President Trump flees from his own promises on Ukraine -- and his MAGA followers cheer

ALTHOUGH THIS IS NOT SURPRISING, IT IS INDICATIVE OF HOW REPUBLICAN STATECRAFT AND MAGA DELUSIONS INTERACT

Possibly no promise except lowering the price of eggs became more of a Donald Trump signature line than his posturing on the Ukraine war:

////Former President Donald Trump said if reelected he would end the war in Ukraine before his inauguration because he is respected by Ukraine and Russia’s leaders.

////“That is a war that’s dying to be settled. I will get it settled before I even become president,” the Republican said during his debate with Vice President Kamala Harris on Tuesday. If I win, when I’m president-elect and what I’ll do is I’ll speak to one, I’ll speak to the other, I’ll get them together.”

////“I know Zelenskyy very well and I know Putin very well. I have a good relationship and they respect your president, O.K., they respect me, they don’t respect Biden.”////

It's completely unsurprising that he's been backing away from that since day one as well, with my personal favorite idiotic lie coming about a month ago:

////“Well, I was being a little bit sarcastic when I said that,” Trump said in a clip released ahead of the episode airing Sunday. “What I really mean is I’d like to get it settled and, I’ll, I think, I think I’ll be successful.”////

At the end of March, CNN published a timeline of the Trump administration reeling backward from his words, which could have been subtitled, "President Trump learns that neither Putin nor Zekenskyy actually respects him."

Now, predictably, comes Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who took time off from his daily masturbabory quest for foreigners who said something he doesn't like to announce that the United States is about to dump the entire enterprise:

////“We are now reaching a point where we need to decide whether this is even possible or not,” Rubio told reporters upon departure. “Because if it’s not, then I think we’re just going to move on.”

////“It’s not our war,” Rubio said. “We have other priorities to focus on.” He said the U.S. administration wants to decide “in a matter of days.”////

This was, of course, inevitable, but there's an aspect of the situation that deserves closer attention: how successfully the Trump administration has been in terms of undermining pro-Ukraine legislators in his own party.

Why the US military cannot suppress the protests of millions of people ...

Washington DC Summer of 2020: Calling in the National Guard does not
always work out the way the government plans.

Sending troops into the streets -- regardless of the issue -- is always trying to solve a political problem with a military solution, which is why you tend to see it done most often by authoritarian governments.

But there is a specific calculus for that: authoritarians try to move in fast, crush dissent quickly, ruthlessly, and publicly to strike terror in the hearts of those who might consider joining the protests because ...

Even authoritarians know the 3.5% rule, as noted by the Harvard Kennedy School:

Nonviolent protests are twice as likely to succeed as armed conflicts – and those engaging a threshold of 3.5% of the population have never failed to bring about change.

"In 1986, millions of Filipinos took to the streets of Manila in peaceful protest and prayer in the People Power movement. The Marcos regime folded on the fourth day.

In 2003, the people of Georgia ousted Eduard Shevardnadze through the bloodless Rose Revolution, in which protestors stormed the parliament building holding the flowers in their hands."

In a country of 340 million people like the US, this means that we need 12 million people in the streets, protesting non-violently, and sustained for multiple continuous days -- in effect an ongoing general strike to topple the government (we can discuss the mechanics of that later).

It turns out that while this will be a big challenge for the various organizations like Indivisible or the 50501 Movement, achieving that over the next few months is far from impossible, and there is surprisingly little the government can do to stop it with force.

We are not here because of Donald Trump; Donald Trump is here because we created the conditions for him to emerge

We are too conditioned to see history in terms of changes rather than continuity.

The political narratives of the day represent the rubble that the historian or political scientist has to clear away in order to reconstruct what really happened. Those reconstructions are often so painful that, instead of being examined by the public and policymakers, they are often completely rejected in favor of a reinforced narrative of "good vs evil" in zero-sum game politics.

Here are two end points for you, from an historian's point of the terminus a quo (beginning point) and terminus a quem (ending point, or, in our case, today):

The real beginning point is between 1948 - 1951, but that would make zero sense to you without a detour through 1968, because that's where most people's major historical misconception about American politics begins.

The 1960s are, of course, famous for the counter-culture, Vietnam, the Civil Rights movement, urban riots, and LBJ's extension of the New Deal welfare state. We look back on that as an era of protest, rock music, long hair, and weed. It was, in fact, a year of worldwide social protest and calls for revolution.

It gave birth -- in the eyes of many social commentators -- to the transition from Cold War America to what is often called the "liberal consensus" about human rights (evolved from FDR's "Four freedoms"), the role of the State, and the necessity for even greater democracy. (If you are interested in learning more about the exact nature of the revised social contract that formed this liberal consensus, you cannot do better than the first chapter of Matthew J. Costello's Secret Identity Crisis: Comic Books and the Unmasking of Cold War America.)

But here's the ugly little secret: the liberal consensus and the social revolution in America was a mile wide and an inch deep. The reality is that the majority of American citizens -- especially white American citizens -- were always significantly more conservative than our popular political narratives suggest.

Most of what you think you know about the presidential election 1968 is wrong.

This can be fully documented, but I am going to give you one overwhelming example to prove my point: the Presidential election of 1968, which pitted Republican former VP Richard Nixon against Democratic VP Hubert Humphrey and the insurgent independent campaign of Alabama Governor George Wallace.