It’s taken Trump less than six weeks to Make America Less Great: Brent Larkin

CLEVELAND -- The lies seem more sadistic now. There’s a heartless quality about them, a sense that the liar’s intention is to inflict as much harm and suffering as possible.

Bodies were still being pulled from the Potomac River when, without a shred of evidence, Donald Trump’s inhumanity moved him to blame affirmative action policies as the likely cause of a midair collision over Washington, D.C., that killed 67 people.

Trump repeatedly slanders tens of thousands of government employees fired from their jobs with a blanket assertion of corruption he cannot prove. Any 4-year-old would recognize this venomous disregard for the truth as a figment of Trump’s twisted imagination.

One of Trump’s favorite excuses for shuttering the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) was a “discovery” that $50 million in federal aid was sent to Gaza for the purchase of condoms for Hamas.

After Trump’s lie was widely reported, he doubled down, raising the amount of the lie to $100 million.

Millions of young lives are being put at risk by massive cuts in the medicines supplied to children in desperately poor nations -- medicines that represent no more than a rounding-error fraction of the federal budget -- entirely because of a single person’s perverted version of the truth.

In Ukraine, more than 40,000 civilians have been killed or injured at the hands of Russian forces unleashed by Vladimir Putin, one of the most evil men to ever walk the planet. It’s estimated that ten million others have lost their homes.

Yet Trump has now assumed the role of Putin’s apologist, lying about the origins of Russia’s 2022 invasion and scheming for a “peace” that rewards America with money from Ukraine’s mineral wealth while causing more human anguish by handing a large portion of a once-sovereign nation to a mass murderer.

Lying has always been Trump’s lifeblood, sustained by a MAGA base either inexplicably willing to pretend he’s a truth-teller, or embarrassingly unable to recognize he isn’t.

More than 77 million Americans voted for Trump. And there is not yet any significant evidence they have come to terms with the enormity of that error. That may soon change, given the number of lives Trump is now aggressively trying to ruin and the constitutional guarantees he seems bent on shattering.

The biggest threat to America’s future are voters whose support for Trump has been largely unshakeable. High on that list have always been older white males and whites without a college degree.

But it’s another voting bloc whose devotion to Trump runs even deeper. An Associated Press survey of more than 120,000 voters taken in the days after the 2024 election found that Trump received about 80% of the votes cast by whites who identify as evangelical Christians. As those red hats at the rallies of our most sacrilegious president proclaim, “Jesus is my savior; Trump is my president.”

Many Americans hold the understandable view it’s not in America’s job description to double as the world’s policeman. But to abandon a genuinely bipartisan commitment to Ukraine, a nation besieged by a murderous despot, is evidence of a country that has lost its moral compass.

As Trump prepares to close the deal on a “peace plan” that hands large chunks of Ukraine to Russia, imposing a life of agony on children and families, the so-called religious members of his cult should be asked, “Exactly where in the Bible does it state that a child born here is more important than one born in Kyiv?”

Few people in this country are working harder than Andy Futey at preventing his parents’ homeland from being sold out by the United States. Futey, 59, is a lifelong Greater Cleveland resident who recently spent eight years as president of the Ukrainian Congress of America. He is now a vice president of the Ukrainian World Congress.

Futey worked for the late George Voinovich when Voinovich was mayor of Cleveland and later as an executive assistant to Voinovich in the governor’s office. Futey’s father, Bohdan, was a top aide to Mayor Ralph Perk when I covered City Hall in the early 1970s. Bohdan Futey was later appointed a federal judge of the U.S. Court of Claims by President Ronald Reagan, who long championed liberation for what then were known as the Soviet Union’s “captive nations.”

Andy Futey has been to Ukraine 14 times since the Russian invasion three years ago and has met often with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. More recently, Futey spends his days presenting “real facts on the war” to Republican and Democratic members of the U.S. House and Senate.

To his credit, former Sen. Rob Portman of the Cincinnati area also spent time in Washington last week, arguing the Ukrainian case to his former colleagues.

Understandably, Futey seems to choose his words carefully when discussing the role of the United States in determining the future of a nation with nearly 38 million people.

“The ultimate goal is that the Ukrainian nation is victorious in this war and continues to be a strategic partner for the United States and Europe,” he said.

Such a worthy goal is not one shared by the president of the United States. On Friday, in a tense televised Oval Office exchange with Zelensky, Trump again embarrassed his office by demanding fealty from Zelensky and relitigating nearly a decade of grievances in a meandering rant that appeared predesigned to publicly humiliate the Ukrainian leader.

With a sickening assist from Vice President JD Vance, Trump also seemed to be signaling Putin that the United States will do whatever possible to reward the Russian leader for his unprovoked invasion of a sovereign nation and the senseless slaughter of innocent Ukrainians.

There was Trump, embarrassingly acting the part of a tinhorn dictator whose only real loyalty is to his pal in the Kremlin. He is a mean and petty man who, left to his own devices, might just drag the nation that so unwisely elected him down a road to ruin.

Brent Larkin was The Plain Dealer’s editorial director from 1991 until his retirement in 2009.

To reach Brent Larkin: blarkin@cleveland.com

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