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Almost lost among Donald Trump’s latest assault on America, has been his utter disdain for our democracy, and love for Russian President Vladimir Putin.Amid Trump’s attack on our government, White House, health-care, food benefits, vote, the arts, environment, our economy, and peace and quiet, the Russia-Ukraine War has raged on.Defying all odds, the Ukrainians and their gutsy, charismatic leader Volodymyr Zelenskyy, have held off the once-feared Russian army for nearly four years. This should be celebrated as one the most inspirational events of a 21st Century that has been sorely lacking inspiration or good.Putin and his vaunted army were supposed to cut through Ukraine like a knife through butter when they launched their attack on Feb. 24, 2022. When Putin’s army amassed on the Ukrainian border it was estimated by many experts that Ukraine would fall in mere hours.Except that never happened because the Ukrainians proved themselves more feisty and prepared, and Russia weaker and more clumsy, than all these experts expected.By the third day of fighting Zelenskyy was proving himself more than ready for what feeble Russia was bringing him, and produced a video watched my millions that turned down the United State’s invitation to evacuate him, saying:“The fight is here; I need ammunition, not a ride!”Something wonderful was happening on the eastern front, as a small, upstart and proud nation was smacking the murderous Putin and his army right in the mouth.It was scary, thrilling and good news to everybody it seems except for Putin and his puppet, Trump, who wasted no time alerting the world to what side he was on, calling Putin’s attack, “savvy” and “genius.”Just three days later, when he saw what was happening, as the valiant Ukrainians stood up to the bully, and “savvy genius,” Putin, the carnival-barking Trump changed his tone at a CPAC gathering in Florida, on February 27, 2022, and slobbered this:“The Russian attack on Ukraine is appalling. We are praying for the proud people of Ukraine. God bless them all.”After surviving this anti-democratic whiplash, instead of apologizing for his grotesque words praising Putin, Trump did what he always did, and has always done: He attacked the United States, and let Putin off the hook, saying:“The real problem is that our leaders are dumb, dumb. So dumb.”But Trump’s phony reversal, and attack on America, was only the subhead of that event in Florida, because he used that never-ending speech to hint loudly at another run for office by taking a swipe at America and its President, Joe Biden:“As everyone understands, this horrific disaster would never have happened if our election was not rigged and if I was the president …”He went on:“In November 2024, Democrats will find out like never before. We did it twice, and we’ll do it again. We’re going to be doing it again, a third time.”Here’s where I will always point out with precision and rage that this anti-American, no-good monster should have been on his way to rotting in jail by now for his attack on our country that had occurred just one year earlier, on Jan. 6, 2021. Except Attorney General Merrick Garland still hadn’t even laid a glove on the traitor, Trump, and allowed him to reclaim his hold over a party that had proven itself morally busted, and incapable of standing up against Trump or Putin, and for America.Now four very painful years later, the proud Ukrainians are still holding off Russia, and Trump is still doing everything he can to make sure Russia prevails.As I type this, Trump has rolled out a U.S. peace plan this is so absurd even the cowards who helped enable him in the Republican Party are speaking out against it, saying it is nothing but a Russian wish list.Here is Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC):“Putin is a murderer a rapist and an assassin. We should not do anything that makes him feel like he has a win here.”Here is Sen. Mitch McConnell, (R-KY):“If administration officials are more concerned with appeasing Putin than securing real peace, then the president ought to find new advisors.”I am aware that both of these men are not seeking reelection, which is why you can be assured they are both finally telling the truth.On Sunday, Trump was right back where he was four years ago, despite all the heroics of the Ukrainians since, blaming the United States, Ukraine and our allies for the attack, by blasting this out on his state-run social media channel:“With strong and proper U.S. and Ukrainian LEADERSHIP, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine would have NEVER HAPPENED.”