"DISGUSTING": Trump shows the world that war crimes pay

  Collage of Putin and Trump walking on a red carpet amid the corpses of civilians killed by Russian troops in the Ukrainian city of Bucha in 2022. Shared by Bucha’s mayor Anatolii Fedoruk in response to the Putin-Trump meeting

Putin left Alaska knowing genocide is rewarded. Every dictator was watching.  

 

Euromaidan

Fedoruk in response to the Putin-Trump meeting 

17 August 25 

Disgusting.

That’s the word watching American soldiers drop to their knees, unrolling a red carpet for the man who killed Ukrainian children yesterday and will kill more tomorrow.

While Putin posed for photos in Alaska, Ukrainian parents were pulling their kids from rubble.

While he grinned in Trump’s limousine, Ukrainian mothers were digging graves.

While an Orthodox bishop exchanged gifts with a war criminal, 19,000 stolen Ukrainian children remained in Russian camps.

What really happened Friday: America told the world that genocide pays. War crimes get you red carpet treatment. Russia’s Foreign Minister showed up wearing a USSR sweatshirt. Russian state media served “chicken Kyiv” on Putin’s plane while actual Kyiv burns nightly from Russia’s drones.

The message was clear: We own you now.

The truth Trump abandoned

Putin didn’t just get legitimacy in Alaska; he got proof that the West has abandoned truth itself.

Genocide became “diplomacy.”

War crimes became “peace talks.”

Child killers become “partners.”

Here are the truths they’ve abandoned:

Truth 1: Peoples have the right to exist. They call this a “territorial dispute” when Russian officials openly admit genocidal intent.

Putin isn’t after land—he’s after eliminating Ukraine itself. But reality doesn’t bend to political convenience. Our right to exist isn’t negotiable.

This is bigger than Ukraine. Russia is fighting against existence itself—the principle that different peoples should exist, should grow, should contribute their own gifts to the world. Every time a people is erased, the world becomes smaller, darker, less human.

While America rolled out the red carpet for our destroyer, Ukraine stood up for the right of all peoples to flourish in this world. Because when the powerful are allowed to erase the weak, you’ve destroyed the only thing standing between civilization and chaos.

Once might makes right, there’s always someone mightier.

Truth 2: Truth and justice make civilizations great, not strongmen. Trump thinks Putin is powerful. He said Russian troops “retreated” from Kyiv because they got stuck in the mud, not because Ukrainians stood and fought.  He looks past Zelenskyy, thinking Ukraine doesn’t have the cards.

But he has it backwards.

Ukraine’s strength doesn’t come from tanks. It comes from standing for truth and justice—the very foundations that once made the West great.

Trump promised to “Make America Great Again.” He could have done exactly that by supporting the nation fighting for the very things that make America great. Instead, he chose a perpetrator of genocide.

Truth 3: Unconfronted evil grows. Politicians say: “This war needs to end, it’s cost thousands of lives.”

The lie is that giving Putin what he wants will make him stop. It won’t.

Putin didn’t stop after Georgia or Crimea, and he won’t stop after Donetsk. Evil doesn’t get satisfied when fed. It gets hungrier.

The choice before us

This is the West’s war being fought with Ukrainian blood. Putin isn’t just trying to erase Ukraine—he’s testing whether democratic civilization will defend itself. Friday gave him his answer.

The West can abandon Ukraine today and face Putin’s tanks in Warsaw tomorrow. America can sell us out now and watch its own children conscripted later.

What must happen now

Friday was America’s test. America failed.

But Ukrainians are still fighting. Still dying for the principles democratic civilization claims to believe in. Still holding the line that Western leaders are too weak to defend.

The West has one chance left:

• Send every weapon Ukraine needs. Now.
• Freeze every Russian asset. Today.
• Cut every pipeline, every bank, every trade deal that feeds Russian aggression.

Ukraine still fights for existence itself. The only question is whether the West will fight for its own.

If what we witnessed in Alaska isn't enough to arouse every American to stand up and be counted, then shame on us.  If you as an individual are not personally involved in this battle, then shame on you.

 

Hurry, Hurry, Hurry! It’s Trump’s Great Ukraine Giveaway. Bargains Galore, if Your Name Is Putin

   President Trump, left, and Russian President Vladimir Putin. (photo: Pablo Martinez Monsivais/AP)

Will the Donald pull out his infamous Sharpie and carve out a chunk of Ukraine for his bud?

