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    ‘Dummies for Putin’: Democrats defend Zelenskyy after ‘shameful’ Trump meeting

    Democratic lawmakers rushed to defend Volodymyr Zelenskyy after the Ukrainian leader was publicly berated by Donald Trump in a disastrous Oval Office meeting.The US president accused Zelenskyy of “gambling with world war three” while his vice-president, JD Vance, called the Ukrainian leader “disrespectful”, before cutting short talks aimed at kicking off the process of ending Kyiv’s three-year war with Russia.Zelenskyy abruptly left the White House soon after without signing a rare critical minerals deal with the US that Trump has said is the first step toward a ceasefire agreement that he is seeking to broker between Russia and Ukraine.Democratic senators came to Zelenskyy’s defense in statements condemning Trump and Vance’s “shameful” and “disgraceful” treatment of the Ukrainian leader.“Every time I’ve met with President Zelenskyy, he’s thanked the American people for our strong support,” Chris Coons, a Democratic senator from Delaware, wrote on X. “We owe him our thanks for leading a nation fighting on the front lines of democracy – not the public berating he received at the White House.”Adam Schiff, the California senator, said: ““A hero and a coward are meeting in the Oval Office today. And when the meeting is over, the hero will return home to Ukraine.”Chris Murphy, a Democratic senator from Connecticut, said: “What an utter embarrassment for America. This whole sad scene.” The Arizona senator Ruben Gallego added: “This is a disgrace.”Senator Chris Van Hollen from Maryland also described the scenes in the Oval Office as “beyond disgraceful”. The Illinois senator Dick Durbin added: “The people of Ukraine and President Zelenskyy deserve an apology.”“Trump and Vance berating Zelenskyy – putting on a show of lies and misinformation that would make Putin blush – is an embarrassment for America and a betrayal of our allies,” Durbin said. “They’re popping champagne in the Kremlin.”Trump and Vance “are doing Putin’s dirty work”, the Senate Democratic leader, Chuck Schumer, said after the calamitous meeting, adding that his party will “never stop fighting for freedom and democracy”.Sheldon Whitehouse, the Democratic senator from Rhode Island, also accused Trump and Vance of “acting like ventriloquist dummies for Putin”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionWhitehouse was part of a bipartisan group of senators who met with Zelenskyy earlier in the morning before his meeting with the president. The Minnesota Democratic Senator Amy Klobuchar said the hour-long discussion showed “strong bipartisan support in the Senate for Ukraine’s freedom and democracy”.Klobuchar later addressed Vance directly in a social media post saying that Zelenskyy had thanked the US “over and over again” both privately and publicly.“Our country thanks HIM and the Ukrainian patriots who have stood up to a dictator, buried their own & stopped Putin from marching right into the rest of Europe,” she wrote. “Shame on you,” she said, referring to Vance.Tina Smith, another Democratic senator from Minnesota, called on her Republican colleagues to “speak out” in the name of “patriotism”. “Once, we fought tyrants. Today Trump and Vance are bending America’s knee,” she said.But Republican senators rushed to defend Trump, describing the president’s exchange with Zelenskyy as evidence that he was “putting America first”.Mike Lee, a Utah Republican senator, thanked Trump and Vance “for standing up to our country and putting America first”. The Indiana Republican senator Jim Banks also thanked Trump for “standing up for America”.“[Zelenskyy] ungratefully expects us to bankroll and escalate another forever war–all while disrespecting the President,” Banks wrote on X. “The entitlement is insulting to working Americans.” More

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    Trump’s effort to curtail birthright citizenship suffers yet another setback

