Columbia University, Antisemitism, and Free Speech

Posted on March 15, 2025 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, March 15, 2025

I began my undergraduate career at Columbia University as a naïve, seventeen-year-old Jewish kid from Brooklyn. In 1960, Columbia was an elite university, an Ivy League school ranked with Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, and the University of Chicago. Being in New York, it was always a mecca for protests and demonstrations. Fifteen years after the end of World War 2, the Cold War was already underway, and the Soviet Union had forged ahead of the United States in the space race. With misplaced fears that whoever controlled near-Earth space would have a huge military advantage, young people were mostly concerned with avoiding a nuclear war.

Columbia believed in free expression; years before Civil Rights became law, the university supported diversity and enlightened free speech. It was my first exposure to a world in which I felt free to speak out against things I disagreed with. It was mind-expanding and freeing in a way I’d never known before. In the early sixties, our campus protests focused on the ROTC program, which in retrospect seems kind of silly, but that isn’t the point. The three thousand young men who attended Columbia College were learning in real time what it meant to grow up in America.  

We were also learning about finding a balance between freedom of expression and personal responsibility. It was okay to be angry and express our anger in speeches and marches. It was not okay to destroy public property or injure people. It was also not okay to march and protest but not listen to what the other side had to say. To be honest, it was also fun, until October 16, 1962, when our play-acting at solving real world issues ran into the Cuban missile crisis. The campus where we had marched and given voice to whatever we disagreed with was suddenly a scene of more than a thousand terrified young people listening to our transistor radios to find out if we were about to be nuked.

The obvious incompetence and lack of transparency with which the Kennedy administration handled that crisis changed everything, and our attention switched to our growing involvement in the mess the French left us in Vietnam. Fears of a guerilla war in Asia began to dominate campus protests, and in the years after I left Columbia, a protest movement instigated by the radical Weather Underground and Students for a Democratic Society, led by Mark Rudd, took shape.

In 1968, students occupied campus buildings and completely disrupted the business of the university. They were angered by the school’s military research which they believed was supporting the growing war in Vietnam and by alleged instances of racial segregation. The university showed great restraint, at first, but eventually had to ask the NYPD to clear the campus. The university adhered to its support of free speech, taking action only after the demonstrations prevented it from functioning.

After students attempting to defend the university blockaded the protestors, police used tear gas to break up the demonstrations, resulting in 150 injuries, including twelve police officers. Compare that to the current protests by Palestinian activists angry over the war in Gaza. They were loud and intense, resulting in many Jewish students and faculty feeling unsafe on campus. It was an ugly, regrettable scene that re-opened religious and ethnic wounds that go back two thousand years. Antisemitism is not new. Neither is the plight of Palestinians who have fallen prey to Islamic terrorist groups.

Columbia became the focus of protests at universities all over the country, but it’s essential to remember that compared to 1968, what happened at Columbia in 2025 was relatively benign. The larger problem is a President who is mad with power, who believes he has the right to tell schools and universities what they are allowed to teach, who is using the unfortunate situation around Palestinian grievances to further his autocratic agenda. As awful as the events of 1968 were, no one in Lyndon Johnson’s White House attempted to abridge the principle of free speech on which our society is based.

That is precisely the issue here. Antisemitism, while awful, has little or nothing to do with Trump’s attempt remake American values, and American Jews would be foolish to believe Trump’s actions are about protecting them. Trump only believes in free speech if the speaker agrees with him. Restricting free speech is the surest way to destroy America.

Let’s ask America’s first Jewish Supreme Court Justice, Louis Brandeis, what he thinks. Brandeis wrote that only a dire emergency justified restricting free speech. He believed that until such time as there is an overt threat of violence, “the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence…[and] we have nothing to fear from the demoralizing reasonings of some, if others are left to demonstrate their errors and especially when the law stands ready to punish…criminal act[s].”  “[F]reedom to think as you will and to speak as you think are…indispensable to the discovery and spread of political truth.”

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How to Survive 2025

Posted on March 13, 2025 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, March 13, 2025

Most Americans are so distressed over Donald Trump’s actions, they won’t watch newscasts, and they shun political discussions. But turning into ostriches won’t save our nation from slipping into fascism and autocracy. We need to remain informed, whether we’re directly engaged or not, and remaining informed includes distinguishing truth from fiction, lies, and fantasies.

It’s also important to not exaggerate problems or succumb to thinking they’re insurmountable. They’re not. That’s an illusion Trump’s strategists choreographed by flooding the ether with so much chaff, no one can tell what’s a real threat and what is just a distraction. We must learn to tell the difference. Trump’s game has always been to create sufficient confusion and chaos that his victims and adversaries don’t know what to defend or when to fight back.

Don’t fall into that trap. Pick your battles and try to ignore everything else. We can’t defend against every potential threat – that’s what Trump wants us to do. The painful truth is that solving crisis situations must start with triage. Doctors and first responders do it every day. Trump is going to do a lot of damage and hurt a lot of people. He is going to create terrible turmoil as he tries to dismantle the protections average Americans depend on from their government. That’s unavoidable.

