by Last night, in response to the appalling behavior of Trump and Vance in the Oval Office earlier in the day, Timothy Snyder, who teaches history at Yale and is the author of On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century, released his first substack video. While acknowledging that there are likely more, he focuses on Five Failures in the Oval Office: of hospitality, decency, democracy, strategy, and independence. It only takes six minutes to watch it. Today, he wrote an analysis about what happened and its ramifications in The War Trump Chooses. It begins this way:
The Americans claim that their attempt to humiliate the Ukrainian president in the White House yesterday was about peace. On that premise, nothing they said makes any sense.
The attempted mugging of a visiting president was about the world war that Elon Musk, Donald Trump, and JD Vance have chosen. If we attend to what Vance and Trump said yesterday, we can work our way to the unreason of American policy, and to the chaos that will follow.
Snyder also shares some ways we can directly support Ukraine:
- Come Back Alive — Ukrainian NGO that supports soldiers on the battlefield and veterans
- United 24 — the Ukrainian state platform for donations, with many excellent projects
- RAZOM — an American NGO, tax-deductible for US citizens, which cooperates with Ukrainian NGOS to support civilians
- Documenting Ukraine — a project that helps to give Ukrainians a voice, also tax-deductible for Americans
Let’s demonstrate that those creeps do not speak for the country. We can use some of those dollars that we didn’t spend yesterday.
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Ruth Neuwald Falcon 
Thank you for sending this. Shavuah Tov.
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The depravity of yesterday’s ambush in the Oval Office is almost impossible to measure. Timothy Snyder has been warning about this developing tyranny since the beginning of Trump’s first term and surely Trump’s clearly telegraphed his ambitions if he were given a second term. The majority of voters did not wish to hear, chose to disregard what they heard, or were fine with what was likely to come. The world’s political order is now shifting like quicksand under our feet and I’m afraid we won’t have a sufficient collective will to stop it. But we must try. I am contributing to one of Snyder’s recommendations to support Ukraine. Thanks for posting this!
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