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Putin and The Felon: Both Trapped in Losing Battles Against Reality

The Felon is a huge admirer of Vladimir Putin - perhaps in part due to Kompromat Putin has on him - but also because in many ways the two man are narcissistic megalomaniacs cut from the same cloth who view themselves as smarter and more able than those around them. Both also seem to embrace a toxic view of masculinity as they malign and denigrate - or, in Putin's case, murder - those who oppose them  The Felon's temper tantrum on Meet the Press where he walked off when Kristin Welker refused to accept his lies demonstrates both the fact that he is not as strong as he pretends and that he lives in his own false reality.  These shared personality traits, delusions and refusals to accept objective reality are on display in the wars of choice both launched against Ukraine in the case of Putin and Iran in the case of the Felon.  This inability to accept objective reality and the fact based advise of counselors and others have put both men in situations where their wars that they boasted would result in quick victories are dragging on with no victorious end game in sight.  A piece at The Guardian looks at the traps of their own creation and their inability to find a "win" to save face.  Here are excerpts: 

The strongman president, self-styled redeemer of national glory, is trapped in a conflict he can’t win but doesn’t know how to end without looking like a loser. A cult of infallibility prevents the leader admitting a strategic blunder even to himself. It could be Donald Trump or Vladimir Putin; Iran or Ukraine.

The conflicts and the regimes involved are also dissimilar in important ways. Russia’s campaign to eradicate a neighbouring democracy is nastier in conception and bloodier in execution than the bungled US effort to dislodge a dictatorship in Tehran. It has also gone on much longer. The first world war was shorter than a “special military operation” that was supposed to capture Kyiv within weeks. The Soviet Red Army repelled Nazi invasion and marched on Berlin in less time than it has taken Putin’s forces to occupy a tranche of eastern Ukraine, and they are not making any significant advances. The war has burned trillions of rubles and sacrificed hundreds of thousands of lives for no discernible dividend in national greatness.

The failure is too big for the Kremlin’s propaganda machinery to hide. Civilians hundreds of miles from the frontline see the plumes of black smoke from the oil refineries struck by long-range Ukrainian drones. They feel the depletion of their wages by inflation. They noticed how last month’s Victory Day parade, the high holy day of Russian militarism, was strangely modest.

Official opinion polls have shown a drop in support for Putin, albeit from impossible heights to improbable ones. Since the data-collecting agencies are under state control, the blip is best interpreted as a symptom of factional jostling for influence within the regime. Pragmatists in the civilian administration might have flashed a glimpse of presidential vulnerability as a warning to hardliners in the security apparatus that their approach isn’t working.

Any internal Russian lobby for ending the war runs into the problem that Putin sees the conflict as an existential struggle to avenge national honour against the perfidious west. He casts himself as the incarnation of national destiny, reaffirming Russian civilisational supremacy over borderlands to which it is historically entitled. Such a man doesn’t easily accept the prospect of dealing with Volodymyr Zelenskyy on equal terms as legitimate president of an independent country.

Trump’s worldview is less cluttered with antique mythology, more pumped with celebrity narcissism, but the effect is the same. He shares Putin’s concept of alpha powers whose interests override any sovereignty claims of lesser nations in their neighbourhoods. He was easily persuaded that Ukraine’s cause was hopeless and that Putin held all “the cards” because it would have offended his own sense of majesty to believe that someone in Zelenskyy’s geopolitical class could be a winner.

If the US president had been interested in the reality of Ukraine’s defensive campaign he might have observed the levelling effect of drones, allowing a smaller force to thwart an apparently overwhelming onslaught. He might even have considered the relevance of that asymmetry when judging whether Iran could be bombed into unconditional surrender. He might then have taken advice from people in the state department and CIA who had war-gamed an all-out campaign against the Islamic Republic under previous administrations. They concluded that regime change couldn’t be achieved from the air and that closure of the strait of Hormuz was a viable Iranian countermeasure with devastating economic consequences.

