Oh boy, is Senator Kelly in trouble now. In addition to referring Kelly for court martial, Secretary of I-wanna-start-a-war-so-bad-I-need-a-drink Hegseth has accused Kelly of displaying the medals on his uniform jacket out of order and threatened, “When/if you are recalled to active duty, it’ll start with a uniform inspection.”

First, Hegseth is utterly and completely wrong about Kelly’s medals, which are displayed the photo above in correct order. Second, I cannot even begin to describe how puerile Hegseth’s post on X is. It is utterly beneath the dignity of the office of Secretary of Defense or War or whateverthefuck Hegseth and Trump are illegally calling it these days. Kelly flew 39 combat missions during the first Gulf War in support of ground troops at the risk of his life and was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross and the Air Medal with “V” device signaling “valor,” two of the medals Hegseth accuses Kelly of displaying wrongly in the photograph of his dress uniform.

There is a special place in hell for pipsqueaks like Hegseth accusing war heroes such as Mark Kelly of anything regarding their service, much less improperly displaying the medals he was given for going to war for his country and serving not only with distinction, but heroically. Hegseth has referred Kelly for court martial on the basis of the video Kelly made with five other members of Congress which did nothing more nor less than state the law regarding the obligations of service members if they are given illegal orders.

Hegseth engaged in what the military considers illegal “command influence” when he posted this on X about the actions of the six members of Congress; “The video made by the ‘Seditious Six’ was despicable, reckless, and false. Encouraging our warriors to ignore the orders of their Commanders undermines every aspect of ‘good order and discipline.’” What command influence means in the military is a commander – that would be Hegseth – judging someone guilty of a crime, in this case sedition, before he is charged with the crime, tried, or convicted.

Everyone in the military serves under the command of others – even the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff is under the command of Hegseth and Trump, who under the Constitution, is the Commander in Chief. Your job in the military is to do what you’re told by your commander – to follow orders, at least when they are lawful. When a commander tells you someone is guilty of a crime, in the absence of any information contradicting that, you’re supposed to believe them.

In the case of Hegseth’s command influence, in his referral, Hegseth is telling the Secretary of Navy and everyone under him that Kelly is already guilty, so the conclusion the Navy’s chain of command should be that Kelly has done something that subjects him to court martial, and once the court martial is held, the jury of members of the Navy hearing the case against Kelly, must find him guilty.

In the military, command influence is equivalent to giving an order to find someone guilty. The great irony here is that Hegseth has in effect given an illegal order. That is exactly what Kelly and the others were warning service members they do not have the obligation under the Uniform Code of Military Justice to follow. If this seems like a classic “Catch 22,” that’s because it is. Here is the law, but do not follow it. Instead, do as I tell you, and find Kelly guilty of doing the right thing.

The words inside out, backwards, and upside down apply to everything Hegseth and Trump are doing with respect to the six members of Congress who made the video. Today, we found out that not only is Kelly under threat of court martial by the Navy, the other five have been told by the House and Senate Sergeants at Arms that the FBI has requested they be made available to be “interviewed” by agents from – get this – the FBI Counterterrorism Division.

So now we know, as if we didn’t before, how far Donald Trump is willing to go to enforce his will on those who speak words that he doesn’t like. Trump is seeking to criminalize speech by members of Congress. He has said they are guilty of sedition and should be “hanged,” and now he has turned loose his Department of Justice and FBI to invent some sort of violation of the law that has been committed by speech that clearly and unmistakably told members of the military that they should follow the UCMJ, the law which governs the military.

These people, Hegseth and Trump and the rest of the Republican Party for that matter, are more of a threat to the national security of this country than any foreign power could ever be. They have invaded our democracy using the laws of the democracy itself, the Constitution, they are destroying this country, and in the process, destroying the Constitutional rights of Mark Kelly and the five other members of Congress who have stood up and spoken not just a truth, but a truth that is written down in the laws of the military, the Uniform Code of Military Justice.

