A transformative week

20250124

Donald Trump has just validated, through his flurry of executive orders, most of the negative observations I have made about the United States over the past couple of decades. The briefest explanation would be this. There will be no more made-up crises in the realms of climate, environment, health, discrimination and the like. Finally, after 50 years, discrimination against straight white man will end.

Ukraine has unhappily been lumped with the entire woke agenda. It was easier for conservatives to be against everything Biden did than to make an exception for Ukraine. Ukraine did itself no favors by consistently supporting the Democrat party in the United States.

This found expression as outright support for Russia by the likes of Paul Craig Roberts, and passive support from the likes of JD Vance, Robert Kennedy, Ron and Rand Paul and so on. Supporters of Ukraine were generally disappointed and downhearted when Trump won.

Trump had played it close to the vest. I was one of the more optimistic people with regard to hope for Ukraine, but he has far surpassed even my optimism. He was smart to remain noncommittal with regard to Ukraine prior to taking office, given the widespread animus against Ukraine among his supporters. Why is he now so fully in our camp? A factor that has not been mentioned before is that he has had a Czech and a Slovenian wife, both of whom grew up in Soviet satellites. He can have had few illusions about the Russians.

Jake Broe, who whose reporting I was introduced last summer, is a diehard Democrat who had nothing good to say about Trump. It was a pleasure to ask Oksana to include this link to his latest blog in a Facebook post. He expresses more enthusiasm for what Trump is doing that he ever did for anything the Biden administration offered.

Gen. Kellogg says there are realistic hopes that the war may end in 100 days. I will not be shocked if deep in the bowels of Russia some of the oligarchs figure out where things are headed and manage a coup even before then. I do not think that the West in general appreciates how to shaky things have been in Russia. I point again to YouTube videos by The Russian Dude.

I will be posting a video of my Toastmasters speech on college in America later today. I wrote it a month ago to be delivered tomorrow. The events of the last week lead me to update it rather dramatically.

That is the word from Lake WeBeGone.

Graham