ANS -- The democratic world will have to get along without America.

This was an article on Facebook.  Sad.  

--Kim

Sandy Moscato  · drSntpoosef3 1rcfa86grf268a9u m1l:a 9uu2ey5M1Ai0u00m1bF88at a  · 

Jonathan Cowans

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The democratic world will have to get along without America. It may even have to defend itself from it.

~ Andrew Coyne, The Globe and Mail, February 14, 2025

I wonder if we have underestimated the gravity of the situation the democratic world faces.

Even now, as the United States hurtles toward autocracy – the petty grotesqueries perhaps tell the story better than anything else: a reporter barred from the White House for not using the name "Gulf of America," President Donald Trump naming himself chair of the Kennedy Center by a "unanimous" vote of its board – the tendency is still to describe events in relatively conventional terms. For example, the "mistakes" that Mr. Trump is said to have made in his dealings with Vladimir Putin, of the United States as an "unreliable ally" under Mr. Trump, and so forth.

But that is not the situation we are now in. The policies on Ukraine announced, or rather confirmed this week by Mr. Trump and his Defence Secretary, Pete Hegseth – peace talks without Ukraine; Ukraine locked out of NATO membership indefinitely; Russia keeps all territories gained since its illegal and unprovoked invasion, because, as Mr. Trump said, "they lost a lot of soldiers" taking them – are not, as described, irresponsible concessions to Russia.

They are not concessions at all. They are demands, aimed not at Russia but at Ukraine, and presented to it jointly by the United States of Russia and America. They are of a piece with the Trump administration's very clear signalling that it will not be bound by Article 5 of the NATO treaty – that the United States will not, as promised, come to Europe's defence should Russia broaden its attacks on it, but will, as Mr. Trump so memorably put it, let them do "whatever the hell they want."

That is not merely an abrogation of its treaty commitments, or an abdication of America's historic responsibilities, or even a declaration that the way is now open for other hostile powers to launch attacks on democratic states. The United States, under Mr. Trump, cannot be considered an idle bystander in the great twilight struggle between the democracies and the dictatorships, as it was in the 1930s. It is now on the side of the dictatorships.

The United States that openly threatens to invade Panama or Denmark – or to annex Canada – has not just stepped outside international law, including the basic Westphalian proscription of attempts to alter borders by force. Neither does a country that launches trade wars on a different country every day, including countries with which it has longstanding free trade treaties, reveal a simple lack of commitment to a rules-based approach to international trade. It is engaged in an all-out assault on both. It has become an outlaw state.

And in this regard, too, it is aligning itself with the dictatorships. That is what dictatorships do. It is intrinsic to their nature. Just as they refuse to be bound by law internally – we are counting down the days to when the Trump administration defies its first court order – so they recognize no law in their dealings with other states. (Or rules of any kind: you'll have noticed they also cheat at sports. As does Mr. Trump.)

It is not just that the democratic world can no longer count on America. It is that America, under Mr. Trump, is no longer necessarily part of the democratic world: neither fully democratic in its own affairs, nor committed to the welfare of other democracies, but hostile to both. If the international order is to be preserved, then, it will have to be preserved, in part, from the United States. Certainly it will have to be rebuilt without it.

Which means abandoning all attempts to propitiate Mr. Trump on military matters, in hopes of "keeping NATO together," that is with the United States in it. Not only will that do nothing to strengthen NATO, an organization to which Mr. Trump is viscerally opposed, but our desire to strike a deal only invites him to use it against us, as an instrument of blackmail.

We need to face some unpleasant facts. NATO, as a transatlantic democratic alliance, is dead. Henceforth the defence of Europe will be the responsibility of Europe. (And the defence of Canada? Wedged as we are between the United States and Russia, with the North an increasingly tempting prize? We better get some allies, fast.)

The same applies to the World Trade Organization, or any of the other instruments of international co-operation developed after the Second World War, in which the United States played such a constructive part: they will have to be reconstituted, de jure or de facto, without it. We will need new defence alignments, different trade arrangements, the works.

That is not our choice. That is America's, or at least the Trump administration's. The democratic world must therefore regard and treat it as it does the other non-democracies: not as an ally to be consulted but as an adversary to be contained.

ANS -- The conservative media is going bonkers trying to normalize Trump

I got this from Robert Reich, who sent it along because he thought it was worth noting.  