Where is it written that speaking out in defense of liberty is an illegal act? In the minds and morals of these people who want to destroy laws and lives and the Constitution itself.

The one thing Kelly has going for him is that most members of the military don’t like it when outsiders, people who are not in uniform, come into their world and fuck around with the rules they live by. The motto of West Point – Duty, Honor, Country – encapsulates the code under which members of the military services live their lives and conduct themselves in service to their country. To those in uniform, Hegseth and Trump are outsiders, despite their temporary status in the chain of command. Elected officials like Trump, and appointed officials like Hegseth, come and go, but the uniforms worn by service members were there before them, and they will be there after they are gone. That is why Mark Kelly proudly displayed a photograph of his Navy dress uniform to accompany his response to Hegseth’s disgusting post on X. Here is what Kelly wrote:

“Secretary Hegseth’s tweet is the first I heard of this. I also saw the President’s posts saying I should be arrested, hanged, and put to death. If this is meant to intimidate me and other members of Congress from doing our jobs and holding this administration accountable, it won’t work. I’ve given too much to this country to be silenced by bullies who care more about their own power than protecting the Constitution.”

Sen. Mark Kelly and Sen. Elissa Slotkin and Rep. Jason Crow and Rep. Chris Deluzio and Rep. Maggie Goodlander and Rep. Chrissy Houlahan are truth-tellers and patriots. They are heroes. They will prevail.

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When I was very young, like, 5 years old, I was obsessed with the Titanic. I wanted to find it. I wanted to find the iceberg that sank it and blow it up (dude, I was 5). I had a light-up globe with world disasters on it (the 70s were a different time) and I could find the spot where the Titanic sank faster than any other catastrophe. One of my favorite movies, a few years later, was 1980s’ “Raise the Titanic,”1 which, if you’ve ever seen it, you are aware of just how ridiculously bad it was. Soooooo bad. And yet, watching that model2 pop to the surface was a BFD for Little Ogre.

Anyway, my mother happily fed my obsession with a board game, The Sinking of the Titanic. We played a looot of board games when I was kid, but this one stayed with me more than any of the others.

The game was silly but fun. You played a crew member racing around the Titanic, gathering food, water, and passengers while the ship steadily sank. Then you had to get to a lifeboat, get off the ship, brave the open seas, and…tropical islands?,3 before getting to the rescue ship.

I loved this game so SO much. I played it with my mother so many times, I can’t even begin to recall. It was a frantic race to escape the ship and sometimes, you didn’t make it. For a stupid little board game by a company that disappeared in 1997, it really ramped up the anxiety. Neat trick.

Fast forward 44 years. Anastasia is going through HER Titanic obsession phase, which, apparently, is genetic? We speed-watched the movie because even though she will read the absolute shit out of a romance YA graphic novel or book, she’s not going to sit through three hours of Leonardo DiCaprio making kissy faces. That’s gross!

But watching the ship sink? THAT was worth paying attention to. Glub glub. She watched a ton of YouTube videos about it and ranted about all these little details for weeks and months.

And I started to think of how cool it would be if we could play that stupid little game from when I was a kid. I knew she would love it as much as I did, even though it was just full of WTF? Dead serious, one of the cards you could pull was “Island full of cannibals, lose one passenger.”

Cannibals. In the North Atlantic. Bro, whut?

So last year, we were up in NYC to visit family. We stopped by our friend Christine’s, and another of our friends was there, Glenn. We were talking about random whatevers, and as I was looking at Christine’s extensive collection of board games, I mentioned that I was looking online to see if I could buy a copy of the Titanic game from almost 50 years ago. Glenn says he has it, and I just stare at him.

“The Titanic game? Where you rotate the ship until it sinks? And you have to run around in little lifeboats?”

“Yeah. That one.”

“Are you fucking kidding me? Give it to me now!”

OK, I was more polite than that. But we arranged to have Glenn mail it to us so we could play it and then return it when we were done.

