"History will remember this day— when an American President and Vice President abandoned all we stand for"

Peter Baker: “Trump and Vance Berate Zelensky During Testy White House Meeting.”

President Trump and Vice President JD Vance berated President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine on Friday in an explosive televised Oval Office shouting match that ultimately blew up plans to sign a rare minerals deal and signaled a dramatic break in relations between two wartime allies.

In a public confrontation unlike any seen between an American president and foreign leader in modern times, Mr. Trump and Mr. Vance castigated Mr. Zelensky for not being grateful enough for U.S. support in its war with Russia and sought to strong-arm him into making a peace deal on whatever terms the Americans dictated.

With voices raised and tempers flaring, Mr. Trump threatened to abandon Ukraine altogether if Mr. Zelensky did not go along. After journalists were escorted out of the Oval Office, Mr. Trump canceled the rest of the visit, including a planned joint news conference and signing ceremony for the minerals deal. A grim-faced Mr. Zelensky then strode out of the West Wing, climbed into a waiting black sport utility vehicle and departed the White House grounds.

“I have determined that President Zelenskyy is not ready for Peace if America is involved, because he feels our involvement gives him a big advantage in negotiations,” Mr. Trump wrote on social media. “I don’t want advantage, I want PEACE. He disrespected the United States of America in its cherished Oval Office. He can come back when he is ready for Peace.”

Some other quick reactions (quotes and links from Charlie Sykes' Substack newsletter today).

Liz Cheney:

“Generations of American patriots, from our revolution onward, have fought for the principles Zelenskyy is risking his life to defend. But today, Donald Trump and JD Vance attacked Zelenskyy and pressured him to surrender the freedom of his people to the KGB war criminal who invaded Ukraine. History will remember this day— when an American President and Vice President abandoned all we stand for.”

Tom Nichols:

Friday, February 28, 2025, will go into the history books as one of the grimmest days in American diplomacy, the beginning of a long-term disaster every American, every U.S. ally, and anyone who cares about the future of democracy will have to endure. With the White House’s betrayal of Ukraine capping a month of authoritarian chaos in America, Putin, along with other dictators around the world, can finally look at Trump with confidence and think: one of us.

Michael Weiss:

Increasingly obvious they invited him to Washington to humiliate him. This is theatre for the benefit of their base and of course a suddenly very happy man in Moscow.

Susan Glasser:

If there are any illusions about what side Trump is on between Russia and Ukraine, this should dispel them.

Damon Linker:

That event in the Oval Office is going to send shock waves across the world -- far more so than Vance's Munich speech. We're the most powerful country on the planet, and we are Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde from admin to admin. Today Mr. Hyde made his full debut.

Gregg Nunziata:

I’m hard-pressed to think of a more disgraceful and damaging performance by a U.S. President on the world stage than what we just witnessed in the Oval Office.

Mark Hertling:

Some have disappointed, some had bad policy, some made big mistakes. But I’ve never in my life been ashamed of American leaders. Until today.

David French:

This is utterly shameful. This is Vladimir Putin's best outcome. The U.S. is placing pressure on a free nation fighting for its life while giving aid and comfort to an authoritarian thug.

Mona Charen:

We are a completely different country from what we were 2 months ago. Bully. Aggressor. Putin suck-up. Betrayer of allies. Rude. Crude. Dishonest. The most dishonorable display by an American president in our lifetimes.

Shiri Bibas was not returned with the bodies of her two sons today

It seems there is no end to evil. 

This morning (between 9:00-10:00 am Israel time, between 2:00-3:00 am east coast US time, Hamas handed over four coffins to the International Committee of the Red Cross - supposedly containing the bodies of Shiri Bibas, her two sons, Kfir and Ariel, and Oded Lipfschitz. 

But this was not a quiet handover - no, Hamas put on a spectacle, placing the coffins on a stage with a grotesque caricature of Benjamin Netanyahu on a sheet behind them, and a masked Hamas terrorist giving a speech with music in the background. The crowd around the stage and the ICRC included armed terrorists with green headbands and civilians - children and women among the men. Some of them took photos or videos of the scene with their cellphones, as if this was a play or a movie.

