TRUMP THE WEAKLING

            Throughout his “Let’s make America Great Again” campaign for the presidency, Trump repeatedly implied that President Obama had been weak in international affairs. The recent announcement by Trump at the Helsinki Summit that Russia and Putin did not interfere in the U.S. 2016 election was a craven act of pandering and appeasement far worse than anything done by Chamberlain at Munich. It is hard to say what drove Trump to this act of cowardice, but perhaps Putin has blackmail video evidence of Trump’s cavorting with bed-wetting prostitutes in Moscow.

            Trumps capitulation to Putin in Moscow gave rise to stunned response from both Democrats and Republicans. They are aware that the entire U.S. intelligence administration has found that the Russians did, in fact, hack-into and interfere with the 2016 election. Even conservative George Will asserted that Trump colluded with Putin during the 2016 election. Trump is contradicting every department of intelligence in the U.S. Government. For some personal reason, Trump is betraying his own intelligence departments and coming to the support of a Russian dictator who wants only the destruction of American democracy.

            When Neville Chamberlin gave-in to Hitler in Munich, he used as an excuse that surrendering the Sudetenland of Czechoslovakia to the German Wehrmacht was a way to maintain “Peace in our time.” Trump used the same kind of language to justify his spineless submission to Putin. In effect, he said that he would rather maintain the peace by having good relations with Russia than rely on the intelligence departments of his own government.    

It is hard to decipher the motive for Trump’s gutless proclamation. Surely it was not to preserve the peace. Chamberlain was at least trying to avoid war at a time when England was unprepared. Right now, the United States is militarily strong and certainly stronger than Russia. No, the reason for Trump’s treasonable behavior is probably either that Putin has good blackmail material on him, or that Trump has important financial relations with Putin and the Russian Oligarchs, or that Trump is obsessed with avoiding the claim that he won the election with Russia’s help.

            You would think that millions of Trump’s supporters would be chastened by this revelation of his weakness, but they did not vote for him on account of foreign affairs. They voted for Trump as a form of class conflict. They wanted him to attack the  educated elites who run the media, the universities, the professions, and other institutions which employ educated people. The very name given to the CIA, NSA, FBI, and other such governmental entities, “Intelligence,” forces the average uneducated blue collar voters to deal with something they do not have. Those same supporters also wanted him to confront African Americans, immigrants, and other minorities, a demand he has met to their satisfaction. If you include the anti-abortionist voters who care mainly about Trump’s appointment of Supreme Court justices, Trump supporters will continue to vote for him no matter what he does with Putin.

            One hopes that for some of the people who supported Trump simply because he was the Republican candidate, this act will make them realize that he is a fraud and that he will not make America great again. He will diminish the reputation of America so that nations around the world will neither rely on us nor fear us.