Anastasia foamed at the mouth when she saw it. We played the shit out of it and Anastasia moved on from her Titanic phase. Then we put the game away, safely (it’s OLD!) and there it sat until this week. Now we’re heading back up to NYC, and we’ll be stopping by Christine’s again. We’ll drop the game off with her and she can give it to Glenn (who will be there the next day).

But before we go, we broke out the Titanic last night for one last sinking. We raced around the ship, collected our food and water, and avoided the flooding blukheads. We all got to a lifeboat, barely, and none of us got assaulted by cannibals. There was a lot of laughing and yelling and only a spot of piracy on the high seas.

Then we packed it up again for its trip back to New York.

It’s not often I get to share something that meant this much to me and my mother with my kids. She died long before they were born and there is precious little of her I can share with them. The Nutcracker. D&D. And now The Sinking of the Titanic. It was a good night and a sweet memory for Anastasia (and me) to hold on to.

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Here we are, the first Thanksgiving of the Trump regime, and, wow, do we have a lot to not be thankful for. People have died. People have been hurt. People have lost everything, all because there is a white nationalist regime working nonstop to destroy the country with little thought about what comes next.

Project 2025 (Underwear Gnome Edition):

Phase 1. Destroy everything

Phase 2. ????

Phase 3. Everlasting fascist utopia for oligarchs!

There might be a few things they’ve overlooked, but I’m sure it will work out in the end.

Most of us are focused on the regime and ICE and the violence they are bringing to our communities. But the holidays are a time for friends and family, and just like in years past, I am urging you to look at the Trump supporters in your life and make them suffer.

They’ve earned it.

Before we move on to the true villains of the story, I’m going to take a few seconds to be a smug asshole and wallow in a little bit of FAFO for all the other people who brought us to this point. The idiots and dupes who sided with the monsters and are now discovering what a terrible mistake they’ve made.

Last year, just a few weeks after they elected Trump, I called out three very specific groups and made some very specific predictions about how the leopards were going to eat their faces:

Group #1: “The Muslims who think Trump is going to end the war in Gaza because he’s a man of peace.”

Specific prediction: “They signed the death warrants of their friends and family in both Gaza and the West Bank.”

How’s it going a year later? Unleashed from all constraints, Netanyahu has spent most of 2025 trying to murder everyone in the Gaza Strip, which is exactly what we said he would do. When he’s done there, he will almost certainly find “terrorists” in the West Bank and he’ll be “forced” to invade there as well.

Bonus! The regime has used risible accusations of antisemitism against Israel to attack America’s Muslim community, stifle free speech, and undermine American universities.

American Muslims not only fucked their friends and relatives in Gaza, they fucked themselves and the rest of us in the process. Maybe siding with Republicans because you both hate The Gays is a bad strategy because the GOP hates you just as much. How did you forget that after the violence and racism they subjected you to after 9/11?

Group # 2: The Latinos who think Trump’s mass deportations won’t affect them because they’re “the good ones.”

Specific prediction: They’re going to discover that white nationalists don’t distinguish between “good” and “bad” Latinos. They ALL have to go. Hence the WHITE in “white nationalist.”

How’s it going a year later? Badly. Stephen Miller’s white nationalist army is terrorizing entire cities to hunt down anyone with brown skin who speaks Spanish. They drag them out of their homes, their jobs, their cars and assault them. They put them in cages and refuse to feed them or give them water. They send them to foreign countries to be tortured and killed.

The regime waited less than a month before dropping the pretense the purge would only be criminals and “bad people.” They will grab anyone. Children. Grandmothers. The disabled. Legal immigrants. American citizens. No one is safe if they’re Latino. Every week that passes, they become more violent and unhinged, and they’ve barely begun to recruit the white nationalists they’re explicitly looking for to fill out their ranks. Six months from now, mobs of literal Nazis with badges will be roaming the streets, looking for victims.

The real violence hasn’t even started. If only someone had warned them…

Group #3: The REALLY stupid people who think Trump was great for the economy and will cut them a new stimulus check.