That would have required a capacity for strategic analysis that recognised practical constraints on what the US can achieve. Since Trump sees no boundary between himself and his country’s power, and treats every interaction in zero-sum terms, factoring Iranian advantages into the military equation would be like admitting limits to his personal potency. Intolerable.

Like Putin, Trump is marooned on an island of autocratic delusion, surrounded by advisers and ministers who are too cowardly or too blinded by ideology to survey the distant shore of reality and suggest a way back. For the Russian president there might be some compensation in seeing the US humbled in the Middle East, but the gains are fewer than they appeared at the start of the war. The revenue boost from higher oil prices has been largely cancelled out by the costs and logistical impediment of Ukrainian drones landing on industrial infrastructure.

Meanwhile, a Trump administration bogged down in negotiations with Tehran has no bandwidth for Ukraine. That shifts the odds against Putin in his bet that Zelenskyy can be bullied by the White House into conceding territory that Russian soldiers haven’t been able to seize on the ground. It also creates a space for more proactive involvement of Ukraine’s European allies. They feel the need to check Kremlin aggression more urgently than anyone in Washington.

That agenda has become easier to pursue since Viktor Orbán’s defeat in Hungarian elections earlier this year. The removal of Putin’s favourite spanner from the European works led to a prompt unblocking of aid to Kyiv. There are signs of momentum behind a Europe-led peace initiative. At a recent meeting of EU foreign ministers there was discussion of candidates to lead negotiations with Moscow. This week, Keir Starmer hosted Zelenskyy, along with Germany’s Friedrich Merz and France’s Emmanuel Macron for a summit in Downing Street.

It still isn’t clear what a “coalition of the willing” would really be willing to do to keep the peace in Ukraine without the US. But Putin’s confidence that the decadent west would not stay the course when confronted with Russia’s inexhaustible supply of manly valour has also not been vindicated.

This is something else he has in common with Trump, or that Russian ultranationalism shares with Maga mania. Both movements view Europe as a decrepit civilisation in the death throes of cultural suicide by overdose of immigration and liberal degeneracy. It is a diagnosis repeated by many nationalists and mainstream conservatives across Europe, assisted on their ideological journey by campaigns of overt and covert online influence originating in Russia and the US.

It is also an underestimation of liberal democracy’s defining strength, which is the resilience afforded by pluralism and institutional acceptance of legitimate opposition. The authoritarian strongman, seeing no difference between his will and the nation’s destiny, treats dissent as an assault on his authority, tending towards treason. He sits atop an edifice of power that promotes loyalty at the expense of truth, until reality itself is banished from his court.

In the US that process can still be corrected by constitutional checks and balances, fair elections, a free press and independent courts. Not in Russia. That is why European democracies must prove that their system of government is not only better in principle, but stronger in practice. And the way they do it is by embracing Ukraine’s struggle as their own.

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The Supreme Court Has Invented a Right to Discriminate

The overarching agenda of Project 2025, the Felon's regime, and the extremist majority on the United States Supreme Court ("SCOTUS") is to restore white supremacy and the primacy of right wing Christianity.  This past week's ruling by SCOTUS in favor of Alabama's redrawn congressional voting districts that erased a majority black district (in a state where 26% of the population is black) has in effect created a right to racial discrimination as longs a fig leaf of partisan purpose can be fabricated.  Meanwhile, the "Department of War" announced the reduction in the number of religious affiliation categories for service members from over 200 down to 31. While the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, a/k/a Mormon church, is included as a religious category on the updated list, it is not included in the list of faiths labeled “Christian.” The take away is that the goal of evangelical "Christians", many of whom are blatantly racist, to have the right to discriminate against anyone they choose, be they black, gay, non-Christians, and even women is well on the way to fruition.  The situation ought to terrify thinking Americans because once the rights of others can be erased or marginalized, the rights of many are put at risk. One need to look at Nazi Germany to see how this can progress. A piece in The Atlantic looks at SCOTUS's frightening ruling. Here are excerpts:

This week, the Roberts Court made clear that when it comes to drawing congressional districts, Black voters have no rights that anyone is bound to respect.

