Siding with Putin, America’s moral stature is damaged

The past decade has been a brutal one politically—for me, and for millions of other Americans. The relentless cycle of loathing and venomous vitriol would lead an objective bystander to believe we are mortal enemies, not fellow citizens with differing opinions on how tax dollars should be spent. Gone is the notion of a society that celebrates its achievements and progress; in its place, a culture devoted to division.

Social media, with its engineered echo chambers and mind-bogglingly powerful algorithms, deserves its share of blame. Too many people don’t realize they exist in a digital bubble, fed only the news and information that reinforces their preexisting beliefs.

The Left has contributed to this polarization, indulging in performative virtue signaling and prioritizing identity-based equity over real outcomes. The disastrous “Defund the Police” slogan may stand as the most prodigiously stupid policy pitch of the past century.

But from my vantage point, none of this compares to the invective rise of unhinged conspiracy theories and nationalistic fervor that has accompanied Donald Trump’s dominance on the national stage. I could cite thousands of examples, but none more damning than what we witnessed on Friday, February 28, in the Oval Office.

Forget the debate over whether the United States should intervene when an aggressive power invades a sovereign nation. Forget the question of whether we should act as the world’s police in the face of tyranny and oppression. What happened on that day was something unprecedented in the history of this great—though flawed—nation.

For a century, America’s foreign policy has been littered with missteps—errors in timing, failures in decisiveness, the replacement of bad men with worse. But never—not once—could it be said that we stood with the oppressor, the aggressor, the tyrant.

That changed on Feb. 28, when the president of the United States made it abundantly clear that he favors a butcher, a man who may be the worst autocrat the world has seen since Joseph Stalin or Adolf Hitler.

Donald Trump is siding with a dictator who has all but threatened us with nuclear annihilation over our support for a free Ukraine. Vladimir Putin’s troops have tortured Ukrainian POWs, stolen tens of thousands of children and repatriated them to Russia, and slaughtered countless innocent civilians simply because he refuses to recognize Ukraine’s right to exist.

And yet, we now have a president—and a vice president—who blame the victims for this misery and death.

I don’t know where we go from here. But I do know it will only get worse over the next four years. And I have significant doubts that this country will reclaim its moral stature in my lifetime.

Jesse Thoeming currently lives in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, but works throughout the country. He is the author of “The Brown Bottle Squeeze” and the forthcoming novel, “God Bless You, Mr. Trump.”