Marina Hyde / Guardian UK

13 august 25

Good to have it confirmed that Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin will be talking about Ukraine behind its back on Friday in Alaska, as the US president rambled through a press conference on Monday in which he explained that Putin “wasn’t going to mess with me” and that Ukraine was going to have to accept new borders. 

And listen – you’ll agree that territorial pronouncements mean so much more coming from a guy whose staff once shamelessly redrew a hurricane impact map to stop him looking stoopid. It’s a true honour for the Ukrainians to see their country effectively carved up by someone who would prefer to post-rationalise any old crap with a Sharpie than admit he doesn’t have the first clue about it and cares even less.

Leave it to the tasteful visionary behind the Gaza Riviera to categorise what he’s doing as trying to get back some of Ukraine’s “oceanfront property”. “In real estate we call it oceanfront property,” Trump said on Monday, demystifying this term of high art for non-developers who haven’t contrived to bankrupt several Atlantic City casinos. “That’s always the most valuable property.” Thanks, Mister Mogul! It is assumed that the stretch of high-end primo coastline Trump was referring to included Mariupol, the utterly ruined port in which many thousands of civilians perished during the Russian siege. In international law we call it a possible war crime; in real estate we call it … what? Strategic pre-construction? Spa-chitecture?

Certainly, how we put things is a matter of concern to this supremely sensitive president, who can find words very hurty, particularly when allied to optional concepts such as truth or the law. 

“I was a little bothered by the fact Zelenskyy was saying, ‘I have to get constitutional approval,’” he whined on Monday of the Ukrainian leader’s desire to put any peace deal to the Ukrainian people via a referendum. “He’s got approval to go into war and kill everybody?” Again, whether Ukraine “go[ing] into war” is a fair categorisation of its being invaded by Russia is not something that bothers the Sharpie king of the White House.

As for the precise nature of the forthcoming cartography, Trump spent quite a lot of time talking suspiciously nebulously about “land swapping”. Can you swap things on behalf of someone who doesn’t want to swap them, and without them being present at the table? If so, I would like someone to swap me one of Trump’s second-tier golf courses, and would expect him to be very relaxed about it. He’ll just have to take my word that it’s in the wider interests of everybody.

In terms of what he deems to be the interests of interested parties, there has been some strong suggestion in recent days that the Trump administration thinks it would be a win for Ukraine to abandon the bits of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions that are not even occupied by Russia, with only a ceasefire and the promise of some future better deal to show for it. Which would certainly be the absolute wrongest reading of a land deal since the New York Tribune called the Alaska purchase a folly and a waste of money.

In fact, it would explain Putin’s willingness to travel to that very territory to hold Friday’s peace talks instead of doing it on neutral turf – you can probably afford to concede on the meeting location if everything else is likely to be such a complete gift to you. The Russian president might even bring along another hideously flattering portrait of Trump as an ice-breaking present, having already commissioned one as a personal gift earlier this year, which was passed on to Trump via his special envoy Steve Witkoff. Witkoff said it was a “beautiful portrait” and that the president was “clearly touched by it”.

And so to the buildup to Friday. We’ll have to see how excited Trump gets about the chance to join some sort of German-organised conference call with European leaders on Wednesday. For the US president, the negotiating table is a place that seats only two people, one of which should always be him. 

For Putin, many fear through bitter experience, the negotiating table is a place where you simply obfuscate and buy time to regroup before renewing aggression. Rather like Holly Golightly at the window of Tiffany’s, nothing very bad can happen to Putin in Alaska. Merely turning up avoids the threatened sanctions. 

If, as seems likely, Trump decides he should be appeased with some land, any Ukrainian refusal to rubber-stamp this would leave him frustrated with and lashing out at Zelenskyy, not Putin. (Give the orange guy his peace deal and then his peace prize, dammit! He’s getting bored out here.) And if a ceasefire is somehow agreed, it would surely, on the form book, be regarded by Putin merely as a strategic buying of time. The Russian leader is obsessed with Ukraine in a way the Trump administration seems incapable of, or indifferent to, grasping.

Look, maybe geopolitics really will turn out to be just a simpler version of commercial real estate. Maybe someone who has lost almost as many fortunes as he has gained in that particular trade really will turn out to be a maverick master whose refresh-the-parts traditional diplomacy can’t reach. 

