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Tucker Carlson: Putin's Useful Idiot

Little rich boy Tucker Carlson - an heir to the Swanson fortune - has long displayed his contempt for minorities and has pushed the "great replacement" myth.  He has also displayed his admiration of dictators, particularly Vladimir Putin, a man guilty of was crimes and whose solution to potential political rivals is to have them murdered or imprisoned on fabricated up charges.    Of course, Carlson is not the only one to show admiration  of Putin.  Many Christofascists admire Putin's push for "traditional values" which has granted power and privileges to the Russian Orthodox Church in exchange for political support and waged a relentless war against the existence of LGBT individuals in Russia.  Carlson's latest stunt was a roughly two hour "interview" of Putin which was nothing more than a two hour flow of lies and propaganda from Putin, a man even more amoral than Donald Trump and delusions of himself as the new tsar of Russia (within Russia an effort is underway to rehabilitate the imperial past with palaces restored and exhibits centering on Nicholas II, his wife Alexandra and their five children, but conveniently leaving out the fact that it was Putin's predecessors who murdered them and 12 other members of the Romanov dynasty).  A piece in Politico looks at Carlson self-prostitution to Putin and how he is part of a line of journalists who have supported America's enemies over the decades.  Here are excerpts: 

Tucker Carlson is far from being the first Western journalist to have aligned himself with the enemy. There’s a long tradition of the likes of Hitler and Stalin finding pliable Brits and Americans to do their propaganda for them.

Russian President Vladimir Putin can be confident he won’t be facing any zingers in his interview with Carlson, due to be broadcast on Thursday night in the U.S. It will probably be more an exercise in sycophancy akin to the softball encounter between Carlson and Donald Trump last August. Indeed, it could be an attempt to map out the contours of another Trump-Putin love-in.

After all, Carlson nailed his colors to Putin’s mast long ago. He’s argued Washington should take Russia’s side in its war on Ukraine and dubbed Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelenskyy a “dangerous authoritarian” — not a description, apparently, he thinks applicable to the Russian leader. He has also always been in tune with Putin’s calls for “traditional values” — which in Russia tends to mean the abuse of LGBTQ+ rights.

The most obvious parallel with Carlson’s fawning approach to a Russian despot is arguably the New York Times reporter Walter Duranty, bureau chief in Moscow from 1922 to 1936.

After proving his loyalty and writing glowing accounts of the Communists’ Five-Year Plan he was granted an exclusive interview by Stalin. He failed to report on the Holodomor, the famine that killed millions of Ukrainians in 1932 and 1933, and attacked those who tried to get the word out, including Gareth Jones, a Welsh journalist. “Any report of a famine in Russia is today an exaggeration or malignant propaganda,” Duranty noted in one false article.

Historian Mark von Hagen later wrote that Duranty’s reporting was just rehashed Soviet propaganda at odds with the “experience of the peoples of the Russian and Soviet empires.” But it had impact. Sally Taylor, author of a critical biography, argued Duranty’s reporting was a factor in U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s decision in 1933 to grant official recognition to the Soviet Union. Later, when Stalin’s atrocities became public knowledge, Duranty said: “You can’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs.”

Duranty was a true believer, insisting the ends justified the means. Much like American socialist reporter John Reed, author of “10 Days That Shook the World,” who worked for the People’s Commissariat for Foreign Affairs, translating decrees and news about the Bolshevik government in the early days around the 1917 revolution.

Later he returned to the U.S. with his spouse Louise Bryant, an American feminist and political activist, where they defended the Bolshevik revolution and he co-founded the short-lived Communist Labor Party of America. Charged with sedition, he fled back to Russia. U.S. novelist Upton Sinclair described Reed as “the playboy of the Russian revolution.”

Reed, in fact, started to fall out with his Soviet bosses over revolutionary tactics, and succumbed to typhus but was given a hero’s burial, becoming one of only four Americans buried at the Kremlin Wall Necropolis in Red Square.

There’s probably space there for Carlson too.

The Nazis as well as the Soviets found useful propagandists for their cause.

