Republican Warns Trump Is Ending U.S. Legacy of Leader of Free World

Republican Representative Don Bacon warned Monday that Donald Trump’s botched handling of the negotiations to end Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was forfeiting America’s status as a global leader.

During an interview on CNN, the Nebraska Republican was asked whether he felt that Trump’s stance on Russia was “too conciliatory” and amounted to “walking away” from the American legacy as the leader of the free world.

“We are the leader of the free world, but right now, many countries are questioning, are we still the leader of the free world?” Bacon said.

“We may be the most powerful country in the world, we were the leader of the free world, but it appears to many leaders and people all over—to include Republicans in Nebraska—that this administration is walking away from that legacy,” Bacon said.

“I’m not interested in a foreign policy that is totally built on realism, or transactionalism, where it’s just, ‘What do we have in it for us?’ I believe in having a foreign policy where it’s a mix of realism, protecting our country, and idealism,” Bacon said.

Bacon urged Americans to be “clear-eyed” and have “moral clarity” when it came to negotiating with Russia. To him, that meant understanding that Russian President Vladimir Putin is the aggressor, period.

Bacon cited Russia’s invasion of Ukraine—which Trump has suggested was somehow Ukraine’s fault—as well as the Kremlin’s lethal attacks against its critics, and Russia’s seemingly renewed aerial attack campaign in Ukraine.

“[Putin’s] ramped up the bombing of cities since President Trump has been harsh toward President Zelenskiy,” Bacon said.

“We’re playing into the hands of Putin and it’s devastating for our national security, and our foreign affairs for the years to come. So, I’m very concerned,” he added.

Trump has continued to make outrageous demands of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, while asking absolutely nothing of Putin, who is responsible for the continued fighting in Ukraine. During an interview on Fox News Sunday, Trump suggested that Ukraine “may not survive anyway”—a startling admission for someone who has placed himself at the head of negotiations.

It does seem that the United States is well on its way back from being a “city upon a hill,” and was recently included on the Civicus Monitor Watchlist, a selection of countries experiencing a rapid decline in civil freedoms published by the Civicus, a civil rights–tracking watchdog.

The list referred to Trump’s onslaught of executive orders targeting diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, undocumented immigrants, and transgender Americans, as well as other legislative actions infringing on the freedom of association, peaceful assembly, and expression.

Vice President JD Vance is being attacked by his own cousin, who fought on the front lines in Ukraine, over his insults to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy and the Trump administration’s abandonment of the country. 

Nate Vance, a Texas native who volunteered for Ukraine and fought on the front lines against Russia for three years, told French newspaper Le Figaro that Donald Trump and Vance are turning the U.S. into “Vladimir Putin’s useful idiots.”

“JD is a good guy, intelligent,” Nate Vance said. “When he criticized aid to Ukraine, I told myself that it was because he had to please a certain electorate and that it was a political game. But what they did to Zelensky was an ambush of absolute bad faith.”

Nate and JD are first cousins: JD’s mother is the sister of Nate’s father. Nate, a Marine veteran like JD, traveled to Ukraine in 2022, fighting in some of its deadliest battles, according to the publication. 

“You’re family but that doesn’t mean I’m going to accept the fact that you’re getting my comrades killed,” Vance said. He believes that the U.S. has benefited from aiding Ukraine, and that U.S. equipment has been used effectively in the war, and was incensed after watching Trump and Vance disrespect Zelenskiy in the Oval Office two weeks ago.   

“I was disappointed. When JD justified his distrust of Zelensky by the ‘reports’ he had seen, I thought I was going to choke,” Vance said. “His own cousin was on the frontline. I could have told him the truth, plain and simple, without any personal agenda. He never tried to find out more.”

Nate Vance left the Ukrainian war in January after his cousin was sworn in as vice president, having kept his relationship to JD under wraps until then, due to the risk of being captured because of his famous relative. The lifelong Republican is at odds not only with his cousin but with other members of his family—his mother, Donna, called Zelenskiy a “pretentious little shit” on Facebook. 

Vance has tried to contact his cousin multiple times, going back to JD’s time in the Senate, to no avail. 

“From Ukraine, reaching a senator is not easy,” Nate Vance said. “But I left messages at his office. I never heard back.”

One of the highest ranking members of the State Department used to tweet about how gay and stupid he thought now Secretary of State Marco Rubio was, according to CNN.

Darren Beattie, who used to be one of Trump’s speechwriters before being fired for openly fraternizing with white nationalists, has multiple deleted tweets slandering his current boss.

“Forget Wainwright park, forget the foam, forget the war promotion and the neocon sugar daddies, forget the low IQ, forget the 2016 primary … Rubio is TOUGH ON CHINA (and good for military industrial complex),” Beattie wrote sarcastically in just 2021, referring to unsupported far-right claims that Rubio has attended “gay foam parties.”

