Churchill would condemn Trump's cowardice, capitulation

 

Lost in all the pomp and thunder of Donald Trump’s presidential inauguration was word that he returned to the Oval Office from another White House location a prized Jacob Epstein bust of Winston Churchill, a showy testament to Trump’s identification with the forceful, courageous wartime British prime minister who steadied his nation in fending off devastating daily attacks by Nazi Germany after Adolf Hitler had subdued the rest of Europe.

But in abandoning besieged Ukraine in time of war, Trump proves that he has far more in common with Neville Chamberlain than Winston Churchill. Certainly, he lacks the wisdom, virtue and guts of the great Anglo-American statesman and soldier he so admires.

To the disdain of Churchill, British Prime Minister Chamberlain infamously demonstrated the pitfalls of appeasement to tyrants, much as Trump proposes in bowing to Russian President Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, notwithstanding a multitude of horrific war crimes committed under Putin’s banner. In signing the Munich Agreement with Chancellor Hitler in September 1938, Chamberlain ceded the German-speaking Sudetenland region of Czechoslovakia to Nazi Germany in a myopic bid to prevent world war.

By accommodating Hitler’s lust to expand his domain, Chamberlain unwittingly invited the fascist to commit more transgressions against not only sovereign nations but also humanity. Given the context of the war to come, one can only marvel at Chamberlain’s arrogance, crystalized in his cavalier dismissal of concerns by fellow citizens about Hitler’s determination to take a piece of Czechoslovakia. “A quarrel in a faraway country, between people of whom we know nothing,” Chamberlain sniffed.

In a famous Oct. 5, 1938, House of Commons speech, Churchill lambasted the agreement as "a total and unmitigated defeat." Indeed. A year later, World War II began with the invasion of Poland by Nazi Germany. By May 1940 Churchill was leading Great Britain in the way Trump so admires – talking tough, strolling about his bombed-out city and countryside while encouraging resistance by everyday people, raising spirits, invoking patriotism and coordinating plans to militarily confound Nazi Germany.

Less remembered: Churchill spent much time trying to rouse from slumber the United States of America to the dangers looming over it. Alas, America and many of its lawmakers were then under the spell of “America First,” an antisemitic movement that under the leadership of such traitorous individuals as American aviator and Hitler admirer Charles Lindbergh fought President Roosevelt’s Lend-Lease plan to send U.S. arms and war materials to help the British people resist Nazi domination.

Less remembered: Churchill’s seething low regard for his predecessor. At one point he privately labeled Chamberlain “the narrowest, the most ignorant, most ungenerous of men” – a description that neatly fits Trump. When Churchill nonetheless gave a respectful eulogy over Chamberlain in 1940 and his wife Clementine complimented her husband on his restraint and decorum, Churchill grumbled: “Well, of course, I could have done it the other way round.”

Whenever as a young journalist years ago I attended reunions of World War II veterans, one of them would inevitably get full of himself and boast how the United States had saved “Europe’s ass” without acknowledging that the war wound up harder for Americans to fight and win precisely because America sat on its “ass” under the America First Committee’s fiercely isolationist, dictator-coddling, know-nothing policy, deluding itself as Hitler expanded his territorial gains and strengthened his fortifications.

Truth? America rose up in defense of Europe and the rest of the world only after it got its own “ass” handed to it through the bombing of Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941 – an attack by the Japanese that killed more than 2,400 people and hobbled our naval defenses. As a staunch ally of the Japanese, Hitler declared war on the United States days later. Till then, too many Americans naively believed the massive oceans west and east of our continent would safeguard us from attack and war.

Oops.

During my early years in journalism, I came to marvel at the Greatest Generation. I worked alongside a veteran newspaperman who, like thousands of Americans before Pearl Harbor, demonstrated zero tolerance with Lindbergh’s “America First” lot, crossed the U.S.-Canada border and joined the Royal Canadian Air Force to fight Nazis in Europe – a stark difference from the cowardly, constitutionally contemptuous rabble now occupying the White House.

