The Trump-Vance-Musk-Putin plan

Making the world safe for oligarchy

Friends,

Trump’s startling remarks this week that Ukraine’s leadership “should have never started” the war in Ukraine, that Ukraine’s President Zelensky is a “dictator without elections,” and that the war “is far more important to Europe than it is to us” — signaled that the United States is prepared to jettison its European allies and switch sides to embrace Putin’s Russia.

This is despicable.

Trump’s phone call with Putin last week also reaffirmed Putin’s view of the world — that Russia and the United States are “two great nations” that should not only negotiate Ukraine’s fate directly but also together address even weightier global affairs.

Just after the call, Trump posted that he and Putin had “reflected on the Great History of our Nations, and the fact that we fought so successfully together in World War II, remembering that Russia lost tens of millions of people, and we, likewise, lost so many! We each talked about the strengths of our respective Nations, and the great benefit that we will someday have in working together.”

The phone call occurred on the same day, not incidentally, that Trump’s defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, declared that the United States would not support Ukraine’s desire for NATO membership.

And on the same day that the Senate confirmed Tulsi Gabbard, widely seen as sympathetic to Putin, as the next director of national intelligence.

At last week’s Munich security conference, Vice President JD Vance — a man who refuses to say that Donald Trump lost the 2020 presidential election — accused Europe of abandoning the values of democracy by excluding the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) from government.

Vance’s bizarre comments came just days before Germany’s general election (Vance had earlier met the AfD’s co-leader Alice Weidel).

The AfD is closely associated with neo-Nazis. In 2017, Björn Höcke, an AfD party leader in the eastern state of Thuringia, complained that Germans were “the only people in the world who’ve planted a monument of shame at the heart of their capital” — Höcke was referring to the memorial to the victims of the Holocaust — and that Germany needed “nothing less than a 180-degree turnaround in the politics of remembrance.”

In 2018, AfD party leader Alexander Gauland dismissed “Hitler and the Nazis” as “just a speck of bird shit in over 1,000 years of successful German history.”

In 2023, AfD politicians met with other far-right extremists to discuss an “overall concept, in the sense of a master plan” for the “remigration” of “migrants” to their countries of ethnic origin — no matter whether those migrants were asylum seekers, permanent residents, or German citizens.

The AfD wants to end German military aid to Ukraine and restart the Nord Stream pipelines through which Russia used to supply Germany with natural gas.

So what is Vance doing endorsing the AfD? Why has Musk also promoted the AfD on his X platform? Why is Trump bashing Ukraine and Zelensky and embracing Putin’s view that Ukraine started the war?

Connect these dots. The Trump-Vance-Musk regime wants to empower the nationalist far-right in Europe and side with Russia over Ukraine in order to divide European democracies and weaken the Western alliance — and strengthen Putin and the global oligarchy.

This potentially emboldens further Russian military incursions like the 2014 and 2022 invasions of Ukraine.

Commentators in Moscow are claiming that the American-led effort to isolate Russia over Ukraine has ended and are celebrating Trump’s support for Russia’s narrative about who started the war in Ukraine.

After Trump’s phone call with Putin, Russia’s main stock market index jumped 5 percent to its highest point since last summer, and the ruble gained against the dollar to its strongest level since September.

Make no mistake. The Trump-Vance-Musk regime is not only undermining democracy in the United States. It is also laying the foundation for undermining democracies around the world.

Since the end of World War II, liberal democracies have stuck together — led by America. On the opposite side have been authoritarian states, led mainly by the Soviet Union, followed, after the demise of the Soviet Union, by Russia and China.

But all this is rapidly changing. Both Russia and China have morphed into oligarchies, run by small groups of extraordinarily wealthy people.

America has also been moving from a democracy to an oligarchy — and is doing so at lightning speed under Trump, Vance, Musk, and their billionaire buddies.

The new poles of international power are coming to be global democracies versus a global oligarchy. The United States is emerging on the side of global oligarchy.

When Trump was sworn in as president for the second time, he was joined by tech CEOs, business leaders, and financiers — all of whom are among the richest men in the world.

Trump, Vance, Musk. and Putin are making the world safe for oligarchy.