Trump tells the media we have to absorb some pain. He admitted that bringing the price of eggs down was a lie to buy votes – I paid $8.99 for a dozen Sauder’s eggs, yesterday – and he told Maria Bartiromo of Fox Business he’s okay with his policies resulting in a recession, but it will all be worth it in the end. To beat him, we’ll use his own argument against him.

Corporate CEOs and economists keep telling us Trump’s insistence that he’s making America richer is utter nonsense, though saying richer instead of stronger or better reveals his real intentions. The more likely end result is that he’ll permanently damage both our economy and our country. But his argument makes perfect sense for the rest of us. We will undoubtedly suffer pain in 2025, but that pain is a necessary price to pay if we’re ever to rid ourselves of the dangerous, fascist, isolationist populism Trump preaches.

If you want your mental health to survive this year, you need only discipline your thinking. Don’t let fear and anxiety drive you. If you feel like you’re drowning in the confusion Trump creates, do what you would do if you woke up from a nightmare feeling that way. Remind yourself that it’s just a dream – you’re not really drowning, and most of what you hear and read is just propaganda designed to make you feel that way. Neither are you helpless against MAGA craziness; they want you to think you’re weak and defenseless.

Most important, remember that Trump has no regard for laws, regulations, morality, common decency, or the Constitution. He considers all those things annoying hindrances to his personal agenda, and that will be his undoing in the end. As Jim Carville said last week, I believe Trump has about eight months to try to remake our government in his autocratic, greed-based image. His approval rate is slipping, down from 52% when he was inaugurated to 43% seven weeks later. When his trade war re-ignites inflation, puts farmers out of business, closes factories, and creates impossible supply chain delays, that number is certain to drop into the thirties.

We may not care about Trump’s approval rating, but a few dozen people who are critical to the success of the Project 2025 script do. Every House Republican in a swing district is already dreading the midterms. As voter anger mounts, especially as Trump’s trade war impacts his base far more than the rest of us, those Representatives will do what they always do: act entirely in their own self-interest, and their first priority is being re-elected in 2026. They will have to choose between loyalty to Trump, a man who routinely stabs anyone he considers insufficiently loyal in the back, and responding to voters ready to reject MAGA. What do you think they’ll choose? And if, as Carville suggests, Virginia voters, who include 150,000 angry government employees and thousands of underserved veterans, elect a Democratic Governor in November, it will be game over for Trump’s agenda.

As I was writing this, federal “Judge William J. Alsup of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California…ordered six federal agencies to rehire thousands of workers with probationary status who had been fired as part of President Trump’s government-gutting initiative.” That’s just the latest of a rapidly growing number of court decisions that are telling Trump he won’t get away with tearing up our Constitution.

Hang in there. The game has just begun.

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Does the Fate of the World Hang on a Grudge?

Posted on February 28, 2025 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, February 28, 2025

Just when we thought it couldn’t get worse, the arrogant, insulting behavior of President Trump and Vice President Vance in their White House ambush of Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky illustrated how quickly hope can turn to terrified despair. That’s surely what 40 million Ukrainians must be feeling, not to mention the leaders of our former allies in western Europe. You can watch and listen to it here.

The appalling dressing down of the president of a sovereign nation that has been brutally attacked for three years by Russia, captured live before the entire world is unprecedented. The clowns our country elected to govern us last November have no class and even less sense of history. Can you imagine Franklin Roosevelt or Charles deGaulle addressing the president of Poland, Ignacy Mościcki that way as Hitler’s military was bombing his country? To most of Europe, Vladimir Putin’s determination to recreate the Soviet Union looks very much like a replay of the lead-up to World War II.

Zelensky tried to make that point today, on camera, as French President Emanuel Macron and British Prime Minister Keir Starmer did earlier this week in separate meetings with Trump. What an embarrassing, frightening spectacle. The leaders of two nuclear powers whose soldiers have shed blood alongside our own in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan, and who stood with us in complete solidarity after 9-11, had to bow their heads and bend their knees to a narcissistic wannabe emperor. It’s what might happen if a spiteful child somehow got control of our ICBM launch codes, and the rest of the world had to tiptoe on eggshells to pacify him.

Much of the MAGA crowd will cheer their heroes for today’s performance. The remaining real Republicans in Congress, and all the rest of us, however, will look on in horror. Our mentally ill president is simply acting out a personal grudge against Zelensky.  It was Zelensky who refused to let Trump blackmail him into framing Hunter Biden, and whose resistance baited Trump into attempting a public shakedown of the Ukrainian president, which resulted in Trump’s first impeachment. Trump’s fury and embarrassment over his own illegal action is what caused the resentment he showed today, because Trump cannot ever be seen to be wrong or weak.