    Donald Trump’s effort to curtail automatic birthright citizenship nationwide as part of his hardline immigration crackdown suffered another legal setback on Friday when a second federal appeals court declined to lift one of the court orders blocking the Republican president’s executive order.The Richmond, Virginia-based 4th US circuit court of appeals on a 2-1 vote rejected the Trump administration’s request for an order putting on hold a nationwide injunction issued by a federal judge in Maryland who concluded the order was unconstitutional.“For well over a century, the federal government has recognized the birthright citizenship of children born in this country to undocumented or non-permanent immigrants,” the appeals court’s majority said.It said it was “hard to overstate the confusion and upheaval” that would result from allowing Trump’s order to take effect, as it challenged long-standing legal interpretations and practice in ways that could cause “chaos”.The panel’s majority included the US circuit judges Roger Gregory and Pamela Harris, both appointees of Democratic presidents. The US circuit judge Paul Niemeyer, an appointee of Republican former president George HW Bush, dissented, saying a nationwide injunction was “inappropriate”.It was the second time an appellate court had taken up Trump’s executive order on birthright citizenship, whose fate may ultimately be decided by the US supreme court.Another appeals court last week declined to lift a similar injunction issued by a judge in Seattle. Other judges in Massachusetts and New Hampshire have likewise enjoined the order, finding it violates the US constitution. The White House did not respond to a request for comment.Trump’s order, signed on his first day back in the White House on 20 January, directed US agencies to refuse to recognize the citizenship of children born in the United States if neither their mother nor father was a US citizen or lawful permanent resident.That order was to apply to children born after 19 February, but implementation has been repeatedly blocked by judges at the urging of immigrant rights groups and Democratic state attorneys general. It has also been rejected by the supreme court in the past. More

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    Stephen Colbert on Trump’s second term: ‘The last five weeks have been shock and awful’

    Late-night hosts took aim at Donald Trump’s disastrous start to his second term as president and looked at the rising cost of food.Stephen ColbertOn The Late Show, Stephen Colbert spoke about his expectations versus his reality of Trump’s comeback, saying that the president has done “every terrible thing I could imagine” but that “I just never imagined he’d do all of them at once.”He said: “The last five weeks have been shock and awful.” Things have got so bad, he added, that even those within the Maga-verse have been getting “buyers’ remorse”, with reports of unhappy Trump voters.Colbert said it was “kinda hard to feel a lot of sympathy” for them, though. “They ordered the turd soup then said: ‘Waiter, there’s turds in my soup’ and then they came back four years later and asked: ‘Do you still have that turd soup?’” he joked.While Trump had promised that prices would go down on day one, his supporters “still think things are too expensive”.The last few weeks have seen “Elon slice through the federal government like a drunk raccoon with a samurai sword”.Colbert moved on to the soaring price of eggs, which may still go up even further by 41%. “This year’s Easter egg hunt is going to be The Purge,” he said.Stores in New York have been selling loose eggs for those who can’t afford a full pack and customs agents have stopped at least 90 people from smuggling them into the country.Colbert said that the head of the smuggling operation is “Pablo Eggs-cobar”.Jimmy KimmelOn Jimmy Kimmel Live! the host also spoke about how bad things have quickly become under Trump, joking that he was “tired of all the winning”.He said that “no one seems to know what the hell is going on” with Elon’s ongoing “chainsaw massacre of the federal workforce”.He spoke about an email sent to federal workers asking them to share five things they accomplished last week or face job loss while also talking about Republican senators demanding a meeting with the White House chief of staff to complain about cuts.The Department of Veterans Affairs has seen 1,400 jobs cut, which is a “tricky situation for Trump” as “we know he doesn’t think much of veterans but he loves affairs”.He said that Elon had been “just about as efficient as a Cybertruck in 2in of snow”.This week has seen the far-right Republican Lauren Boebert tweet that she didn’t realise how much “distain” she had for many of these departments. “Maybe let’s not get rid of that Department of Education just yet,” Kimmel said.The Federal Aviation Administration also cancelled its major contract with Verizon to instead sign with Starlink, a company owned by Elon Musk. “Nothing shady about that at all,” he said.Giving Musk government contracts is “like putting Pac-Man in charge of fruits”.The Trump administration also claimed it would release the full list of Jeffrey Epstein’s clients and flight logs this week but instead just released “binders full of information everyone already had”, which led Kimmel to say: “Everything these people do is screwed up.”He remarked that the craziest thing is that Trump was “good friends” with Epstein, something his followers have chosen to ignore. More

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    Trump can’t fulfil his promise to fix the economy, so he’s blaming workers instead

