“My heart has always been truly convinced,” Marquis de Lafayette declared 250 years ago, “that in serving the cause of America I am fighting for the interests of France.” The French nobleman put his life where his mouth was, volunteering for George Washington’s Continental Army as his country provided critical support for our war for independence from British kings.
Imperfect as we have been, and as often as we have failed to fully live up to it, it has been the cause of America that we try to support democracies against tyrants, and not the other way around. We don’t always do it, we don’t always do it right or well, and we don’t always succeed, but standing up for the vulnerable against bullies and murderers is what we Americans have always believed we stood for. And whether or not we deserved the reputation, it is also what the world has come to believe we stood for, too.
When Great Britain was virtually all alone fighting against Adolf Hitler, Franklin Roosevelt contrived to provide Winston Churchill with the materiel necessary for its defense. And when Churchill came to Washington to plead for help, Roosevelt didn’t taunt or browbeat him.
After World War II, Americans provided over $13 billion to rebuild Europe to serve both humanitarian needs and our own national security, the equivalent of about $174 billion in 2025 dollars. President Harry Truman didn’t swagger, didn’t deride, didn’t insult — and didn’t extort.
And when Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990, when President George H.W. Bush and Secretary of State James Baker deployed American resources to repel Saddam Hussein, they didn’t kiss Saddam’s feet, and they didn’t condition American support on transfers of Kuwaiti oil.
Americans came to expect the White House to be a place of decency, of dignity.
With the schoolyard display of crude bullying of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy by Donald Trump and J.D. Vance in the Oval Office last Friday, this expectation is now dead and gone, smashed to pieces. It was a performance that demeaned Zelenskyy and his remarkably courageous countrymen, sure, but more fundamentally, it demeaned America.
Vance accused Zelenskyy of having failed to thank the U.S. for our support. This was garbage; Zelenskyy has thanked America and its leaders dozens if not hundreds of times over the last three years. Trump accused Zelenskyy of “disrespecting” the U.S. As is almost always the case, Trump was full of it. He can legitimately boast to be world famous for his lack of class, and the meeting with Zelenskyy did not disappoint. “Make a deal or we’re out!” Trump berated Zelenskyy, yelling over Zelenskyy to drown him out, threatening that if Ukraine did not surrender to Vladimir Putin’s demands to be handed Ukrainian territory, Trump would terminate American aid for the embattled country.
Trump has been a fan of the KGB agent’s subjugation of Ukraine right from the start. If Trump liked Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, he positively loved Putin’s lies about it; bullying and deceit are, quite simply, Donald Trump’s happy place. “I went in yesterday,” Trump gushed days after Putin sent some 200,000 troops into Ukraine in order to pulverize it into capitulation, “and there was a television screen, and I said, ‘This is genius.’ … Putin declares it as independent. Oh, that’s wonderful. He used the word ‘independent’ and ‘we’re gonna go out and we’re gonna go in and we’re gonna help keep peace.’ You gotta say that’s pretty savvy.”
The party of Ronald Reagan is now conclusively the party of Putin. It was as if instead of “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall,” our 40th president had urged, “Mr. Gorbachev, double its size, and if you want to invade West Germany, by all means.” Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who as senator had been forceful on the need to support Ukraine, slouched so far down on the couch in the Oval Office as to be inches from the floor, saying nothing. To her credit, Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski commented, “I am sick to my stomach as the administration appears to be walking away from our allies and embracing Putin, a threat to democracy and U.S. values.”
There was no “appears” to it. And we haven’t “walked away” from our allies; we have pushed them overboard. But sick-to-the-stomach was spot on.
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