscow messages and conspiracy theories already existed. White nationalists had acclaimed Putin as a savior of Christian civilization for years before the Trump campaign began.

But, as Frum notes, the coup de grace that connected these sentiments to the electoral fortunes of the Republican Party was the appearance of Donald Trump, whose unabashed admiration for Putin, combined with is undisputed status as both president and GOP leader, “tangled the whole party in his pro-Russia ties.”

At this point the sheer magnitude of the GOP’s reversal began to manifest itself. 

Frum writes:

The urge to align with the party’s new pro-Russian leader reshaped attitudes among Republican Party loyalists. From 2015 to 2017, Republican opinion shifted markedly in a pro-Russia and pro-Putin direction. In 2017, more than a third of surveyed Republicans expressed favorable views of Putin. By 2019, [Tucker]Carlson—who had risen to the top place among Fox News hosts—was regularly promoting pro-Russian, anti-Ukrainian messages to his conservative audience. His success inspired imitators among many other conservative would-be media stars.

Once Trump attempted to extort Ukraine by denying the country needed military aid to defend themselves against Russia, conditioning such aid only if Ukraine agreed to open an “investigation” to publicize dirt Trump’s allies had invented about his presumed 2020 opponent, Joe Biden, Republicans found themselves in a quandary. How could they reconcile such objectively obvious treachery with their newfound embrace of Putin?

Frum contends it was done by embracing what he refers to as “undernews,” regurgitating innuendo and social media-churned rumors that are too ridiculous or far-fetched for even Fox News to broadcast with a straight face, but are well understood by the Republican base. In the case of Trump’s first impeachment, Frum believes the “undernews” was that Trump’s acts did not rise to the level of high crimes necessary for impeachment, because in the end Ukraine had received its weapons. Frum also recalls this “undernews” involved “an elaborate fantasy that Trump had been right to act as he did.”

In this invented world, Ukraine became the villain as part of a Biden-connected “global criminal enterprise,” and Trump acted heroically by trying to unmask it. Frum’s example provides valuable insight into not just the delusional world that many Republican voters actually occupy, but how the party exploits it.

Frum believes that continued fealty to Trump is the sole motivation behind newly elected House Speaker Mike Johnson’s refusal to allow additional aid to Ukraine. Even as Putin issues warnings and threats against Poland and the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania (all now members of NATO), Republicans remain beholden to the notion of (as Frum describes it): ” Ukraine=enemy of Trump; abandoning Ukraine=proof of loyalty to Trump.” He believes a majority of House Republicans actually still support aid for Ukraine, but the calendar is controlled by those in leadership like Johnson, whose only interest is catering to the deluded, so-called “undernews” faction. 

Thus it is not only Ukraine, but also our European allies—whose perception of Putin’s real aims is based not on delusional notions or political loyalties but the real, existential threat Putin represents to their societies—find themselves left out in the cold by a Republican Party that places more priority on appeasing the whims of an indicted fraudster and Putin sycophant than on standing up to its own established and assumed strategic commitments.

As Frum emphasizes, “If Republicans in Congress abandon Ukraine to Russian aggression, they do so to please Trump. Every other excuse is a fiction or a lie.“

It’s probably not possible to capture in words the magnitude of betrayal that would be felt not just by Ukrainians—who have no choice but to fight on—but by the entirety of Europe. That abandonment would remain a stain on the history of the U.S. for the rest of its existence.

The economic and strategic impact on this country’s standing in the world would be incalculable, with our ability to establish other alliances forever compromised. Seventy-five years of cooperation and trust could be wiped out by the actions of one corrupt, ignorant man and the treachery of his delusion-ridden political party.

All of which, of course, would suit Vladimir Putin just fine.