As a starting proposition, I am grateful my parents are not alive to see any of this.
Babies and mothers abducted and murdered, for the sin of being Jewish, and much of the world shrugging. Monsters disguised as men, spraying schools and places of worship with bullets. Swastikas and symbols of death being paraded through places where ordinary people live, with impunity. Science being denied, democracy being denuded, ignorance being celebrated.
And, now, the most powerful man on Earth — in just one month — upending Western civilization, demonizing allies, and forming a Satanic alliance with the fascistic, genocidal Russian regime.
It is a cliché to say that we are living through history. But this? This? This feels like what my parents must have felt, observing the rise of Nazism and Hitler, and wondering if it was ever going to get better. Wondering if it could all be actually happening.
Now, as then, it is probably a waste of time to speculate about the motivations of madmen. Is Donald Trump mentally ill? Is he fashioning a dictatorship? Is Putin blackmailing him with some decade-old footage taken one night at the presidential suite at Moscow’s Ritz Carlton Hotel?
The same sorts of questions were asked about Hitler and his ilk, and no one had the answer. So, then — as now — politicians and pundits sought to defend the indefensible. All of us are familiar with the symptoms of that disease: asserting that Donald Trump is right on borders or fentanyl or dairy products or banking or military spending, or whatever lie he conjures up to justify his psychopathy. As long as he has the right ideology, these Vichy Canadians believe, Trump’s thuggery is justifiable.
Except it isn’t, not ever. Three years ago this week, Russia invaded Ukraine. As my colleague Brian Lilley wrote in that fateful week: “In the coming days, Ukrainians will find out if the Western allies they’ve been turning towards for more than two decades will help them or once again leave them to fend for themselves … The people of Ukraine deserve better than this.”
They did, and they do. In the intervening three years, we did not send troops. But Canada, the United State and Europe delivered arms to Ukraine, offered it financial lifelines, and hit Putin’s regime with tough economic sanctions. All of it was starting to take a toll. By the fall of 2024, Russian troop losses were mounting — nearly 2,000 in a single day in November — and, as The Economist wrote in that same month, “The war in Ukraine is straining Russia’s economy and society.”
In November, Vladimir Putin was granted a reprieve. Donald Trump was elected to a second term, and he immediately got to work: deconstructing American democracy, gutting liberal trade relationships and dismantling the Western alliance of nations. And, now, absolving Russia.
As before, there are the useful idiots who always fool themselves into thinking that Trump is fooling. That he was not serious — about making Canada the 51st state, about using military power against allies in Denmark and Panama, about turning Gaza into a resort, about declaring economic war on every nation but Russia. That he was not going to cast off Ukraine, and ally himself with Russia.
But this week, Trump and his kleptocrats did just that. Trump bald-faced lied, and said that Ukraine had started the war, and he posted this online: “A Dictator without Elections, Zelenskyy better move fast or he is not going to have a Country left. In the meantime, we are successfully negotiating an end to the War with Russia, something all admit only ‘TRUMP,’ and the Trump Administration, can do.” It read like something on the wall of an asylum.
John Bolton, once a Trump national security adviser, called Trump’s words “some of the most shameful remarks ever made by a U.S. president.” Lindsey Graham, usually as sycophantic as the eunuch Trump chose as his Secretary of State, posted that “when it comes to blame for the Russian invasion of Ukraine, I blame Putin above all others.”
But none of that matters, or will. A madman is on the loose, and words have never deterred him. Our parents would find it all familiar. They would reassure us that, in the end, evil usually fails. Democracy and decency usually prevail.
But in the meantime, there will be blood.