I was deeply sad and afraid after listening to—I’m tempted to say ambush, but let’s call it—the special meeting between President Trump, Vice President Vance, Secretary of State Little Marco Rubio, who was trying to disappear into his chair, assorted handpicked press, and the ambushee and begger, Ukrainian President Zelensky for the third time, I was sad more than angry. And I was disappointed. I was disappointed in my country, the country I thought I was too cynical to become disappointed in anymore. and disappointed in myself for being part of our country’s fall from grace.

Now, sitting at my keyboard on a beautiful but cold spring day, I am still sad. Maybe I was not cynical enough or maybe Trump is just being open about who we, The United States of America, really are. I am beginning to realize that Trump’s America is the real America, and that makes me deeply sad.

In 1991, Ukraine was the third largest nuclear power in the world. By 1994, Ukraine had no nukes; they had given them away for a guarantee that Russia, Great Britain, and the United States would protect them. It was called the Budapest Memorandum of Security Assurances. Russia was the first signer to break the Agreement when they invaded Crimea and part of Eastern Ukraine in 2014. Great Britain and the US, under President Obama, were next to break the Agreement when they didn’t protect Ukraine as promised (although we did instigate some sanctions against Russia).

Without going deep into the details, most of which I don’t know, by the time Joe Biden took office, Congress had voted some military aid to Ukraine. We increased that in 2022 by about $67B, in 2023 by $47B, and $61B in 2024. President Biden said “We are with you as long as it takes”, however, he refused to define “it”, for some reason not known to me, considering an undefined “it” a sign of good diplomacy. To quote U.S. Lieutenant General Ben Hodges “These statements that ‘we are with you for as long as it takes’ mean nothing to me.” We don’t want Russia to disappear Ukraine, but, seemingly, we also don’t want Ukraine to win the war, even though we carefully didn’t say that.

Now Trump has said we don’t want Ukraine to win. Well, Trump may not have said it, but he has certainly strongly implied it. All this preamble has led me to the realization that our actual reality will never match our shared, professed reality. I still believed that our shared, professed reality was a shared dream if not a reality. Now I am sad that we, much of the majority of our collective we anyway, really do not want our actual reality to ever match that professed reality.

I first realized we were not who we said we were when I was about 17, or 18, or 19, when I read Hiroshima by John Hersey. About the same time, we had a Black housekeeper, Cary, who cleaned our house every couple of weeks. One day, on her way to our place, her car was hit by a couple of young kids going the wrong way down a one-way street. The police were called and gave Cary a ticket. I wanted to fight the ticket, but we didn’t, we paid for the ticket and the damage to Cary’s car in a sort of “don’t make waves” way.

Sitting here, I remember that there were other clues, clubs we couldn’t join, hotels we couldn’t stay in because we were Jewish, cousins who were harassed by HUAC for essentially nothing, being treated as different when I changed schools in the seventh grade. I grew up being taught that White Europeans first brought civilization to California with the Missions; and the Jewish Holocaust survivors who had taken over Palestine and who were making the desert bloom. I was taught that we saved the world – for freedom and Democracy – in World War II.

I was not taught that the Missions were essentially slave camps that the Indians themselves were forced to build, or that Palestinians even existed, or that, months before the Atomic bomb, we set Tokyo on fire. I was not taught that the Tokyo firebombing was planned to kill as many people as possible, and that we set the record for the number of human beings killed by other human beings in one day.

But I was taught, OK, we’re not perfect but we are getting better. And we were. I could see it with my own eyes. What I didn’t see was that we have the highest incarceration rate in the world, by far. What I didn’t see was the minimum wage stuck at $7.25 an hour as if anybody could live on that. But, even when I did, I believed that we aspired to be more perfect. More perfect in our acceptance of other people, more perfect in our national treatment of people, more perfect in acting out the Ideals we say we believe in. More perfect in acting in accordance with The Christ’s teachings. And all that’s true for the people in my life even though very few of them are Christians. It is true in the books, magazines, and papers I read, and the people I see on television or Instagram.

But that is what I believe, not what many Americans believe. We blame Trump, but it is not just Trump. That makes me deeply sad.

If I meet Putin, I’ll say to him: “So you’ve finally given us back our territory, how much more are you ready to give as compensation money for taking away our land and helping those who took part in the escalation in Crimea and Donbas?” President Volodymyr Zelensky

Think of it, a modestly successful comedian, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, talked the United States of America into spending 350 Billion Dollars to go into a War that couldn’t be won, that never had to start, but a War that he, without the U.S. and TRUMP, will never be able to settle, President Donald Trump during an address before a meeting in Miami of business executives hosted by Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund.

I’ve been trying to ignore most of what I read about Trump. But it is rough; the SOB is everywhere. All the time. He has a three-year-old’s need to be the center of attention, and he is good at getting it. Part of Trump’s superpower is that he has no connection with the truth. The more outrageous he is, the more attention he gets. Now his Mexico will pay for building the wall. assertion is Ukraine started the war, and they will pay us for the equipment we gave them. They won’t, just like Mexico didn’t.