“UKRAINE ‘LEADERSHIP’ HAS EXPRESSED ZERO GRATITUDE FOR OUR EFFORTS, AND EUROPE CONTINUES TO BUY OIL FROM RUSSIA.”Read that again, and try to tell me that Trump is not a traitor.Not a single word of condemnation at the aggressor and murderer, Putin. Only disdain for America, Ukraine, and our NATO allies whose relationship over the decades has been forged in blood and honor.Russia helped install Trump into office in 2016. We know this. In fact, nobody knows it better than his Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who chaired the Republican-led bipartisan committee who rendered these findings in August, 2020, which stated:The Trump campaign’s interactions with Russian intelligence services during the 2016 presidential election posed a “grave” counterintelligence threat.This is from a PBS story that went into the 1,000-page report. It was the fifth and final one from the Republican-led Senate intelligence committee on the Russia investigation:“The findings, including unflinching characterizations of furtive interactions between Trump associates and Russian operatives, echo to a large degree those of special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation and appear to repudiate the Republican president’s claims that the FBI had no basis to investigate whether his campaign was conspiring with Russia. Trump has called the Russia investigations a “hoax.”Cold irony then that it is the feckless Rubio who seems to be caught in the middle of unfriendly fire right now between Trump and the rest of the free world as his boss attacks the United States and makes excuses for Putin with his pathetic excuse for a “peace plan.”From AP reporting:Lawmakers critical of President Donald Trump’s approach to ending the Russia-Ukraine war said Saturday they spoke with Secretary of State Marco Rubio who told them that the peace plan Trump is pushing Kyiv to accept is a “wish list” of the Russians and not the actual proposal offering Washington’s positions.A State Department spokesperson denied their account, calling it “blatantly false.”Rubio himself then took the extraordinary step of suggesting online that the senators were mistaken, even though they said he was their source for the information. The secretary of state doubled down on the assertion that Washington was responsible for a proposal that had surprised many from the beginning for being so favorable to Moscow.“For being so favorable to Moscow …”Shocking, eh?So here we are again. Donald Trump is doing everything in his seemingly unlimited power to make sure Putin gets what he wants after starting this illegal and immoral war against Ukraine.He is clearly in the tank FOR Russia and AGAINST America.Just what in the hell is going here????(D. Earl Stephens is the author of “Toxic Tales: A Caustic Collection of Donald J. Trump’s Very Important Letters” and finished up a 30-year career in journalism as the Managing Editor of Stars and Stripes. You can find all his work here.)

The Trump State Department officially added a German antifascist group and three other European far-left groups to its list of foreign terrorist organizations last week. But the action, which freezes U.S. assets and imposes penalties on anyone who offers support to the groups, ignored a transnational neo-Nazi group that has committed acts of violence of its own and is linked to the murder of two men in Florida.The State Department announcement about plans to apply the terror designation to Antifa Ost accused the group of conducting “numerous attacks against individuals it perceives as ‘fascists,’” specifically citing “a series of attacks in Budapest in mid-February 2023.”What the announcement leaves out is that the attacks allegedly committed by Antifa Ost took place during an annual gathering, the “Day of Honor,” organized by neo-Nazis to commemorate a battle fought by the German army and local collaborators against the Soviet Union in Hungary during World War II. By the State Department’s own admission, “extreme right sympathizers … attacked groups they took to be antifascist demonstrators” during the event.The first “Day of Honor” march in 1997 was organized by the Hungarian chapter of Blood and Honour. Members of the international Blood and Honour group and its armed wing Combat 18 continue to attend the event, according to a report financed by the German Foreign Ministry. Canada added Blood and Honour and Combat 18 to its list of proscribed terrorist entities in 2019, alongside the UK and Germany. A Spanish court ordered the dissolution of the group in that country. The Canadian government describes Blood and Honour as “an international neo-Nazi network whose ideology is derived from the neo-Nazi doctrine of Nazi Germany,” while saying Combat 18 “has carried out violent actions, including murders and bombings.” As noted by the Canadian government, Blood and Honour members pleaded guilty to murdering two unhoused men in Tampa, Fla. in 1998, reportedly “because they considered them inferior.”“It sure shows the game here that’s afoot,” Tom Joscelyn, a senior fellow at Just Security, recently told a podcast, adding that the Trump administration is “going after what they claim is this international terrorist menace in antifa” by sanctioning Antifa Ost. “But they’re not going after the neo-Nazi group, which is by far larger and has also committed acts of violence in this context. I think it puts everything in stark relief.”‘Greatly inflating the threat’Joscelyn has written extensively about al-Qaida and was a principal author of the final report of the House January 6th Committee.