Maybe! But the sheer lack of jeopardy for Putin in Alaska feels far more significant than the mood music. The best-case scenario is that Europe and Ukraine prepare themselves for the artlessness of the deal. 

The worst-case scenario is a darker pathway altogether – and one we seem increasingly likely to stumble on to.

Poor Kristi Noem doesn't like 'South Park' highlighting her awfulness

A still from Wednesday night's episode of "South Park" depicts Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem as she pulls her firearm to shoot a service dog in the audience of a live "Dora the Explorer" stage show.

Trump bootlicker incredulously says president would never make fun of how women look

 

By Emily Singer 

Daily Kos Staff

Monday, August 11, 2025 at 10:30:08a MDT

 

REPUBLISHED BY: 

Blue Country Gazette Blog 

Rim Country Gazette Blog 

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem is trying to play the victim after the satirical animated show "South Park" mercilessly mocked her on Wednesday night’s episode.

"It’s so lazy to just constantly make fun of women for how they look. It’s only the liberals and the extremists who do that," Noem told right-wing podcaster Glenn Beck on Thursday night, referring to how “South Park” made fun of her obviously Botox- and filler-filled face. "If they wanted to criticize my job, go ahead and do that, but clearly, they can’t. They just pick something petty like that."

Of course, the show made fun of more than just Noem's looks. It also ridiculed her cringeworthy cosplaying, the fact that she shot and killed her own puppy, and that she's one of the biggest cheerleaders for President Donald Trump's evil immigration plan. 

But more than that, Noem claiming that only "liberals" make fun of how women look is insane, given that she works for Trump, the king of making crude and disgusting comments about how women look.

Over the years, he’s made fun of pop icon Cher's plastic surgery, called actor Bette Midler "ugly," said Angelina Jolie is "not a beauty," said Rosie O'Donnell has a "fat, ugly face," and accused MSNBC host Mika Brzezinski of "bleeding badly from a face-lift," just to name a few.

In 2018, The New York Times published an article laying out some of the other times Trump made fun of women's appearances: 

Mr. Trump has accused women of having “fat, ugly” faces and of repelling voters because of their looks. He called one woman a “crazed, crying lowlife” and said another was a “dog” who had the “face of a pig.” He said Hillary Clinton’s bathroom break during a 2015 presidential debate was “too disgusting” to talk about. He has repeatedly mocked women for being overweight.

During the 2016 presidential campaign, he also made fun of then-Fox News host Megyn Kelly for having “blood coming out of her wherever." (Kelly now debases herself daily to lick Dear Leader's boots because she can make more money in the right-wing grift-o-sphere by doing that.)

But leave it to Noem to play the victim amid authentic criticism of her horrific behavior.

“Imagine working for Donald Trump and saying ‘it’s only the liberals’ who make fun of women’s looks,” journalist Mehdi Hasan wrote in a post on X. “They have no shame whatsoever.”

New York governor ramps up fight with Texas gerrymandering 'renegades'

New York Gov. Kathy Hochul

As we all must, Gov. Hochul takes a stand

By Walter Einenkel 

Daily Kos Staff 

August 08, 2025 at 2:00:11p MDT

 

REPUBLISHED BY:

Blue Country Gazette Blog

Rim Country Gazette Blog

New York Gov. Kathy Hochul held a press conference Monday to respond to ongoing GOP efforts to disproportionately increase Republican representation in Congress. She discussed potential Democratic strategies to combat Texas’ gerrymandering scam, including redrawing New York state’s congressional maps to offset the loss of Democratic seats.  

"If that's what's called for, I will put saving democracy as my top priority at any cost, because it is under siege,” Hochul told reporters. “Just like those who put on a uniform to fight in battles across the ages. For centuries we've stood up and fought. Blood has been shed. This is our moment in 2025 to stand up for all that we hold dear and not let it be destroyed by a bunch of renegades in a place called Texas.”

Hochul joins Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom, who has also pledged to counter Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s machinations to sabotage democracy by redrawing California’s congressional maps.

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Related | California Democrats have a new plan to combat GOP in the next election

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Texas Democrats have been preparing for this fight. On Sunday, most Democratic state legislators left the state, denying Republicans the quorum needed to pass any legislation. Texas Democratic state Rep. James Talarico accused the GOP of “trying to rig the midterm elections right before our eyes.”

Abbott has since threatened to replace Democratic representatives and charge them with “bribery.” 

