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Frederic B. Hill is a former foreign correspondent for The Baltimore Sun and former senior adviser to a Republican senator Charles McC. Mathias of Maryland. He later conducted wargaming exercises on national security challenges for the Department of State. He is a graduate of Bowdoin College.
To have an American president support the bombing and killing of tens of thousands of men, women and children by Russia’s dictator is beyond belief. But here is Donald Trump, now surrounded by sycophants and a trembling coterie of Republicans, doing just that.
Make no mistake about Trump’s misguided attitude towards Ukraine and its brave president. It may derive directly from his lingering anger with Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy for not agreeing with Trump to lie about former President Joe Biden during that infamous 2019 telephone call that led to Trump’s first impeachment.
As Tom Nichols of The Atlantic wrote after the Feb. 28 meeting at the White House between Trump and Zelenskyy: Trump at times sounded like a Mafia boss. “‘You don’t have the cards, you’re buried there’ — but in the end, he sounded like no one so much as Putin himself as he hollered about ‘gambling with World War III,’ as if starting the biggest war in Europe in nearly a century was Zelensky’s idea.”
Sen. Susan Collins’ comment about Trump’s treatment of Zelenskyy? “Very unfortunate.”
This meek reaction marks what I see as another step in her reluctance to more forcefully stand up to a reckless president and for the standing of the United States in the world.
Trump’s embrace of Russian dictator Vladimir Putin and Russia’s brutal invasion of Ukraine deserve to be condemned by all Americans and Collins has no farther to look for encouragement than to the comments of her colleague, Sen. Angus King.
King was asked recently on CBS’s 60 Minutes about what Congress should do in response to Trump’s reckless policy to lend American support to the worst aggression in Europe since Adolf Hitler attacked Poland in 1939.
King, one of two independent senators, said: “I think they have to start speaking up. If we persist in walking away from Ukraine, it will be the greatest geopolitical mistake the country has made since World War II.”
Collins was one of seven Republicans who sided with all 50 Democrats to vote to convict Trump in that second impeachment, 10 short of the required two-thirds of the Senate. It was, I believe, one of her finer moments.
Now she faces another moment of truth.
Collins is the only Republican of the 33 members in the U.S. Senate and U.S. House from New England, and now is, I believe, the right time for her to break completely with an unhinged president who in addition to his reckless foreign policy defies the rule of law and the Constitution in so-called domestic reforms.
She has several options, but the most promising I see for her — and for the nation — would be to declare herself an independent. She might lose votes in the conservative Second Congressional District, but would most likely gain them in the more liberal First District. She may want to hang on in GOP ranks to preserve her seniority, yet Trump has shown disdain for her before and is likely to continue to punish Maine for its independence and overall vote against him.
In addition to a tradition of independent political leaders in Maine, such a move would hardly be unprecedented. There have been 23 such switches in the U.S. Senate in American history. There have been five in the 21st century — with four changing from Republican or Democrat to independent, and caucusing with the Democrats.
Sen. Jim Jeffords of Vermont switched from Republican to Democrat in 2001 and temporarily gave control of the Senate to the Democrats. The most recent two senators to switch, Kyrsten Sinema, of Arizona, and Joe Manchin, of West Virginia, both Democrats, became independents, though still largely aligning with the Democrats.
For another example of courage and conviction, Collins can look back to Maine Sen. Margaret Chase Smith’s brave denunciation of a fellow Republican, Sen. Joseph McCarthy, in her memorable 1950 “Declaration of Conscience” speech.
With the right-wing senator from Wisconsin behind her, Smith declared that McCarthy’s reckless and unproven charges of widespread Communists and spies in the government had “debased the Senate to the level of a forum of hate and character assassination.” She defended “the right to criticize, the right to hold unpopular beliefs, the right to protest.”
Smith concluded: “It is high time that we all stopped being tools and victims of totalitarian techniques — techniques that if continued here unchecked, will surely end what we have come to cherish as the American way of life.”
Six members of the Republican party promptly signed her declaration and began the end of McCarthy’s campaign of right-wing hate and fear-mongering.
