Uncle Sam has switched sides. The old guy no longer stands for democracy and freedom—rather, he’s now the Kremlin’s errand boy.
That was made clear Friday afternoon during President Trump’s attempted Oval Office mugging of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.
The debacle—televised live!—was a low point in U.S. foreign policy history. Zelenksy was the hero in his encounter with Trump and J.D. Vance—the one standing up for truth and American values. The President and Vice President were the villains, and the ones attacking them.
But it was also the latest in a series of statements and actions by Trump and his administration that have made it clear they have rejected every foundational idea that once defined the U.S. and our role in the world.
The Constitution is no longer a revered repository of our national ideals, but has been relegated to be increasingly empty words slipped by our founders into the suggestion box of history.
The Statue of Liberty stands as a beacon not to “huddled masses yearning to be free” but to the world’s uber-wealthy who will seek to buy their way in with Trump “gold cards.”
Our national bird is surely now the vulture.
I have often wondered what it was like to wake up in Russia after the fall of the Soviet Union and have your entire belief system discarded— the national myths you were taught to believe since childhood tossed into the trash with yesterday’s blinis. Now we all know.
We all know because, in the past month, everything we were led to believe about America has now been undone. Worse still, everything good we observed for ourselves about the country—even after we became aware of the dark chapters and unfulfilled promise of our past—has also been wiped away.
That’s right, those who came to “make America great again” have actually launched an unprecedented assault against our greatness, diminishing us more with each passing day.
This is not politically motivated hyperbole. It is the bleak arithmetic of the consequences of the Trump-Musk administration’s actions.
It’s hard for many to comprehend because the scope of their changes has been so astonishing—as has velocity at which they have occurred. But let’s be clear: to a stunning degree, what we were once for, we are now against.
What we once hailed as our national identity, we now repudiate. What were once core scientific and historical facts, guides (and guardrails) for our actions, are now rejected. Those who were valued friends are now enemies. And those who were enemies are now embraced and elevated.
It is the most stunning reversal of a nation’s strategies and professed beliefs in modern history, in many ways greater even that which occurred in the former Soviet Union. It is undoubtedly a geopolitical earthquake. But using words like geopolitical can be dangerous because it makes it seem abstract and the human consequences of what has happened, is happening and seems likely to happen are grave both here in the U.S. and around the world.
Just a couple months ago, if you asked most American leaders to enumerate the foundations of our country’s strength and the strategies guiding it at home and abroad, you would produce a list that included the following: promoting and defending democracy, promoting and defending the rule of law, establishing and supporting the institutions of an international order, combatting corruption, defeating authoritarianism, defending against aggression, promoting domestic and open trade, investing in American education, building alliances and strengthening our relations with our neighbors.
In some cases, yes, we have talked a better game than we actually played. But the one thing that should be crystal clear is that in each and every one of them, the Trump administration has not just altered our course, it has reversed it.
In no area is this clearer than in how the administration has treated Russia. Throughout the post-World War II era, Russia was our identified and established enemy, one of the most active hubs of anti-US policies and actions. Yet it is clearer today now more than ever Trump seeks to align the U.S. with Russia, to treat Russia as our ally and to undermine the alliances we built to help contain it. (All while dismantling international institutions, attacking our allies, launching trade wars against them and siding with Russia against them at the U.N.)
Even before the Trump-Zelensky face-off, officials across the Trump administration refuse to acknowledge the demonstrable fact that Russia invaded Ukraine—first in 2014 and then again in 2022. They have instead promoted the Russian view that Ukraine provoked the war. They have said that the U.S. will no longer support Ukraine. They have said the U.S. will no longer be seen as the primary guarantor of European Security, while Trump has said the EU was created to “screw” the U.S. They have broken tradition and sought to extort access to Ukrainian rare earth metals in exchange for aid.
Trump has shut down the part of the Department of Justice that had targeted law-breaking by Russian oligarchs. He has shut down the part of the Department of Homeland Security that protected against foreign election interference (activity that was led by Russia). He has put Russia apologists in charge of the Intelligence Community and the Department of Defense. He has reached out to Putin and proposed Russia’s reentry into the G8; his Secretary of State Marco Rubio has met with Russians for the first time since the 2022 invasion—and came out of the meeting hailing opportunities for economic cooperation.
When asked whether his “gold card” for admission to the U.S. might lead to Russian oligarchs coming into this country, Trump responded that he knew some very nice Russian oligarchs.
We have not adjusted our policies. We have switched sides.
Legend has it that when the U.S. defeated the British at Yorktown in 1871, Lord Cornwallis' army band played a song called “The World Turned Upside Down.” Today, the song should be played again, although this time it would be marking what is clearly a defeat for American ideas, and ideals—the very ideals we have been fighting for ever since Washington triumphed on that Virginia battlefield.