“There is a threat from antifa adherents inside the U.S., and no one will be surprised if there’s a successful antifa-style attack in the future,” Joscelyn told Raw Story. “However, the administration is greatly inflating the threat for their own political purposes while ignoring well-established threats from far-right and neo-Nazi groups.”In order to designate a group as a foreign terrorist organization, the State Department is required to demonstrate that a group’s activities “threaten the security of U.S. nationals or the national security (national defense, foreign relations, or the economic interests) of the United States.”Thomas Brzozowski, formerly domestic terrorist counsel for the Department of Justice, said the State Department announcement cited “no attacks or alleged attacks on Americans” and “no plots against Americans” by members of Antifa Ost or the three other left-wing groups.“We do not discuss deliberations or the potential deliberations of our designations process,” an unidentified State Department spokesperson said in a statement to Raw Story.The German government has said the threat posed by Antifa Ost has “decreased significantly” thanks to the successful prosecution of several prominent members, according to Reuters. The outlet reported that the German government said it was not consulted by the U.S. before plans to designate Antifa Ost as a foreign terrorist organization were announced.Brzozowski said he thinks “even the folks at State know” there’s no way to show Antifa Ost as a legitimate national security threat. “And they’re doing their best, I’m sure,” he said. “But come on! They’re put in a bind. They’ve got to deliver, or else they’re going to get fired.“The sequencing is all backwards at this point. And that’s dangerous. Because this is really political theater, is what it is. This is giving effect to a presidential directive.”Brawling with neo-NazisThe violence at the “Day of Honor” event in Budapest has been politicized in Hungary.Légió Hungária, a neo-Nazi group that assumed responsibility for organizing the event from Blood and Honour, receives support from the ruling Fidesz party, led by Trump ally Viktor Orbán, according to the 2023 report by B’nai B’rith and Amadeo Antonio Foundation, underwritten by the German Foreign Ministry. In 2019, members of Légió Hungária vandalized a Jewish community center in Budapest during a nationalist gathering commemorating the 1956 uprising against the Soviet Union, as reported by the State Department during Trump’s first term.This September, Hungary declared Antifa Ost a terrorist organization, in alignment with Trump’s agenda. But the Trump administration has remained silent on the 2019 attack carried out by Légió Hungária, as well as reports cited by B’nai B’rith that participants in the 2020 “Day of Honor” chanted, “Jews out!” The report also cited “Holocaust denial and distortion, historical revisionism of World War II, and worship of the Waffen-SS as core ideological elements of the event.”Shortly after taking office this year, President Trump announced the launch of a Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism, which accused U.S. universities of turning a blind eye to the issue, amidst an administration campaign to deport pro-Palestine activists.“Anti-semitism in any environment is repugnant to this nation’s ideals,” said Leo Terrell, senior counsel to the assistant attorney general for civil rights and leader of the task force, when the effort was launched. “The [Justice] Department takes seriously our responsibility to eradicate this hatred wherever it is found.”The Department of Justice did not respond to a request for comment from Terrell for this story.Despite Légió Hungária receiving state backing, Hungary’s Supreme Court reportedly upheld a police ban on the 2023 “Day of Honor,” finding: “Extreme groups are expected to appear at this event. The holding of the event in their presence may be accompanied by considerable attack on public order and peace.”But, as a 2023 State Department report noted, neo-Nazis sidestepped the ban.“Media outlets reported that despite the police ban, several hundred extreme-right and neo-Nazi sympathizers gathered in the Buda Castle to commemorate ‘Day of Honor.’ Police successfully prevented them from clashing with a group of 100-200 Hungarian and international counter-protesters in the area,” the report reads.“According to statements by police, antifascist demonstrators elsewhere in the city assaulted several individuals they assumed to be affiliated with the extreme right,” the report continues. “Similarly, extreme right sympathizers reportedly attacked groups they took to be antifascist demonstrators.”The circumstances of violence allegedly committed by antifascists in Budapest is telling, Joscelyn told Raw Story.“The U.S. went from designating al-Qaida for the 9/11 hijacking to designating overseas antifa adherents for brawling with neo-Nazis,” he said.The State Department’s selective sanctions against antifascists while turning a blind eye to neo-Nazi violence reveals the Trump administration’s actual objectives, Joscelyn added. “You saw even during the No Kings protests there were very prominent MAGA Republicans that said this was an extremist effort and warning of violence and warning of events that didn’t happen. “That shows how desperate the administration and its supporters are to portray its opposition as extremists. The concept of antifa is the cudgel they’re using to bash their opposition.”

