So, Donald Trump has betrayed the Ukrainian people for a second time.
His treachery is of historic, maybe even literary, proportions: repeatedly selling out the people of Ukraine for his own political ambitions. He’s been in Shakespearean villain territory many times, but this most recent selfish and heartless move puts him up there with the vilest villains the Bard of Avon ever created.
Donald Trump, private citizen, has insisted to elected members of Congress that there be no bipartisan agreement on new security measures for the southern border — you know, the “invasion” that Republicans are constantly talking about, which Democrats agree is a crisis that must be addressed.
Because Republicans have already tied any changes to immigration policies to their support of more funding for Ukraine, that country’s effort to repel Putin’s illegal, bloody and incredibly destructive invasion is also now suffering.
Does this remind you of anything? Yes, when Trump, then occupying the White House, tried to strongarm Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy into saying that Ukraine was opening an investigation of Joe and Hunter Biden, when Joe Biden was still just one of many Democrats vying for his party’s nomination. Trump threatened to cancel a promised visit to the White House, and funding for military aid was delayed.
You may remember his first “perfect call,” the one that got Trump impeached by the House that first time, with two counts: abuse of power and obstruction of Congress.
It’s notable that Trump pressured Zelenskyy to merely say Ukraine had opened an investigation of the Bidens. That was all he desired, because any actual investigation would have come up with zilch. But the idea an investigation was underway would affect how voters saw Biden.
Republicans are still at it, doing bogus investigations out of the public’s view. Their planned impeachment of Alejandro Mayorkas, secretary of homeland security, for not upholding immigration laws is absurd, because he has upheld the immigration laws we have and which Republicans refuse to change, or even fund properly, so they can keep it as an election issue — that and, I guess, the psyops conspiracy that is Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce.
As I write this, the details of the proposed bipartisan deal are not completely known, but it is apparently a real compromise between the two parties (so much so that one Republican senator has been censured by his party for leading the negotiations with his Democratic colleagues). According to a recent New York Times account:
Democrats already have agreed to substantial concessions in the talks, including making it more difficult for migrants to claim asylum; expanding detention and expulsion authorities; and shutting down the intake of migrants when attempted crossings reach a level that would overwhelm detention facilities — around 5,000 migrants a day.
Here’s what President Biden had to say about it:
“What’s been negotiated would — if passed into law — be the toughest and fairest set of reforms to secure the border we’ve ever had in our country. It would give me, as president, a new emergency authority to shut down the border when it becomes overwhelmed. And if given that authority, I would use it the day I sign the bill into law.”
By some accounts, Biden may be belatedly changing his view on how to best deal with the obvious crisis on the border, and he apparently has not been able to overcome obstacles placed in his way during the first three years of his term. Still, it’s unfortunate the Republicans in the House will do only what benefits them politically now and have also tied any further support of Ukraine to a bipartisan border deal, months in the making, they say they will not vote for. It is especially unfortunate, given that a number of the things they complained about this administration’s handling of immigrants — Mayorkas’s so-called lawlessness — also apply to the Trump years and even before. If you are interested in understanding what is driving this level of immigration, and our own deep complicity in it, you’ll want to listen to this.
Republicans did not allow Mayorkas to testify publicly, so he had to issue a letter to defend himself and to request Congress take appropriate action. The impeachment of Mayorkas is merely performative; as with other Republican-led investigations, it’s about insinuation, not facts.
MAGAs clearly think little of education and get exercised by all sorts of literature, so let’s bring Shakespeare back in to refresh ourselves for a moment as we work our way through this pitiable drama of repeated treachery. Given that Trump regularly finds glee in crafting derogatory names for his opponents, I wonder what Shakespeare might have written about the likes of him?
As it happens, I don’t have to search for appropriate names for Trump because they’re right here on the “Shakespeare’s Insults” coffee mug our older daughter gifted me some years back. So many fit the man-child: “light of brain,” “clod of wayward marl,” “bolting-hutch of beastliness,” but specifically to his inability to speak the truth there’s the perfect “infinite and endless liar, an hourly promise-breaker.” (To be sure, I looked it up, and the quote is even more apt than that, speaking also of cowardice.)
As with nearly all things Trump, this would be funny if it weren’t so dire, with so many followers laughingly following this hollow character, this particularly addled Shakespearean fool. The MAGA faithful like to pretend Trump is joking about being a dictator, but, as Salon’s Amanda Marcotte keeps noting, they love him because they know he’s serious about it. He may play the clown, making all the hate easier to digest, but he’s not the fool in this play, now in it’s third act; he’s the monster, the megalomaniacal villain, and has been all along.
In a discussion of Trump working to stop the bipartisan agreement to heighten security on the border on Joy Reid’s program on MSNBC, Stuart Stevens, lifelong Republican and senior advisor to the Lincoln Project, reminded us that lives are at stake:
“This is not a serious party. What gets lost in all of this is sort of the scope of the human tragedy that’s involved, both on the border and in Ukraine. I mean, it’s not an exaggeration that people are dying every hour because of this. It’s not some theoretical game…this is real stuff. This is why you have a government and you elect people to make tough decisions. We have this massive budget, and we have the largest military…this is a false choice. We can afford to do both.”
But Donald John Trump — the compulsive liar, the sexual predator, the guy who used to pretend to be his own press agent so he could claim a spot on the Forbes list, the twice-impeached former president with 91 felony counts in four different venues — doesn’t want an immigration deal or more assistance for Ukraine, nevermind that the lack of both will lead to more suffering, homelessness and death.
People will lose loved ones so Trump can run on his favorite xenophobic issue, as much his comfort zone as all that orangy pancake makeup he applies to hide his face every day. He certainly has nothing else real to put before the American public, not on the economy (which Trump is now pathetically trying to claim as his own) or bolstering our foreign alliances or protecting the rights of American citizens.
Oh, that perfect description of Trump — “an infinite and endless liar, an hourly promise-breaker”? It’s from “All’s Well That Ends Well.” We must work hard this year to make certain of that, for us and all the peoples and countries around the globe that depend on a strong, stable and dependable United States.