American-born anti-semite William Joyce, a scion of the British Union of Fascists, gained infamy as broadcaster Lord Haw-Haw in World War II, taunting U.S. and U.K. audiences with his Nazi radio show Germany Calling.

Just in case Carlson is tempted by the idea of a show called Russia Calling, he’d best be warned these things can end badly, and the British hanged Joyce in 1946.

The British socialite Unity Mitford turned to Nazi propaganda out of idol worship. . . . The British socialite Unity Mitford turned to Nazi propaganda out of idol worship.

In 1934, she went to Munich hoping to meet Adolf Hitler and stalked him at the Osteria Bavaria, his favorite eatery. Finally, after 10 months, Hitler invited her over to his table. “It was the most wonderful and beautiful [day] of my life,’ she wrote to her father. “I am so happy that I wouldn’t mind a bit, dying. I’d suppose I am the luckiest girl in the world. For me he is the greatest man of all time.”

Germany’s Führer approved of Mitford’s middle name Valkyrie and was delighted that her grandfather had translated the anti-semitic works of Houston Stewart Chamberlain, a favorite author, according to historian Giles Milton. Unity became part of Hitler’s inner circle, and wrote for Julius Streicher’s anti-semitic newspaper Der Stürmer a vitrolic article denouncing the Jews, beginning the piece, “The English have no notion of the Jewish danger.” 

The Nazis were also able to press into service the comic novelist P.G. Wodehouse, known for his fictional characters Jeeves and Wooster. Interned by Vichy French authorities, Wodehouse was released by the Germans and whisked off to the luxury Hotel Adlon in Berlin and agreed to make five broadcasts to the U.S. via German radio before America joined the war, comprising humorous anecdotes about his experiences as a prisoner, that helped to humanize the Nazis.

Carlson himself has defended his approach, by lying that Western media have not even bothered to try to speak to Putin.

But even the Kremlin effectively admitted it chose him as a “useful idiot.”

When confronted with Carlson’s statement that media didn’t bother to apply to talk to Putin, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said: “Mr. Carlson was incorrect” and added Western media requests were rejected because “they cannot boast of any attempt to even seem like they are providing impartial coverage.”

Carlson, however, who has claimed to “root for Russia,” can presumably be relied upon to be impeccably impartial.

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If Russia Wins: Republican Obstruction Courts Disaster

In embracing Donald Trump's amorality and making appeasing Trump and clinging to power more important than anything else, Republicans have jettisoned honor, decency and any shred of moral standing and set the stage for potential international disaster. With Republicans increasingly the water carriers for Vladimir Putin and by extension autocrats around the world, the stage is being set for a destruction of the world order that has for the most part served the world and America well since the end of WWII and the Cold War. Seemingly, the worldwide consequences of their betrayal of international allies and embrace of Trump's sick "America First" - driven in large part by Trump's admiration of dictators - is utterly lost on both Congressional Republicans and the increasingly ignorance worshipping base of today's GOP.  Only appeasing Trump and avoiding his wrath while performing for the knuckle dragging and misogynistic base of Christofascists and white supremacists matters.  In the process, America's standing in the world which Joe Biden has sought to restore is at risk as is the long time security of America's interests.  A piece in The Atlantic looks at the disaster Republicans are courting and how America and the world could be severely harmed.  Here are highlights:

Ukraine is fighting for the lives of its people and its very existence, and it is running out of ammunition. If the United States does not step back in with aid, Russia could eventually win this war.

Despite the twaddle from propagandists in Moscow (and a few academics in the United States), Russia’s war is not about NATO, or borders, or the balance of power. The Russian dictator Vladimir Putin intends to absorb Ukraine into a new Russian empire, and he will eradicate the Ukrainians if they refuse to accept his rule. Europe is in the midst of the largest war on the continent since Nazi panzers rolled from Norway to Greece, and the Russian invasion of Ukraine is by far the most important threat to world peace since the worst days of the Cold War. In a less febrile political era, defeating Russia would be the top priority of every American politician.

The Republicans in Congress, however, remain fixated both on their hatred of Ukraine and on their affection for Russia. Their relentless criticism of assistance to Kyiv has had its intended effect, taking a bite out of the American public’s support for continuing aid . . . .

