LETTER: Bullying of a hero in White House brought shame to U.S.

To Ozaukee Press:

I’ve had the good fortune over a long life to have traveled much of the world from Manila to Moscow and beyond. And even during the Vietnam and Iraq war years, wherever I traveled, I’ve always felt openly proud to be an American. That is until this past Friday while watching the despicable exchange between Donald Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

As it happened, I was sitting in a restaurant in Costa Rica among a small group of mostly aghast and bewildered foreign nationals when, for the first time in my life, I was overcome with a deep and profound sense of shame.

What we all witnessed, what the world saw, was the public browbeating and bullying of a courageous and respected international hero by two petulant adolescents in a perverse parody of American diplomacy.

Midway through this fiasco, JD Vance actually accused Zelenskyy of being “disrespectful” of the Oval. But for anyone watching with an ounce of brains it was obvious that it was Trump and Vance who were in fact defiling the office. The presidential office has not been so abused since the time they sandblasted Trump’s burger stains off the walls.

It is well documented that Hitler danced a jig when Chamberlain left Berlin after signing the “peace in our time” agreement. I have to believe that Putin danced all night and into the next morning after this pathetic spectacle.

Whatever happens from this point forward the world has now seen Trump at his dealmaking best. In a few short minutes he managed to trade away 250 years of accumulated American respect, honor and dignity for the pathetic satisfaction of giving the middle finger to the rest of the free world.

Appeasement is simply too inoffensive a word for what the world witnessed last Friday. Churchill and Roosevelt must be spinning in their graves. If Ronald Reagan were still alive he’d never stop throwing up. When Reagan raised the specter of an authoritarian “evil empire” he couldn’t possibly have imagined that in the end he could be talking about us.

Republicans appear once again to be remaining silent in the face of perhaps the greatest cascading diplomatic and domestic disaster we’ve seen in our lifetimes. If this continues, we must assume that there is absolutely no act by Trump, however low, however vile, that will raise them from their knees.

Republicans have transparently abandoned their oath to the Constitution and their obligation to the American people. They have made it clear that they accept their role as a spineless rubber-stamping collection of bootlickers at the feet of Donald Trump.

 Donald Harvey

Port Washington