It comes as no surprise America’s mutation of Neville Chamberlain raped our national honor during his meetup in Alaska with his Russian master, sucking up so shamelessly that any second I expected him to drop to the carpet and lick the mass murderer’s shoes.

Trump’s been doing this since forever. What’s just as detestable is formerly tough-on-Russia Republicans have mutely indulged his perfidies, and that oblivious Americans have rewarded him with ever-higher vote totals in three straight elections.

I hate to write this. I’ve spent the summer boating, biking, and hiking, and the last thing I want to do is stew anew about the Putin appeaser, the consummate fraud, the poster child for weakness. But “we are at a perilous moment without equal in the history of this nation, and Trump is demonstrably incapable of confronting it.”

There I go, quoting myself.

I wrote that seven summers ago, when Trump was preparing to meet Putin at a summit in Helsinki. And when they met, Trump told the world that Putin had more credibility than America’s intelligence agencies. In the end, “Helsinki proved that when the stakes are highest, when the nation’s security is threatened by a seasoned enemy standing a few feet away, Trump cannot bring the requisite A-game. And the Republicans who revered Ronald Reagan as The Great Communicator, as the stalwart foe of an ‘evil empire,’ are saddled with a president who verbally waffles in defense of his country.”

Just as Hillary Clinton did during the final campaign debate nine years ago when she stated that Putin “would rather have a puppet as president of the United States.”

What the puppet did in Alaska – rolling out the red carpet, clapping like a cheerleader with pom poms, surrendering to the war criminal’s stance on Ukraine – was merely consistent with his long-established misbehavior. Like in 2016, when he publicly pleaded for Putin to hack Hillarys’ emails (“Russia, if you’re listening…”). Like in 2018, when he trashed the federal indictments of 12 Russian intelligence agents who’d meddled with our 2016 election on his behalf (he called the indictments a “rigged witch hunt”). Like in 2022, when he praised Putin for invading Ukraine (“This is genius…He’s going to go in and be a peacekeeper”). Like when he lauded Putin’s “great charm” and boasted how much Putin “liked me.”

We may never know whether Putin is blackmailing his pathetic supplicant or whether he’s just masterfully exploiting Trump’s grand canyon of neediness. Whether Trump is obliged to bow down because his businesses survived for years on Russian money (son Eric in 2014: “We have all the funding we need out of Russia”) or whether this is just Trump’s penis envy for Putin’s authoritarian prowess. All we can do, here on the receiving end, is glumly track the boundless damage he continues to inflict on our global reputation.

We’re collateral casualties of his mission to reward Putin for the original sin of waging war on an independent nation.

You can’t say we weren’t warned. Trump’s fealty to the enemy has been advertised in plain sight for a decade – and yet, as I mentioned earlier, his vote tally has steadily risen. As Casey Stengel used to say, “You can look it up.”

It’d be nice if Democrats could manage to craft a relentless 24/7 message about his soft-on-Russia weakness and the MAGA GOP’s appeasement. But somehow that’s too heavy a lift for the perpetually supine blue team. Suffice it to say that if the situation was reversed – if, say, Barack Obama had ever clapped like a trained seal after luring the murderer to American soil – Republicans would already be screaming about treason and citing Article III of the Constitution, which in part defines “Treason against the United States” as “adhering to (our) Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort.”

And Republicans would’ve been right.

Copyright 2025 Dick Polman, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate. Dick Polman, a veteran national political columnist based in Philadelphia and a Writer in Residence at the University of Pennsylvania, writes the Subject to Change newsletter. Email him at [email protected]