[S]o it’s time to think more seriously about what might happen if the Republicans succeed in this irresponsible effort to blockade any further assistance to Ukraine. The collapse and dismemberment of a nation of millions is immediately at stake, and that should be enough for any American to be appalled at the GOP’s obstructionism. But the peace of the world itself could rest on what Congress does—or does not do—next.

First, what would it even mean for Russia to “win”? A Russian victory does not require sending Moscow’s tanks into Kyiv, even if that were possible.

The destruction of Ukraine would begin with some kind of cease-fire offered by a Ukrainian leadership that has literally run out of bullets, bombs, and bodies. (The average age of Ukraine’s soldiers is already over 40; there are not that many more men to draft.) The Russians would signal a willingness to deal only with a new Ukrainian regime, perhaps some “government of national salvation” that would exist solely to save whatever would be left of a rump Ukrainian state in the western part of the country while handing everything else over to the Kremlin.

The Russians would then dictate more terms: The United States and NATO would be told to pound sand. Ukraine would have to destroy its weapons and convert its sizable army into a small and weak constabulary force. Areas under Russian control would become, by fiat, parts of Russia. The remaining thing called “Ukraine” would be a demilitarized puppet state, kept from integration of any kind with Europe; in a few years, an internal putsch or a Russian-led coup could produce a new government that would request final union with the Russian Federation. Soon, Ukraine would be part of a new Russian superstate, with Russian forces on NATO’s borders as “peacekeepers” or “border guards,” a ploy the Russians have used in Central Asia since the 1990s.

Imagine the world as Putin (and other dictators, including in China) might see it even a few years from now if Russia wins in 2024: America stood by, paralyzed and shamed, as Ukraine was torn to pieces, as millions of people and many thousands of square miles were added to the Kremlin’s empire, and as U.S. alliances in Europe and then around the world quietly disintegrated—all of which will be even more of a delight in Moscow and Beijing if Americans decide to add the ultimate gift of voting the ignorant and isolationist Trump back into the White House.

The real danger for the U.S. and Europe would begin after Ukraine is crushed, when only NATO would remain as the final barrier to Putin’s dreams of evolving into a new emperor of Eurasia.

After the collapse of Ukraine, he would want to take bolder steps to prove that the Atlantic Alliance is an illusion, a lie promulgated by cowards who would never dare to stop the Kremlin from reclaiming its former Soviet and Russian imperial possessions.

Reckless and emboldened, emotional and facing his own mortality, Putin would be tempted to extend his winning streak and try one last throw of the dice, this time against NATO itself. He would not try to invade all of Europe; he would instead seek to replicate the success of his 2014 capture of Crimea—only this time on NATO territory. Putin might, for example, declare that his commitment to the Russian-speaking peoples of the former Soviet Union compels him to defend Russians in one of the Baltic states.

The Kremlin would then sit on this piece of NATO territory, daring America and Europe to respond, in order to prove that NATO lacks the courage to fight for its members, and that whatever the strength of the alliance between, say, Washington and London, no one is going to die—or risk nuclear war—for some town in Estonia.

Republicans might soon succeed in forcing the United States to abandon Ukraine, but if fighting breaks out in Europe between Russia and America’s closest allies—old and new—no one, not even a President Trump, who has expressed his hostility to NATO and professed his admiration for Putin, is going to be able to keep the United States out of the battle, not least because U.S. forces will inevitably be among NATO’s casualties.

And at that point, anything could happen.

The world, should Russia win, will face remarkable new dangers—and for what? Because in 2024 some astonishingly venal and ambitious politicians wanted to hedge their bets and kiss Trump’s ring one more time?

Perhaps enough Republicans will come to their senses in time to avert these possible outcomes. If they do not, future historians—that is, if anyone is left to record what happened—will be perplexed at how a small coterie of American politicians were so willing to trade the safety of the planet for a few more years of power.