    During his presidential campaign, Donald Trump never missed an opportunity to harp on inflation, promising that “on day one” he would “end inflation” and lower the costs of groceries, cars and other common goods.Well, it’s day 40, and inflation saw its largest increase in over a year. Blink and you might have missed that Trump and his fellow Republicans have largely abandoned their concerns about inflation to focus on government “waste”.While Trump hasn’t fulfilled his campaign promise, he is living up to his usual brand of politics: the blame game. And this blame, as usual, is rooted in generating anger against “undeserving” Americans.This time, the undeserving are federal workers and poor people who get nominal benefits from the federal government – like Snap, which administers food stamps, and Medicaid. To fix so-called waste, the president apparently has no choice but to crack down on spending (and enlist help from Elon Musk), an issue that barely registered in the public consciousness in the past 10 years but is somehow now a rampant problem, according to Trump.There are policy frameworks backing Trump and the GOP’s divisiveness, including the well-known Project 2025 and a lesser-known House proposal published in 2024, Fiscal Sanity to Save America, that centers government “waste” instead of corporate greed. And now, with Republicans controlling the House, Senate and presidency, Republicans have the power to act on cuts that will harm millions of Americans.Musk and Trump, of course, have already worked to cut thousands of federal workers’ jobs. And with the Trump-backed budget bill the House passed on Wednesday, including $800bn in likely cuts from Medicaid, Republicans are one step closer to bulldozing America’s already paltry social safety net.This isn’t just at the federal level. Republicans have been floating proposals in state governments that would restrict healthcare, housing and food benefits instead of making it easier to afford things.The party of “freedom” is endorsing government home visits to surveil “fraud” in all US states (according to page 43 of the GOP’s “Fiscal Sanity” plan). The party of “family values” is also turning its attention to school lunch and breakfast programs, which it claims are subject to “widespread” fraud and abuse (page 46). The party that wants to “make America healthy again” is floating restrictions to Medicaid that would make recipients work at least 80 hours a month, a proposal that wastes government time and money to verify work requirements and which would probably just deter people from getting healthcare, as a flailing GOP work requirement experiment in Georgia has shown.And as Trump touts himself as an anti-war president, his proposals belie the fact that much of these spending cuts will now be diverted to defense contracts and other military and border spending, not on improving the economic lives of everyday workers to whom he made sweeping campaign promises.Meanwhile, straightforward proposals to simply give people more money (which does have evidence of working), such as universal basic income, would be outright banned at the federal level under the GOP plan. So as the cost of living is primed to increase, Republicans have ready-made excuses to justify cutting billions of dollars from these programs, an exceptional sort of cruelty.Of course, no one wants to see public money being spent wastefully or fraudulently. But incessant focus on “waste” stems from faulty, selective evidence. According to reports from Musk’s own so-called “department of government efficiency”, nearly 40% of cancelled contracts to cut costs are expected to yield no savings. It also stems from something else that does have proven results: the utility of public outrage.Focusing on extreme examples and “undeserving” government beneficiaries animates America’s existing propensity for divisiveness, giving Trump and his party wide latitude to wreck the lives of millions of people who don’t engage in fraud, waste or abuse. When Reagan wanted tax cuts for the rich, we saw the “welfare queen” trope. When neoliberal Democrats and Republicans wanted to cut public housing at the federal and local level, we saw extreme stories about the criminality of people who lived there. We cannot waste the money of hard-working Americans on these “others”. It’s a narrative – often hinging on racism and sexism – that has great outcomes for America’s capitalist class and the politicians who support them.So instead of protesting against the rising cost of living or making demands for universal healthcare, federal job guarantees, increased labor rights, or Snap benefits for all, or cutting the bloated defense budget and increasing taxes on the super-rich to pay for the nominal social welfare benefits that other industrial countries have normalized, working-class Americans are engaging in petty debates about what kinds of groceries other working-class Americans should buy and deputizing themselves to root out “abuse” among other workers.Republicans redirecting blame towards people who are suffering in this economy under the guise of “waste” is a distraction. As inflation is poised to worsen under Trump, Americans would be wise to focus their anger more on the elected officials and billionaires who profit from their pain than on each other.