I wonder if Trump ever read Gulliver’s Travels in school. If he did, the message didn’t sink in. Remember the story of Gulliver and the Lilliputians? Of the many moral lessons offered by Jonathan Swift, the one that made the most impression on me was that even if you’re a giant in a land of tiny people, if they unite against you, your size advantage won’t help you. Trump imagines himself a giant among world leaders. He thinks he can dictate not only to Americans but to the rest of the world. We knew his ego had no bounds, but even I never imagined a scene like the one in the video link.

Zelensky and the leaders of almost every NATO country view the war in Ukraine as an existential threat to the whole world. When they compare it to Hitler’s attempt to take over Europe, and the war that cost 40 million lives, their message is clear. Giving in to Putin and rewarding his aggression is the surest way to wind up fighting another major war in Europe. We’ve been taught all our lives to never give in to terrorists and bullies, because that simply tells them we’re afraid to defend ourselves.

Vice President Vance has never been a supporter of defending Ukraine against Russia. He wasn’t always a blind isolationist, but his conversion from a never-Trumper to an acolyte was on display before the world today. Did Trump and Vance orchestrate today’s spectacle, with Trump sitting back and pretending to hear Zelensky while Vance waited for the right moment to attack him verbally on camera? If that’s not what happened, Vance went rogue, and Trump couldn’t resist humiliating his guest..

The thought of Trump and Vance egging each other on, stroking each other’s need to be relevant is horrifying. Is the fate of the world in the hands of two people drunk on power, neither of whom has a realistic sense of history or our future? The only reason our allies put up with it is that we control most of the West’s nuclear arsenal.

Perhaps today was just a performance to humiliate Zelensky before the world, and once Trump’s ego is satisfied and Zelensky resigns, he’ll make a sensible deal with whomever succeeds him. But this clown show is no way to conduct diplomacy, and it puts us all at risk. Trump had the audacity to assert that in defending his country against Russia, Zelensky is leading us into World War III.

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James Carville on Responding to Trump

Posted on February 27, 2025 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, February 27, 2025

As long ago as the Reagan administrations, Republicans have argued that tax cuts and deregulation of the private sector would ultimately bring prosperity for all Americans. The last forty-five years, however, have shown that the trickle-down theory of economics never came close to delivering on that promise, and the primary beneficiaries of that theory were billionaires who became far wealthier than they were before, while the income gap between them and other Americans grew massively. Most of that wealth growth came at the expense of the other American taxpayers, who could ill afford it.

James Carville, the most astute political commentator Democrats have, understands that. He noted in a February 25th New York Times Op-Ed, that the things Trump’s first administration will be remembered for are massive tax cuts that added $2 trillion to our national debt, over 80% of which benefitted the wealthiest Americans; 500 miles of border wall; and a wrong-headed approach to COVID that sacrificed over a half-million American lives to fight against the lockdown that broke the back of the pandemic. That sacrifice was a vain attempt to protect corporate profits.

Carville noted that Trump is great at making promises to the disaffected, who then go out and vote for him. But when it comes to governing, in Carville’s words, Republicans suck. He said George H. W. Bush was so out of touch with how most Americans saw the economy, it cost him re-election. His son, George W. Bush, reacted to nine-eleven by getting us involved in a nearly twenty-year-long war in Iraq and Afghanistan, while sucking up to the Saudi regime that produced the nine-eleven terrorists. And Trump left our economy in a shambles that resulted in the awful inflation inherited by the Biden administration.

Carville also notes that as the second Trump administration attempts to blitz the opposition into submission and re-write our Constitution, Democrats have no clear leader and no legitimate way to slow down the Trump juggernaut. His advice is to not even try. He thinks Democrats should “play dead.” Try to fight back and you’ll look disorganized and inept. Trump holds all the political leverage right now.

There’s a chance the courts will stop Trump from committing some of the worst mayhem he’s attempting. Lower courts have slowed or stopped the implementation of the most obviously illegal and unconstitutional of Trump’s Executive Orders, but appellate courts may take a more conservative stance. Mitch McConnell finally realizes his legacy requires him to speak out against Trump’s policies, though he spent the last decade enabling all this, stacking those courts with right-wing judges. Too little too late? McConnell’s past actions could be what enables Trump to destroy our federal government.

Some look to the Supreme Court and its six to three conservative majority which includes the three justices Trump appointed to reverse Roe v. Wade. They place their faith in Conservative Chief Justice John Roberts to keep the court on a relatively nonpartisan path, but his action yesterday, allowing the decimation of USAID to continue, makes that look unlikely. Having eliminated every other way to combat Trump’s power grab, Carville looks to the voters to solve this mess.

The process of voter disaffection is already underway. Trump began this term with an approval rating of more than 50% for the first time in his political career, but in five weeks, his approval rating is back where it used to hover, around 43%. The drop seems based on fears that his promises on inflation were lies and that his Cabinet picks seem based on pledged loyalty to the president with little regard to qualifications or past accomplishments, and especially the illegal role given to Elon Musk.

Carville sees the alienation of Trump voters growing quickly and crashing his approval rating back into the thirties, where it sat for the last year of Trump’s first term. He suggested that could happen by the end of March, but almost surely by the end of April, citing massive federal job cuts and reductions in federal spending that must result in large private sector job losses. Voters will soon feel the inflationary impact of Trump’s tariffs, which will hurt red states, where the bulk of Trump’s support lives, most.

