Trump's False Attacks on Ukraine Dishonor Our Nation - Rob Horowitz
Rób Horowitz, MINDSETTER™
Trump's False Attacks on Ukraine Dishonor Our Nation - Rob Horowitz
The outrageous and blatantly false claim that President Zelensky started the war was only one of Mr. Trump’s series of obvious untruths about the roles of Ukraine and Russia in the conflict. He spent all last week launching a firehose of falsehoods that not only pleased President Putin; they would have made the old Soviet leaders who invented the propaganda technique proud.
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Parroting Russian talking points, President Trump, for example, claimed that Zelensky’s approval rating in Ukraine was only 4%, when in the most recent poll, it was 63%. In other words, Zelensky is far more popular in Ukraine than Trump is in the United States.
Similarly, Trump called Zelensky a “dictator without elections” even though he was popularly elected in 2019 to a 5-year term and has postponed elections in accordance with the Ukrainian Constitution. which specifically bans conducting an election when the nation is under martial law. This is a decision that is supported by the overwhelming majority of the Ukrainian people, according to opinion polls.
At the same time, Mr. Trump continues to refuse to give that label to Vladmir Putin, though it is beyond any shadow of a doubt that he is a dictator This is in keeping with Mr. Trump’s refusal to criticize the Russian president for his naked attempt to take a sovereign nation by force just because he believed—mistakenly as it has turned out--that he had the military power to easily do so.
The president and his allies also continue to advance the self-serving fiction that the only reason the Russians are coming to the negotiating table is because of Donald Trump. Putin is willing to negotiate because the brave Ukrainians, bolstered by American and European military equipment, have cost nearly 100,000 Russian soldiers their lives, significantly degraded Russian military capacity, and successfully denied the Russian leader his goal of conquering their entire nation. After 3 years of fighting, conquest of Ukraine remains an elusive and distant Russian dream. In fact, Putin would have come to the table sooner, but he was waiting to see if Trump---who he views as an easy mark--was going to win the election.
Watching the spectacle of top members of Trump’s national security team---all of whom know better--twist themselves into pretzels to avoid contradicting the president’s blatant falsehoods would be amusing if the issue was less important. Perhaps even more embarrassing are allies of the president explaining his indefensible actions and comments away by saying it is part of some high-level negotiating strategy that is the equivalent of 3-dimensional chess.
In Donald Trump’s first term, he drove perceptions of the United States around the world to near-record lows, according to opinion polls. This past week, however, is likely to drive world opinion to an all-time low. Both allies and adversaries are watching and they and their publics' --with the possible exception of the Russian public--all know what our president is saying is blatantly false. They also know he is abandoning the democratic values that we have stood for, admittedly imperfectly, sending a message of weakness to our adversaries and of unreliability to our allies.
Ukraine’s unwillingness to sign on to a one-sided mineral deal that contained no security guarantees is evidently what spurred Mr. Trump’s ire. Trump’s new attempt to shakedown Mr. Zelensky has a familiar ring for all who followed his first impeachment trial. This time, his reaction to Mr. Zelensky’s desire for a fairer deal is all too characteristic of a second-rate mob boss, not the supposed leader of the free world.
Past presidents have driven hard, but reasonable bargains with our allies to limit conflicts or sometimes bring them to an end. One can do so without repeatedly looking the American people and the rest of the world in the eye and telling blatant and harmful untruths. One can do so without giving aid and comfort to a brutal dictator.
Last week, Donald Trump truly made it hard, in the words of the Lee Greenwood song, which I like almost as much as the president does, to “be proud to be an American.” In his false attacks on President Zelensky and Ukraine, he dishonored our nation, doing lasting damage to our reputation as a force for good around the world.