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Doing Nothing - The GOP’s True Priority

The current Republican controlled the House of Representatives is one of the worse in history with very little legislation of substance being enacted.   This week we have seen the farcical impeachment of a member of Biden's cabinet crash and burn along with a failed effort on aid to Israel.  The irony is that the effort to impeach Alejandro Mayorkas was ostensibly due to his failure to control the southern border even as House and Senate Republicans killed at tough bill that some of their brethren had negotiated that would have gone a long way to fixing the border crisis.   Meanwhile, the House Republicans managed to only pass a resolution trying to clear Donald Trump of his guilt for leading/orchestrating an insurrection.  The sad reality is that todays congressional Republicans had neither the desire or the ability to govern.  Instead we see performance bills introduced to excite the GOP base - and please Donald Trump - that do nothing to address the very real needs of the nation.  Obstruction and blocking any meaningful legislation that might help the country and in their lizard like brains aid Joe Biden is the GOP's sole agenda.  The good of the nation and the majority of its citizens be damned.  Only Trump's ego driven whims and stroking the Christofascists and white supremacists of the party base matter.  It's shameful and threatens America's place in the world.  A column in The Atlantic by a former Republican looks at the GOP's true priority.  Here are excerpts:

Sometimes, a negotiation produces a deal. Sometimes, a negotiation reveals the truth.

Negotiators in the Senate have produced a draft agreement on immigration and asylum. The deal delivers on Republican priorities. It includes changes to federal law to discourage asylum seeking. It shuts down asylum processing altogether if too many people arrive at once. Those and other changes send a clear message to would-be immigrants: You’re going to find it a lot harder to enter the United States without authorization. Rethink your plans.

The draft agreement offers little to nothing on major Democratic immigration priorities: no pathway to citizenship for long-term undocumented immigrants, only the slightest increase in legal immigration. The Democrats traded away most of their own policy wish list. In return, they want an end to the mood of crisis at the border, plus emergency defense aid for Ukraine and Israel.

Yet Republicans in the House seem determined to reject the draft agreement. They appear poised to leave in place a status quo that one senior GOP House leader has described as an “invasion” and an “existential and national security threat.”

So if no deal results, what truths will we learn from this process?

The first is that Republicans don’t really care all that much about the situation at the border. A real “existential threat” cannot wait for some later date. People who perceive an existential threat don’t delay. In fact, a good many Republican legislators are very happy to allow a continuing flow of laborers across the border.

Consider that Florida’s Republican-controlled House of Representatives has voted to allow 16- and 17-year-olds to work eight-hour days during the school year. Or that the Republican governor of Arkansas has signed a bill that relieves the state of having to certify that teenage workers aged 14 and 15 may work. Or that Ohio’s Republican-controlled legislature may soon pass a law allowing 14- and 15-year-olds to work as late as 9 p.m. on school nights. . . . . Consider also that all of these changes are written with teenage migrants very much in mind: Almost 40 percent of recent border-crossers have been under 18, a fivefold increase since the late aughts.

Those teenagers are traveling both alone and in family groups. They are coming to the U.S. to work. When state legislatures relax the rules on employing under-18s and under-16s, they’re flashing a giant WE’RE HIRING sign to job-seeking teenagers around the world. The legislators know that. The teenagers know it. American voters should know it too.

A second truth concerns what Republican priorities really are. When Mike Johnson was elevated to the House speakership, he claimed that he genuinely wanted to help Ukraine but that aid had to wait until Congress passed new laws to harden the U.S. southern border. He wrote to President Joe Biden as recently as December 5 that further aid to Ukraine was “dependent upon enactment of transformative change to our nation’s border security laws.” When Senate negotiators produced exactly what Johnson said he wanted—a transformative bill that Congress could enact—he responded by reversing his demands. Johnson no longer wants any law at all. But one thing is constant: no aid to Ukraine—which suggests that “no aid to Ukraine,” not “defend the border,” is the true priority here.

A third truth is suggested by the angry reaction of House Republicans to the work of Senate Republicans: The very act of negotiation is mistrusted. Along with their speaker, House Republicans radically altered their position from “there must be a new law” to “there must be no new law,” and from “the president must sign our bill exactly as we wrote it” to “the president must act unilaterally by executive authority only.” How does anyone negotiate with a House majority that can so abruptly and totally pivot? The true goal revealed is failure and chaos.