For years, Alabama, where a quarter of the population is Black, had defied federal court orders, including one reaffirmed by the Supreme Court itself in 2023, to create a second majority- or plurality-Black congressional district. Alabama’s reasoning for not doing so was simple: Its Republican legislators didn’t want to, and they didn’t believe that the Roberts Court would make them. “The Supreme Court ruling was 5–4,” State House Speaker Nathaniel Ledbetter said about the 2023 decision. “So there’s just one judge that needed to see something different.”

The state was making a gamble that the Roberts Court was more partisan than sincere. And it paid off: On Tuesday, the Court allowed Alabama to proceed with a map that diminishes Black voting power to the advantage of Republicans. For all the Court’s pretenses—all of its insistence on the rule of law, precedent, and good faith—many critics and supporters of the Roberts Court see the institution as an appendage of the Republican Party.

“Alabama willfully drew a map that flouted the District Court’s preliminary injunction and hoped that this Court would eventually see things its way,” Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in her dissent, which was joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson. “After today, it is hard to call Alabama’s cynical gambit anything other than a success, and the Court’s rewarding of Alabama’s behavior anything other than a blow to the rule of law.”

The majority opinion was unsigned. In it, the judges argued that the lower court had “failed to follow our instruction” in ordering the creation of the new district. This was a reference to the April decision in Louisiana v. Callais, in which Justice Samuel Alito announced that “race and politics are so intertwined” that there are almost no circumstances under which the Fifteenth Amendment’s prohibition on racial discrimination in voting actually applies.

Now here was an example of exactly what Alito was talking about. “States are free to decide for themselves whether last-minute changes to an election are in their best interests,” the justices wrote this week. If a Republican legislature decides that a redistricting plan to suppress the power of Black voters is “in their best interests,” they may proceed.

The implications of this case go far beyond one congressional district in one state. In Callais, Alito issued a classic Alito disclaimer: insisting he was not doing the thing he was about to do. The Court, he wrote, was not effectively nullifying Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act when it determined that Louisiana drawing a second majority-Black district (out of six total, in a state that is one-third Black) was an “unconstitutional racial gerrymander.” This week’s ruling on Alabama makes explicit what was merely implied in Callais. The Court’s logic may apply only to districting for now—but there is no obvious reason to limit its application to that. The Roberts Court has replaced the Fifteenth Amendment’s ban on racial discrimination in voting with a right to engage in racial discrimination in voting.

Theoretically, Callais was a statutory case about the Voting Rights Act’s ban on voting provisions that have the purpose or effect of discriminating against Black voters. That test, adopted by Congress in the 1980s (and opposed by Chief Justice John Roberts when he was an attorney for the Reagan Justice Department), was meant to prevent discrimination by actors careful enough to hide their intent. In Callais, the Court ruled that discrimination was fine because Louisiana argued that its purpose was partisan and not racist.

But in the Alabama case, the federal-district-court panel, which included two Trump appointees, had already determined that lawmakers had intentionally discriminated against Black voters. . . . Alabama’s plan was “tainted by intentional race-based discrimination,” the district court found, and the legislature was attempting to “rob Black Alabamians of an equal opportunity under the law to elect candidates of their choice.”

Fortunately for those legislators, the justices were waiting to drive the getaway car. . . . This week’s decision is important because intentional discrimination is banned, not just by the Voting Rights Act, but by the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. When the Roberts Court says that the lower court’s ruling “failed to follow our instruction,” it is referencing Alito’s argument that partisanship cannot be separated from race. Even if a court finds evidence of intentional discrimination, therefore, the Supreme Court may simply ignore it on the grounds that the discrimination in question is merely partisan and therefore acceptable. This turns Callais into something much broader than it purported to be: a finding that the Constitution permits not only unintentional racial discrimination but intentional racial discrimination, as long as there is also a partisan pretext for engaging in that discrimination.

