JoJoFromJerz

The Seal and the Tsar One Nation, Under Putin, With Servitude and Shame for All      What happened in Anchorage yesterday wasn’t a summit, it wasn’t diplomacy, and it sure as hell wasn’t leadership. It was a spectacle. A freak show of power inverted — the President of the United States turned into a clapping seal, and Vladimir Putin strutting across American soil like he owned the deed. If you didn’t watch it live, good for you. Protect your sanity. But if you did, you know: we just lived through one of the most humiliating scenes in modern American history. Air Force One came groaning into Anchorage after eight months of Trump’s empty promises about “ending the war in Ukraine on day one.” He’d rambled and sputtered through rallies, repeating himself like a malfunctioning car alarm: Day one. Day one. Nobody else could do it. Only me. Day one. And yet here we were on day 240, and all he had to show for it was a Temu-brand imitation of a North Korean dictator parade. Jets overhead, flags flapping, red carpet rolled out like a clearance rack Versailles. It was supposed to look “historic.” Instead, it looked like someone ordered “totalitarian chic” from Amazon, and it arrived two sizes too small. And then came Trump. If you expected a commander-in-chief, what you got instead was a man losing a custody battle with his own skeleton. He didn’t stride. He lurched. He waddled down those steps like gravity itself was trying to drag him offstage. His suit — if you can call it that — sagged like it had been borrowed from a thrift store mannequin. His tie dangled absurdly low, like a velvet leash dragging him toward the ground. And his face — my God, his face. Nuclear orange. Not bronze. Not tan. Radioactive Cheeto-orange, glowing under the Alaskan sun like a traffic cone dipped in fryer oil. It wasn’t skin. It was a warning flare. It was the last gasping breath of a highlighter. And to behold it in person — to see the supposed leader of the free world glowing like a defective jack-o’-lantern, dripping sweat, jaw slack, unable even to sit up straight — was a bizarre, humiliating sight. I remember being a kid, standing in front of the TV, watching Ronald Reagan tell Mikhail Gorbachev to “tear down this wall.” Whatever you thought of Reagan — his policies, his failures, his blunders — in that moment, as a child, I was proud. I was proud of my country. Proud of my president. Proud to see America stand for something bigger than itself. That is not what happened yesterday. Yesterday, I watched a man who once bragged that avoiding STDs in the ‘80s was his “personal Vietnam” clap like a trained seal for a dictator. Yesterday, I watched the United States surrender its dignity for a photo op. Yesterday, I watched shame dressed in a rumpled suit and a red tie too long for his body. And let’s not skip past the visuals. His face — seven shades redder than usual, a nuclear-orange glow so intense it looked like the White House lighting team had swapped his foundation for radioactive Tang. He looked like a melted Oompa Loompa who had been left in the back of a hot car. He couldn’t sit up straight, couldn’t keep his jacket buttoned, couldn’t summon even the posture of a man pretending to lead. He looked like he was cosplaying the gimp from Pulp Fiction, slouched, slack, and waiting for someone else to tell him what to do. This wasn’t statesmanship. This was a hostage video in real time. And still, the clapping. The clapping that will follow him like an epitaph. Clapping as though he had been invited to a private performance of Cats, palms smacking together for his favorite number, eyes wet and gleaming in the dark. Only this wasn’t Broadway. This was America’s humiliation. And the world was watching. And then Putin descended. He didn’t waddle. He glided. He strolled down the steps with the ease of a man who knew he had already won. He slipped into The Beast — the presidential limo of the United States — like it was his ride now. He spoke Russian, on our soil, into American cameras, and took no questions. Not from our press, not from Fox News, not from anyone. And the President of the United States? He stood hunched and sweating beside him, lips pursed inward like a broken ventriloquist dummy, while his aides stood ashen, shell-shocked, as though they’d just walked in on him naked except for Crocs and a Burger King crown. This wasn’t a summit. It was a surrender. And the punchline is that it was the inevitable end of eight months of Trump’s “negotiations.” Let’s review how that went: Trump: “Vladimir, stop the killing. Okay? Stop it. Just stop it.” Putin: “Nyet.” Trump: “We want a ceasefire. A very good ceasefire. Beautiful ceasefire. The best ceasefire.” Putin: “Nyet.” Trump: “Okay but listen, nobody’s ever seen sanctions like mine.” Putin: “Nyet.” Trump: “But when we meet, folks… huge things. Tremendous things.” Putin: “Nyet.” Eight months later in Anchorage, Putin’s demands were unchanged since 2022: Ukraine must surrender territory, NATO must be weakened, Russia must be appeased. And Trump’s grand takeaway? “There’s no deal til there’s a deal. We didn’t get there, but there is a good chance of getting there.” That’s not leadership. That’s a Yelp review from the business fraud who bankrupted casinos and stole from his own charity. Meanwhile, NPR reported that guests at the Hotel Captain Cook — where American officials were staying — found a State Department memo with sensitive details about the Trump-Putin meeting sitting on the public printer. Classified strategy, abandoned between a Sudoku puzzle and someone’s boarding pass. Our national security, treated like lost-and-found at a La Quinta Inn. And through it all, Republicans cheer. MAGA quotes Vladimir Putin now as if he’s Walter Cronkite. They parrot him on the 2020 election, pointing to his comments as “proof” that Trump was robbed — because apparently the Kremlin is their new fact-checker. They parrot him on Ukraine, too: “Putin says he never would have invaded if Trump were president!” Well, no shit. He wouldn’t have needed to. Trump would’ve handed Ukraine over on a silver platter, gift-wrapped in a red MAGA bow. That’s not strength. That’s servitude. That’s a puppet bragging about how tightly the strings are pulled. This is not what leadership looks like. This is what capitulation looks like. It was grotesque pageantry: a Dollar Store dictator parade, a kennel puppy waiting for kibble, a nuclear-orange waxwork slouching in the sun while Putin took the driver’s seat. And it should haunt us. Because this is the reality of Trump’s America: Republicans quoting Vladimir fucking Putin as their truth-teller, cheering for surrender, and treating humiliation as patriotism. There is no bottom. There is only the freefall — ravenous, defiant, and morally depraved — as the Republican Party spirals into damnation, not by accident but by design. They are not slipping. They are charging headfirst into the abyss, grinning as they drag every institution, every survivor, every fragile piece of our democracy down with them. And let’s not lose sight of the stakes. Innocent civilians are still being slaughtered in Ukraine. Russian soldiers are still dying to appease one madman’s obsession with destroying Western democracy. And our Idiot-in-Chief is playing right into his hands. Contrast that with what came before us. The Greatest Generation crossed oceans to liberate strangers they’d never met. They stormed the beaches at Normandy, where boys fresh out of high school drowned under machine-gun fire to crack open the gates of freedom. They clawed their way up the black sands of Iwo Jima, where men bled out clutching photographs of wives they’d never see again. They froze and starved through the Battle of the Bulge, surrounded, outnumbered, and still refusing to yield an inch to fascism’s advance. They fought and died with no certainty of victory, but with absolute certainty that democracy was worth the risk. And here we are — handing the microphone to a five-time draft dodger who mocks POWs, sneers at Gold Star families, and spits on the graves of men who fought real wars so that democracy wouldn’t perish from the earth. A man who once called fallen soldiers “losers” and “suckers,” now playing footsie with a Russian dictator because it makes his teeny-tiny mushroom member tingle. That is the contrast. That is the shame. That is the humiliation etched into history yesterday in Anchorage. And don’t think the dead don’t notice. Because when you stand at Normandy and look out at the sea, when you walk past the endless rows of white crosses at Arlington, when you stand in the quiet at Iwo Jima and feel the ghosts in the sand, you know damn well those boys are still watching. And what did they see yesterday? They saw their sacrifice mocked. They saw the freedom they bled for auctioned off to a tyrant. They saw the country they died for clapping for the very enemy they gave their lives to stop. Because what we watched was not statesmanship. It was not diplomacy. It was not even theater. It was burlesque — the United States reduced to a trained seal clapping for the man who wants to dismantle the very freedoms that generation fought and died to protect. That is what happened in Anchorage. And history won’t remember it as a “summit.” It will remember it as the day the President of the United States performed like a trained poodle for a dictator, while America’s soul slipped further into the fire.