The killer and the clown

Two lasting images came forward in the last couple weeks, the final shot of Navalny alive and Trump’s golden sneakers.

Those images are overlaid onto a dark-painted backdrop of grinding war in Ukraine. They can be seen as emojis expressing greater notions.

With Navalny, last seen through the bars of his arctic prison, what shines out is his charisma, youthful, tall, good looking, articulate. All the things Putin is not. And, it is now coming out, a deal for Navalny’s freedom may have been in the works.

So a strong case can be made for the proposition that the Russian leader was so eager to see Navalny dead that he pushed the execution ahead of schedule, and then rewarded the prison official in charge of doing the deed with a promotion.

Now the grim backdrop. The same leader has moved his country’s economy onto war footing, cranking out bombs and tanks, and is sacrificing thousands of soldiers, with thousands more to be lost, in a war to take the breadbasket of Europe. He is on the march.

As the West dithers.

Europe is trying but their aid package is financial and not made up of arms. It is left to our nation to counter-weight the increasing bulk of Russia’s might.

In that state of play — a European nation that, not unlike Navalny, is slowly being overtaken until there will no longer be a Ukraine — in that state of play, look to the leader of the American political party that determines whether our great nation will summon its full strength.

He is selling fancy sneakers.

OK so the sneakers were kind of funny, gold high-tops with our flag on the back. Trump is an entertaining figure. He is a pitch man, a carnival barker above all carnival barkers.

But can his party rise to the gravity and peril of this time in history. Not while in his thrall.

Trump is thrashing around in the courts, busy sabotaging border legislation and pursuing petty vendettas, all the while promoting one single, main idea: himself. I asked a friend who voted for him last time whether she would do so again.

“He’s an idiot!” she almost shouted with both conviction and humor in her voice. But she is no fan of the Democratic administration either, and is likely to not vote.

So you have a true killer on the march, a relentless, remorseless leader of the biggest country in Europe with a land mass of almost 1.5 million square miles, determined to take over an area long called the borderland and now the second biggest country in Europe with a land mass of 230 thousand square miles.

On the other side — sabotaging the fight against that force — you have a true clown.

The lack of national will that Trump represents, however, is not isolated within his carnival persona. It is bigger than that.

What stood out to me about the loss this month of the Ukrainian town of Avdiivka was that the narrative of war had changed. It was no longer trench warfare amidst an exchange of long-range artillery shells, it was Ukrainian ground troops under constant bombardment from Russian planes. No ground force can withstand 1000-pound bombs raining down on them.

Russia now has total air superiority in the war, with 4,200 military planes compared to Ukraine’s pathetic figure of 373. The only answer to that kind of overwhelming strength is to supply arms capable of sending the Russian planes burning towards earth.

To deliver the armaments needed to combat Russia’s dominance, and overcome its cranked-up military production, takes a centrally organized, fully funded, focus of national will.

When I look around at what animates our nation — handguns, race, immigration, procreation, social media antics and influencers — it makes me imagine a cartoon where a bunch of people are all pounding each other on the head. As the bear slouches their way.

There remains a hope that the Republican House majority will allow a vote on arms to the Ukrainian nation, but time is slipping away and so is the nation,

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