More Blood on Trump's Hands | Opinion

It's not "just politics" when people are literally dying because of your actions.

Ukraine is in dire straits. As the war drags on, the people are starting to lose hope. Young Ukrainians are avoiding the draft, convinced fighting has become a futile effort, not wanting to spend years of their lives battling an enemy that has a vast amount more manpower and resources. POLITICO reported that the average age of the country's frontline soldier is now 43, showing both how desperate the nation is for soldiers and how problematic the draft-dodging has become.

Ukrainians have seen over 31,000 soldier deaths and another 10,000 civilian deaths in the war already. The army has reduced daily ammunition firing by over 70 percent, going from 7,000 rounds a day to just 2,000.

"If there is no U.S. support, it means that we have no air defense, no Patriot missiles, no jammers for electronic warfare, no 155-millimeter artillery rounds," Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky pleaded to The Washington Post. "It means we will go back, retreat, step by step, in small steps."

A Ukrainian loss would prove not just catastrophic for Ukraine itself, but could very well force the United States and its European allies into a larger conflagration, as defense analyst Edward Arnold explained to CBS. Russia, he said, is "an aggressive state, and if they win in Ukraine, they're going to most likely start to look at other states in Europe, particularly the Baltic states." Our reluctance to help could also send a message to China, he said, that we will not intervene if that nation should attempt to invade Taiwan, which it could potentially be ready to do within the next three years.

Granted, our allies should also step up, as it is both the right thing to do and in their own interests. Yet any reasonable analysis of the situation also makes it clear that it's a complete no-brainer that we should pass the $60 billion aid package currently stalled in Congress. Why haven't we? Two words: Donald Trump.

There are two types of monsters in the world: those like Russian President Vladimir Putin who commit atrocities, and those like former President Donald Trump who allow them to do so for their own personal benefit.

Through his acolytes, including devoted House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.), Trump has tied aid to Ukraine to a border security bill, and then prevented that bill from passing as well, despite widespread agreement that it would ease the border situation and provide much needed help to our border security agents. The package would have also sent aid to Israel and Taiwan, which has been carefully monitoring Chinese aggression.

There is absolutely no sound reasoning for doing this, and certainly no moral basis for it. The only basis is a political calculus: Trump is betting that the worse he makes things, the more the American people will want a change, and that they'll blame President Joe Biden rather than the person who is actually causing the damage, Trump himself.

This means that the border situation won't get any better, that Ukrainians will continue to suffer and die, and that the Taiwanese fears will continue to grow because Dirty Donald and his disciples will put their own interests before the safety and security of the United States and the world.

Not since former President Richard Nixon worked to scuttle a Vietnam deal in the lead-up to the 1968 election have we seen such a high level of self-interested duplicity. Nixon did it in secret; Trump is doing it out in the open, hoping Americans are too unaware and uninformed to notice.

It should come as no surprise, though, that Donald Trump is willing to go to such lengths, nor be shocking that his apologists are willing to do his bidding for him. We're now living in a world, after all, wherein essentially the entire Republican Party is pretending that Trump did not send an angry mob to overthrow our republic on Jan. 6, and that he is not guilty of many, many crimes, both involving the election and through his personal history of financial malfeasance. Trump has blood on his hands from Jan. 6 as well, and the Republicans know it, yet they are all subservient to their party's leader and afraid of what speaking out against him would bring.

Trump often talks in apocalyptic terms—not just with his "bloodbath" remark that his campaign insists was meant only as a metaphor for the economy—but in his constant refrain to supporters that if they don't put him back into power, they "won't have a country anymore" and that the people he's up against are "evil." He's began appealing to Christian fundamentalists through this type of oratory, and has even started comparing himself to Jesus, as if he is their sole savior.

The problem with this argument is that Trump isn't the firefighter, he's the arsonist. And because of him, in Ukraine, it's already an apocalypse.

Ross Rosenfeld is a political writer and educator based on Long Island. Follow Ross on Substack.

The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.