Specific prediction: BWHAHAHAHAHAHA! GOOD LUCK WITH THE COMING TARIFFS AND RECESSION YOU FUCKING IDIOTS! There ain’t gonna BE a stimulus check. And if you live in a red state? You ain’t getting an unemployment check, either. Sucks for you, dumbass.

How’s it going a year later? Tariffs have stolen hundreds of billions from the economy and put that money…well, we don’t know where that money went, do we? We do know, though, that everyone in the regime seems to be getting awfully rich at taxpayer expense and openly talking about how if Democrats win back power, they’re all going to jail. I’m sure it’s just a coincidence.

Meanwhile, the phenomenal and steady job growth under Biden? That’s gone. Inflation? That’s back. The AI bubble? The largest in history and on the brink of bursting, along with a housing bubble and a new Wall Street derivatives bubble that will make the 2008-2009 crash look like a speed bump.

Red states are going to lose billions in Medicaid and SNAP, pushing tens of millions of Republican voters into deep poverty.

The leopards, on the other hand, will be getting incredibly fat from all the faces they’ll be devouring.

Those are the Trump voters who fell for the bullshit. Who swallowed that delicious legacy media propaganda about “Genocide Joe” and how Biden’s economy was actually on the brink of a recession for four years and how Trump would close the border and catch all the “bad hombres.”

Those people are fucking morons, and now they’re paying the price for their stupidity. We’re all paying along with them but at least most of them have snapped out of their delusions. The electorate’s wild swing back to the left and the public’s fury at Trump’s “broken promises” tell us that these people are not completely hopeless. So that’s good, I guess. I’m not going to waste any tears on them, but I’m not going to beat them up over family dinner.1

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But then there’s the other Trump voter. We all know who that is. The ones who voted for him three times and are eager to illegally vote for him a fourth time.

They’re wearing their Trump 2028 hat. They’re laughing about ICE raids beating up reporters. They’re calling Democrats traitors and insisting “antifa” is a terrorist organization funded by George Soros.

They’re your uncle, who’s much more comfortable these days talking about how “The Jews” are the real problem. They’re your cousin, who’s a huge fan of Nick Fuentes and getting increasingly vocal about it. They’re your grandfather, who thinks maybe we don’t need any more elections if they’re going to be rigged by the “Democrat Party.” They’re your sister who won’t shut the fuck up about poor Charlie Kirk and how you godless shitlibs murdered him.

All of them are excited for Trump. Maybe they wish he would do something about the price of eggs, but, really, it’s worth a little pain at the grocery store to Make America White Great Again. And, sure, maybe Trump is getting a little old but, really, that’s OK because the Department of Justice is finally going after the enemies of America!

They’ll turn a blind eye to the Epstein files, maybe. After all, everyone knows the REAL pedophiles are the Democrats and, besides, they’re all babykillers and banning abortion is soooooo important. It’s part of Trump’s divine mission from God!

We all know these people. We’ve been putting up with their bullshit for the last decade. Or longer.

I’ve asked people to push back or avoid them or simply cut them out of your life because they would the collaborators to a fascist regime and a threat to you and yours.

But these are people who are now seeing their god-emperor falter. Their party/cult is now starting to look beyond Trump and thinking about how they will wash themselves of his sins. That’s bullshit.

The MAGA faithful are monsters and they should never be allowed to forget it.

Now, as much as I would like to carve a big letter “T” or “MAGA” onto their foreheads, I can’t ACTUALLY do that.2 But when the regime falls, the first thing your MAGA relatives are going to do is insist they never be held accountable for anything the regime did. We know this because that’s exactly what they did after eight years of Bush.

Eight years of war and death and torture and corruption and hate, and none of the millions of eager Bush voters took an ounce of responsibility for it. They magically transformed into “The Tea Party” or “constitutional conservatives.” They’re going to do the same exact thing in a few years and you should take every opportunity between now and then to tear them to shreds.