I watched some of it on a livestream from several different news organizations, including Reuters and AP (I don't know whose cameras were actually there).

But it turns out that Shiri Bibas was not one of them. The IDF was not able to identify the body.

From the Times of Israel today, after Hamas returned four coffins to Israel this morning.

IDF: Remains of Kfir and Ariel Bibas ID’d, 3rd body sent by Hamas isn’t their mom Shiri

By Lazar Berman

The military informs the Bibas family that the bodies of Ariel and Kfir Bibas have been identified after their remains were given to Israel by Hamas on Thursday.

However, the third body at the Abu Kabir Forensic Institute was not that of their mother, Shiri Bibas, says the Israel Defense Forces. Specialists at Abu Kabir were not able to identify the body.

The authorities, using forensic evidence and intelligence, assess that the two young boys were ‘”brutally murdered” by terrorists in November 2023, says the IDF. Ariel was 4-years-old and Kfir was 10-months-old when they were murdered.

“This is a very serious violation by the Hamas terrorist organization, which is required by the agreement to return four dead hostages,” says the IDF. “We demand that Hamas return Shiri home along with all of our hostages.”

“We share the deep sorrow of the Bibas family at this difficult time and will continue to make every effort to return Shiri and all the hostages home as soon as possible,” says the IDF.

Trans people were at Stonewall!

Among the many evil things the Trump administration has already done only in his first month in office (hard to believe!) is their attempt to erase trans people from American life and memory. One thing they did was to try and erase the role of trans people in the Stonewall rebellion that began the modern gay liberation movement (as it was first called). From a letter of protest written by scholars of the movement:

On February 13, 2025, the National Park Service, following an executive order issued by the Trump administration on January 20, 2025, “to recognize [only] two sexes, male and female [that] are not changeable,” removed references to transgender people from the web pages of the National Stonewall Monument in lower Manhattan. Later, the word “queer” and the letter “Q” were also removed.

This part of the letter explains the rebellion:

As scholars who study the history and politics of sexuality and gender, we write to testify that these changes are not supported by the historical record concerning the events that the monument commemorates.

The National Stonewall Monument commemorates an important event in the history of LGBTQ+ activism. During a six-day conflict that began at a New York City tavern called the Stonewall Inn in the summer of 1969, commonly referred to as the Stonewall riots, LGBTQ+ New Yorkers resisted systematic harassment and mistreatment by police in a series of clashes that continued in Greenwich Village for several days. The Stonewall Inn’s patrons and the participants in the subsequent uprising were predominantly young New Yorkers who defied dominant sexual and gender norms. Some understood themselves as gay or lesbian or queer, and some lived part or all of the time as members of a sex other than the one assigned to them at birth. Some called themselves “drag queens” and “crossdressers,” others “transvestite” or “transsexual,” and still others used ambiguous terms that could describe both sexuality and variation in gender expression. The rioters at Stonewall varied in their class background, their racial and ethnic identity, and in words they used to describe themselves. This range and complexity of variation in gender expression and sexuality were common in the gay liberation, lesbian feminist, and trans movements of the period, which were characterized (like all social movements) by some disagreements and debates about language as well as shared visions of liberation.

Diversity in both sexuality and gender expression, forms of human variation often inextricably related to one another, are empirically verifiable parts of the historical record, even as the terms different societies use and the particular meanings of those terms change over time. Neither “transgender” nor “queer” were commonly used as terms of identity in 1969, but “transvestite,” “transsexual,” and other terms were, including by people at the Stonewall Inn and the protests that followed. Notable examples included Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera, influential activists who were assigned male at birth but lived for periods of their adult lives as women.

Participants in the Stonewall riots challenged both mistreatment based on the kinds of sexual partners they sought and mistreatment based on how they performed gender in everyday life. Efforts to address both forms of oppression were part of the riots in 1969 and the civil rights struggle that followed. Any accurate account of the Stonewall Riots and the subsequent fight for LGBTQ+ civil rights must recognize the full range of people who joined the battle and the full scope of the oppression they faced. The actions of the National Park Service reduce these events to a story that is only about sexual orientation, but that interpretation lacks basis in historical fact and distorts the legacy of this important event in American history.

"With burning anxiety"