And this points to a fourth truth, maybe the most important one of all. Donald Trump has sold his supporters the dangerous fantasy that democratic politics can be replaced by one man’s will. No need for distasteful compromises. No need to reckon with the concerns and interests of people who disagree with House Republicans. Just somehow return Trump to the presidency: He’ll bark; the system will obey.

[S]uch fantasies have no basis in reality. As the Cato Institute reported last November:

The Biden Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has removed a higher percentage of arrested border crossers in its first two years than the Trump DHS did over its last two years. Moreover, migrants were more likely to be released after a border arrest under President Trump than under President Biden. In absolute terms, the Biden DHS is removing 3.5 times as many people per month as the Trump DHS did.

Altogether, about 1.1 million unauthorized border-crossers were released into the United States during the Trump presidency and not removed by the end of his term. Glowering and yelling do not in fact accomplish much. But to many Trump supporters, glowering and yelling are the whole of it. They don’t care how little gets accomplished, so long as that little is done in the most offensive manner possible.

Arriving at no is what’s happening now among the House Republicans. Because they refuse to understand the other side, they cannot appreciate a good offer and recognize when to accept it. They’re going to arrive only at no—no for America, and no for Ukraine. But no is what they want.

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The GOP: Trump First. Putin Second. America Third

Betrayal of America's national interests has become standard operating procedure for today's Republican Party where furthering one's perceived best interest in appeasing the ugly base of the party and prostituting ones self to the "glorious leader", Donald Trump is all that matters.   Oh, there is lots of Republican bloviating and posturing about patriotism and snatched photo ops, but when the rubber meets the road, Republicans are either missing in action or actively sabotaging America's best interests and long term future to posture for the worse elements of the party base or appease Trump's never ending assault on American interest and betrayal of allies. Events this week underscore the GOP's contempt for the majority of Americans and off the charts hypocrisy of Republicans like House Speaker Mike Johnson - comrade Johnson is a more appropriate title - as we see a bill on border security (which gives Republicans what they claim to have wanted for years) and aid to allies likely being killed solely because Der Trumpenfuhrer opposes it because he wants a continued crisis at the southern border. It is both disgusting and a severe threat to American interests.  The GOP has become the party of Trump and Putin.  A column in the New York Times looks at this betrayal - which even the right wing Wall Street Journal has condemned - and the potential long term harm that will be done.  Here are highlights:

Every so often there is a piece of legislation on Capitol Hill that defines America and its values — that shows what kind of country we want to be. I would argue that when it comes to the $118.3 billion bipartisan compromise bill in the Senate to repair our broken immigration system and supply vital aid to Ukraine, Taiwan and Israel, its passage or failure won’t define just America but also the world that we’re going to inhabit.

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.

Barring some last-minute surprise that saves the compromise bill, a terrible thing is about to happen, thanks largely to a Republican Party that has lost its way as it falls in lock step behind a man whose philosophy is not “America First” but “Donald Trump First.” “Trump First” means that a bill that would strengthen America and its allies must be set aside so that America can continue to boil in polarization, Vladimir Putin can triumph in Ukraine and our southern border can remain an open sore . . . . Our allies be damned. Our enemies be emboldened. Our children’s future security be mortgaged.

Today’s G.O.P. bumper sticker: Trump First. Putin Second. America Third.

“The United States has for some time ceased to be a serious country. Our extreme polarization combined with institutional rules that privilege minorities makes it impossible for us to meet our international obligations,” the political theorist Francis Fukuyama remarked on the American Purpose website. “The Republican Party has grown very adept at hostage holding. … The hard-core MAGA wing represents a minority within a minority, yet our institutional rules permit them to veto decisions clearly favored by a majority of Americans.”

[H]ow we came to this awful moment is a longer, deeper story.

This emerging post-post-Cold War era is a real throwback to the kind of dangerous, traditional great-power competition prevalent in the Cold War and World War II and most of history before that. Unfortunately, we have arrived at this moment with too many elected officials — especially in the senior ranks of the Republican Party — who never experienced such a world and with a defense-industrial base woefully unprepared for this world.