    Malaika Jabali is a 2024 New America fellow, journalist and author of It’s Not You, It’s Capitalism: Why It’s Time to Break Up and How to Move On More

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    Who’s the boss in Washington? An unelected, chaotic billionaire thinks he is | Moira Donegan

    If you work for the federal government, it has become clear that Elon Musk thinks that he is your boss. The world’s richest man and patron of far-right causes worldwide has taken on his bizarre and extra-constitutional role in the Trump administration with an unexpected enthusiasm, enlisting a small squadron of college-aged boys to drastically cut spending across vast swaths of the sprawling US bureaucracy. His efforts have led to public health and safety crises in America, humanitarian emergencies abroad, economic devastation in families and communities that depend on federal employment, and the end of large amounts of American scientific and medical research. He has helped cut off funding for cancer research and Ebola prevention; he has ended services for disabled children, abused women and victims of consumer fraud.Musk has said that he aims to cut the federal budget by $2tn, though he has dramatically overstated the amount of spending cuts that he has achieved thus far – and does not seem to understand that some of these expenditures, such as the ones that prevent mass injury or disease, may in fact save the government money. Congress, for its part, is playing along. On Tuesday, House Republicans passed a budget resolution that dramatically cuts funding to Medicaid, the federal program that provides healthcare coverage to low-income Americans. But much of Musk’s slash-and-burn project to eliminate the functioning of the government comes from firing federal workers – which he seems to think he has the authority to do at will.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThis was the logic behind an email that Musk sent on Saturday to all federal employees – including those decidedly not working in executive agencies, such as federal judges. The email, subject line “What did you do last week?”, asked every federal employee to list five “bullet points” describing their recent working accomplishments. Musk later stipulated on X, his social media platform, that anyone who did not respond by midnight on Monday night would be fired. With one missive, Musk appointed himself the manager of every single one of the federal government’s estimated 2.3 million employees. Report to him, they were told, or lose your jobs.Chaos ensued. Some employees said that responding to such an email would put them in legal danger, since they work on sensitive or classified material. Others were weary of auditioning for positions they already held, and submitting their work for the appraisal of an unelected billionaire whose claim to authority over their jobs has no legal basis. Supervisors were swamped with calls from their employees, asking what they should do about the email; they, in turn, tried to get clarity from upper management.At some agencies, work was derailed as teams spent time trying to figure out what to do with Musk’s demand; at others, employees who had gone home for the weekend had to come back into work because they could not access their work emails for instructions from their home computers. People were calling their bosses, their union reps, their colleagues, confused and panicked, wondering what would happen to them if they lost their health insurance or couldn’t make their car payment.It did not help matters that different government departments responded to Musk’s ultimatum with different instructions for their employees. Some told workers to respond to the email; others told them not to. A hastily assembled group of officials from defense and intelligence agencies spent the weekend trying to figure out a coordinated response, with the director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, and the FBI head, Kash Patel, ultimately telling their staff to ignore it. Agencies including the Departments of State, Energy, Justice, and Defense also told their workers not to respond. But others, such as the Departments of Commerce, Education and Transportation, told their employees that they should comply. Things only got more confusing on Monday when the office of personnel management, the federal government’s HR body, through which Musk initially sent the mass email, tried to back off the billionaire’s demand, telling the management of various government entities that it would be up to each to determine how to direct its employees to respond. But then Donald Trump appeared to reiterate Musk’s initial demand, saying in the Oval Office of federal workers who did not respond to Musk’s email: “If you don’t answer, like, you’re sort of semi-fired or you’re fired.”Who, exactly, is in charge here? The frightening speed with which the new Trump administration has pursued its sadistic agenda and frightening and unconstitutional expansion of executive powers can tend to obscure just how incompetent these people are. Two million federal workers now do not know whether their boss is the person above them on the org chart, or an erratic billionaire. Trying to figure it out required them to spend time in hectic and undignified scrambling, figuring out whether they would be obliged to grovel for their livelihoods or not. They spent time catering to the senseless and stupid demands of Musk’s ego, and because they had to spend their time that way, they could not spend it on their actual work.Not to mention that Musk, in his demand to control all federal employees and to rewrite the budgets and missions of federal agencies at a whim, seems to be pissing some people off. Members of the Trump cabinet have been leaking their displeasure with Musk over the past week, trying to assert control over their agencies and defend their turf. They, after all, have the Senate confirmations; they, after all, have the mandate of being selected by the president. It is yet to be seen whether any of that will hold a candle to what Musk has: the money.So far, the future is not looking bright for agency independence. Musk, who is not a cabinet member, appeared on Tuesday at a meeting of Trump’s cabinet and lectured the assembled agency heads just hours after the initial deadline had passed for their employees to report to him. Trump seemed to signal to the cabinet members that they should assume that an order from Musk was as good as an order from him. “Is anybody unhappy with Elon?” Trump asked, according to the New York Times. The response? “Nervous laughter rippled around the table.”

    Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist More

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    ‘I decided I was done’: Canada pizzeria boycotts US ingredients in tariff dispute

    Tucked away in a former garage space in Toronto’s west end, Gram’s Pizza is usually packed with diners hankering for anything from a classic pepperoni to vodka and hot hawaiian.Lately, however, owner and chef Graham Palmateer has made some changes to how he makes his pizzas.After Donald Trump threatened to slap a 25% tariff on Canadian goods – and even to annex the whole country – Palmateer decided to banish US ingredients from his restaurant.“I just decided I was done with the US. I wanted to move away from American companies,” he said. “Canadians know Americans pretty well, and we don’t always agree with the choices that they make. A lot of us are disappointed, to put it mildly.”Making the switch has not been the easiest task: the two countries’ economies have been tightly bound through a longstanding free trade agreement since the late 1980s.But years of cross-border trade and investment has blurred the lines on country of origin: in the car manufacturing industry, for example, a vehicle passes the border an average of seven times during the manufacturing process.View image in fullscreenThose attempting to impose a full boycott of consumer goods have been caught off-guard at grocery stores where “Made In Canada” products might contain some US ingredients.And while Canada’s political leaders have at times appeared to be flailing in their response to Trump’s threat, ordinary Canadians have decided to get their retaliation in early, and boycott American goods.A poll this month by the Angus Reid Institute published found that since Trump revived his threat of tariffs, four in five Canadians have been buying more Canadian products.Some grocery stores have even labeled which items are made by Canadian producers. Bar Sazerac in Hamilton, about an hour west of Toronto, is no longer using American alcohol in its menu.Palmateer said his transition to Canadian ingredients had some bumps initially. He had trouble sourcing Canadian diet soda, while some items, like mushrooms, are more expensive to source locally. Instead of Californian tomatoes, he opted for canned ones from Italy.But he has since gotten into the swing of things. He uses a Quebec-based company to source pepperoni, the flour he uses is made with Ontario grain and cheese is easy to source from Canadian suppliers.View image in fullscreenThe cost of operating has increased slightly, “but by and large, I haven’t had to change pricing”, he said.Kenneth Wong, an associate professor at the business school at Queen’s University in Ontario, said he had been surprised by an apparently organic response among Canadian consumers: on a visit to his local grocery store, homegrown apples were sold out, while next to them, a bin of US apples appeared to be untouched.“Canadians are bearing down in ways I never thought they would,” he said.After appearing to relent on the tariff threat, Trump on Thursday repeated his intention to apply the levy on imports from Canada on Mexico from 4 March.The continuing uncertainty has prompted Canadian provinces to lift some internal trade barriers – a move which Wong said could somewhat reduce Canada’s strong reliance on the US.“And once that fully happens, tastes will change and habits will form. I’m not saying you can’t win back your consumer if you’re a US firm, but I am saying it’s going to be a lot more expensive to do so,” he said.Palmateer said his customer base seemed to be happy with his choice to shun American products. “It’s pretty much been positive. ‘Good for you’ kind of comments,” he said.One customer was upset they could no longer drink a Sprite with their Pizza. But Palmateer has since found Canadian soda brands like Sap Sucker which he hopes will fit the bill. Either way, he says he will not go back to using US ingredients.“This boycott … is my way of voting with my dollar,” he says. “If it encourages someone else to also do the same thing and divest, that’s a good step.” More