--Kim

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The conservative media is going bonkers trying to normalize Trump

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  Robert Reich

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  	Forwarded this email? Subscribe here for more The conservative media is going bonkers trying to normalize Trump Robert Reich Feb 19   READ IN APP   Friends, From time to time, I come across essays that are particularly apt and helpful in terms of understanding the time we are in. Here's the latest from my friend Harold Meyerson, writing in The American Prospect: One of the themes recurring in conservative media these days is the normalization of Donald Trump by historical analogy. This kind of sweeping arrogation of power, we're told by Wall Street Journal editorialists, columnist George Will, and other conservative commentators, has ample precedents in the records of progressive presidents particularly: Woodrow Wilson, both Roosevelts, Lyndon Johnson, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden. So why this harping on poor Donald Trump? Trump's overreaching claims to power, Will tells us, "is an institutional consequence of progressivism." Journal editorialists note that "Mr. Trump is stretching laws to see what he can get away with, but so have other recent Presidents," including both Obama and Biden. As historical analysis, this is malicious piffle. No previous president has told the nation's many thousands of autonomous school boards what their schools should teach; required his cabinet secretaries to affirm his Big Lie that he actually won a presidential election he actually lost; dictated which shows are suitable, and which not, for the Kennedy Center; told the NCAA which athletes to disqualify; or excluded media organizations from the White House that didn't conform to his renaming international bodies of water. If we seek precedents for this kind of conduct, we must look not to American presidents but to, say, the Bourbons of France. The power of our presidents has grown chiefly during wartime or other crises, and as the development of mass media, beginning with radio, enabled them to speak directly to their fellow Americans. There was nothing pernicious or threatening about Franklin Roosevelt's aptitude for radio or John F. Kennedy's for television. Trump's tweets, on the other hand, are pernicious and dangerous, not because he's mastered that medium but because he deliberately peddles lies and slanders. Nor has he taken power at a time of crisis; rather, he's claimed this to be a time of national emergency that presumably justifies his power grabs, though that emergency is not visible to the naked eye. So Trump's opening salvos are in no way like Franklin Roosevelt's first hundred days, as some right-wingers have argued. Roosevelt took office in a time of genuine crisis, when unemployment stood at 25 percent and when an epidemic of runs on banks had shuttered every depository institution in the nation on the eve of his inauguration. To address this, Roosevelt did order federal examiners to spend the next several days assessing the solvency of the country's banks, but then he turned to Congress to enact the emergency measures that defined his first months as president. At his behest, Congress enacted a bailout for American farmers and a semi-cartelization of American industry, created deposit insurance for the nation's bank depositors, and established a Civilian Conservation Corps that provided work to jobless young men and improvements to national parks and forests. He did not claim for himself powers he knew presidents did not have; he asked Congress, successfully, to enact these far-reaching changes. Progressive presidents have indeed enlarged government's regulatory capacity, but invariably because public interest and public safety demanded it. Congress established the departments and agencies that these presidents sought and the public desired. The growth of the administrative state did not come from presidential decrees, unlike the destruction of the administrative state flowing from unlawful executive orders today. Teddy Roosevelt persuaded Congress to create the Food and Drug Administration so that Americans wouldn't be poisoned so frequently by what they consumed. Wilson's allies pushed a bill through Congress that established the Federal Trade Commission to aid consumers and small businesses struggling to deal with corporate domination of markets. FDR signed congressional legislation establishing the Securities and Exchange Commission and the National Labor Relations Board. Congress, responding to the financial chicanery that led to the crash of 2008 and the ensuing Great Recession, passed a bill, which Obama signed, creating the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. This was all government by consent of the governed, with Congress passing, the president signing, and the courts upholding the constitutionality of these newly created agencies. None of these fundamental changes were due to presidential executive orders, decrees, tweets, or pronunciamentos. If there is a model in the annals of our history for the agency closures and funding impoundments that Trump has unilaterally ordered, it's the despotic one that James Madison cautioned against in his Federalist Papers arguments. There, he explained why the Constitution he'd just co-authored created separate branches of government precisely to forestall the prospect of a despot's rise. The possibility that the new American nation could degenerate into the monarchical form of government that then prevailed across Europe was very much on Madison's mind. "The accumulation of all powers—legislative, executive and judiciary—in the same hands, whether of one, a few or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny," Madison wrote in Federalist 47. To keep that from happening, he wrote in Federalist 51, "Ambition must be made to counteract ambition." To this end, he installed the French philosophe Montesquieu's ideas of separation of powers and checks and balances as the centerpiece of the Constitution. Despite that, a cowed and supine Republican Congress has raised nary a peep at Trump's seizure of its power; because Republicans want these agency closures and funding impoundments but know they could not get them through their chambers of the legislature, they'd rather the president seize their power while they go mute. And while federal courts, so far, have sought to curtail those seizures of power, the Supremes have yet to be heard from. Ours is the only constitution enacted in the 18th century that's still operative; the constitutions of every other nation were drafted and enacted in more modern times, when the specter of a monarchial despot had by then generally receded. Ours was by no means a fully democratic document, limiting popular sovereignty to the lower levels of government and endeavoring to ensure rule by elites. While amendments have mitigated some of these biases, vestiges (the Senate, the Electoral College) are still with us today. Yet the Founders' emphasis on a separation of powers rooted in fear of a despotic president has long been a kind of background noise in discussions of our constitutional order. It's there, and we're generally glad it's there. But as a result of the nearly 250 years that we've gone without a wannabe despot president, it's not the sort of thing that has merited much attention. Mr. Will's and the Journal's stabs at Trump normalization notwithstanding, it does now.