March 2, 2025

Sunday, March 2, 2025. Annette’s Roundup for Democracy.

Trump exacts revenge on the Ukrainian President who didn’t lie for him in July 2019.

My analysis.

Combine Trump’s desire for revenge, and his anger at Zelenskyy with the well-established and widespread recognition that Trump and Putin want to divide the world (think FDR, Churchill and Stalin at Yalta - see Gessen 👇) and we have a fuller answer about what happened on Friday.

Certainly Trump sees Zelenskyy as “disrespectful” because

1. Zelenskyy didn’t grovel during the infamous July 2019 call and offer fake proof to the world that the Bidens were corrupt.
2. Zelenskyy campaigned for Biden in 2024 and stood with Biden, thanked Biden, etc.
3. In 2025, Zelenskyy didn’t immediately accept Trump’s demand that he hand over rare mineral rights in Ukraine, but asked for security guarantees for Ukraine as well, and
4. Zelenskyy dared to show up in military garb on Friday rather than in a suit when meeting the almighty Trump.

Yes, Trump means it when he and Vance declared Zelenskyy hasn’t “been grateful enough.” Has Zelenskyy held a press conference to tell the world how great Trump is? Yes, this is about a socio-path’s notion of “respect.”

True, as Jonathan Chait of the Atlantic thinks, Trump also just “likes Putin more.”

Putin a “strong man,” “ a “smart” man, a dictator who helped him out in the 2016 election. A role model for Trump.

But the Trump-staged ambush on Zelenskyy was set up to validate what we should expect next.

NATO will now admit Ukraine. This is the trap that Trump has set.

Trump will then use Ukraine’s admission as a reason to have the US quit NATO - “NATO is disrespecting us,” admitting a man who already “disrespected” us.

Trump will next make public a deal between the United States and Russia.

Expect Putin to execute a full scale military take-over of Ukraine while agreeing to share mineral rights with Trump. Both Putin and Trump believe that the European nations won’t take action.

What will the 2nd Step be? Trump moving forward to take over Panama, Greenland and Canada? Will he put American troops on the Canadian border?

I don’t know.

Who can guess with a man, so crazy, driven only by power and money.

But I wouldn’t be surprised.
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Here is Jonathan Chait’s more moderate analysis.👇

The Real Reason Trump berated Zelensky.

He simply likes Vladimir Putin better.

By Jonathan Chait.

Of the many bizarre and uncomfortable moments during today’s Oval Office meeting between Donald Trump, J. D. Vance, and Volodymyr Zelensky—during which Trump finally shattered the American alliance with Ukraine—one was particularly revealing: What, a reporter asked, would happen if the cease-fire Trump is trying to negotiate were to be violated by Russia? “What if anything? What if a bomb drops on your head right now?” Trump spat back, as if Russia violating a neighbor’s sovereignty were the wildest and most unlikely possibility, rather than a frequently recurring event.

Then Trump explained just why he deemed such an event so unlikely. “They respect me,” he thundered. “Let me tell you, Putin went through a hell of a lot with me. He went through a phony witch hunt, where they used him and Russia. Russia, Russia, Russia, you ever hear of that deal? … It was a phony Democrat scam. He had to go through it. And he did go through it.”

Trump seems to genuinely feel that he and Vladimir Putin forged a personal bond through the shared trauma of being persecuted by the Democratic Party. Trump is known for his cold-eyed, transactional approach, and yet here he was, displaying affection and loyalty. (At another point, Trump complained that Zelensky has “tremendous hatred” toward Putin and insisted, “It’s very tough for me to make a deal with that kind of hate.”) He was not explaining why a deal with Russia would advance America’s interests, or why honoring it would advance Russia’s. He was defending Russia’s integrity by vouching for Putin’s character.