A few months of this, and Trump’s plummeting approval ratings will cost him his majorities in Congress, as the midterm elections loom. The cowards in Congress who show no inclination to stand up for their oaths still want to be re-elected in 2026. They’ll stab Trump in the back as readily as he turns on them when it suits him.

There’s a governor’s race in November in Virginia. Glenn Youngkind, who was elected in 2021 on an aggressive MAGA platform, cannot run for re-election in 2025 because Virginia’s constitution prohibits anyone from serving two consecutive terms. But Virginia is home to almost 150,000 federal workers who all feel the threat Trump poses. Carville suggests that if the Democrats win in Virginia in November, that will spell the end of Trump’s ability to move his agenda forward.

The good news is that Carville is right a lot more often than he’s wrong.

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Robot Umpires

Posted on February 24, 2025 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell. February 24, 2025

We all need a break from worrying about whether Donald Trump can upend our Constitution and become a virtual king. Since many Americans are in mourning and withdrawn since the Super Bowl, I’m focusing on baseball today. Specifically, on the arrival of robot umpires during Spring major league games.

Baseball needs this. Not as badly as football, but neither the NCAA nor the NFL seems inclined to make such a change. Ironically, it would be easy to fix the absolute worst thing about football: spotting the ball accurately at the end of a play. How many times have you seen a game turn on a “4th and inches” call? Referees can’t even place a football down within a couples of inches of where it should be after an incomplete pass or penalty.

At the end of a play that resembles a rugby scrum, like the fashionable Tush Push perfected by the Philadelphia Eagles, television cameras and observers in the coaches’ booths have no idea where the ball ended up, surely not within a critical couple of inches. How do we fix that? Place micro-transmitters in the ends of every football, and set up receiving antennas along both sidelines. Football is a high-profit business, so cost isn’t an issue. It’s not hard to find a transmitting frequency that’s not affected by a two-ton pile of humans.

Back to baseball. I was an umpire when my kids were growing up. I even taught umpire school, and I’d begin the course by asking: “Who can tell me what a strike is?” After a dozen or so wrong answers, I’d say: “A strike is anything the umpire says is a strike.” That sounds pretty arbitrary, because it is.

Anyone who watches baseball knows a good umpire is right more than 90% of the time, but if 250 pitches are thrown in a game, up to twenty are likely to be miscalled. Anyone who’s been an umpire knows it’s physically impossible to call every pitch accurately, especially pitches that touch one of the corners of that rectangle you see in every baseball telecast. It happens so often, baseball had to outlaw arguing over ball and strike calls. Anyone who challenges a pitch call is likely to be thrown out of the game.

Baseball players accept that umpires have their own strike zones. We frequently hear commentators say things like: “This guy has a high strike zone,” or “He’s a hitter’s umpire,” meaning his strike zone is smaller than usual, making it more difficult for the pitcher. On average, a human umpire’s strike zone averages, top to bottom, from 55.6% to 24.2% of a player’s height. The robotic Automated Ball-Strike System (ABS) always uses exactly the same strike zone, based on the precise height of the batter. The strike zone is always between 53.5% and 27.0% of the batter’s measured height. MLB provided the following chart to illustrate this:

Note that the average human-called strike zone tends to miss the four corners of the rectangle that defines the robot strike zone. That means batters will see more strikes called at the corners but fewer at the high and low extremes when robots are in full use. And scrappy players who bat from an exaggerated crouch may have to rethink that – ABS always assumes the batter is standing tall.

In 2006, I published a novel, The Portal, in which my main character was, among other things, a baseball star a hundred years in the future. I described a robot umpire in that book as “an inset metal box with identical dimensions [to home plate] that [lay] beneath it. The umpire worked by scanning a batter to create a three-dimensional strike zone as a hologram shimmering in the air. Microchips embedded in the artificial rawhide that covered the baseballs emitted cold sparks whenever they intersected the strike zone. No one argued with electronic umpires…”

I thought that was a pretty cool approach, but ABS uses a series of radars to accomplish the same thing. It’s been used in the minor leagues for a couple of years, but in 2025, robot umpires are being debuted in Spring major league games. Human umpires will call balls and strikes, but this Spring, each team gets to challenge two pitches in each game. If the ABS sides with the challenger, the team is awarded another potential challenge. Only batters, catchers, and pitchers may challenge an umpire’s call.

Robot umpires will change the game considerably. For example, human umpires vary their strike zones depending on the batter’s count and the game situation. Historical data show that on average a human umpire’s strike zone, (the rounded red shape in the figure,) ranges from 412 square inches to 550 square inches. Strike zones get smaller when a batter’s count has more strikes, larger, when it has more balls. ABS’ strike zone is always 443 square inches, much smaller than the average human strike zone, which should favor hitters.

