Why America Must Now End the Tyranny of Trump

By Maria Behan — SPOTLIGHT

The American experiment began with an 18 th-century revolt against a mentally ill despot. A few centuries later, the United States must rise up to rid itself of another one.

President Donald Trump is far more dangerous for his country and the world than King George III was back in the day. For starters, the weapons Britain’s Mad King George had access to were mostly muskets and bayonets, and his mental illness hadn’t reached its apex at the time of the American Revolution. But Donald Trump has his stubby finger on the button that can unleash thermonuclear weapons-and his pathology is erupting volcanically under the pressure of impeachment.

And with the damning testimony of career diplomats like Bill Taylor and Fiona Hill, that pressure has begun to squeeze with the force of tectonic plates. It’s become nearly impossible to deny that Trump held up Congressionally approved aid to an ally, Ukraine, to try to get dirt on his political opponents. And of course, Ukraine isn’t just any U.S. ally, it’s one whose interests are diametrically opposed to those of the man who helped Trump get into office: Vladimir Putin.

The craven recklessness of the Trump administration is also on full display in Syria, where Trump, seemingly taking orders from a different strongman, Turkey’s Recep Erdoğan, sold out another ally, the Kurds, so their territory could be carved up by Erdoğan and the ubiquitous Putin. Perversely, around the time that Trump tweeted that he was pulling U.S. troops out of Syria to leave the Kurds to their fate, we learned that America would be sending in troops to support Saudi Arabia’s ruling authoritarian regime.

So much for the argument that Trump is trying to end the cycle of America’s endless wars. Far from it: He’s just moving U.S. soldiers where his foreign overlords tell him to. What leverage do Putin, Erdoğan, and Saudi butcher Mohammad bin Salman have over Trump that lets them control him like a puppet?

The jaw-dropping nature of Trump’s foreign-policy outrages is making even the supine Republicans in Congress reluctantly realize that their protoplasmic spinelessness is showing. Mitt Romney, Mitch McConnell, and Lindsey Graham aren’t exactly taking a principled stand, but at least the…