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    ‘They’ve lost my trust’: consumers shun companies as bosses kowtow to Trump

    In late January, Lauren Bedson did what many would likely find unthinkable: she cancelled her Amazon Prime membership. The catalyst was Donald Trump’s inauguration. Many more Americans are planning to make similar decisions this Friday.Bedson made her move after seeing photos of Jeff Bezos, the Amazon founder, sitting with other tech moguls and billionaires, including Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg and Google’s Sundar Pichai, just rows behind Trump at his inauguration.“I just couldn’t stand to see them so cowardly,” Bedson, of Camas, Washington, told the Guardian. “I lived in Seattle for over a decade. I was a fan of Amazon for a long time, I think they have a good product. But I’m just so disgusted. I don’t want to give these billionaire oligarchs any more of my money.”It’s a sentiment that many Americans have been feeling since Trump entered the White House. Companies and business leaders who were once passive or vocally critical of Trump are now trying to cozy up to him, leading consumers to question the values of the brands they used to trust. A recent Harris poll found that a quarter of American consumers have stopped shopping at their favorite stores because of shifting political stances.Many are being inspired by calls to boycott coming from social media. One boycott has gone viral over the last few weeks: a “blackout” of companies that dropped some of their diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) goals, including Target, Amazon and Walmart, is planned for 28 February with protesters planning to halt all spending at these corporations for the day.View image in fullscreenBut people are also making the decision to boycott at their kitchen tables, trying to figure out how to resist Trump, and perhaps corporate capitalism at large, within their own communities.The Guardian asked readers how their shopping habits have changed over the last few months, as the political climate started to shift after Trump’s win. Hundreds from across the country said that they have stopped shopping at stores such as Walmart and Target that publicly announced the end of DEI goals. Dozens like Bedson had cancelled long held Prime accounts. Others have shut down their Facebook and Instagram accounts in protest of Meta.“I’m just trying to do little things that make me feel a little bit empowered, to stake my claim against what’s happening and how companies are acting in ways that are opposed to my values,” said Kim Wohlenhaus, of St Louis, Missouri, who cancelled her Prime membership, deleted her Meta accounts and has stopped shopping at Target. “It feels good to be able to do something.”Erica Bradley, of Reno, Nevada, said she stopped shopping at Target because of their changing DEI policies.“I don’t plan on going there ever again, just because I feel like they’ve shown that they’re not really committed to these things,” Bradley said. “They’ve lost my trust.”View image in fullscreenFor many consumers, the shift away from the big companies has revealed how much they have come to rely on them. As of last spring, 75% of American consumers had Amazon Prime memberships, a total of 180m Prime accounts, according to Bloomberg.Bedson said cancelling her account made her aware of a culture of consumerism in American where “in some ways, it feels like we don’t have a choice”.“Amazon is so convenient,” she said. “I think we all have become very complacent or complicit, and it’s hard to make these changes. But on the other hand, what else can we do?”It’s been a year since Bradley cancelled her Prime account, after she saw Amazon’s union busting. She recalls a transition period as she was adjusting to life without Prime, but it ultimately led her to spend less overall.“I just decided I don’t really need a lot of these things. Like I don’t need more clothes, I don’t really need more house decorations, which are things I used to spend a lot of money on,” Bradley said. “It’s not retail therapy anymore.”The Harris poll found that a third of Americans are similarly trying to “opt out” of the economy, cutting down on overall spending as the political stances of corporations have become murky.View image in fullscreen“It’s like a Whac-a-Mole now,” Wohlenhaus said. “You could really look in any direction and find something you dislike about the way corporations are caving to this administration.”Wohlenhaus said she has started to prioritize shopping at local businesses. She kept her Costco membership, since the company affirmed its DEI policies.During Joe Biden’s presidency, many of the boycotts against companies actually came from conservatives who felt corporations were caving to a “woke” mob. But boycotts didn’t amount to any serious consequences – with two exceptions. Bud Light saw a drop in sales after it sponsored a post by a transgender influencer and Target removed some of its Pride merchandise after conservative backlash.It’s unclear what the consequences of the current backlash will be. But Wohlenhaus and others voiced optimism that consumers are thinking critically about the choices they’re making at checkout.“Hopefully if thousands of other families are doing what we’re doing, I think they’ll start to feel it,” she said. “We don’t care about your products as much as we care about those values that we cherish.” More