That’s crazy. And it is particularly crazy at a time when three revisionist powers (Russia, China and Iran) are each simultaneously probing every day to see if they can push back America and its allies along three different frontiers (Europe, the South China Sea and the Middle East). . . . . In Putin’s case, when the time seemed right, he launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

“Because of generational change, most of America’s political elite today grew up in the relatively benign Pax Americana post-Cold War era, 1989 to 2022” (when Putin invaded Ukraine), “and they have lost the habit and the knack of thinking about global politics in military terms,” the U.S. foreign policy historian Michael Mandelbaum told me. “Very few members of the elite today have served in the military.”

This is “very different from the Cold War era, when most of our policymaking elite were people who experienced World War II, . . . . after 30 years of the post-Cold War era, Joe Biden is one of the few remaining leaders who was a policymaker during the Cold War — and issues of grand strategy and the management of great-power competition are no longer a major part of our public discourse.”

Trump, like Biden, grew up in the Cold War, but he spent a lot of it contemplating his wealth rather than contemplating the world. Trump’s instincts, Mandelbaum noted, are really a throwback to the interwar period between World War I and World War II, when a whole segment of the elite felt World War I was a failure and a mistake — the equivalent today of Iraq and Afghanistan — and then approached the dawn of World War II as isolationists and protectionists, seeing our allies as either hopeless or leeches.

As for House Speaker Mike Johnson, I wonder how often he uses his passport. I wonder if he has a passport .. . . .So far, he seems to care only about serving Trump’s interests, even if that means playing extremely risky games with foreign policy.

Meanwhile, many on the left emerged from this post-Cold War era with the view that the biggest problem in the world is not too little American power but too much — the lessons they drew from Iraq and Afghanistan.

And so who will tell the people? Who will tell the people that America is the tent pole that holds up the world? If we let that pole disintegrate, your kids won’t grow up in just a different America; they’ll grow up in a different world, and a much worse one.

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.

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.

Yes, America still has considerable power, but that power led to influence because allies and enemies knew we were ready to use it to defend ourselves and help our friends defend themselves and our shared values. All of that will now be in doubt if this bill goes down for good.

Remember this week, folks — because historians surely will.

I am truly ashamed that I was ever a Republican.

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Trump is Already Damaging US National Interests

Republicans and Democrats have negotiated a historic agreement on border security which to a large measure gives Republicans everything they have claimed to want over the years yet Speaker Mike Johnson is saying the deal is dead on arrival in the House.  Why?  Because Donald Trump is against it because god forbid the border issues be improved, he thinks it would deprive him of a campaign issue. He cares nothing of the good that the bill would accomplish, including decreasing deadly illegal drugs flowing into the country, but only about himself and his ego driven wants.  Meanwhile, critical aid to Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan is being held hostage - Johnson has voted pro-Putin ever since Russia launched its illegal invasion - and the world is being given a loud message that America no longer can be trusted as a steady ally and brutal dictators like Putin, Xi and others are being emboldened. All because Der Trumpenfuhrer admires dictators and wants to become one himself.  Sadly, his hate and grievance driven base cares nothing about the long term consequences of their cult worship of a man who is morally reprehensible.  The world currently faces many dangers that require a consistent and reliable role played by America, yet everything is placed at risk by a megalomaniacal, sociopath in the form of Trump.  A column in the Washington Post looks at the damage already being done:  

The 2024 election is shaping up to be much more than a likely rematch between President Biden and former president Donald Trump — or even as a test of their competing visions for U.S. democracy. To a greater extent than perhaps any other moment since the 1920 debate over U.S. entry into the League of Nations, this country’s role in the world will be on the ballot. At the same time, the United States faces critical global challenges in Ukraine, the Middle East, East Asia and elsewhere.

Mr. Biden and Mr. Trump will offer voters a stark choice between the former’s support for the network of alliances and international institutions the United States helped create after World War II and the latter’s “America First” approach. In that sense, U.S. voters will not be choosing a direction for their country alone but for the world as a whole.