Make them defend masked ICE agents dragging children out of bed, naked, in the middle of the night, and zip-tieing their hands. Make them defend ICE shooting unarmed priests over and over again. Make them defend putting men and women and children in concentration camps and denying them food and water. Make them defend letting women bleed to death in hospital parking lots. Make them defend closing hundreds of rural hospitals and sending thousands of Americans to their death from lack of access to emergency care. Make them defend cutting billions from SNAP and making millions of children go hungry so Elon Musk can get billions in tax cuts.

Call them murderers and liars and fascists. Make them defend it all and be ugly about it. Make them afraid to ever open their fucking mouths about politics again. They’re monsters and they should be ashamed to show their faces in public.

And when the regime falls and your MAGA relative tries to burn their Nazi uniform, never let them forget who they were and the evil they eagerly supported. They don’t get to rebrand themselves as a victim of Trumpism (I’m looking at YOU, Marjorie Taylor Greene!). They don’t get to wipe the slate clean. They have to wear the stain of their evil for the rest of their miserable scumbag lives, just like we have to live with the scars of what they’ve done for the rest of ours.

There is nothing racist white Republicans despise more than accountability, which is why it is vital we make them choke on it at every opportunity. These are bad people who have spent the last decade wishing harm on millions and wallowing in that pain and misery. Let them drown in it, and do not waste a second of pity for them. They made their choice. THREE. FUCKING. TIMES. They are irredeemable. Let them pay the price for being filth.

I hope you feel better informed about the world and ready to kick fascists in the teeth to protect it. This newsletter exists because of you, so please consider becoming a supporting subscriber today for only $5 a month or just $50 a year (a 17% discount!). Thank you for everything!

🔥Burn Fascism To The Ground!🔥

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Fascism hates organized protests. They fear the public. They fear US. Make fascists afraid again by joining Indivisible or 50501 and show them whose fucking country this is!

The Blue Wave is here! No matter what a handful of scumbag Democrats try to do to dissuade us, it cannot be stopped. There are 343 days until the most important midterm election in American history. The regime is afraid, and they should be. We are legion, and they are weak. Stay strong. You are never alone.

The raging trash fire that is the so-called “peace plan” for Ukraine is all the evidence you need that Donald Trump has not only lost the narrative, he’s lost the last clue he ever had about the location of anything even resembling reality.

Trump has been bragging that he will end the war in Ukraine and get the Nobel Peace Prize seemingly since he was in diapers. Ooops. Come to think of it, he is in diapers. He keeps claiming that he has ended seven wars, at least three of which weren’t even wars to begin with. Ukraine, he realizes, is The Big One. We don’t know how often he’s been on the blower with Pal Putin, but a good guess would be weekly. One of their big ideas was to meet in Alaska to discuss the war that Putin could end if he wanted to with a single phone call. That idea fell apart after an entirely embarrassing display of obsequiosity that included greeting a man facing indictment by the Court International Justice with a red carpet that ran between two F-35 fighter jets parked on the tarmac of Joint Base Elmendorf Richardson.

Putin fired rockets and armed drones at the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv the night he and Trump flew back to their respective lairs in Moscow and Washington D.C., so that plan, which never was a plan, utterly fell apart.

It was strange to me at the time, and it remains strange today, that the mainstream media and politicians, especially Republicans, had so little to say about the fact that Putin was ordering up a war crime – purposefully killing civilians – at the same time he was holding “peace” talks with Trump. It’s as if what passes for a political class in this country has completely lost the ability to discern what is criminal and immoral in the actions of a dictator like Vladimir Putin. The “analysis,” such as it was, after the Alaska talks focused on the fact that the talks ended earlier than expected and what that meant. Well, it meant the talks had failed spectacularly, which should have been apparent when there was no press conference held by Trump and Putin afterwards. Instead, Trump stood mute as Putin launched into one of his Khrushchev-style lectures on the “root causes” of his war against Ukraine and a gratuitous and deadly boring history lesson about Russia’s former ownership of Alaska.