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    America must not surrender its Democratic values | Bernie Sanders

    For 250 years, the United States has held itself up as a symbol of democracy – an example of freedom and self-governance to which the rest of the world could aspire. People have long looked to our declaration of independence and constitution as blueprints for how to guarantee those human rights and freedoms.Tragically, all of that is changing. As Donald Trump moves this country towards authoritarianism, he is aligning himself with dictators and despots who share his disdain for democracy and the rule of law.This week, in a radical departure from longstanding US policy, the Trump administration voted against a United Nations resolution which clearly stated that Russia began the horrific war with Ukraine. That resolution also called on Russia to withdraw its forces from occupied Ukraine, in line with international law. The resolution was brought forward by our closest allies, including the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Japan and dozens more democratic nations. And 93 countries voted “yes”.Rather than side with our longstanding allies to preserve democracy and uphold international law, the president voted with authoritarian countries such as Russia, North Korea, Iran and Belarus to oppose the resolution. Many of the other opponents of that resolution are undemocratic nations propped up by Russian military aid.Let’s be clear: this was not just another UN vote. This was the president of the United States turning his back on 250 years of our history and openly aligning himself with Russian dictator Vladimir Putin. This was the president of the United States undermining the independence of Ukraine.And let us not forget who Putin is. He is the man who crushed Russia’s movement towards democracy after the end of the cold war. He steals elections, murders political dissidents and crushes freedom of the press. He has maintained control in Russia by offering the oligarchs there a simple deal: if you give me absolute power, I will let you steal as much as you want from the Russian people. He sparked the bloodiest war in Europe since the second world war.It has been three years since Russia’s brutal, unprovoked, full-scale invasion of Ukraine. More than 1 million people have been killed or injured because of Putin’s aggression. Every single day, Russia rains down hundreds of missiles and drones on Ukrainian cities. Putin’s forces have massacred civilians and kidnapped thousands of Ukrainian children, bringing them back to Russian “re-education” camps. These atrocities led the international criminal court to issue an arrest warrant for Putin in 2023 as a war criminal.Not only is Trump aligning himself with Putin’s Russia, he is prepared to extort Ukraine for its natural resources. While a proud nation desperately fights for its life, Trump is focused on helping his billionaire friends make a fortune excavating rare earths and other minerals.But Trump’s turn toward authoritarianism and rejection of international law goes well beyond Ukraine.The president sees the world’s dictators as his friends, our democratic allies as his enemies and the use of military force as the way to achieve his goals. Disgracefully, he wants to push 2.2 million Palestinians out of their homeland in order to build a billionaire’s playground in Gaza. He talks openly about annexing Greenland from Denmark. He says the United States should take back the Panama canal. And he ruptures our friendship with our Canadian neighbors by telling them they should become the 51st state in the union.Alongside his fellow oligarchs in Russia, Saudi Arabia and around the globe, Trump wants a world ruled by authoritarians in which might makes right, and where democracy and moral values cease to exist.Just over a century ago, a handful of monarchs, emperors and tsars ruled most of the world. Sitting in extreme opulence, they claimed that absolute power was their “divine right”. But ordinary people disagreed.Slowly and painfully, in countries throughout the world, they clawed their way toward democracy and rejected colonialism.At our best, the US has played a key role in the movement toward freedom. From Gettysburg to Normandy, millions of Americans have fought – and many have died – to defend democracy, often alongside brave men and women from other nations.This is a turning point – a moment of enormous consequence in world history. Do we go forward toward a more democratic, just and humane world? Or do we retreat back into oligarchy, authoritarianism, colonialism and the rejection of international law?As Americans, we cannot stay quiet as Trump abandons centuries of our commitment to democracy. Together, we must fight for our long-held values and work with people around the world who share them.

    Bernie Sanders is a US senator and a ranking member of the health, education, labor and pensions committee. He represents the state of Vermont and is the longest-serving independent in the history of Congress More