The assumption underlying such institutions as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the mutual defense agreements that bind the United States with Japan and South Korea is that security is not a zero-sum proposition. By committing resources over extended periods and combining them, taking mutual advantage of differing capabilities, countries can make themselves far safer than would have been possible if they acted unilaterally or in temporary concert. Mr. Biden believes this is still a workable model, which is why he is trying to apply and expand it to deter the challenge to NATO posed by Russia’s aggression against Ukraine.

Mr. Trump, by contrast, has repeatedly depicted security alliances not as prudent long-term investments but as free rides for allies . . . . Trump is pushing to end America’s support for Ukraine and hinting at a separate peace of some kind with Russia’s Vladimir Putin. His campaign website promises “fundamentally reevaluating NATO’s purpose and NATO’s mission.”

Self-absorbed and easily swayed by honeyed words and calculated attention from autocrats such as North Korea’s Kim Jong Un, he inconsistently directs venom at China’s predatory trade practices and admiration for that country’s leader, Xi Jinping. This sows uncertainty not just in Taiwan but also the wider range of allies and partners that includes Vietnam, the Philippines, Australia and India.

The Eurasia Group, a risk consultancy, has warned that a Trump return would raise foundational questions about America’s trustworthiness as well as “the credibility of its commitments to foreign partners, and the durability of its role as the [linchpin] of the global security order.” We wish it were exaggerating.

Mr. Trump’s brand of America First is ascendant within the GOP but not unanimous. Nikki Haley, former ambassador to the U.N. and governor of South Carolina, is still running against him and speaking for the Republican Party’s internationalist wing. Most Senate Republicans still support Ukraine. Part of what’s so concerning about the prospect of an isolationist second Trump presidency is that it would defy majority sentiment: Sixty-five percent of Americans want the United States to play a “leading” or “major” role in world affairs, according to the most recent Gallup Poll.

One way to gauge the radical changes that might lie in store is through the anticipatory words and deeds of leaders abroad. Mr. Putin shows no signs of backing down in Ukraine or negotiating peace because he obviously hopes for a better deal from Mr. Trump. Democratic leaders in Europe, by contrast, speak nervously of hedging against Trump Round 2. Whether or not he wins, Mr. Trump has already created a more dangerous world, in which the power and principles of the United States are seen not as constants but as variables.

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Republican Collaborators and Accommodators

Throughout history dictatorial regimes have relied on collaborators and accommodators to rise to and then hold on to power.  During the 20th century, the prime examples are the rise of Hitler and the rise of Mussolini.  As a percentage of the population, the core of the Nazi Party, Mussolini's core supporters,  or even earlier, the Bolsheviks, never made up a majority of the population. The same held true in conquered areas such as Vichy France (whose leader is at right). Therefore, it was essential for the "true believer" minority to have collaborators and accommodators that out of self-interest and a desire to further their own interest or out of laziness, never resisted the dictatorial regimes. The phenomenon continues today in Putin's Russia. Xi's China and here in America within the Republican Party.  The number of Trump/MAGA collaborators in Congress now includes much of the Republican leadership (some like Elise Stefanik shamelessly so).  Add to this list the equivocators and the moral relativists who lack the courage or basic morality to call out Trump and the Christofascists/white supremacists of the party base and the moral collapse of the GOP is near complete. Indeed, those who have put democracy, the rule of law and loyalty to country first within the GOP have been sent into exile.  A column in the Washington Post looks at the Republican collaborators and accommodators who now threaten the nation.  Here are highlights:

Across time and geography, people respond to totalitarian threats in similar ways. Some people collaborate; others resist. And still others accommodate authoritarians, trying to keep their heads down to avoid an existential choice.

As Anne Applebaum eloquently put it in her 2020 essay in the Atlantic on collaborators:

To the American reader, references to Vichy France, East Germany, fascists, and Communists may seem over-the-top, even ludicrous. But dig a little deeper, and the analogy makes sense. The point is not to compare Trump to Hitler or Stalin; the point is to compare the experiences of high-ranking members of the American Republican Party, especially those who work most closely with the White House, to the experiences of Frenchmen in 1940, or of East Germans in 1945, or of Czesław Miłosz in 1947.

