Sometimes you have to get outside America, and go to a place like Ukraine, to see the full impact of Donald Trump’s policies on both our country and the world. What I saw so clearly from Kyiv several days ago was a stark contrast: How Trump is loving Israel’s democracy to death, while shunning Ukrainian democracy to life, to coin a phrase.
Over the past few years, Ukrainians have developed their own drone industry, with a system for adapting to new battlefield conditions that is now so fast that Ukrainian army engineers are recoding their drones from one attack to the next to respond to Russian countermeasures. At the Yalta European Strategy conference that I attended, the hosts showcased a typical drone assembly line: One person was building the frames, one adding propellers and another the control boards. Over the two days of the conference, I’d guess they built around 100 of them right there in the lobby.
Ukrainians aren’t waiting for Trump to save their democracy. In recent months, the US president has been all over the place and then some on the Ukraine-Russia war: One day blaming Ukraine for starting it, one day vowing to sanction Putin’s oil exports, one day posting on Truth Social that “This is not TRUMP’S WAR ... It is Biden’s and Zelenskyy’s war,” without even mentioning Putin, and then declaring on Tuesday — after meeting Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy at the UN General Assembly — that Ukraine “is in a position to fight and WIN all of Ukraine back in its original form,’’ without offering any new US help.
But can we rely on our democratic institutions to save us? When you look at today’s America from Kyiv or Jerusalem, you notice the degree to which democracy-loving Ukrainians and Israelis have been willing to take to the streets — in the middle of hot wars — to push back on their would-be autocrats trying to gut their democratic institutions.
Meanwhile, in the face of declarations like Trump’s that it should be “illegal” to criticize him, the most cowardly Americans — particularly the tech titans of Silicon Valley and virtually the whole Republican Party — go along for the ride, while those who are the most activist boast that they tweeted against it or pressed the like button on a post from their favorite liberal influencer. That is the protest equivalent of firing a mortar into the Milky Way and believing that you’ve had an impact. Thank God social media was not around for the women’s rights or civil rights movements.
For a contrast, consider one of the first things I learned in meeting with democracy activists in Kyiv — something that I had missed while worrying about my own democracy. Earlier in the summer, Zelenskyy’s ruling party in Ukraine, Servant of the People, had pushed through a law stripping the authority of two independent anti-corruption bodies (the National Anti-corruption Bureau of Ukraine and the Specialized Anti-corruption Prosecutor’s Office) to decide who could be prosecuted in high-level corruption cases. The new law transferred their prosecutorial authority to the general prosecutor, a presidential appointee. This would have allowed the presidency to unilaterally close or reassign corruption investigations involving top officials.
The troubling bad news is that Zelenskyy — and the powerful head of his office, Andriy Yermak — pushed this law. The amazingly good news is that average Ukrainians, led mostly by young people, pushed against it. And they didn’t just post emojis against it on their Facebook pages. Instead, they defied the almost daily and deadly drone attacks by Putin and took to the streets in mass protests to demand that Zelenskyy and Yermak take their hands off these vital anti-corruption institutions. They forced Zelenskyy to call a new vote and overturn the law a few days after he signed it.
My fellow Americans: These are the democracy-loving people whom Donald Trump has been stiffing — in our name — in favor of his pal Vladimir Putin. This is what I mean when I say Trump is “shunning” Ukrainian democracy to life. By favoring Putin and retreating from aiding Ukraine’s cause, he is forcing Ukrainians to double down on both creating and strengthening their own democratic advances.
One of Ukraine’s most influential journalists, Vitaliy Sych, remarked to me in Kyiv that what Ukrainians did in restoring their anti-corruption laws, “feels good for Ukraine.” But it left him “baffled and amazed by Americans,” who he said, “gave up so easily and quickly and paved the way for an incompetent, exotic and destructive president.” I hear the same from Israelis: Tens of thousands of them dedicated their time every Saturday for nine months to oppose Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s attempt to strip the Israeli Supreme Court of its authority to check the excesses of Israeli politicians — and they have succeeded, for now. Today, much the same coalition of Israelis is in the streets almost every Saturday demanding an end to the war in the Gaza Strip and prioritizing the return of Israeli hostages.
But they are up against two authoritarians working together: Netanyahu and Trump.
Trump’s ambassador to Israel, the Christian Zionist Mike Huckabee, regularly throws the full weight of the US behind the settler movement in Israel and treats with utter indifference the more secular, liberal Israelis who still hope for some kind of secure separation from Gaza and the West Bank. Huckabee shamefully acts as if he were the ambassador to America for the Israeli settlers in the West Bank, instead of the ambassador for all of America to all of Israel.
This is what I call loving Israel to death, because it can end only with a permanent Israeli military occupation of Gaza, to go along with its permanent military occupation of the West Bank. That means, at best, we are going to see roughly 7 million Israeli Jews trying to control roughly 7 million Palestinian Arabs between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea in perpetuity. At worst, it will lead to Israel eventually evicting millions of Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza, thereby destabilizing two of America’s most reliable Arab allies — Egypt and Jordan.
Both are a prescription for a forever war that will be broadcast live on TikTok, turning a whole young, global generation against Israel and helping to ensure that the Jewish state becomes one of the great pariah states in the world. Already we saw this weekend the decision by Britain, Canada, Portugal and Australia to ignore Israel’s concerns and recognize a Palestinian state, almost seemingly as a punishment for Israel’s land grabs in the West Bank and military occupation of Gaza. No matter, Huckabee’s messianic evangelical vision for Israel will be fulfilled. Thanks a lot.
Netanyahu seemed to implicitly acknowledge that this is where he is leading the country and, absurdly, tried to make a virtue out of it by boasting that Israel’s strength will make it the new “Sparta" of the Middle East.
That is why I say that when you look at America from the outside — from either Kyiv or Jerusalem — you understand that Trump is not animated by saving their democracies or ours.
But please don’t post this column on Facebook or hit the share button on X. Don’t make a point. Make a difference. Register someone to vote in the 2026 US midterm election, for any candidate who promises to protect our democracy — and those in Kyiv and Jerusalem as well — and to put our Constitution ahead of Trump’s creeping authoritarianism or Silicon Valley’s profits.
Otherwise, we too will be Sparta — and if you know your history, it did not end well for Sparta. — The New York Times
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