“If it is not possible to end the war in Ukraine, we need to move on,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio. "The president is getting bored," David Ignatius on the war in Ukraine.

 

Our top diplomat, Marco Rubio, says U.S. will decided in days if the end to the war in Ukkrain is “doable.” On MSNBC David Ignatius said he thinks “the president is getting bored” with the war.

“If it is not possible to end the war in Ukraine, we need to move on,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio said as he departed meetings in Paris. The following is from The New York Time’s article on this:

“It is not our war. We didn’t start it,” Mr. Rubio said. “The United States has been helping Ukraine for the past three years and we want it to end, but it’s not our war.”

He added: “If it’s not possible — if we’re so far apart that this is not going to happen — then I think the president’s probably at a point where he’s going to say, well, we’re done. We’ll do what we can on the margins." He described Mr. Trump as feeling “very strongly” about this.

This is the subtitle of The Washington Post article on the same subject: “Rubio’s remarks appear to reflect the president’s frustration with the difficulty of achieving peace in Ukraine after Russia’s 2022 full-scale invasion.”

The president is frustrated. Poor baby! We dare not have a presdient who is frustrated.

I wish someone would remind Rubio, who I assume knows a bit of history, that we didn’t start World War I or World War II either. Rubio says he wants to see if winning the war is “doable.” Doable!?!? 

While two other presidents must have had dark days of uncertainty during wars we were fighting to save the democratic world, the country never heard Woodrow Wilson or FDR going public saying that they wondered whether winning either war was “doable” and say they would stop helping our allies because it wasn’t.

On MSNBC David Ignatius1 interpreted this as “the president is getting bored.”

The Washinton Post doesn’t have proof that Trump is frustrated. David Ignatius doen’t know for a fact that the president is getting bored, but I think both are making educated guesses based on an accurate assessment of Trump’s personality.

The war in Ukraine, while obviously not a world war, is the closest war to a world war we’ve been engaged in since World War II. It is a proxy war between the forces of democracy and the forces of totalitarianism. It is a war against the most powerful evil country in the world which invaded its neighbor. 

Russia invaded Ukraine to overthrow its pro-Western government and reassert control over Ukraine, which President Putin views as part of Russia's sphere of influence. The invasion aimed to "demilitarize and denazify" Ukraine, reflecting a distorted view of Ukrainian identity and history. (Reference) Putin’s goal was more modest than Hitler’s, but that shouldn;t make a difference. 

Even so, the president of the United States is getting bored with it the war and doesn’t want to be bothered thinking about it. 

Add to this, to the extent he cares about being called “Putin’s puppet” and having people suggest another strongman is pulling his strings, if the United States pulled out of the war he wouldn’t have to deal with this.

At least he wouldn't unless Russia defeated Ukraine and instituted a reign of terror and revenge there which Trump would be blamed for. Then again, Trump probably wouldn’t care because he’d be consulting with Putin at the White House about how to dump our traditional allies and become a partner with Russia.

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1

David Reynolds Ignatius (born May 26, 1950) is an American journalist and novelist. He is an associate editor and columnist for The Washington Post. He has written eleven novels, including Body of Lies, which director Ridley Scott adapted into a film. He is a former adjunct lecturer at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University and was a Senior Fellow to the Future of Diplomacy Program from 2017 to 2022

Wait until Trump & Co. find out about Harvard Law's initiatives to "honor the enslaved people whose labor generated wealth that contributed to the school's founding." Harvard took a stand for truth, justice, and what should be the American way. By Hal M. Brown --

 

Trump’s war against Harvard is all over the news, but he has missed Harvard Law in particular.

In 2021 Harvard Law School changed it’s crest because the previous one had a connection to a slave owner. The Latin words mean truth, law, and justice. This is similar to Superman’s slogan about his fighting for “truth, justice, and the American way” which also has a complicated, albeit not tawdry, history (here). 

Here’s an article about this from The Harvard Crimson:

The dean of the school, John F. Manning, wrote “I believe that the simple, elegant, and beautiful design of the new shield captures the complexity, the diversity, the limitlessness, the transformative power, the strength, and the energy that the HLS community, in Cambridge and throughout the world, sees in Harvard Law School.” There’s that verboten D word, diversity.

