What happened? There will be reports citing White House, media and Russian views, but my take is that this meeting was planned as an ambush for Trump to extract his revenge stemming from his
first impeachment in 2019.
From
Fox News:
After the Friday meeting, Zelenskyy wrote on X, "Thank you America, thank you for your support, thank you for this visit. Thank you @POTUS. Congress, and the American people. Ukraine needs just and lasting peace, and we are working exactly for that."
Following the wipeout, Zelenskyy was featured on Fox's Bret Baier program. Here is that interview. Zellenskyy remained defiant.
From what I see, Zelenskyy will return home and be replaced as president by someone else. Perhaps with someone more in alliance with Vladimir Putin, as will be insisted in backroom talks involving Russia and the U.S. The clear winner today was Putin. The obvious loser was the future of Liberty and Freedom.
There is nothing much NATO can do to rescue Ukraine, for they don't have the hardware to be of much help. If the war proceeds, Russia will only more and more take over Ukraine territory, perhaps even getting to Kiev.
No doubt the NATO nations, especially those in previous alliance with the Soviet Union, will now upgrade their military expenditures to at least what Trump indicated as necessary. Further, there will probably be some type of incurrence of Russia into one of these countries, probably Poland.
As a result of the fallout from this disastrous meeting in the Oval Office, the U.S. has lost all the reputation we had as the leading defender for Freedom and Democracy. Other nations will now mistrust the USA as long as Trump is president. The nation has in the past advocated isolationism. However, we have never had a dictator against freedom and liberty. We are getting very close today.
Within the U.S., some more patriotic Republicans will ponder doing something to neutralize Trump. Early signs show Trump still strong enough to prevent anything serious from occurring. The question now is when does Trump act to become a true dictator, for he has the Department of Defense to now insure that he succeeds this time:
I've posted in the past of the new Axis Power Alliance looming to take over world leadership: Russia, China, North Korea, (Iran?) and the USA.
- Here is an article from 5February2024.
- Another from earlier this month, 7February2025. Here is a small quote from that posting.
Trump has longed to join the President for Life Club, now occupied by Vladimir Putin, Jinping Xi and Kim Jong Un. We are on our way to a New Power Axis: the U.S., Russia, China and North Korea versus the rest of the world. These four countries control more than 90% of nuclear warheads. One of these detonated over New York City would cause more than half a million deaths, and there are 12,512 of them.
Ironically, this latest brouhaha has actually lessened the chances for a Third World War. If the New Power Axis does form, no one else can threaten them to start such a war to end all wars. Maybe this progression can improve the chances of Humankind being around a little bit longer.
Perhaps Bob Woodward warned us in his 2018
Fear. This was 7 years ago. Two quotes, first from
Steve Donaghue of Open Letters Review:
...it’s possible to look at Fear as not really a book at all, any more than a pile of court transcripts would be a book. But this would indeed be an injustice, because there’s a surprising and encouraging amount of wry, almost literary business going on in Fear, a kind of dry, mordant wit that’s likewise discernible in Woodward’s earlier books but never quite so badly needed as in this one, with its relentless anecdotes of apocalyptic incompetence and deceit. Woodward is too much of a professional to put a soft focus on that apocalypse, but his native comic sensibility prompts him often to see the humor in a free country’s slide into trivial despotism ... despite the sobering nature of what Fear describes, those little po-faced jabs happen throughout the book and are apt to be overlooked in the news-desk frenzy to decry the political calamity described on every page ... Fear isn’t the moment in the doctor’s office when the diagnosis of cancer is made; it’s the series of follow-up appointments in which the extent of the rot is clinically clarified. It has the same dead-weight momentum of those follow-up appointments, and it shares their macabre fascination.
David Runciman, the
London Review of Books:
Bob Woodward’s new book about the first year of the Trump administration raises [several] thorny issues, but it turns them on their head ... Almost no one in this book comes across as authentically themselves, because each source is replaying the events so as to come out of them with a minimum of dignity. Since there is no dignity to be had in Trump’s White House, this often sounds forced and fake. The one person who appears to be himself throughout is the one person whom Woodward acknowledges at the outset did not grant an interview for the book: Trump. The president emerges as a bizarre and brutish character, but his behaviour has a strong streak of consistency ... For the most part, Woodward tells his story straight and leaves the reader to draw the moral, though he also makes sure that the moral is hard to miss.
On July 30, 2018, CNN reported that anonymous sources told them that a well-sourced book on the Trump Administration by Woodward would be published on September 11, 2018.[2] Woodward said that the book's title is based on a quote by Trump in an unrelated 2016 interview:[2] "Real power is, I don't even want to use the word, fear."[2]
If Woodward writes FEAR 2, that term will now mean what the nation and free world should dread. Amen, for this appears to actually be happening
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This past weekend I went to two films: Timbuktu and The Interview. Yes, I missed Furious 7 (Rotten Tomatoes reviewers' rating of 83% and audience of 90%), which had a weekend gross of $147 million. Way down at #52 was Timbuktu (RT 99% and 81%--99% is an eminent achievement) with revenues of $18,900. But this movie has been around for 10 weeks, where it has made a grand total of one million dollars. The Interview is that controversial film which was pulled by SONY and only shown in a few brave theaters. I couldn't find it in Box Office Mojo, which went down to #87.