Given Trump’s assault on democracy, we should identify which Republicans chose which category and what consequences flow from their choices.

Collaboration: Local snitches, propagandists and eager Nazi party joiners helped implement oppression in occupied Europe during World War II. Today, collaborators wear red hats, not black-and-red arm bands. They parrot racist slogans, stir xenophobia, attack law enforcement, incite violence, condone their leader’s cruelty, spread conspiracies and conceal Trump’s mental disintegration. They have given up on the United States’ quest to become a more perfect union.

Close Trump cronies (e.g., Stephen Miller, Mark Meadows) and the mid-level officials (many of whom joined to gain proximity to power) whose presence shrouded the administration in a thin veil of normality chose collaboration. Cable news apologists (some adjudicated liars), MAGA lawmakers (from Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida to former speaker Kevin McCarthy of California to Speaker Mike Johnson of Louisiana to Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas) and right-wing radio hosts afraid of losing their audience also went down this path. Governors, such as Texas’s Greg Abbott, who openly defy court rulings and spur voter suppression efforts adopt collaboration — as do state legislators who gleefully gerrymander districts and suppress voting.

Let’s not forget supposedly sober-minded Republicans who insisted in 2020 that Trump was the safer choice. Add in MAGA donors, campaign aides, the former officials who refused to testify against Trump and once-respectable think tanks turned into propaganda and policy arms for Trumpism. All the GOP major presidential candidates who left the 2024 race, except former New Jersey governor Chris Christie, became collaborators when they endorsed Trump. Collectively, they not only normalize MAGA extremism but demonize those who resist Trump. Collaborators also include the right-wing partisans on the Supreme Court who strip away civil rights, wreck the regulatory state and erode separation of church and state in service of their MAGA patrons.

Resistance: Naturally, Democrats opposed Trump and Trumpism. Republicans did not face imprisonment or death for standing up to Trump. It wasn’t that hard to put up a fight. And yet, Republican resisters remained pathetically scarce.

They broke from their “tribe,” suffered ostracism and, in some cases, lost their jobs because they persistently denounced MAGA’s attacks on democracy and truth. Some former Trump aides (e.g., Cassidy Hutchinson), former state representatives (e.g., Arizona’s Russell “Rusty” Bowers) and lawyers from “team normal” (who willingly told their story to the House select committee investigating Jan. 6, 2021) all resisted.

[A] common pattern emerges: Resisters refused to put personal ambition above love of country. They entered politics with a code of conduct grounded in religious belief, patriotism or family heritage. Had they joined Trump, they would not have been able to sleep at night or explain themselves to their children and grandchildren.

Accommodation: Dictatorial regimes succeed not just by roping in enthusiastic collaborators. Without the equivocators and the moral relativists who try to stay out of their era’s overriding moral choice, evil regimes would falter. In that regard, many ex-Trump advisers remain mum about his unfitness. Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) voted not to impeach for the insurrection (and hence encouraged others not to break ranks), and GOP lawmakers frequently pretend they missed Trump’s latest tweet to avoid criticizing him.

“When challenged, they speak up only long enough to make excuses for Trump and engage in moral obfuscation over issues that they must certainly know are not remotely complicated,” the Atlantic’s Tom Nichols wrote. They thereby “create a permission structure for Trump supporters, to model how a reasonable person can dismiss Trump’s astounding disregard for the law and even for basic decency and yet still vote for him and other GOP candidates in the name of some greater good” (e.g., preventing “socialists” from ruining America).

The media’s habit of blurring the moral stakes makes accommodation easier. Media outlets that resort to false equivalences and values-neutral horse-race coverage prioritize obfuscation (dubbed “neutrality”) over truth-telling.

The most dangerous form of accommodation: No Labels and fringe candidates lure voters from the only candidate who can beat Trump (President Biden) while falsely denying they are spoilers for Trump.

Accommodators who think they can avoid history’s harsh judgment might consider how “moderate” White ministers whom the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. condemned in his “Letter From Birmingham Jail” were regarded. History scorns moral cowards for enabling evil. Trump accommodators will fare no better.

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