As if this isn’t enough reason for Trumpworld to go after Harvard here’s another.

Trump continues to try to make good on his promises about ending wokeness in universities:

Donald Trump’s vision for education revolves around a single goal: to rid America’s schools of perceived “ wokeness ” and “left-wing indoctrination.”

The president-elect wants to forbid classroom lessons on gender identity and structural racism. He wants to abolish diversity and inclusion offices. He wants to keep transgender athletes out of girls’ sports.

Throughout his campaign, the Republican depicted schools as a political battleground to be won back from the left. Now that he’s won the White House, he plans to use federal money as leverage to advance his vision of education across the nation.

Trump’s education plan pledges to cut funding for schools that defy him on a multitude of issues.

On his first day in office, Trump has repeatedly said he will cut money to “any school pushing critical race theory, transgender insanity, and other inappropriate racial, sexual or political content on our children.” On the campaign trail, Trump said he would “not give one penny” to schools with vaccine or mask requirements. Reference.

I don’t want to give the Trump and his anti-woke sleuths another reason to go after Harvard, and especially such a bastion of liberalism as their law school. This reputation is in spite of the fact that notable conservatives like Ted Cruz got their law degrees there. While not lawyers, Trump has had many advisors who went to Harvard including Stephen K. Bannon, Jared C. Kushner ’03, Wilbur L. Ross, Jr., Michael R. Pompeo, and Elaine Chao (Reference). 

From: Harvard Alumni Have Powered the Trump Administration.

Harvard’s silence on graduates as recent as 2016 using their Harvard degrees to wage a full-fledged assault on the truth is unworthy of the University’s own “Veritas” motto. Failure to take a position or set the record straight on Harvard’s expectations of its alumni is a tacit endorsement that power itself is the school’s only true value. Discussions of ethical and moral leadership in my classes at Harvard Law School and the Kennedy School ring hollow against this reality. Harvard should publicly commit to higher expectations for its alumni than achieving the social cachet to dance with the stars (as former Harvard Institute of Politics fellow Sean Spicer quite literally did last year).

I am getting off-topic here. 

Back to Harvard Law: I am surprised the Trumpers haven’t already found out about Harvard Law and gone after it in particular. Not only about the logo change, but what they did the following year:

Excerpt:

A report issued on April 26 by the Presidential Committee on Harvard and the Legacy of Slavery recounts in detail the many ways Harvard University participated in, and profited from, slavery, and the long history of discrimination against, and exclusion of, Black people by the university long after slavery was abolished by the Thirteenth Amendment.

In a statement to the Harvard Law School community shortly after the release of the committee’s report, Dean John F. Manning ’85 commented on the report and the law school’s own connections with slavery, and he announced several initiatives to honor and commemorate the enslaved people whose labor generated wealth that contributed to Harvard Law School’s founding and to better understand the legacy of slavery and the as yet unfinished business of advancing racial justice.

“[T]hough it is difficult, indeed heartbreaking, to read in cumulative detail the pervasive and grievous wrongs committed here at our university, only by honestly reckoning with this history can we together find new ways to make meaning of our past,” said Manning.

“We must also do these things in part because of the distinctive roles that law and the legal profession, at their best, can play in furthering the highest ideals of law and justice,” Manning wrote, stating that the law school must recommit itself to remedying the ills of “racism, inequality, and many other injustices that continue to this day in our society.”

Harvard Law is proudly woke, but when it comes to teaching about slavery, so is the the rest of the university. For example here’s just one of their courses from their Department of Continuing Education: Slavery and Race in American Law. “This course explores the relationship between enslavement and racialization in American law. The course starts from the premise that American slavery was an institution that enlisted law in support of power and exploitation.”

I do not think this it is any accident that if you look up Harvard Medical School this is what you see on their website:

Here’s the article about Harvard rejecting the Trump administration’s demands.

Trump obviously is going after Harvard with a vengeance because it is our preeminent university and has a legitimate reputation as being liberal. 

