Here is one view in regard to Joe Biden's surprise visit to Kyiv...
President Biden’s secret visit to wartime Kyiv is an example of America in its finest tradition. This trip took guts…Make no mistake, there was risk involved in this trip. Traveling to the capital of a nation fighting a shooting war with a great power, the U.S. had no way to choreograph with exactitude the circumstances of his travel or arrival. Neither the U.S. nor Ukraine has total control of the airspace. Neither the U.S. nor Ukraine could guarantee Biden’s security on the ground.
At home, it may often feel like our republic is irretrievably fractured. Abroad, mistakes and wrong turns have tarnished our reputation for competence and steadfastness. But America is still, for all its faults, seen in dark and terrible places as the last best hope. Beyond our shores, people still react to our presidents with hope…We should remember that.
Was this some partisan left-wing monologue that we should expect to hear from the Democrats’ side? No, this was written by Mark Antonio Wright, the executive editor of the National Review, the “traditional” conservative publication founded by William F. Buckley Jr., which has on occasion felt compelled to respond to what Donald Trump and the far-right call “conservatism.” So what has been the Republican response to Biden’s secret visit in war-torn Ukraine near the one-year anniversary of Russia' s unjustified invasion of conquest?
Trump merely
reiterated his “friendship,” “trust” in
and belief in Vladimir Putin’s lies about not intending to invade Ukraine.
Putin knew Trump to be a fool who could be "played" and knew he wouldn’t lift a finger to help
Ukraine. If the rest of Europe had acted unilaterally while the U.S. did
nothing, the U.S. would have lost what credibility it had left to influence
world events. In other words, Trump would have made this country more weak than it has ever been.
In a world that is so interconnected economically and ideologically, Trump’s
bullying tactics were simply being ignored and alienating fellow democracies
who no longer trusted us to lead. Trump's "American First" foreign policy never brought manufacturing jobs back to this country, it just made Trump look like a braggart who talked a lot of hot air that some people actually thought was "great." So much for "thinking."
Then you had Trump’s seeming main rival in 2024, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis—who mainly rivals him on the level of who is more extreme in their mental imbalance. DeSantis declared Russia a “third-rate” power that didn’t deserve anyone’s attention, claimed that Ukraine was being given a “blank check” to defend its sovereignty, and suggested that without Western military aid to Ukraine, Putin wouldn’t be thinking twice about invading NATO countries like those in the Baltics, which are particularly vulnerable to Russian aggression. Yeah, this is a guy who also believes that projecting strength on the international stage is a sign of weakness.
And then of course there was Marjorie Taylor Greene, who we are told by Rep. Steven Cohen “made a fool of herself” during an intelligence briefing on the Chinese spy balloon caper. Greene claimed she didn’t believe anything she was told by intelligence officials, and that she was speaking for “average people”—who she apparently assumes are all as uneducated and uniformed as she is. She is now proclaiming that Republican states should “secede” and create their own country; Greene seems to forget that Georgia voted Democrat in the last presidential election, so someone should check her mental capacity for public office. Like most of the others on the far-right, she poo-pooed the historic visit to Kyiv and blasted Biden for “ignoring” the train wreck disaster in East Palestine, Ohio and of course “the border” again, which of course has become a racist dog whistle.
Now just because
East Palestine voted 3 to 1 for Trump in the past two presidential elections
and the people don’t blame Trump at all for another one of his petty moves to
“erase” Barack Obama’s initiatives, which included ending the TPP agreement
which would have been a powerful tool to counter Chinese domination of trade,
and this time a case directly related to the train disaster, doesn't mean we should just give them the cold shoulder. But they are too blind in their "strongly conservative" attitudes to realize that the Obama administration
instituted new rules in regard to replacing 19th Century braking
technology for trains carrying hazardous materials with Electronically
Controlled Pneumatic (ECP) brakes, and Trump vacated the rule.
Just to show you the stupidity of both the industry and Trump, the line that operated the train, Norfolk Southern, had previously indicated that it was intending to install ECP brakes. But after the Obama administration put out a rule requiring them on trains carrying hazardous materials, their bonehead executives decided that they were not going to be told what to do, and Norfolk came in opposition to the brakes. But Trump has the “forgotten people” in mind, he says, but that apparently doesn’t mean the people of the deteriorating town of East Palestine that Trump only “helped” in the sense of giving them scapegoats to gripe about. By ending the Obama initiative and caving in to industry demands of ignoring public safety, he showed he was only interested in his rich friends and corporate profits.
We are told that Trump is visiting East Palestine to tell them all about how much he “cares” about them, and they will likely believe him despite all the evidence that he doesn't (talk about "nuking" a problem)...
...because they still don’t understand the different level of “caring” a narcissist like Trump has for people like himself and everyone else. That’s the kind of country Trump and the rest of the fascist far-right wants it to be: one that "unknowingly" self-destructs from within, with civility, morality and simple common sense cast aside on personal whim.
People like Trump and Greene are acting not for the national good, but their own private prejudices that most of the people who have voted for them happen to share, when before self-respecting people wanted to work at solutions instead of simply “nuking” them. Instead, we have what John Boehner called “legislative terrorists” like Jim Jordan who only have destructive impulses, and they and the people who vote for them are either blind or don’t care about the effects of their efforts to turn people against each other.
This is supposed to make America “great again”? A divided country cannot be “great” if there is a segment of the population that wants to destroy the other. This is what Russian hackers and propagandists involved in election interference were aiming at, and the far-right unsurprisingly have been the Kremlin’s most reliable tool in this. That is why the Kremlin and various pro-war Russian commentators are infuriated that Biden was able to arrive unmolested in Kyiv. It showed that the U.S., at least in the sense of its power projection in the world, was “great” again, leading a pro-democratic coalition against the forces that would oppress it.
But under Trump, the U.S. projected weakness from both within and without; but while far-right forces continue their efforts to destroy the country from within like so many termites eating away at the structure, at least from the outside the U.S. is again projecting strength as the leader of the free world.
“Freedom” of course is not a general vision of the far-right in this country, but an expression of individual cupidity. Not everyone is allowed to have “freedom” if it isn’t by the far-right’s definition; like a child having a hissy fit, it cannot abide those who actually want this country to be great, which means not looking backwards to find “solutions” to new problems or employs those that have been proven not to work, but forward to address inescapable changing times. This country has to show the way, and that is what Biden did and what far-right fascists and Trumpists are not.
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