If you’re a baseball fan, this will be a welcome added dimension to the game. But even if you’re not, isn’t this more fun than watching Donald Trump create mayhem?

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What Voters Think After Trump’s First Month

Posted on February 22, 2025 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, February 22, 2025

Because he has dominated our media and our attention for almost ten years, it feels like Donald Trump has been president forever, although in this incarnation it’s only been a month. The only president in the modern era who had a first-hundred-day agenda as aggressive as Trump’s was Franklin Roosevelt in 1933. FDR inherited a nation drowning in the throes of The Great Depression, but he never used phrases like “Make America Great Again.” He simply did it because America was in grave danger of collapsing, and the rest of the world was spinning out of control due to the rise of Communism and Fascism. Trump’s motivations are greed, megalomania, and avenging personal grudges.

Another thing about FDR, from Trump’s point of view, is that it was his being elected four times that resulted in the 22nd amendment that limits a president to two terms. Trump has been publicly salivating about repealing the amendment, ignoring it, or finding a loophole around it. One idea floated by MAGA extremists is having someone else run for president in 2028 with Trump as his running mate. If they won, the new president would resign, and Trump would again be elevated to the presidency. The 22nd amendment only specifies that someone may only be elected to that office twice.

Before we begin anointing Trump to a Putin-style imperial presidency, let’s not forget that contrary to MAGA claims, America does not have rigged elections. Voters can be slow to realize the true nature of a politician, but they eventually get it right. There are many reasons Trump won in 2024, but the mandate he claims to have received doesn’t exist. He won primarily because America is not ready to elect a woman as president, especially a woman of color. Kamala Harris received fifteen million fewer votes that Joe Biden did in 2020, running on a platform very like the one Biden used to revive our economy, return inflation to acceptable levels, and reduce unemployment to its lowest rate since WW2.

A month into Trump’s second term, we’re starting to see polling results about how the voters perceive his words and actions. Addressing Republican governors last week, Trump asserted that he had “unheard of” approval ratings of 69% and 71%. Whether that’s a lie or a delusional fantasy, those numbers are false. The most respected polling organizations have now released his voter approval/disapproval ratings after one month in office. According to NBC News, the results are:

To place these numbers in perspective, Trump’s approval numbers were initially higher than in the first month of his first term, but they are the lowest any president has had since 1953  by an average of fifteen percentage points. In late December, Americans felt optimistic about Trump’s return to power by 52%-48%. After a month of watching his actions in office, they are now pessimistic by 54%-46%, a six point drop in less than two months.

There are more specific polling results that show, after a month in office, Trump is underwater with voters in several key areas. They fear his aggressive attempts to increase his own power and disregard Congress. They feel lied to about inflation, which he promised he would reduce to pre-pandemic levels (they had already dropped to pre-pandemic levels under Biden.) Majorities of polled voters are afraid of Elon Musk’s influence on Trump and oppose the politically motivated shutdown of federal agencies with the loss of hundreds of thousands of jobs, a large percentage of which are held by veterans. Voters oppose abandoning NATO and Ukraine, and a significant majority oppose Trump’s plan to take over Gaza and relocate 2.2 million Palestinians.

An issue that could dominate polls in coming months is a growing awareness among average voters that Trump’s tariffs are primarily a back-door to increasing taxes on low-income Americans, while Republicans work to extend and expand tax cuts for the wealthy. Changing the tax code to increase the burden on lower income Americans requires the approval of Congress. But tariffs have essentially the same effect, and Congress has ceded most of the authority to issue them to the Executive Branch of government.

Given the extreme political polarization that exists in America, today, a six point drop in overall approval in one month is virtually unprecedented. It’s too soon to assume that Trump’s policies are in trouble, but if this trend continues, it won’t be long before Republicans in Congress start worrying about re-election next year and begin distancing themselves from Trump.

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Trump and Ukraine

Posted on February 19, 2025 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, February 19, 2025

Avoiding the temptation to respond to every salvo MAGA sends up, I will focus on Ukraine, today. It’s a problem Trump promised to fix “on day one” and one that poses the greatest existential risk to the western alliance that has averted nuclear war for seventy-five years.

One aspect of the Ukraine problem is the ongoing battle between truth and fiction that has been the hallmark of Trump’s ten-year political career. Trump spent his life treading the fine lines between fraud, slander, libel, and free speech. That sometimes cost him huge fines resulting from lawsuits, but his calculation was that knowing how to play our legal system allows him to win more often than not. He has applied the same strategy to governing.

Trump’s problem with Ukraine began when he tried to strong-arm Ukrainian President Zelensky to frame Hunter Biden, with the sole intent of weakening Trump’s then strongest rival, Joe Biden, resulting in Trump’s first impeachment. Trump has a virulent grudge against Zelensky, and as we have seen since his inauguration, his personal grudges significantly affect his decisions. Our transactional president is driven by three things: increasing his own wealth and power, doing harm to everyone he perceives as an enemy, and fulfilling his fantasy of being lauded as the hero who saved America.