He’s going after Columbia and other colleges too, see for example “Trump demands unprecedented control at Columbia, alarming scholars and speech groups.”

The Trump administration brushed aside decades of precedent when it ordered Columbia University to oust the leadership of an academic department, a demand seen as a direct attack on academic freedom and a warning of what’s to come for other colleges facing federal scrutiny.

Federal officials told the university it must immediately place its Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies Department under “academic receivership for a minimum of five years.” The demand was among several described as conditions for receiving federal funding, including $400 million already pulled over allegations of antisemitism.

I think that the anti-Semitism rationale is merely an excuse. The same goes of all the transgended and DEI attacks. If it wasn’t these issues Trump would find another reason to attack and try to control what universities taught. He may not know much about Mao’s reeducation camps where for decades, the Communist Party of China relied on reeducation camps to reform “parasites” and persuade people to support the communist cause. I have no doubt he wants our universities to be loyal and obedient supporters of him personally and his regime.

Here’s another quote from the article about Columbia:

President Donald Trump has been threatening to withhold federal funding from colleges that do not get in line with his agenda, from transgender athletes’ participating in women’s sports to diversity, equity and inclusion programs. On Friday, his administration announced investigations into 52 universities as part of his DEI crackdown.

What do freedom loving people around the world think about all of this? What do they think about the fact that the United States not only has an Education Secretary whose assigned mission is to demolish the Department of Education and comes from the world of Professional Wrestling, but who earned herself a fact check on Snopes? It is true that U.S. Secretary of Education Linda McMahon twice referred to artificial intelligence — AI — as "A1."

Here she is in one of her X posts:

It has become hackneyed to bring up 1984 where the truth is what Big Brother says it is and to share this photo from the movie, but in closing, I will do it anyway.

On a related matter: 

What I don’t understand is how Trump can take away the tax exempt status of a university. I can see him having legal grounds for cutting their federal funding, but eliminating the tax exempt status of Harvard or any other university seems problematic. 

Even the Church of Scientology, after a several years long battle, maintained their tax exempt status as a religious insitition.

This is what the Association of American Universities says about the tax exempt status of colleges. The detailed article begins:

The vast majority of public and private universities and colleges are tax-exempt entities as defined by IRC Section 501(c)(3) because of their educational purposes—purposes that the federal government has long recognized as fundamental to fostering the productive and civic capacity of its citizens—and/or the fact that they are state governmental entities. In turn, states generally grant tax-exempt status to organizations, including universities and colleges, which qualify as tax-exempt entities under Federal law.

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Addendum: 

If you have 22 minutes I strongly recommend you watch this video.

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You don't have to be another Hitler to be Hitlerian, by Hal M. Brown Trump's agenda is Hitler without death camps and starting a war that would kill 75 million.

Today Sabrina Haake wrote Contempt of Court (here).

She references Hitler twice:

Bukele’s ‘States of Exception’ are the legal cover he employs to silence his critics and send people to concentration camps with no legal process. States of Exception were also Hitler’s initial cover for controlling the media, dispatching SS henchmen, and sending millions of innocent people to unthinkable deaths.

Like Bukele, Hitler, and other autocrats throughout history, Trump is also fond of declaring “national emergencies,” which are precursors to states of exceptions. After only three months in office, Trump has already declared six new national emergenciesranging from the “US border emergency” to a “National Energy Emergency,” to a national emergency designating “Cartels and Other Organizations as Foreign Terrorist Organizations and Specially Designated Global Terrorists.”

For my own Substack today I am expanding on what I posted as a comment to her Substack:

For some time people like Sabrina and me have not been reluctant to compare Trump, and people like Bukele, to Hitler when appropriate. Others with a public forum treat mentioning his name like uttering the name of the evl Voldemort. Only Harry Porter dared to do this. When Trump does something Hitlerian and we point this out we do so knowing full well that to say that this does not diminish the worst in history genocide and a war that killed some 75 million people. One doesn't have to be literally a modern day Hitler to be Hitlerian which is defined as "relating to or characteristic of Hitler or the policies of the Nazi party."