Join Gov. Hochul - stand up to Trump.

Trump Destroys Our Source of Information About Jobs. This Is Beyond Irresponsible.

 

He hates facts. He rejects truth. He doesn’t want the public to know what’s really happening. 

 

Robert Reich / Robert Reich's Substack

 

Former Clinton Labor Secretary Robert Reich. (photo: Steve Russell/Toronto Star)

05 August 25

Sorry to intrude again on your day, but this is urgent.

I spent much of the 1990s as secretary of labor. One unit of the Labor Department is the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

I was instructed by my predecessors as well as by the White House, and by every labor economist and statistician I came in contact with, that one of my cardinal responsibilities was to guard the independence of the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Otherwise, this crown jewel of knowledge about jobs and the economy would be compromised. If politicized, it would no longer be trusted as a source of information.

So what does Trump do? In one fell swoop on Friday he essentially destroyed the credibility of the BLS.

Trump didn’t like the fact that the BLS revised downward its jobs reports for April and May.

Well, that’s too bad. Revisions in monthly jobs reports are nothing new. They’re made when the bureau gets more or better information over time, which it often does.

Yet with no basis in fact, Trump charged that Erika McEntarfer, the commissioner of labor statistics, “rigged” the data “to make the Republicans, and ME, look bad.” Then he ordered her fired and replaced with someone else — presumably someone whose data Trump will approve of.

How can anyone in the future trust the information that emerges from the Bureau of Labor Statistics when the person in charge of the agency has to come up with data to Trump’s liking in order to stay in the job? Answer: They cannot.

Trump has destroyed the credibility of this extraordinarily important source of information.

When Trump doesn’t like the message, he shoots the messenger and replaces them with someone who will come up with messages he approves of. So we’re left without credible sources of information about what is really occurring.

Trump is in the process of trying to do the same with the Federal Reserve — demanding that Jerome Powell, the Fed’s chair, cut interest rates. Trump is even threatening Powell with a Trumped-up expose of Powell’s supposed extravagance in refurbishing the Fed as a means of forcing Powell to do his bidding or resign.

What happens to the Fed’s credibility if Powell gives in to Trump? It evaporates.

In the future, we wouldn’t have confidence that the Fed is fighting inflation as rigorously as it should. And without that confidence, longer-term interest rates will spike, because investors will assume that there’s no inflation cop on the beat and therefore will demand a higher risk premium.

Trump hates facts that he disagrees with. That’s why he’s dismembering the Environmental Protection Agency, which has repeatedly shown that climate change isn’t a “hoax,” as Trump claims, but more like a national emergency.

It’s why Trump is attacking American universities, whose scientists are developing wind and solar energy and whose historians have revealed America’s tragic history of racism and genocide of indigenous people.

He is killing off the Centers for Disease Control and the National Institutes of Health, which are showing the sources of sickness and disease and how we can guard against them.

This is a man and a regime that doesn’t want the public to know the truth. He is turning America into George Orwell’s dystopian 1984.

The Trumping of America is happening so fast and in so many places that it’s hard to see the whole. Which partly explains why he doesn’t want the facts out. He doesn’t want us to know how bad it really is.

Help spread the truth. Help organize and mobilize against this calamity.

Will Trump one day adorn Ghislaine's neck with the medal of honor?  If she agrees to cover for him, you can bet on it.

OF COURSE: Ghislaine Moved to Minimum-Security Prison After Questioning by former Trump lawyer

  Ghislaine Maxwell exercising on the track inside FCI Tallahassee, where she is currently serving twenty years for for her role in the sex trafficking ring operated by Jeffrey Epstein. (photo: Matt Symons/MEGA)

SURPRISE: Epstein associate and co-sex offender transferred to cushy digs after promising who knows what.

Alan Feuer / The New York Times

 02 August 25

 

ALSO SEE: Ghislaine Maxwell Moved to a Lower-Security Prison in Texas

Ghislaine Maxwell, the longtime associate of Jeffrey Epstein now serving a 20-year prison sentence for sexually exploiting and abusing teenage girls, has been moved from a federal prison in Florida to minimum-security prison camp in Texas, her lawyer said on Friday.

The move, which was reported earlier by The New York Sun, came about a week after Ms. Maxwell was interviewed over two days about the Epstein case by Todd Blanche, the No. 2 official in the Justice Department and one of President Trump’s former lawyers.