In recent years, the kinship between Trump and Putin has become somewhat unfashionable to point out. After Robert Mueller disappointed liberals by failing to prove a criminal conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia, conventional wisdom on much of the center and left of the political spectrum came to treat the scandal as overblown. But even the facts Mueller was able to produce, despite noncooperation from Trump’s top lieutenants, were astonishing. Putin dangled a Moscow building deal in front of the Trump Organization worth hundreds of millions of dollars, and Trump lied about it, giving Putin leverage over him. Trump’s campaign chair, Paul Manafort, was in business with a Russian intelligence officer. Russia published hacked Democratic emails at a time when they were maximally useful to Trump’s campaign, and made another hacking attempt after he asked it on television to find missing emails from Hillary Clinton. The pattern of cooperation between Trump and Putin may not have been provably criminal, but it was extraordinarily damning.

Conservatives have invested even more heavily in denying any basis for the Trump-Russia scandal. A handful of MAGA devotees have openly endorsed Russian propaganda, but more Republicans have explained away Trump’s behavior as reflecting some motivation other than outright sympathy for Moscow: He is transactional, he is a nationalist, he admires strength and holds weakness in contempt.

And it is all true: Trump does admire dictators. He does instinctively side with bullies over victims. He does lack any values-based framework for American foreign policy. But many Republicans who acknowledged these traits nonetheless believed that Trump could be persuaded to stay in Ukraine’s corner. They were wrong. The reason they were wrong is that, in addition to his generalized amorality, Trump exhibits a particular affection for Putin and Russia.

Immediately after Zelensky left the Oval Office, Trump posted to Truth Social, “I have determined that President Zelenskyy is not ready for Peace if America is involved.” The clear implication is that the United States will cut off its support for the Ukrainian war effort. Trump’s allies have already tried to foist the blame for that momentous decision onto Zelensky. Trump “felt disrespected” by the Ukrainian leader’s body language and argumentative manner, White House officials told Fox News. “Zelensky was in a terrible position,” National Review editor in chief Rich Lowry acknowledged on X, “but he never should have gotten sucked into making argumentative points.” And, he added, “he should have worn a suit.”

All of this ignores the much more plausible explanation of what happened today: It was a setup. Trump and Vance appear to have entered the meeting with the intention of berating Zelensky and drawing him into an argument as a pretext for the diplomatic break. Why should anyone have expected anything different? Trump has been regurgitating Russian propaganda, not only regarding Ukraine, since before Zelensky even assumed office. In 2018, the year preceding Zelensky’s election, he defended Russia’s seizure of Crimea; he has repeatedly refused to acknowledge Russian guilt for various murders; and he has even stuck to Russian talking points on such idiosyncratic topics as the Soviets’ supposedly defensive rationale for invading Afghanistan in 1979 and their fear that an “aggressive” Montenegro would attack Russia, dragging NATO into war.

Republican Russia-hawks hoped they could bring Trump around by getting Ukraine to sign a deal handing over a portion of its mineral wealth to the United States. Instead, Trump announced that the mineral deal was dead. This, too, would be a strange move if his motives were purely transactional, but a very understandable one if his motives were to abandon Ukraine to Putin’s tender mercies.

Even today, Trump’s bullying commenced well before Zelensky had opened his mouth. Trump greeted his counterpart on the White House driveway with condescending mockery, pointing at him and telling onlookers, “He’s all dressed up today,” like Bill Batts in Goodfellas belittling Joe Pesci’s character. (“Hey, Tommy, all dressed up!”) Zelensky’s attire—the Ukrainian president wears military attire, not a suit, to remind the world that his country is at war—has been a fixation on the right, and conservatives have seized upon it as a pretext to blame him for Trump’s anger. Oddly, they did not seem to mind that Elon Musk showed up at the White House this week in a T-shirt and baseball cap.

Might Zelensky have gotten a different outcome by taking Trump’s abuse and stream of lies with more self-abasement? Sure, it’s possible; if you reason backwards from a bad outcome, any different strategy is almost axiomatically smarter. Zelensky had no good options at the White House. He walked into an ambush with a president who empathizes with the dictator who wants to seize Ukraine’s territory. Everyone who spent years warning about Trump’s unseemly affinity for Putin had exactly this kind of disastrous outcome in mind. (the Atlantic)

M.Gessen.

