Glory to Ukraine!
Glory to the defenders of Ukraine and all modern civilization!
Today’s edition:
- Briefly about the latest news
- A year and a half of Trump: what goals has the president achieved?
▶ Briefly about the latest news:
The escalation of military actions between the US and Iran has been ongoing for a week now. The US is striking Iran. Iran is striking US military bases in the Middle East. On Saturday, Iran launched a missile strike on a US military base in Jordan. Two American soldiers died, one is missing, and several American soldiers were injured.
Shipping through the Strait of Hormuz is effectively blocked. Only a few ships manage to pass through the strait.
Amid the escalation and blocking of the Strait of Hormuz, oil prices are rising. Within a day, the price of Brent and American WTI oil increased by 4.5%. Brent is $88.10 per barrel, and WTI is $82.49 per barrel.
In the US, prices for gasoline and diesel fuel are rising again.
▶ On Monday, it will be exactly a year and a half since Trump became the 47th president of the US. An occasion to assess what has happened during this year and a half and think about what will happen in the next two and a half years.
Today, we will talk about what goals Trump wanted to achieve and how successful he has been in achieving those goals.
In the next review, we will talk about the foreign policy of Trump and his administration.
Trump ran for president, evidently setting himself four goals, three personal and one global.
1) To avoid guilty verdicts and punishment in his four criminal cases (falsification of financial documents, attempting to overturn the results of the 2020 election to usurp power, pressuring Georgia authorities and extortion to falsify election results in his favor, stealing secret documents from the White House and obstructing the investigation into their theft).
Donald Trump fully achieved this goal. Before the election, a trial was held for one of his four criminal cases. In June 2024, Trump was found guilty by a jury of falsifying 34 financial documents related to an illegal payment to adult film actress Stormy Daniels to keep quiet about their sexual affairs. However, the judge did not impose actual punishment due to his election as President of the USA, stating in the decision that voters spared him from punishment. Nevertheless, according to the court verdict, Trump is and remains a criminal (it can be added that in two other court rulings, he’s found guilty of sexual assault on a woman in a civil suit, and his main business – the Trump Organization – was found guilty of systematic financial fraud, resulting in him being barred from running businesses in New York). Avoidance of liability in the other three criminal cases was initially helped by the conservative majority of the Supreme Court, deciding that a president is immune for any actions performed as president, delaying the proceedings indefinitely until it is separately determined whether he acted as a president or private individual. Voters then helped him evade accountability by returning him to the White House. As a result, the three criminal cases with charges were dismissed.
2) Revenge on all who resisted his various actions during his first presidential term, those who investigated his law violations, and all he considers his enemies.
Trump is paying great attention to achieving this goal, primarily using the federal prosecution as a tool for revenge. However, he has not achieved significant success in the realm of revenge.
Former FBI Director Comey was charged with alleged perjury in Congress, and New York Attorney General James with alleged fraud in obtaining a mortgage. Both charges were deemed illegal by the court as they were brought by a prosecutor unlawfully holding office. Later, James Comey faced new charges for an Instagram post with a photo of seashells arranged on a beach in a way supposedly coded to call for the President’s removal. The case is being prepared for trial. It is unimaginable that 12 jurors would find Comey guilty over a photo of seashells.
At Trump’s insistence, federal prosecutors attempted to charge former Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell. The case fell apart before reaching court.
Also at Trump’s urging, federal prosecutors tried to charge two Democratic senators and four Democratic House members over a video reminding servicemen that they can refuse illegal orders. Trump accused Congress members of treason. The prosecution attempted to charge them, but the case collapsed in the grand jury – jurors refused to validate the absurd charges the prosecution sought to bring.
Former National Security Advisor Bolton was charged with removing secret documents from the White House. He admitted partial guilt for taking some documents home.
At Trump’s demand, there was a failed attempt to charge Federal Reserve Board member Professor Lisa Cook with mortgage fraud. Her “guilt,” in the President’s view, seemed to be her nomination by Joe Biden and her being African American. An “investigation” to bring similar charges against Senator Adam Schiff, who led the prosecution in Trump’s first impeachment trial, was also fruitless.
The President retaliated with mass firings of federal prosecutors and FBI employees involved in investigating the Capitol riot and the attempted coup on January 6, 2021, and in criminal cases involving Trump.
It is clear the President will not stop there. He will continue to seek revenge on those he considers enemies, using federal prosecution as a tool for this vendetta.
3) Personal and familial enrichment.
In achieving this goal, the 47th president has been quite successful. At one time, Trump lost a court case to journalist and author Tim O’Brien, who wrote in his book that Trump is not a billionaire. Trump could not prove in court that he had a billion. Now he definitely has more than one billion. According to his recently published public financial disclosure, he and his closest family members earned $2.2 billion in 2025. This is almost 4 times more than Trump declared for 2024. Most of this money was earned through cryptocurrency operations. But Trump’s real estate business is also developing. His sons, Donald Jr. and Eric, are successfully promoting the construction of new “Trump Towers” and golf clubs in various countries seeking favor with the American president and with the means to attract money to relevant projects.
And this self-assessment in the declaration is likely minimal. It does not include, for example, a $400 million airplane received as a gift from the Emir of Qatar. It also does not include millions obtained from investments in his businesses by American and foreign companies in exchange for various preferences.
Democratic Senator Chris Murphy recently spoke in the Senate, calling Trump the most corrupt president in U.S. history. For 30 minutes, Senator Murphy talked about the schemes used by the president and his family members to convert power into money and increase their capital.