Trump’s most candid “America First” thoughts on Ukraine come through a preferred form of delivery – social media. In an astonishingly uncivil Feb. 19 post, he clearly backtracks on his vow to bring peace between Russia and Ukraine, instead drawing up de facto terms of surrender for the nation that had been invaded while drawing no meaningful concessions from Putin, whose covert support for Trump in presidential elections is by now a rock-solid matter of record, notwithstanding supporters’ denials.

Never casting a shadow of blame on Putin, Trump instead maligns Ukrainian President Zelenskyy as a “modestly successful comedian” and “dictator” because the latter has held no wartime elections, notwithstanding the fact many Ukrainian voters are under siege or domination by Russian forces. It’s a galling and hypocritical comment from one who on Dec. 3, 2022, actually called for termination of the U.S. Constitution to overturn the 2020 election and reinstate himself to power over America.

For the record, the British held no elections during World War II.

Trump insists the war is “far more important to Europe than it is to us – We have a big, beautiful Ocean as separation” – which proves Trump learned nothing from the 9/11 terrorist attack on New York City that killed 2,753 people, including 343 firefighters. And it’s impossible to ignore his warning that Zelenskyy “better move fast or he is not going to have a country left” – words almost identical to those Trump used in inciting a mob of Make America Great Again zealots to violently storm the U.S. Capitol.

What’s more, Trump proves again that everything is about him. In a post rife with lies that his sheeplike supporters embrace without question, he dismisses Zelenskyy’s protests of negotiations conducted without him. “In the meantime, we are successfully negotiating an end to the War with Russia, something all admit only TRUMP and the Trump administration can do,” Trump boasts. “Biden never tried, Europe has failed to bring peace and Zelenskyy probably wants to keep the ‘gravy train’ going.”

In spoken comments, Trump disgracefully not only sides with the invader over the invaded but also returns to his tiresome refrain of a so-called “stolen” 2020 election: “I could’ve made a deal for Ukraine that would’ve given them almost all of the land, everything … and no people would’ve been killed, and no city would’ve been demolished, and not one dome would’ve been knocked down, but they chose to do it that way and President Biden, in all fairness, he doesn’t have a clue.”

All this demonstrates the ugly transformation of the Republican Party from that of Reagan and Bush 41, who, through different paths in World War II, grasped as Churchill did the importance of a free and secure Europe to American freedom, economic prosperity and peace. They understood the danger of appeasement to tyrants. They understood the lessons of modern history, something that Trump and his followers don’t know or don’t care about to the peril of our children and grandchildren.

“At last weekend’s Munich Security Conference, where America’s public tone towards its European allies shifted towards outright hostility, I felt as if I had a front-row seat as history was being made,” British journalist Zanny Minton Beddoes, The Economist editor-in-chief, wrote on Feb. 20. “Events since then have moved quickly on both sides of the Atlantic. In Europe, there has been panic as the continent’s leaders contemplate that the country which created the NATO alliance now seems prepared to smash it.”

This shocking realization was further confirmed Monday with the United States’ voting with authoritarian states Russia, Belarus and North Korea against a United Nations resolution condemning Russia for its 2022 invasion of Ukraine.

Is Zelenskyy a Churchill, as some champions in Europe and the United States claim? I don’t know about such comparisons but I do know about bullies and blowhards and braggarts. I do know what Trump and his circle of conspirators are doing will long blot out the greatness that the Greatest Generation showed through the Great Depression, World War II and the Cold War. And on the eve of the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, we will show how far as a people we have fallen morally.

Churchill supposedly said (though scholars doubt), “You can always count on Americans to do the right thing – after they've tried everything else.” Perhaps. But the rampant disinformation of our times allows many Americans who see themselves as political inheritors of Reagan, Thatcher and Churchill to ignore abundant evidence that none of those figures out of honor and principle would have stooped so low as to abandon an ally on the battlefield the way Trump now proposes.

Bill Whitaker spent 45 years as a reporter, editor and columnist in Texas journalism, including a dozen years as Waco Tribune-Herald opinion editor. He is a member of the Tribune-Herald Board of Contributors.