Trump’s remarks were uncharacteristically brief. He claimed “great progress” had been made in the talks. Incredibly, as he stood next to the man who was responsible, all by himself, for the war, Trump noted that “five, six, seven thousand people a week” are being killed while claiming that Putin wanted to see an end to the killing as much as he did.

All of which is to say, we should have seen this disaster coming. This week’s “peace plan” turned out to be the same Russian demands that Putin has been making all along – recognition of Russian sovereignty over Crimea, Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson and Ukraine’s acceptance of being turned into a half-country with a smaller military, no rights to treaties or defense agreements with other countries, a defenestrated defense establishment with no right to own or use offensive missiles…one fantasy demand after another.

That was Russia’s stance way back in August in Alaska, and it hasn’t changed a whit since then.

So, what did Trump do? Well, he took Putin’s Alaska “peace plan,” put his stamp of approval on it, and announced that Ukraine had until this Thursday to agree to it.

But that was before Rubio told a gaggle of Senators that the Russians had written the plan, then he said the plan was ours, and then Trump started to back off and claim that it was just a suggested plan and the deadline wasn’t final.

Yet another example of what you get when you mix utter incompetence with a total lack of any morals at all.

Trump is spazzing. He’s lost his grip on his own party. House and Senate Republicans both stiffed him and passed the bill forcing the release of the Epstein files. Marjorie Taylor Greene is using this moment to put herself in the spotlight as a potential future candidate for something or another by standing up to Trump and trashing him in a YouTube video announcing her resignation from the House. Greene has been something of a joke to Democrats, but she’s got the political instincts of a scorpion, and now she has shown herself willing to sting any creature that gets in her way, including Trump.

The Epstein scandal, combined with Trump’s complete capitulation to Putin, shows his weakness and proves he’s the lamest of lame ducks, even with three years left to serve in the now-desecrated White House. He’s incompetent on foreign affairs, he’s crashing the economy with his tariffs, inflation is sitting out there in the weeds just waiting to pop up and bite him in his copious ass, he has allowed the Republicans to show themselves, once again, to have nothing whatsoever to say about health care and insurance other than the same old “free market” garbage that no one takes seriously, and his poll numbers are headed for the third basement below loser.

Best of all, Trump is looking at the midterm elections knowing Republicans are going to lose the House and might lose the Senate. If that happens, he’s going to face yet another Bill of Impeachment in the House and trial in the Senate. Trump hasn’t got enough gold leaf to paper over his ego if that happens.

Mamdani created a YouTube video of how to handle a blowhard in his meeting last week with Trump. If you stand up to him, Trump doesn’t know how to act. Gavin Newsom should be on a plane to New York to sit down with Mamdani to learn his secrets, including his magic with younger voters and Latinos.

Trump is weak. Strike now.

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The Witkoff-negotiated “peace deal” is now being reported as not a U.S. thing at all. A post on X tonight from Senator Mike Rounds, Republican of South Dakota, appears to be evidence of the Trump administration shifting quickly into reverse after the blowback from Europe and U.S. politicians to the absurd sell-out “deal” Trump was pushing.

From Rounds on X: “@SecRubio did make a phone call to us this afternoon. I think he made it very clear to us that we are the recipients of a proposal that was delivered to one of our representatives. It is not our recommendation, it is not our peace plan. It is a proposal that was received. And as an intermediary, we have made arrangements to share it. And we did not release it. It was leaked. It was not released by our members or our representatives... This is an opportunity to receive it and that it has been utilized and delivered to the Ukrainians, and that they will have an opportunity to respond. And in doing so, you now have one side being presented and the opportunity for the other side to respond.”

With his reference to “a phone call to us,” Rounds appears to be referring to a call with Republican senators, since the Trump administration is not exactly known for keeping Democrats in the loop. Rubio’s sudden reversal appears to be an attempt to quiet Republican opposition to the Trump “deal.”