The Court’s ruling amounts to a total inversion of the Civil War amendments, which make no such exceptions for racial discrimination in the name of partisanship. . . . . Race and partisanship were even more intertwined then than they are today, given that the Democrats were then the party of the defeated Confederates. If the Fifteenth Amendment did not bar partisan-motivated disenfranchisement, the amendment would not have changed anything at all. Indeed, the entire purpose of the amendments was to ensure that Black people could use the ballot as a means of self-defense against politicians who would deny them their basic, fundamental constitutional rights if they did not have to answer to them as a political constituency. The Roberts Court has thus rewritten the Civil War amendments to include a constitutional right to discriminate against Black people.

The Court has invented a right to discriminate—as long as you provide a political pretext—that not only does not exist in the Constitution, but is explicitly prohibited by the Constitution. . . . This logic would not have barred any of the Jim Crow voting devices that the Roberts Court frequently congratulates itself and the nation for overcoming. In the aftermath of Reconstruction, white-supremacist Democrats imposed superficially race-neutral requirements such as poll taxes, literacy tests, and grandfather clauses. The approach taken by Alito and the Roberts Court would have found all of these measures constitutional.

[T]he Constitution has few defenses against a majority of justices willing to ignore it or twist it to its exact opposite purpose.

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The Felon Has Failed As Commander-in-Chief

When not scheming about ways to rip off American taxpayers, using insider information for thousands of unprecedented stock trades to garner ever more money, and insulting the majority of one time loyal American citizens and foreign allies, and operating much like a Mafia boss, the Felon has been obsessed with his "legacy" - think the ballroom, the arch, his name and/or face on U.S. currency, the list goes on and on.  Nowhere does the good of America and Americans factor in and true strategic national security factor in.  Indeed, if the Felon has a legacy, it will be that he will be remembered as the most corrupt, unthinking, venal and narcissistic occupant of the White House in America's history. America's once crucial alliances are in tatters and former allies have zero trust in America and are taking steps to lessen their reliance on the United States - e.g., Canada making deals with Chinese automakers, Mexico, Canada and others making joint economic alliances, and European nations moving away from reliance on American weaponry.  Again, the list of the Felon's failures goes on and on and none of them make the United States safer or stronger.  A column in the New York Times looks at the Felon's many failures and ethical bankruptcy.  Here are highlights:

With each passing month of his presidency, [the Felon] Donald Trump behaves more like America’s commander in thief than its commander in chief.

How so? Let me count the ways. We are a nation at war today, with tens of thousands of troops deployed near Iran. Generally, when our nation has been at war, the commander in chief’s top domestic priority is to keep the country united. Because there is nothing more demoralizing for U.S. troops fighting abroad than to look back and see our country ripping itself apart at home. And there is nothing that encourages an enemy to hold out for better terms for ending a war with America than seeing America at war with itself.

And how has Trump risen to that commander-in-chief unifying duty? He has not lifted a finger to bring Democrats behind the war. Instead, he’s prioritized acting like a commander in thief. At the same moment Trump was asking our men and women in uniform to make the ultimate sacrifice, he engaged in a brazen, in-your-face attempted heist of the U.S. Treasury to benefit himself, his family and his political allies, which could include those who attacked the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

Trump conspired with his own Justice Department, headed by his former personal lawyer, to use taxpayer money to create a $1.776 billion political slush fund, supposedly to compensate those Trump supporters who “suffered weaponization and lawfare” at the hands of his predecessor. In fact, as this paper’s editorial board noted, it would “reward loyalists willing to defy the law and commit violence on behalf of the president.”

Fortunately, a federal judge put a temporary hold on the scheme that no one described better than the Republican former Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell: “So the nation’s top law enforcement official is asking for a slush fund to pay people who assault cops? Utterly stupid, morally wrong — take your pick.” In the face of all that opposition, Trump’s acting attorney general, Todd Blanche, said on Tuesday he was withdrawing this terrible plan.