Putin Is Ready to Carve Up the World. Trump Just Handed Him the Knife.

Washington and Moscow have been repairing relations at breakneck speed, comparable only to the speed at which the Trump administration is breaking things at home. After meeting with Secretary of State Marco Rubio in Saudi Arabia on Feb. 18, the Russian foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, said the two sides had resolved to “eliminate impediments” to improving bilateral relations, a phrasing that sent chills down the spines of Russian exiles — myself included — who have sought what at the time seemed like safe harbor in the United States.

Of course, Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, has his sights set on much more than a bunch of political exiles. And his negotiations with President Trump about Ukraine are not just about Ukraine. Putin wants nothing less than to reorganize the world, the way Joseph Stalin did with the accords he reached with Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill in the Crimean city of Yalta in February 1945. Putin has wanted to carve the globe up for a long time. Now, at last, Trump is handing him the knife.

How do I know Putin wants this? Because he has said so. In fact, he, Lavrov and a cadre of Kremlin propagandists and revisionist historians haven’t shut up about Yalta for more than a decade. After illegally annexing Crimea in 2014, Putin addressed a gathering celebrating the 70th anniversary of the accords; it culminated in the unveiling of a monument to the three Allied leaders.

His reverence for the Yalta accords goes beyond the glorification of the once-mighty Soviet Union and its leader Stalin; he believes that the agreement those three heads of state struck — with the Soviet Union keeping three Baltic States it had annexed as well as parts of Poland and Romania, and later securing domination over six Eastern and Central European countries and part of Germany — remains the only legitimate framework for European borders and security.

In February, as Russia celebrated the accords’ 80th anniversary, and prepared to sit down with the Trump administration, Lavrov and the official Russia historians reiterated this message in article after article.

This week, Alexander Dugin, a self-styled philosopher who has consistently supplied Putin with the ideological language to back up his policies, sat down for a long interview with Glenn Greenwald, the formerly leftist American journalist. Dugin affably explained why Russia invaded Ukraine: because it wanted and needed to reclaim its former European holdings but realistically could attempt to occupy only Ukraine. He also laid out potential pathways to ending the war. At the very least, he said, Russia would require a partition, demilitarization and denazification of Ukraine. He was purposefully using the language the Allies applied to Germany in Yalta.

On X, where Dugin has been hyperactive in the last weeks, he is even bolder. In the lead-up to elections last week in Germany, he posted, “Vote AfD or we will occupy Germany once more and divide it between Russia and USA.” (A German journalist friend sent me a screenshot asking if the post was real — German journalists are less accustomed to the unimaginable than Russian ones.)

President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine understands the enormity of the threat, not only to his country but to Europe, for which Ukraine has served as a deadly buffer zone. But on Friday, when he tried to talk about this threat during an Oval Office meeting, Trump and Vice President JD Vance became furious. They yelled at him, demanding that he acknowledge his powerlessness and grovel in gratitude. The talks collapsed.

What happens to Ukraine now? Before Zelensky’s visit to Washington, the best-case scenario was for Russia to agree to a cease-fire in exchange for the roughly 20 percent of Ukrainian territory that it currently occupies. That would leave millions of Ukrainian citizens — those who live in the occupied territories and those who have been displaced east — under the rule of Russian totalitarianism. Now that outcome, which was never likely to begin with, appears all but impossible. We are now in the realm of the worst-case scenario, in which it is possible to imagine Putin launching a renewed offensive against Ukraine, aimed at total domination, this time with the active assistance of the United States.

Putin doesn’t just want a return to the 20th century. He already resides there, and that is where anyone looking for what could happen next should turn. Specifically to 1938, when the British prime minister Neville Chamberlain, who fancied himself a brilliant negotiator and an expert in all things, brokered an agreement that gave Hitler Sudetenland, an area of Czechoslovakia. In exchange, the rest of Europe would, ostensibly, be safe from German aggression. A year after the resulting Munich Agreement was signed, of course, Germany invaded Poland and World War II officially began.