New details have emerged about a Ukraine peace plan secretly worked up between the U.S. and Russia – and how Trump administration officials intend to impose its conditions.President Donald Trump's special envoy Steve Witkoff has been drafting the 28-point plan with Russian envoy Kirill Dmitriev, according to reporting from Tuesday night, and Politico Playbook reported Wednesday the White House will soon unveil the agreement to end the three-and-a-half year war to an end."So this is one way to distract from the Epstein files," Playbook reported. "A senior White House official [says] they expect a framework for ending the conflict to be agreed by all parties by the end of this month — and possibly 'as soon as this week.'""Buckle up," the report added.Army Secretary Dan Driscoll, along with a pair of four-star general and other senior U.S. military officials, made a highly unusual trip to Kyiv on Wednesday to meet with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy ahead of his talks with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, and Trump administration officials said a plan was on the table to end the Russian invasion."But here’s the thing: This new peace plan has seemingly had no direct input from Ukraine, nor from America’s allies in Europe," Playbook reported. "And we have no sense yet of the details, of what’s been hammered out on the thorniest questions around Russia’s seizure of vast swathes of Ukrainian territory, the kidnapping of tens of thousands of Ukrainian children or the security guarantees being offered to Ukraine in the aftermath."The White House feels confident an agreement will be reached because, as administration officials said, Zelenskyy is under too much pressure to turn it down."What we are going to present is reasonable," a senior White House official said.Russian officials apparently agree, and Playbook noted "this sounds ominous."“We feel the Russian position is really being heard," Dmitriev, the Russian envoy. "[This is a proposal] to address the Ukraine conflict, but also how to restore U.S.-Russia ties [and] address Russia's security concerns. It's actually a much broader framework, basically saying, 'How do we really bring, finally, lasting security to Europe, not just Ukraine.'"A senior White House official was asked to comment on Europe's possible input on the agreement and dismissed the issue entirely.“We don't really care about the Europeans,” the official told Playbook. “It's about Ukraine accepting.”

President Donald Trump surrendering American security for the sake of cozying up to Saudi Arabia should have even MAGA questioning their life choices, Axios CEO Jim Vandehei told MSNBC's Joe Scarborough on Wednesday's "Morning Joe.""If you're in MAGA and you're America First, what the hell are you thinking today?" said Vandehei. "You're watching the fact that you have the White House and Congress. The only thing that they've done in the last two months is vote to release the Epstein files over the objection of the president, who doesn't didn't want any of the files to be released in the first place. Nothing else. Then you put next to that the fact that you have a quasi-state dinner with the Saudis.""Now, remember, like, it was the Saudis who were on the airplane that crashed into our Towers, killing 3000 Americans. That's just a fact," said Vandehei. "And it's also a fact that the journalist that he was deriding when he was talking to the press yesterday was sawed into pieces. And the CIA, under Trump, had a report that linked it pretty directly to at least the crown prince being aware of it. And you have him talking to the Saudis about getting deals from us, where we're going to let them have our F-35s on their soil. We're going to give them access to our AI technology" — even as the Saudis say they could pass that tech along to China."It's understandable there's a burgeoning revolt among MAGA activists, Vandehei continued, because "this isn't what we paid for, this isn't what we voted for. This isn't what we asked for in your competence.""If you're a republican, you got to boil at some point because you've got Nirvana. You've got as much power as I've ever seen, vested in one party at one time in one city," said Vandehei. "And yet, if you look at the number of laws actually being signed, the things that will outlast the short term deals, very few of them. And then you look at the polling and you look at that working class white voter who put you into office and they're frustrated ... every issue that they care about, including things being really expensive and them being very worried about whether they're going to get a job or their kid's going to get out of college and enter the job market that we've seen in 5 or 10 years, not even really discussed.""And it does come down to competence," he added. "If you have the right people doing the right work at the right time, you get really good results. That's like the trick of leading anything, running a company, running a government." - YouTube youtu.be