It is quite obvious that the 47th president will continue to move in the same direction. His zeal for enrichment could be cooled by political investigations of his corruption in the House of Representatives, which will occur if the Democrats win the House elections in November. It is also possible that the more the 47th president becomes a lame-duck president, completing his term (as U.S. presidents who will not be re-elected are traditionally called), the less desire there will be for billionaires and emirs to give him gifts in the form of money and airplanes.
4) Establishing an authoritarian system of governance in the country, moving in this direction as far as possible, up to dictatorship.
If there were another ultra-right president in Trump’s place, who sought to usurp power and establish a right-wing dictatorship in the country, he would probably have succeeded much more in this than Trump. For the reason that the 47th president, being extremely narcissistic, is very focused on self-admiration, on constantly being the center of attention, on his portraits and plans for reorganizing the White House and Washington. His narcissism makes him spend too much energy and time on self-admiration, leaving less for everything else.
America is moving towards authoritarianism with Trump more slowly than it would under a more energetic far-right president who would be entirely focused on establishing an authoritarian regime in the country. But slower is a relative term. This movement is still happening. Whether it will be stopped depends on the Americans.
What has Trump achieved on the path to authoritarianism?
There has been an almost complete absolutization of executive power. Republicans, having a majority in both houses of Congress, have de facto refused to allow Congress—the legislative power—to perform its function as a counterbalance to executive power, to oversee it. The administration, the executive power, is beyond any control. The President and his ministers can break laws, and the Republican majority in Congress does not react.
About 200,000 professionals who worked in various agencies, regardless of the party in the White House, have been expelled from the structures of the federal government.
The President has significantly reduced the functions and radically cut the staff of the National Security Council, which for almost 80 years under all presidents has coordinated all decisions regarding national security and foreign policy, by firing about two hundred of its employees.
The Department of Justice, the federal prosecutor’s office, has been turned into a structure serving the President and fulfilling any of his wishes and directives—criminal cases are initiated against those the President considers enemies and halted against those he considers friends.
The National Institute of Health and the National Science Foundation—agencies through which grant funding for major scientific research is conducted—underwent radical dispersal. Their staff was significantly reduced, and many directors and supervisors of various programs were dismissed. Funding for more than half of the grants for scientific research, previously channeled through the National Science Foundation, was halted.
The immigration police “ICE,” whose numbers have been significantly increased, has been turned literally into the President’s personal “guard.” Recent killings on the streets in the states of Maine and Texas by immigration officers show that this “guard” can operate outside any legal constraints. “We are the law,” as Trump himself said. The immigration police were tasked with “catching” two thousand “illegal immigrants” a day. Raids, arrests, detaining people in immigration prisons with gulag-like conditions, where more than 50 people have died since Trump’s return to the White House, and shootings and killings by immigration officers on the streets of American cities—this is the reality of today’s America.
Attempts are being made to absorb dissenting TV channels. In particular, such an absorption happened with the CBS channel. There remains a threat that the same could happen with CNN. The method is approximately the same as was used in Russia after Putin came to power – forcing owners to sell their media business, “merging” it with the absorbing business owned by structures friendly to the president.
Nevertheless, as of today, channels like CNN and MS NOW (formerly MSNBC), NBC, and CNBC remain free, as do the major newspapers.
Despite everything, the judicial system continues to function in the USA. The number of court decisions against the president’s arbitrary actions and his administration is hard to count. The president appeals to the Supreme Court, which has a solid Republican majority (6-3). However, even then, the Supreme Court can make decisions against Trump in very high-profile cases, as was the case with decisions on the illegality of federalizing the National Guard and its deployment to cities, the unconstitutionality of arbitrarily established customs tariffs by the president, and the unconstitutionality of a presidential decree effectively canceling the birthright citizenship article of the Constitution. So far, there are no precedents for the 47th noncompliance with Supreme Court decisions.
However, there’s a precedent where the president appealed to the Supreme Court to reconsider its decision (on the unconstitutionality of the decree canceling birthright citizenship). Whether the Supreme Court will consider this appeal from Trump is still unknown. What is important here is that Trump tried, tries, and will try to go as far as he is allowed. Therefore, he will certainly continue to test how far the Supreme Court will allow him to go.
On November 3, 2026, midterm elections are scheduled in the USA – the entire House of Representatives and a third of the Senate will be re-elected.
Will these elections be free? Or will they take place with “ICE” at the polling stations to deter liberally-minded Americans from participating in the elections? There are no answers to these questions today.
A Democratic victory in the House of Representatives elections will allow Congress to regain its balancing function and practically exclude the transformation of the USA into an authoritarian state. However, such a victory is possible only if the elections are free. And this depends on citizens, who must be citizens constituting an effective civil society.
We will talk about the foreign policy of the 47th president in the next review.
There are 917 days left until the end of the story called “Fear: Trump in the White House” © (title of Bob Woodward’s book published in 2018).
Thank you to everyone who read. Take care of yourself and your loved ones. Take care of each other, help one another. Health to all.
Ultimately, what happens in the world depends on us. Whether we fight evil, do good, remain mere observers, wait passively believing someone somewhere will decide for us, or fight evil and do everything possible so that good prevails.
We must not allow evil to triumph. The triumph of evil would mean the end of the world we live in. We cannot let this happen. Especially now.
Ukrainian friends, I embrace and love you all. Please take care of each other, I ask this of you dearly.
Ukraine is and always will be.
And evil will be defeated and punished. Inevitably.