When Trump, fuming, threatened Zelensky with the potential for World War III, he may have been drawing a more accurate historical parallel than he realized.

What happens if Russia unleashes its aggression against Europe, unchecked or even aided by the United States? The exact contours of the looming catastrophe are impossible to predict. It will not look like the bipolar world of the second half of the 20th century. But just as certainly, it will not look like the world in which we have been living and in which the populations of most of the world’s wealthy countries have felt safe.

I am reminded of reading about the lives of exiles in Paris in the 1930s. German Jews and Communists, who had run for their lives, watched as the world reshuffled itself. Political parties that used to be antifascist flipped overnight, assuming positions that ranged from appeasement to a full embrace. French and British leaders looked away as Hitler tested his strength outside Germany. As antifascism was marginalized, antisemitism became mainstream. Hitler’s victims were blamed for their own misfortune.

Most days now, I touch base with Russian or Belarusian friends in exile who are experiencing a terrifying sort of déjà vu. We are perhaps more shocked than our American friends are by the speed with which the very rich and powerful, like The Washington Post’s owner, Jeff Bezos, have become enablers of Trumpism, and how the air itself seems to change, until suddenly it’s Zelensky, with his cleareyed vision and firm principles, who seems like an anomaly.

We’ve seen it all before, and that is one of the reasons we are shocked: We’ve seen how it ends. Another is that we didn’t expect to see this happen in the United States. We thought that our countries were particularly vulnerable to political warping because of their decades-long histories of totalitarianism. “It was nice to know that there was one country where the people in charge were, if not likable, then at least sane,” is how the young Russian exile Ksenia Mironova put it. More than that, it was nice to think that the society was sane.

A 26-year-old journalist who was forced to flee Russia in the middle of the night three years ago, whose fiancé is in a prison colony serving a 22-year sentence for high treason, who passed through six countries before finding shelter in New York in a film program, Mironova used to think it was just her bad luck to be born in Russia. Now, increasingly, it looks like this world was an unlucky place to be born into. At the start of her spring semester, Mironova received an email informing her that her funding had been cut off as a result of one of Trump’s executive orders. Where should she go? Returning to Russia is not an option. If Trump sides with Putin the United States won’t be, either.

“And even Mars is going to be colonized by Musk,” Mironova said. (M.Gessen, Op-ed, The New York Times).
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One more thing.

Marco Rubio interview. The first time Breitbart made the Roundup. They can thank “little Marco.”

I thought we should hear what he says.

Exclusive — Rubio Details How Trump Going on Offense Against China’s Belt and Road Initiative: ‘Big Story of 21st Century U.S.-China Relations’

WASHINGTON — Secretary of State Marco Rubio told Breitbart News exclusively that President Donald Trump and his administration are aiming to peel Russia off of China in much the same way former President Richard Nixon, during the Cold War, peeled China off of the Soviet Union.

“I don’t know if we’ll ever be successful completely at peeling them off of a relationship with the Chinese,” Rubio said when asked if Trump’s efforts to end the war in Ukraine are similar to Nixon’s famous moment of heading to China to curb the Soviet Union. “I also don’t think having China and Russia at each other’s neck is good for global stability because they’re both nuclear powers, but I do think we’re in a situation now where the Russians have become increasingly dependent on the Chinese and that’s not a good outcome either if you think about it.”

Rubio said that U.S-China relations will define this century, and as such, the better outcome for both the Russians and the Americans is that the Russians are not purely dependent on China as a “junior partner.”

