Sometimes you have to get outside America, and go to a place like Ukraine, to see the full impact of Donald Trump’s policies on both our country and the world. What I saw so clearly from Kyiv several days ago was a stark contrast: How Trump is loving Israel’s democracy to death, while shunning Ukrainian democracy to life, to coin a phrase.
Over the past few years, Ukrainians have developed their own drone industry, with a system for adapting to new battlefield conditions that is now so fast that Ukrainian Army engineers are recoding their drones from one attack to the next to respond to Russian countermeasures. At the Yalta European Strategy conference that I attended, the hosts showcased a typical drone assembly line: one person was building the frames, one adding propellers and the other the control boards. Over the two days of the conference, I’d guess they built around 100 of them right there in the lobby.
Ukrainians aren’t waiting for Donald Trump to save their democracy. In recent months, the U.S. president has been all over the place and then some on the Ukraine-Russia war: One day blaming Ukraine for starting it, one day vowing to sanction Putin’s oil exports, one day posting on Truth Social that “This is not TRUMP’S WAR … It is Biden’s and Zelensky’s war,” without even mentioning Putin, and then declaring Tuesday — after meeting Zelensky at the U.N. General Assembly — that Ukraine “is in a position to fight and WIN all of Ukraine back in its original form,’’ without offering any new U.S. help.
But can we rely on our democratic institutions to save us? When you look at today’s America from Kyiv or Jerusalem, you notice the degree to which democracy-loving Ukrainians and Israelis have been willing to take to the streets — in the middle of hot wars — to push back on their would-be autocrats trying to gut their democratic institutions.
Meanwhile, in the face of declarations like Trump’s that it should be “illegal” to criticize him, the most cowardly Americans — particularly the tech titans of Silicon Valley and virtually the whole Republican Party — go along for the ride, while those who are the most activist boast that they tweeted against it or pressed the like button on a post from their favorite liberal influencer. That is the protest equivalent of firing a mortar into the Milky Way and believing that you’ve had an impact. Thank God social media was not around for the women’s rights or civil rights movements.
For a contrast, consider one of the first things I learned in meeting with democracy activists in Kyiv — something that I had missed while worrying about my own democracy. Earlier in the summer, President Volodymyr Zelensky’s ruling party in Ukraine, Servant of the People, had pushed through a law stripping the authority of two independent anticorruption bodies (the National Anticorruption Bureau of Ukraine and the Specialized Anticorruption Prosecutor’s Office) to decide who could be prosecuted in high-level corruption cases. The new law transferred their prosecutorial authority to the general prosecutor, a presidential appointee. This would have allowed the presidency to unilaterally close or reassign corruption investigations involving top officials.
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The post If Only We’d Fight as Hard to Save Our Democracy as Ukrainians Are to Save Theirs appeared first on New York Times.