The Progressive approach to diplomacy in the 20th century included the notion that countries whose economies are inextricably tied together don’t nuke each other. But engaging economically had its pitfalls, like giving up much of our country’s manufacturing base to China and other Asian countries. It also raised the question: is it morally acceptable or strategically smart to forge economic alliances with countries that don’t respect the sovereignty of others? That’s where we are with respect to Ukraine. Russia is attempting to convince Trump to release all sanctions placed on it by Presidents Biden and Obama as punishment for invading Ukraine in 2014 and 2022.

Vladimir Putin’s decision to seize Ukraine was also motivated by three things. One was the likelihood, that Ukraine would be invited to join NATO. Putin’s fear of facing NATO countries along Russia’s entire western border with Europe was understandable, if misplaced. NATO is a defensive alliance shaped by the realities of the Cold War. There has never been any reason to believe that NATO had aggressive designs on the former Soviet Republics. The Soviet Union’s aggressively expansionist philosophy made the West’s highest priority avoiding another world war.

The decision by Trump to negotiate with Russia to end the war in Ukraine, leaving out both Ukraine itself and our NATO allies had two purposes. One was to continue his tough guy act, making sure our allies understand who is really in charge. The other was revealed by the inclusion in the negotiating team by Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov of Kirill Dmitriev, the head of Russia’s sovereign wealth fund. Dmitriev’s role under Putin is to develop economic opportunities for Russia.

Today, The New York Times reported that Dmitriev shared his negotiating pitch with their reporters. He told American negotiators that America lost $324 billion by curtailing trade with Russia. Lavrov echoed this by stating after Tuesday’s meetings in Riyadh, that “there was great interest” in the room “in removing artificial barriers to the development of mutually beneficial economic cooperation” — a reference to lifting American sanctions.

Russia will end the war in Ukraine if Trump restores its status as a full trading partner, something Russia’s economy desperately needs. But Russia has no intention of giving up Crimea, the warm water port that connects through the Black Sea to the open ocean. Nor will Putin withdraw his claim on the industrial provinces of Eastern Ukraine that border Russia, many of whose citizens are ethnic Russians.

Putin’s pitch to Trump is: formally concede Crimea and the eastern provinces of Ukraine that our forces presently occupy, remove all sanctions, and open up all your markets to Russian products, primarily oil and natural gas, and we’ll stop bombing Ukrainian cities and infrastructure. Not incidentally, Trump and his associates would all have preferential status for doing business with Russia. They can all become as wealthy as Elon Musk if they simply sacrifice Ukraine. That’s the secret deal Trump negotiated behind the scenes, running a shadow foreign policy during the Biden administration. If it came to pass, America would effectively tell the world that the values expressed by our foreign policy are a sham; in the final analysis, our leaders are as greedy and immoral as those we revile as enemies.

There’s a hint of good news. Today, two prominent Republican Senators, Roger Wicker of Mississippi and John Kennedy of Louisiana, spoke out forcefully against siding with Putin, “a war criminal who should spend the rest of his life prison.” With Mitch McConnell (R, KY) showing animus for Trump’s extreme views, and Majority Leader John Thune and Texas Senator John Cornyn having signaled that they will not roll over to Trump’s demands, he may not have the Senate majority he needs to pull off his Ukraine deal.

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Appearances Can Mislead

Posted on February 15, 2025 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, February 15, 2025

Scan any news site, today, and you’ll get the same impression from all of them. The only difference is that the pro-MAGA sites are mocking the opposition’s apparent lack of defense, while the progressive sites seem to be describing a horror show. So far, Trump’s promise to dismantle the federal government and America’s treaties and alliances, and remake them in his image is going according to plan.

That’s where you might be fooled. To all appearances, Trump seems to be having things all his way, so far. His shock and awe approach to governing seems to have the Democrats and everyone else who believes in our Constitution and position in the world running for cover. All the noise is coming from Trump, and some of it is shocking. Taking Greenland away from Denmark, relocating 2.2 million people from Gaza so Trump can develop a resort, annexing Canada?

Rather than falling for the MAGA trap – trying to address every outrageous thing at the same time – I will focus today on Vice President J. D. Vance, who is quite capable of creating a global horror show on his own.

Vance joined the Marines out of high school, a fact he repeats whenever he can, along with the fact that he served a deployment to Iraq. What he doesn’t mention is that he was a Marine journalist, and his time in Iraq never took him close to combat. He earned a law degree from Yale, after which he worked for Senator John Cornyn (R, TX) for a year. He tried his hand at venture capitalizing, but both of his capital ventures failed without accomplishing anything. His memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, which described eastern Kentucky as a place with few educational opportunities and a culture based on coal and drug addiction, was characterized by Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear as insulting and offensive to real Kentuckians.

When Vance, who strongly opposed Donald Trump in 2016, became a loud anti-immigration advocate and began supporting right-wing political parties, he gained Trump’s endorsement in the 2022 Ohio Senate race. His outspoken support of Trump’s policies, and his loyalty pledge to Trump are the reasons he is now our Vice President. He is an accomplished speaker who is skilled at manipulating truth and graying the lines between fact and fiction, and seems fearless when addressing massive gatherings of powerful people.