Wiki defines blitzkrieg as follows:

Blitzkrieg is a word used to describe a combined arms surprise attack, using a rapid, overwhelming force concentration that may consist of armored and motorized or mechanized infantry formations, together with artillery, air assault, and close air support. The intent is to break through an opponent's lines of defense, dislocate the defenders, confuse the enemy by making it difficult to respond to the continuously changing front, and defeat them in a decisive Vernichtungsschlacht: a battle of annihilation.

Ironically, considering the failed Russian attempt to defeat Ukraine in their own blitzkrieg, this is the photo Wiki used as their illustration:

The German bliztkrieg began in 1939 and had achieved the Nazi goal of conquering Europe by 1941. It included the invasions of Belgium, the Netherlands, and France.

Trump, in a matter of months, has been engaged in his own blitzkrieg to achieve the Hitlerian end of turning the country into his dictatorship where the rule of law is what he says it is.

Trump is engaged in a juggernaut to cement his power. A juggernaut, in current English usage, is a literal or metaphorical force regarded as merciless, destructive, and unstoppable. (Wiki). (The word may sound German but it is really an English version of Jagannath, an important deity in the Hindu traditions of eastern and north-eastern India. The meaning originates from the Hindu temple cars.)

Trump has decided to flex his 78 year old golf tournament winning muscles by coming up with things to attack that have little if anything to do with achieving his ultimate goal. Chief among them are the entire DOGE agenda and his trying to wipe DEI from the country. Neither of these needed to be done to become ruler of an authoritarian country. But, back to Hitler, I wonder if the Nazis needed to exterminate the Jews to take over Europe.

What that seems to add up to is my concluding, not as an historian, but as a psychotherapist, that ruthless dictators are a strange breed with both quirks and psychopathology that may differ from one to another. For example, I doubt Hitler ever had anything like a Trump Cabinet meeting, with cameras rolling, going around the room having everyone praise him effusively. I haven’t read anything about Hitler being a grandiose narcissist needing to be effusively praised by his subordinates. He was, however, ruthless in using the force of arms to achieve his goals.

Trump’s armed troops don’t enforce his dictates by rumbling down the streets in tanks. Instead they drive up in black SUVs and his ICE version of the SS are just as intimidating as the Waffin SS were.

Imagine ICE officers like the SS troops below standing on your street and wondering which of your neighbors they were coming to take away, or whether it might by you.

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There may be those who remember history and want to repeat it. --- "History warns us: every major economic crash has led to a world war. Trump’s corruption, debt, and tariffs may be lighting the fuse." Thom Hartmann

 

Read Thom Hartmann's Substack. The subtitle, "history warns us: every major economic crash has led to a world war. Trump’s corruption, debt, and tariffs may be lighting the fuse…" is what my partner, Ann, just read to me when she looked at this and said I should read Thom’s Substack.

When I did, I thought of two sayings about history. The obvious one is about what happens to those who don't learn from history. We can thank George Santayana's “The Life of Reason, or The Phases of Human Progress" for "those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."

The other is from Shakespeare: "What's past is prologue." This is a quotation from his play The Tempest. Of course it now means that history sets the context for the present.

What this doesn't address is that it is possible that there are those in power who do understand this. When it comes to a depression, they don't care. Far more alarming, when it comes to war, they may actually want one. Trump who enjoys playing the wrestling villain, generally bullying all his enemies, and his macho posturing henchmen like Hegeseth and Homan, (and a few henchwomen) may actually want a war.

They have all these weapons. To them they may be toys they are itching to play with. It's not like when I drove across country for the first time before moving to Portland to visit before moving here from Massachusetts. This was in a fast sports car. At 5:00 AM with no cars on the highway I waited for a very wide woodsy divided median on a straight stretch so there wouldn't be a police car on the oposite side to clock my speed. Then floored it. I got it up to 140 mph before the governor on the car wouldn't let me go any faster. It was scary and exhilerating. Boys will be boys, right?

All I risked was a hefty speeding ticket and maybe one for reckless driving, not starting a war. (I may have gotten off with a warning because the many cops I've known like to have a chance to engage in a high speed chase and open up their giant engine police cars and see how fast they can go. I know some have done this in the wee hours of the morning because when I was a reserve cop myself we clocked a sheriff deputy at over 120mpg when we were running radar from a bridge over the expressway though town.)