If Trump had an ounce of integrity, instead of scheming to set aside $1.776 billion to potentially pay off these phony defenders of freedom’s frontier — loyalists who ransacked the halls of Congress — he would direct Congress to spend that exact amount to support today’s real defenders of freedom’s frontier: the Ukrainian Army. It is both resisting Vladimir Putin’s attempt to crush Ukraine’s democracy and sapping Russia’s ability to threaten the other free countries of Europe. God bless Ukraine’s fighters.

Alas, though, Trump apparently wants money only for people who tried to overthrow our Constitution at home, not for those who want to emulate our constitutional democracy abroad.

In addition, the Trump-directed Justice Department quietly inserted, as a supplement to that slush fund deal, a one-page document signed by Blanche stating that the government would be “FOREVER BARRED and PRECLUDED from prosecuting or pursuing” pending tax claims against Trump, his family members or his businesses. That measure remains in force, Blanche said on Tuesday.

[The Felon] President Trump has another moniker suggesting his ethical challenges: “trader in chief,” as The Associated Press recently proposed. Why? Because “recent presidents have stayed away from trading stocks in companies whose fortunes they could lift or scuttle with the stroke of a pen, but Donald Trump smashed that precedent in the first quarter of this year with more than 3,600 buy and sell orders,” The A.P. wrote, “many of them involving companies whose profits have been directly impacted by his decisions as head of the government.”

Not only has Trump choked off virtually all U.S. financial aid to Ukraine, but he is also reducing U.S. troops on the ground in NATO countries right when Putin, sensing he is losing the war, is increasingly threatening them.

Just as Americans are starting to realize that Trump is becoming a predator on our system — trying to manipulate the justice system to generate cash available to his Jan. 6 pirates and immunity from ongoing inquiries into taxes for himself and his family — our allies are concluding that Trump’s America is becoming a dangerous predator on them.

Indeed, something is happening with America’s traditional allies that I never thought I would see in this lifetime or the next. In the post-World War II era, we and our allies together embraced the doctrine of “deterrence” against the Soviet Union, and later Russia, to prevent any attempt by the Kremlin to forcibly expand its influence into the free world or put neighbors under its thumb.

Not any longer.  Our allies have watched Trump threaten to make Canada the 51st state and to seize Greenland from Denmark. They have watched him start a war with Iran without consulting NATO and then demand that NATO help rescue us from what has turned into a mess. They have watched him slash U.S. financial assistance to Ukraine, put the Russian aggressor on the same moral footing as that country and then top it all off with reckless, ill-conceived tariffs on all our allies.

As a result of all that, something unprecedented is happening: “Deterring Trump’s America is now becoming a strategic priority of our allies as much as deterring Russia was,” Nader Mousavizadeh, the chief executive of Macro Advisory Partners, a geopolitical consulting firm, and a former senior adviser to U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan, told me.

And how could it not? When you look at how Trump has hammered Canada with tariffs, it is hard not to conclude that the worst position for a country to be in during the second Trump administration “is to be America’s closest ally and have integrated your economy, energy systems and military with that of the United States,” Mousavizadeh said.

Let’s not forget that early on Trump forced Ukraine to give the United States access to critical minerals in return for U.S. help against a Russian Army trying to overrun it. This is the real “Trump Doctrine”: Oppose America, and I will tariff you; depend on America, and I will extort you.

I have been in Portugal this week and I have been shocked by the degree to which European business executives speak of having lost faith in American institutions and in America as the guarantor of global legal norms — something they have always taken for granted. It is literally disorienting for them, like hikers who have lost their compass.

In short, having a president who behaves like a commander in thief — not a commander in chief — is costing us dearly at home and abroad. This perversion of the American presidency is undermining the very alliance structure that won two world wars and the Cold War and generated one of history’s longest ages of peace and prosperity. Every day we tolerate such behavior we endanger our children’s future.