But even that isn’t clear. The situation is changing by the moment. A friend with excellent contacts in both Ukraine and U.S. diplomatic circles just sent me a message saying that Rubio has now tweeted that “the plan was drafted by the US with input from Ukraine and Russia.”

Did Witkoff negotiate it with Dmitriev, or was the plan handed by Russia to the U.S.? Rubio told the senators, the plan was “delivered to the Ukrainians, and that they will have an opportunity to respond.” So, which is it? Does anyone know?

The whole thing sounds like a typical Trump cobbled-together total clusterfuck at this point. Stay tuned. By midnight, they might be pushing the line that Little Green Men threw the thing down from a hovering UFO.

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The “peace deal” isn’t a ceasefire. It isn’t an armistice. It is a complete capitulation to every fever-dream demand Vladimir Putin has made whenever ending his war has ever been discussed. As written, it is worse than whatever “deal” he and Trump allegedly discussed at their meeting in Alaska, which apparently disturbed Trump enough that he ended the meeting before it was scheduled to close.

Ukraine wasn’t even consulted. The proposed deal as reported by Anne Applebaum in The Atlantic, “was negotiated by Steve Witkoff, a real-estate developer with no historical, geographical, or cultural knowledge of Russia or Ukraine, and Kirill Dmitriev, who heads Russia’s sovereign-wealth fund and spends most of his time making business deals.” That would be Trump’s real estate buddy, with whom he has other deals involving crypto, including the $2 billion investment by Dubai in what is referred to as the “Trump-Witkoff stablecoin,” which for those who haven’t been paying close attention to the topsy-turvy-but-generally-Ponzi world of crypto is neither a “coin” nor “stable.” Putin’s “negotiator,” like anyone associated with him in Russia at this time, can best be described as a killer.

So, a Trump buddy and a killer for Putin. That sounds fair.

The deal would allow Putin to keep all the land in Ukraine he has taken waging war by murdering civilians and burying them in mass-graves, sending rockets and armed drones into Ukrainian population centers almost nightly. Russian air attacks have killed thousands of Ukrainian civilians and destroyed hospitals, schools, churches, apartment buildings, shopping malls, streets, businesses, factories and other civilian infrastructure – all of which amounts to war crimes for which Putin has been charged, and for which, under terms of the deal, he will not face prosecution at the International Court of Justice.

The deal would require Ukraine to cede to Russia the 12 percent of the Donbas – the regions of Luhansk and Donetsk – that Russia has been fighting for, but has not captured. These lands unoccupied by Russia are rich in coal, iron, and the kinds of precious metals necessary for advanced batteries and microchip production.

So, that would reward Russia with land it has not even seized, and from which it would be free to build up militarily for some future attack to seize the rest of Ukraine and launch a war on Europe.

According to the New York Times, the deal was “drafted with no input from the Ukrainians, the European allies or the Congress.” So, one might ask, just who had input in negotiating the deal? Well, Trump’s gofer and Putin’s killer, that’s who.

Under terms of the deal, Ukraine would be required to rewrite its constitution to include a clause forbidding the country from ever joining NATO. Ukraine must agree to limit its military to 600,000 troops, a reduction from its current level of 900,000; it would be forbidden to possess any long range missiles capable of striking Russia. Since to strike Russia, all Ukraine would have to do is fire a missile a few miles over the border, that would seem to include such short-range missiles as the HIMARS missiles that have been supplied by the United States, and other defensive missiles that European nations have provided. Ukraine would also be compelled to hold elections within 100 days of the deal’s signing. This demand, negotiated by Capitulator in Chief Witkoff, has been made by a country in which Putin has outlawed competitor political parties, jailed and killed his political opponents, and not held a legitimate and free election for more than 20 years.

Applebaum reports that “Awkward wording, evident throughout the document, suggests that at least some of it was originally written in Russian.” Oh, boy, couldn’t have guessed that, huh?