“The big story of the 21st century is going to be U.S.-Chinese relations,” Rubio said. “If Russia becomes a permanent junior partner to China in the long term, now you’re talking about two nuclear powers aligned against the United States, and even ten years from now or five years from now, if this trend continues, we could find ourselves in a situation where whether Russia wants to improve its relations with the U.S. or not, they can’t because they’ve become completely dependent on the Chinese because we have cut them off. I don’t know if that’s a good outcome for us. What’s a better outcome for us is to have a relationship. We’re going to have competition and maybe even direct confrontation — not militarily I hope, but otherwise — with the Chinese because they’re doing all kinds of cheating and stealing when it comes to trade and economics. We’re going to have disagreements with the Russians, but we have to have a relationship with both. These are big, powerful countries with nuclear stockpiles. They can project power globally. I think we have lost the concept of maturity and sanity in diplomatic relations. Part of diplomatic relations is the ability to communicate with and manage through problems with other great powers around the world to avoid war and to avoid conflict. But I think having a situation where the Russians are permanently a junior partner to China, having to do whatever China says to do because they are dependent on them, I don’t think that’s a good outcome for Russia and it’s not a good outcome for America or for Europe or the world.

Rubio’s first foreign trip as Secretary of State was in the Western Hemisphere, to Panama. During his visit, he succeeded in convincing the Panamanian government to leave China’s Belt and Road Initiative. The Chinese use the Belt and Road Initiative as a tool to build a global hegemony, capturing less wealthy nations with debt diplomacy using loans and finance as a foreign policy and economic weapon. In Panama, where the Panama Canal is located, this Chinese effort severely threatened U.S. commerce because the Panama Canal is critical for the United States for a number of reasons.

Well, look, the Panama Canal was built by the United States, and we built it because without it, it would take days and days for us to get over to the Pacific and it’s a very important strategic situation for us,” Rubio told Breitbart News. “Unfortunately, Jimmy Carter gave it over to the Panamanians, and you wake up 20 years later and because of a bunch of issues including corruption, the Chinese basically own the two big ports — the Hutchison ports on both sides of the canal. So in a time of conflict, with those ports and all the other tentacles they have established in the canal, in a time of conflict, the Chinese could impede canal traffic. That’s the fear.”

“As President Trump likes to say,” he continuted, “we didn’t give the canal back to China — we gave it to Panama. So I think also, not the current president of Panama — who’s very pro-American — but under the previous president, the Panamanians abandoned Taiwan and took in all kinds of money and became more pro-China. And so it’s good that we have a partner there that’s more pro-American, and he did end Belt and Road Initiative, which is the first country in Latin America to end the Belt and Road Initiative. It’s good that they’re undertaking an audit of the Chinese companies that run those two ports. We’ll see how that audit turns out — I think they’re going to find some bad stuff there when they do that audit. So hopefully that will not be owned by them.”

While the U.S. has been playing defense like this against the Chinese Communist Party’s Belt and Road Initiative — convincing countries like Panama to leave it, or other countries to not join it — what has been lacking mostly until now is an offensive strategy against the Chinese hegemonic plan. Trump seems to be unlocking that, as he signed an agreement with the Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi to further pursue what is called the India-Middle East-Europe-Economic Corridor (IMEC), which seeks to build economic and diplomatic trade routes from the Far East in India through the Middle East then into Europe through Cyprus and Greece.

“I think there’s more big deals like that coming under President Trump,” Rubio said when asked about IMEC and the India deal that Trump and Modi signed. “It’s interesting because I know you always read that President Trump is an isolationist. No, no — he’s not an isolationist. President Trump, what he wants, is America to be respected again in the world and for our interests to be defended all over the world. It is not in our interest to live in a world, particularly in a hemisphere we call home, surrounded by countries that have taken on loans and debt from China that put them at China’s mercy. China loans you all this money and you can’t pay them back so now they hold this over your head and you have to vote with them at the U.N., and you have to do whatever it is they tell you to do. In the direction we were going, we were going to wake up one day and realize the Chinese were setting up naval bases in the Western Hemisphere from where they can threaten us, we were going to wake up and realize that they were the dominant trading partner with all the countries that are our neighbors. So what President Trump has a desire to do, and I think you see the work already beginning to reverse all of that, it’s not just in the hemisphere we call home but also around the world, like in the Indo-Pacific. We have allies over there like Japan, South Korea, the Phillipines, Australia, India obviously. These are countries that don’t want to live in an Indo-Pacific dominated by China where they are considered vassal states. They want the U.S. to remain their partners. They want us to remain engaged and involved. Under President Trump, that’s what we’re doing, from a position of strength not from a position of weakness.”