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This Amanda Marcotte brilliant take is too bad (good) not to share, By Hal M. Brown This is the best description of the month, maybe so far in 2025, of a Trump action: "Last day of Waco decline"

I read this on RawStory before looking as Salon this morning. (I would have eventually seen Amanda Marcotte’s column because I always check out Salon) The RawStory article “Trump's latest 'meltdown' has hints of 'last day of Waco' decline” jumped out at me. It summarizes Marcotte’s Salon column Trump blinks on tariffs in face of GOP resistance — but he hasn't given up on his cult leader dreams "BE COOL": Trump is still giving "last days of Waco" vibes despite a 90-day "pause" on tariffs

RawStory did all the work for me summarzing two crucial points which she makes:

• "We're getting a compelling illustration on the national stage of how a cult leader can induce his followers to stick by him, even as he loses his mind and his behavior becomes too erratic and dangerous to defend. Almost every Republican on Capitol Hill knows that Donald Trump's tariff plan is political suicide, but few are willing to admit that Dear Leader fully intends to see this idiocy to the very end."

• "Trump has a messiah complex, which has only grown since that missed assassin's bullet from July was hyped by his followers into 'proof' that he's the Chosen One," she wrote before suggesting, "Even as he blinks momentarily on his tariff mania, his behavior is getting even more erratic in a way that's got 'last days of Waco' vibes from a president who has already unsubtly compared himself to David Koresh. His Truth Social meltdown when announcing the 'pause' indicates a decline in Trump's already-fragile mental state."

• With Trump writing, "They are dying to make a deal. 'Please, please sir, make a deal. I’ll do anything sir,'” Marcotte called it "...a moment quite reminiscent of how late-stage cult leaders experience a total collapse between reality and their grandiose fantasies," before pointing to Trump also boasting, "Everything is going to work out well. The USA will be bigger and better than ever before!"

• "It all feels like the final stage of a cult, when the leader's frantic efforts to retain control result in escalating dictates and prophecies that become increasingly hard for followers to make sense of," she wrote before adding, "Republicans would be foolish to treat this 90-day pause as a victory big enough to justify scurrying back to their holes, to hide from the wrath of Dear Leader. He is spiraling and sees these tariffs as the final proving ground of his total conquest of the GOP. He will keep going back to that well — which means economic tumult, more stock market crashes, and more panicked constituents — unless this tariff nonsense is put to bed entirely.

From the RawStory comment section:

This is from:

Know how people often use "drinking the Kool Aid" as a metephor for undying loyalty? Referencing the Jonestown incident? That is, in fact, incredibly inaccurate. What happened at Jonestown was not mass-suicide, it was mass-murder.

Most of the cultists did not kill themselves willingly, survivors of the event claim that most were forced to drink the stuff at gunpoint, and those who refused were shot.

As far as this story goes, Jones' health had indeed degenerated by then, was informed of a possible lung infection, upon which he announced to his followers that he had lung cancer – a ploy to foster sympathy and strengthen support within the community. He was said to be abusing injectable Valium, Quaaludes, stimulants and barbiturates.Audio tapes showed he was complaining of high blood pressure, small strokes, losing forty pounds within the span of two weeks, temporary blindness, convulsions, impotence, and, in his final month, grotesque swelling of the extremities.

Yeah, he was a sick, crippled, pathetic lunatic, and if he hadn't whacked himself he'd have been dead anyway within a few month, tops. And I'd put money on the end of Trump's "reign' being even less dignified.

Below is an animation:

I won’t go into how and why Trump has deveoled a following that is often be called and analyzed by experts as a cult. Cult expert Steve Haasan appeared on TV and has writen at book, “The Cult of Trump” (review) about this. A web search of “Trump cult” will come up with numerous articles.

Above is from this DuckDuckGo search.

I appologize to my Substack readers who count on me to try to come up with an original slant on an issue. Amanda Marcotte did all the heavy lifting for me today.

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My previous Substacks hopefully have a semblance of originality.