Here is where we get our hint of what the real deal is behind the “peace deal” Trump wants to foist on Ukraine. The U.S. would be required to help “reintegrate” Russia into the world economy. What does that mean? Well, the U.S. would be required to lift all economic sanctions on Russia and agree to Russia’s readmission to the G8. The $100 billion in frozen Russian assets, most of which is held by European banks, would be returned to Russia, supposedly under the control of the United States, which would “invest” this money in Ukraine. In return, the U.S. would get “50 percent of the profits from this venture.” What would the Europeans get, who have been supplying weapons and other aid to Ukraine for three long years? The “peace deal” requires European nations, unnamed but presumably including those in the European Union, to “invest” $100 billion in the reconstruction of Ukraine. Under whose supervision would that reconstruction take place? That isn’t specified, but in the more than one-fifth of Ukraine occupied by Russia, which the rest of the world would be required to recognize as Russian territory, I would just bet that Russia would be in control of all those hundreds of billions that would be devoted to “reconstruction.”

And what would Russia be required to do in return? Nada. Zip. Zero. Nothing.

According to Applebaum in The Atlantic, Trump’s gofer Witkoff did his duty in making certain that Donald Trump profited from his “peace deal.” According to the wording of the deal, the U.S. and Russia would “enter into a long-term economic cooperation agreement for mutual development in the areas of energy, natural resources, infrastructure, artificial intelligence, data centers, rare earth metal extraction projects in the Arctic, and other mutually beneficial corporate opportunities.”

What are the details of these agreements that would clearly benefit Donald Trump and whichever business-buddies he chooses to include in the flood of profits? There are no details. As Applebaum reports, “the business negotiations carried out by Witkoff and Dmitriev remain secret.”

Oh, boy, we couldn’t have guessed that.

So, who is left out of the mega-exploitation of Ukraine’s resources and all the deals cut by Trump and Russia? Well, that would be every single country in Europe that has been helping Ukraine fight the Russians for three years. They get nothing from Trump and Putin.

In fact, all Europe gets is a strengthened Russia that upon the signing of the “peace deal,” would be free to rearm and start moving even more troops and materiel into the Ukrainian lands it has occupied in preparation for whatever conquest Vladimir Putin wants to order next.

When the U.S. defeated the Nazis in World War II, Germany was disarmed and forbidden from building a new military force that would threaten Europe and the rest of the world. Under the Trump-Putin “peace deal,” Ukraine would be hindered from rearming to defend the rest of its territory, but Russia would be rewarded for its aggression and murder by being permitted to do anything it wants militarily with all the money and resources that are freed-up by the lifting of sanctions and the involvement of Russia in brand new deals with Trump-picked cronies to develop resources and build new AI plants, factories to extract and use rare earth metals, and all the U.S. oil technology necessary to drill for oil in Russia’s deep North, where the lack of that technology has hampered Russian oil exploration for decades.

It is not known what Zelenskyy will agree to between now and the Thanksgiving deadline Trump has set for the deal to be agreed to by Ukraine – there being no question that Russia will agree to the terms of the deal, since it appears that Putin’s killer negotiator was the one who wrote the fucking thing.

Trump was asked by reporters yesterday what would happen if Ukraine did not agree to the terms of his “peace deal.” Here is his response: “He’ll have to like it and if he doesn’t like it then, you know, they should just keep fighting.” Trump was also asked if the U.S. would continue to support Ukraine if Zelenskyy doesn’t agree to the “peace deal.”

“At some point, he’s going to have to accept something,” Trump replied.

Trump has his nose shoved so far up Putin’s ass, it’s amazing he can see enough to play golf. The question is, why? This week, we got at least part of our answer: Trump’s “peace deal” will make him and his family and his gang of American oligarchs much, much more wealthy. That’s why he ran for the presidency, after all, to enrich himself and his family and his friends. That he will be enriching himself at the cost of Ukrainian lives doesn’t matter to him. What matters to Donald Trump is money, and there is plenty of it to be had if he can force Zelenskyy to sign a “peace deal” that will not guarantee him and Ukraine any peace at all.

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