Thus, it was Vance who Trump sent to the Munich Security Conference this week, a top level gathering of our European allies. The Conference had been led to believe that Vance was there to brief them on Trump’s plan to end the war in Ukraine. Instead, however, they received a lecture on how to run a democracy. In political and diplomatic terms, Vance is a young pup with no relevant experience. It was no surprise, then, that his remarks to European leaders were met mostly with stone-faced silence.

He was arrogant and offensive addressing people with far more experience and understanding than he possesses. He accused Europe, particularly its most powerful and influential nation, Germany, of allowing immigration to destroy their countries and demonizing legitimate far-right political parties. By Vance’s definition, that’s a violation of free speech, and he opined that suppressing far-right opinions was a greater threat to Europe than Russia and China.

Whether he failed to recognize that Europe’s history with Fascism made his remarks both insulting and inappropriate, or he just didn’t give a damn, his diatribe in Munich did not go over well. It’s not clear whether Vance showed poor judgment or whether he simply bought into the Trump approach of attacking everyone who disagrees with him. Especially after touring Dachau and telling the  press he was grateful for the experience, he apparently missed the point of all the signs loudly declaring: “NEVER AGAIN!”

Vance aimed his remarks primarily at German Chancellor Olaf Scholz. But Scholz did not respond the way most American politicians have to Trump and Vance. Scholz spoke sharply about Germany’s 80-year commitment to never allowing Nazism to rise in Germany again. Germany, in fact, defends its refusal to work with right-wing parties that spout Nazi slogans and policies, and has passed a law enabling its courts to outlaw such parties when their speech or actions appear to openly support Nazi power. Scholz accused Vance and Trump of interfering with German democracy. The pro-Nazi Alternative for Germany party is running second in the polls in next week’s election.

Vance’s alienation of European leaders coincided with Trump demanding that every member of NATO contribute five percent of its GNP to defending the alliance, a sharp increase from the two percent that he previously agreed upon. It also coincided with Ukrainian President Volodymir Zelensky’s appeal for a European army to help him oust Russian invaders from his country, as Europe’s leaders conclude they can no longer rely on America’s support.

Vance did exactly what Trump wanted him to, but I doubt that Trump expected the kind of unified rejection he elicited.

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The World’s a Stage

Posted on February 12, 2025 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, February 12, 2025

Sometimes it feels like we’re living in someone else’s dream or that we’re puppets in a game being played by superior beings. Once computers were in general use, writers began drafting stories about loss of free will and people living like sentient props trapped in a simulation. Those notions arise when we feel the world we live in changing faster than we’re prepared to deal with, when events seem to be swirling out of control, or when we’re trapped in a sequence of events we feel helpless to influence.

That’s how the first month of Trump Administration 2 feels. The script for all of 2025 was written long before Trump was re-elected and described in more than 900 pages of detail in Project 2025. Taken together, the policies and actions laid out in that manifesto amount to a coup. We normally associate coups with secret plots, conspiracies, and violence, but this one is happening in plain sight and moving with the inexorable predictability of a slow-motion avalanche.

The surprise to me is that so many people are surprised that it’s actually happening. What we’re witnessing is like an epic war movie with thousands of people on each side lined up and ready to create mayhem with their spears and swords, except that this fight will be bloodless. Instead of killing and maiming their opponents, the new Trump team will attempt to destroy careers, threaten civil and criminal actions, ban books, lie, and slander. It’s an all-out unabashed attempt to re-write our Constitution and turn the clock back to a time when women were subservient, minorities knew their place, and our government was driven by an unholy alliance between demagogues, corrupt churches, and wealthy industrialists.

What’s occurring is a clash between two subcultures, two versions of America that have existed side by side for decades without acknowledging each other. After World War 2, America became schizophrenic. On one hand, the forces of progressivism, equality, and human rights were changing our nation into one that looked more like what Thomas Jefferson projected in the Declaration of Independence and what Abraham Lincoln, who turns 216 today, enacted into law. Simultaneously, we became embroiled in both the Cold War and several ill-advised hot wars in a worsening existential standoff between nuclear powers that shaped a whole generation of Americans.

Everything might have changed when the Soviet Union collapsed just after Christmas in 1991. But on both sides, the forces of reaction were working to re-establish the old pre-war order, and China was quietly becoming a major economic power. America had a choice: continue to build trade and military alliances to avert war, while defending future generations against the real threat to humanity – climate change – or revert to greed, isolationism and a massive power grab by wealthy individuals and corporations.

That’s where we are today. The battle lines have been drawn, left versus right, progressive versus reactionary, with the vast majority of Americans watching like Romans at a gladiator match. This is a full-frontal assault on the twentieth century interpretation of our Constitution and our democracy. Both sides have been preparing for this since the Reagan administration, and we’re about to witness an epic battle of ideologies. The scripts have been written, and the actors are already playing their roles. The war will occur on dozens of fronts, because the side trying to overthrow the established order understands that chaos is their greatest weapon.