For IMEC to succeed, the Abraham Accords would need to further materialize and see Saudi Arabia finally join, as well as other Arab nations in the Gulf. Of course, the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians in Gaza after October 7 undermined that for the time being, but as the hostage release deal and ceasefire has held, the hopes for a bigger, longer-lasting solution for Gaza have gotten stronger. In addition to unlocking deals throughout the Middle East to connect the Far East to Europe, European partners like Greece and Cyprus have expressed immense interest in seeing this IMEC trade corridor through to completion. A recent panel that Breitbart News moderated at the Delphi Forum in Washington, DC, hosted by the Hellenic American Leadership Council saw both the deputy foreign ministers of Greece and Cyprus excited at the prospects of expanded dealmaking with Trump back in the White House. What is more, the fact that Rubio’s meeting with his Russian counterpart Sergey Lavrov happened in Riyadh in Saudi Arabia seems like no accident — aimed at greasing the skids for eventual partnerships and deals with not just the Russians but also the Saudis.

“In the case of that, I would say the Saudis have been a good partner of the United States,” Rubio told Breitbart News. “The Crown Prince is making tremendous progress in that country. Think about it: At that meeting, you had the three largest oil producers in the world theoretically in the United States, Saudi Arabia, and Russia meeting, and we talk about energy and how important energy is to the future. I think under President Trump, what you’re going to have is a foreign policy of strength, a foreign policy that rewards our friends and makes it costly to be America’s enemy and to try to undermine us. I think you’re going to have a foreign policy and an economic policy where you’re not going to be taken advantage of anymore. For a long time, our foreign policy was completely devoid in thinking about the national interest. We thought our job was to be some sort of global government. We’re not a global government. We’re the government of the United States. Our number one priority needs to be our national interest. That needs to be defined. You have to define what it is. Then every policy and every dollar you spend by the way in foreign aid has to be in furtherance of that national interest. I think that’s the kind of common sense President Trump is bringing back to foreign policy and that we’re trying to do here at the State Department.”

Rubio also in this part of the interview noted several other successes the U.S. has had with Panama in Trump’s first month in office, from cybersecurity to controlling migration.

“It’s great that last week the Admiral than runs Southern Command visited Panama and signed a cyber agreement because Panama is very concerned that the Chinese and others may have created cyber intrusions that threaten the stability of the canal,” Rubio said. “So these are all positive developments. And on top of that, they took back three or four hundred migrants that they sent from third countries — not Panamanian, but third countries. They were flown to Panama and then sent to a camp in the Darien Gap, and about half of them have already been sent out to their original country of origin. These are people that were in America and were not Panamanian, but we wanted to get them out of the United States so they went to Panama and then from Panama, they went to their countries of origin, their original countries. We hope that the rest will be able to migrate back to their country of origin. Interestingly, additionally, there were a bunch of migrants halfway to the U.S. when President Trump took over — they got the news that Joe Biden is no longer in the White House and migration into the U.S. is no longer going to be allowed in an illegal way, they’ve done a U-turn and now they find themselves back in Panama. Panama is asking us to help facilitate getting them back to their home countries. They have like 500 Venezuelans trying to get back to Venezuela. So this is all good. I think you’ve seen illegal migration numbers collapse in the last four weeks since President Trump took over. I think we’ve been able to end the sort of mass migration crisis at the border. Now, we have to keep it that way, and we have to deal obviously with the people who are here illegally especially the violent criminals. They’re very dangerous people.” (Part 1. Breitbart).

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This ‘n that.

From the late Senator John McCain’s chief of staff, speaking about Lindsey Graham and his support of the bully Trump. 👇

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I will take the rest of today off. I suspect we all need a rest from the news. I do. This is all so sad.

I will see you on Tuesday.

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