Years ago, I wanted to sue a guy. I don’t remember why, but I do know that it seemed like a slam dunk suit, but I do remember that my lawyer said it was an easy-to-win suit but that the guy I wanted to sue was Judgment-proof, meaning that when we won, he didn’t have enough assets to pay for the legal fees, let alone our damages. In other words, we could win, but it wouldn’t be worth it. I think, on a national level, judgment proof is equivalent to conquest proof. Just like Afghanistan – or Algeria, Vietnam – Ukraine is conquest-proof.

If Putin’s Special Military Operation had succeeded, Ukraine would have probably fallen in a short time, like France in 1940. But Putin’s Special Military Operation was stopped by a combination of extraordinary resistance by the Ukrainian military and Russian ineptitude. I keep reading that now this is a war of attrition, as if both sides had the same to lose. They don’t, of course. If Russia loses, they go home. There might be a forced regime change, but maybe not. On the other hand, If Ukraine loses, Ukraine will cease to exist.

Russia is not winning this war; they are losing it. They are losing combatants at unsubstainable rates that are increasing. According to The Institute for the Study of War, At the current rate of advance, it would take Russian forces over 83 years to capture the remaining 80 percent of Ukraine, assuming that they can sustain massive personnel losses indefinitely. Still, Ukraine is not winning, either. They are on the defense everywhere, and partially because of that, their combatants are being killed at a rate much lower than Russia’s. But, they are still being killed, and their cities and infrastructure are being thrashed.

To quote myself from a year ago: All this butchery because of a violent sociopath who is still intent on destroying the whole of Ukraine rather than what? being wrong? being embarrassed? Pretty much all Putin has left is to continue to push untrained, poorly led, and under-equipped troops into the Killing Zone, where tens of thousands are being slaughtered by the better-trained and superbly led Ukrainian Army. According to David Petraeus, former CIA director and US Army general, Putin thinks that Russia can outsuffer the West. He can’t. The West isn’t really suffering that much; Ukraine is providing the suffering, and Ukraine will suffer until the Russian troops go home.

“I was saved by God to make America great again,” President Trump, in his inaugural address.h

“We shouldn’t be in a position where you have tumbleweed that’s dry as a bone. Even tumbleweed can be nice & green & rich & it’s not gonna burn. You don’t even have to remove it. It’s not gonna burn. But it’s just dry. So I hope you can all get together & say I’m so happy with the water.” President Trump at a firehouse in LA.

Mr. Hegseth, like many of President Trump’s nominees, represents a break from the status quo. His nomination directly challenges the internal culture, decision-making process, and politicization of the Department of Defense that the Biden Administration has propagated for the last four years. Horace Cooper in the National Center for Public Policy Research (which bills itself as a non-partisan, free-market, independent conservative think tank).

I don’t know what to make of Trump. I told myself I wouldn’t react like I did his first term. Then I watch a clip of him doing, almost anything, really, and it’s so full of casual assholery that I lose all objectivity.

However, I’m not as depressed as I thought I would be about Donald Trump winning the presidency again, but, listening to Trump bloviating every day, I’m getting there. Part of why I’m not that depressed, I think, is that I don’t think the Democrats are doing that great a job, and part of that is because I didn’t think Trump would be as bad as the New York Times thinks. Maybe the second part of my complacency is a pipe dream; Trump is undoubtedly a narcissist and a disrupter. But he has proven to be incompetent at almost everything he has tried. I think the last two personality traits will cancel each other out in a way.

Donald Trump will make a lot of waves, but he is not going to invade Canada (I don’t think). We liberals get hung up in what he says, and a lot of what he says is just filling space, just staying in the limelight. During his first term, Trump repeatedly said that he was going to release his Obama Care replacement in two weeks, strangely – it was always two weeks – and it never happened. This time around, he was going to end the Russo-Ukrainian War on day one; of course, he didn’t. He didn’t even try. It was all just talk.

Still, he is a disrupter, and he will be disruptive. All indicators indicate that he either doesn’t believe in Climate Change or doesn’t give a shit. Either way, President Trump will be terrible for the planet, but Vice-Presendent Harris wouldn’t have been appreciably better. Vice-president Harris might want to start reacting to Climate Change like it is a real threat, but the Democratic establishment does not want change the status quo. Harris would be better than Trump for sure, for sure, but still not what the world needs.

I do think that Trump will do a lot of damage to a variety of governmental agencies and a lot of people who work for them. He is a vengeful son of a bitch and it will not be pretty. Still, I don’t think he will turn us into a copy of Nazi Germany in the 1930s. I don’t think he will for two reasons: one, Trump is not competent enough to pull off a coup, and, two, the only countries that have slipped from being democracies to being ruled by autocrats were democracies that had been democracies for a short period of time. The German Weimar Republic, even the idea of being a German democracy, actually was only about fifteen years old when Hitler destroyed it.

The United States has been a democracy for about 236 years, and democracy is deep in our blood and deep in our bones. OK, we aren’t really a democracy. We started with the vote being only for White Men who owned property, and it has slowly gotten better. I don’t know when the property qualification was dropped, but Black men were not allowed to vote until 1870 (and for a large portion of Black people, not until the mid-60s). Women were not allowed to vote until 1920.

However, our national myth is that we are a democratic country, and even people who are unable to vote are willing to die for that myth. People like the Tuskegee Airman during World War II. That makes it much more difficult to overturn the United States government compared to, say, Hungry or Russia.

I’m not trying to say that everything is going to be great for the next four years, it won’t be. I don’t think, however, that it will be the end of democracy.