Ms. Maxwell’s lawyer, David O. Markus, declined to comment on the reason for the move.

According to Bureau of Prison regulations, inmates designated as sex offenders are generally supposed to be held in low-security prisons, like the facility in Tallahassee, Fla., where Ms. Maxwell had been previously held, not in minimum-security facilities, like her new prison camp in Bryan, Texas.

Mr. Blanche met with Ms. Maxwell and Mr. Markus last Thursday and Friday amid a firestorm of criticism from Trump supporters who have called for the administration to release all federal files related to Mr. Epstein.

Before entering government service, several top aides to Mr. Trump, including the F.B.I. director Kash Patel, had led the president’s followers to believe that there were secrets lurking in the Epstein files about a cabal of powerful men implicated in Mr. Epstein’s sex crimes. Many of those followers were outraged after the Justice Department released an unsigned letter last month saying there would be no further disclosures about the case.

The letter was issued about two months after top officials at the Justice Department informed Mr. Trump that he himself was mentioned in the files, according to several people with knowledge of the exchange. A person’s name appearing in the documents is not necessarily an indication of wrongdoing.

Mr. Markus has said that during Ms. Maxwell’s interview with Mr. Blanche, she answered questions about 100 people. It remains unclear whether those people were victims of Mr. Epstein, his associates or other people implicated in her own sex-trafficking case.

Ms. Maxwell has made it clear that she would like a pardon or for her sentence to be thrown out or reduced. Mr. Trump has not indicated what he intends to do but has told reporters that he is legally allowed to pardon Ms. Maxwell.

Two women who have accused Mr. Epstein and Ms. Maxwell of abusing them, Maria and Annie Farmer, and the family members of another, Virginia Giuffre, who died by suicide this spring, reacted angrily to the news of Ms. Maxwell’s relocation.

“It is with horror and outrage that we object to the preferential treatment convicted sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell has received,” they said in a statement on Friday. “Ghislaine Maxwell is a sexual predator who physically assaulted minor children on multiple occasions, and she should never be shown any leniency.”

“President Trump has sent a clear message today: Pedophiles deserve preferential treatment and their victims do not matter,” the statement said.

The Gruesome Foursome: Donnie, Melania, Jeffrey and Ghislaine.

Trump and his favorite white supremacist Stephen Miller beg people to join ICE

A smug President Donald Trump smirks as White House resident bigot and deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller speaks at Macomb County Community College Sports Expo Center in Warren, Michigan, on April 29.

World's only masked police force terrorizing land of the once-free 

 

By Oliver Willis 

Daily Kos Staff 

Wednesday, July 30, 2025 at 1:00:08p MDT

 

REPUBLISHED BY:

Blue Country Gazette Blog

Rim Country Gazette Blog 

President Donald Trump and one of his administration’s best-known bigots have turned to social media to recruit people to join up with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

The ICE recruitment drive is occurring as the agency faces harsh criticism for its thuggish approach to immigration enforcement, including abducting people and intimidating law-abiding citizens.

“We need MORE courageous men and women to, MAKE AMERICA SAFE AGAIN,” Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform on Tuesday night. “Join ICE now. We will take GREAT care of you, just like you take care of us!”

The message was echoed by infamous bigot Stephen Miller, who serves as the White House deputy chief of staff. 

Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers wait to detain a person on Jan. 27 in Silver Spring, Maryland.

“Do you want to deport criminal invaders from the United States? The newly-passed Big Beautiful Bill provides extraordinary incentives for new ICE hires,” Miller wrote on X.

ICE has been under fire for the way it has executed Trump’s mass deportations. The agency has deployed masked agents to harass people around the country, in some instances lying to get access to targets. ICE raids even have students afraid of being swept up while attending classes.

The backlash to Trump’s immigration action has led to a loss of support in what has traditionally been an area of political strength. A YouGov poll released earlier this month found that just 35% of Latinos approved of the job he’s doing as president, while 62% disapproved. That drop came as Trump and his team ramped up deportations, including sending military forces to Los Angeles to carry out protection for ICE raids.

The thuggish behavior from the agency has emboldened racists to dress up and impersonate ICE agents, and criminals are doing the same around the country.

ICE is the most visible way in which the public is being faced with the Trump deportation agenda. And they don’t appear to like what they see—so is it any wonder that Trump and his team now have to troll social media to scrape up new recruits?