Opinion: How Trump is Turning U.S. History Upside Down—for the Worse

Kevin Lamarque / REUTERS This column is being republished with permission from its original home on Substack.

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It is starting to feel like all the history we learned was wrong.

We were taught we won the Cold War.

But today, the President of the United States openly serves the interests of Russia.

We have become, in fact, in crucial economic and security matters, a satellite of Moscow.

The U.S. chief executive has publicly and repeatedly declared his loyalty to Russia’s head of state.

For more than a decade he has openly and covertly been advancing Russian foreign policy, often at the expense of the national security of the United States, the laws of the United States, and the interests of the United States and our allies.

It is such a shocking turn of events , so inconceivable to anyone who lived through the Cold War or its aftermath, that many Americans have been in denial about it for years.

But the evidence is not only incontrovertible, but in recent days, the U.S. president has made the situation more explicit.

Trump’s recent announcement that he had entered into an agreement with Russia to purchase diesel was a shock even to those who had long been in denial.

Not only was Trump setting aside congressionally mandated U.S. sanctions policy, but he was offering a financial lifeline of billions of dollars to a cash-strapped Kremlin that could and almost certainly would use the extra liquidity to help fund its brutal, criminal aggression against Ukraine.

Never mind that the amount of fuel involved would make no impact on U.S. supplies, or that Trump could have gotten a better price purchasing the fuel elsewhere.

Never mind that the deal failed on its merits, economically and politically, as a form of relief for U.S. truckers and farmers squeezed by high prices.