That this war will be fought will Executive Actions, lawsuits, and court injunctions makes it no less deadly than an armed revolution. We all have front row seats, but unlike a movie, we won’t all see the same version. Our broadcast and social media, constantly being hacked and influenced by bad actors, will continue to spin their versions of the truth, and the battles will progress through the courts.

We all have a choice between now and the 2026 midterm elections. We can choose to treat the future of our nation as a stage play and sit quietly in the audience watching it unfold. Or we can recognize that this is really serious, and the outcome will determine how our grandchildren live, and whether the America they mature in will look anything like the one we grew up in.

Instead of allowing these events to determine our futures, we can each take a stand and defend what we believe in. The dissolution of our government will not only affect those vying for power. It is already affecting millions of Americans in jeopardy of losing their livelihoods, and the attempt to obliterate institutions that don’t mesh with MAGA values is already underway.

We can be spectators, or we can choose sides. It’s up to us to defend what we believe in, or one day in the very near future we won’t have a choice.

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Prelude to a Year of Chaos

Posted on February 5, 2025 by alanpzendell

ALan Zendell, February 5, 2025

Sixteen days after his inauguration, Donald Trump has given us a roadmap for how he will govern. Nothing about it is surprising. Everything Trump has done was telegraphed well in advance. His friends even published a thousand-page book that described in detail.

If Trump gets his way, his administration will come to be known as The Great Purge. Before his first day in office had passed he had begun purging immigrants from our population. Trump himself and his surrogates who wrote Project 2025 made it clear that they believe America should be a nation of white Christians in which women are dominated and controlled by men. In their view, immigrants, especially brown, black, and yellow ones, have no place in America unless they happen to possess necessary skills we’re short of. No matter if, like Dreamers, they’ve been here for years, going to school, working, paying taxes, and raising families.

Next came Trump’s lust for revenge, which has him targeting 5,000 FBI agents and DOJ personnel who worked on the federal indictments concerning his mishandling classified documents and the January 6th insurrection. He has also floated the idea of criminal charges against members of Congress who voted to impeach him. And his ideological quest to purge America of horrors like gender and racial equality, diversity, and women’s right to control their own bodies is an attempt to re-write the Constitution by brute force.

Perhaps even more significant is his vision of a government run by oligarchs. To accomplish that, he will have to widen even further the huge income gap that exists between classes in America. There is no upper limit to the wealth he believes his billionaire friends should control, which means that his two priorities this year will be extending and expanding the 2017 tax cuts and greatly reducing federal spending by taking the axe to federal agencies he doesn’t approve of.

His first three targeted agencies were those in charge of foreign aid, education, and protecting the environment, all of which exist because of laws passed by Congress. The president who campaigned on jobs and prosperity for his middle and working-class base, had no problem with eliminating the jobs and careers of tens of thousands of federal workers and a comparable number of private sector employees who support those agencies. Could his approach be any more cynical?

If he’s allowed to get away with actions that are likely illegal and unconstitutional, Trump will accomplish, with a few strokes of his pen, what five decades of right-wing extremists have been unable to. He will divert trillions of dollars into further tax cuts that will fill the pockets of the Elon Musks of the world, while isolating us from both our allies and our adversaries and handing China a free pass to expand its sphere of influence. If children in some states are poorly educated or greenhouse gases continue to increasingly upset the balance of life on our planet, that won’t be a problem because the billionaires will be safe and secure in their insulated fortresses.

And now, we’ve gone from the merely cynical to the absurd. Trump wants to expel two million Palestinians from Gaza so he can build a new Riviera in the Middle East. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was all smiles sitting beside Trump at the White House when the president floated the idea. Netanyahu’s own extremist supporters have advocated throwing Palestinians out of Gaza so Israel could take it over for years.

Trump’s plan to deport two million Palestinians and send them to Egypt and Jordan is being bashed by both our European allies and leaders in the Middle East. It would be equivalent to evacuating Cincinnati and relocating all of its residents across the Ohio River in Kentucky so Trump can build a theme park. But like much of what Trump has done in his first sixteen days, it’s not possible to tell what he’s serious about and what is just chaff thrown up to confuse his opponents’ defenses.

The game plan is clear: go after everything in sight that might weaken Democrats or the constituencies he’s attacking. Whether his actions are legal or constitutional is entirely beside the point. The first test was to see who was willing to stand up and fight, and so far twenty-one states have sued to reverse some of Trump’s Executive Orders, and two federal judges have issued injunctions to prevent Trump from usurping the functions of Congress. This was all anticipated by the far right. The drill is to move upward through the court system until Trump’s pet Supreme Court gets to weigh in.

This entire year is going to be one protracted legal battle after another, with the fate of our Constitution and our nation hanging in the balance. Our founders were pretty smart, but they never anticipated a Congress that crawled sheepishly into Trump’s pocket and a Supreme Court put in place solely to do his bidding.

1,445 days to go.

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