“If a bunch of DC wonks try to reinvent Marco Rubio as a nationalist, but a ‘respectable’ one who promises tax credits to BLM supporters and is ‘TOUGH ON CHINA’ will you be a good dog and vote for him?” Beattie wrote in the following tweet.

“I bet Rubio still thinks Assad gassed his own people,” Beattie commented over a tweet in which Rubio criticized Russia for its tactics in Ukraine.

“The idea behind the Hawley/Rubio scam is this. They are smart enough to know the rebranded neoconservatism of Nikki Haley and Crenshaw has no legs,” Beattie wrote in 2020. “Also smart enough to know free-market libertarianism has no legs.”

Beattie is now the State Department’s primary adviser on public affairs and public diplomacy, and he also heads the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, which handles things like Fulbright scholarships.

Rubio has declined to comment.

These tweets are a microcosm of the strange position Rubio finds himself in: someone once considered a moderate, commonsense Republican in the midst of his party’s right-wing takeover, now trying to smile and wave his way through it.

Donald Trump doesn’t seem to have any faith in Ukraine, after all.

​​During an interview with Fox Business’s Maria Bartiromo that aired Sunday, the president expressed a complete lack of faith that Ukraine could continue to survive—either with or without U.S. involvement.

“Are you comfortable with that? The fact that you walked away, and Ukraine may not survive?” Bartiromo asked, referring to a recent conversation she had with Polish President Andrzej Duda in which the foreign leader cast doubts on Ukraine’s longevity.

“Well, it may not survive anyway,” Trump said. “But, you know, we have some weaknesses with Russia. It takes two. Look, it was not going to happen, that war, and it happened. So, now we’re stuck with this mess.”

Trump then went on to blame former President Joe Biden for leaving the war in his hands.

Following a disastrous meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy late last month, the White House ordered a pause on military aid and intelligence sharing with Kyiv in its ongoing war with Russia. That alone could be enough to devastate Ukraine’s ability to target Russian forces in its fight against the dictator-led superpower.

Deciding to backtrack on the global treatises has also rattled international confidence in U.S. allyship. After a week in which Trump sparked a trade war, sent the stock market tumbling, and effectively failed the stipulations of the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, a coalition of the country’s strongest allies were reportedly examining how they could revise their current protocols with Washington in order to withhold intelligence and safeguard foreign assets, according to four sources and a foreign official that spoke with NBC News.

Trump has repeatedly ducked reporters’ questions as to whether his administration’s actions have aligned U.S. policy with Moscow, though in the background of his spat with Ukraine, the president reportedly directed administration officials last week to draft a proposal that would lift sanctions on Russia.

During another portion of the interview, Bartiromo asked Trump if he believed he was giving Russia and Ukraine equal treatment in ongoing peace talks.

“I think so,” Trump said.

“Are you favoring one over the other?” she pressed.

Trump then practically admitted that he wasn’t treating them the same, due to their varying positions in the world.

“They’re very different places, OK? Very, very different,” the president continued. “You’re talking about different levels of power. You’re talking about different parts of the world.”

Droves of world leaders have denounced the U.S. in the weeks since Trump was inaugurated. They have condemned his aggression toward America’s long-standing alliances and his willingness to throw Western nations into a reckless trade war, and have cast aspersions on his seemingly warm relationship with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Russian forces crossed the Ukrainian border on February 24, 2022, which Putin tried to justify by falsely claiming that he needed to protect civilians in eastern Ukraine. The U.S. and Russia opened discussions at a meeting in Saudi Arabia last month, seeking a conclusion to the three-year war, but the assembly conspicuously excluded Ukrainian leadership.

Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency is struggling to come up with accomplishments in the face of public criticism and pressure from Trump administration officials.

Several leading DOGE officials are desperate to show positive results from their work. Thomas Shedd, a former Tesla employee who now works with DOGE in the General Service Administration, or GSA, told his employees in a meeting last week that “I need wins to defend,” The Washington Post reports.

Some of the pressure on DOGE is coming from President Trump himself. Last week, he said that agency chiefs, and not Elon Musk, are in charge of making department cuts, and said on Truth Social that he prefers the “‘scalpel’ rather than the ‘hatchet.’” DOGE officials are also concerned about their image, with negative headlines and angry town halls reinforcing how damaging their agency cuts are.

A Washington Post-Ipsos poll last month showed that nearly half of Americans disapprove of what Musk has done with the federal government, as opposed to 34 percent who approve.

“P.R. is viewed as a big mess internally right now. I think everyone there knows they need to do a better job of telling the story,” one anonymous source told the Post. “And that’s going to be a big component of the next phase of DOGE, leaning into storytelling and showing the wins and not having the story told for them.”

Following their cuts to federal offices, which have resulted in thousands of federal workers being fired, DOGE’s next step is to build apps and websites for government services and federal employees. But even on this, DOGE has undermined its own efforts. For example, DOGE’s effort to overhaul the Social Security website and services upended an effort already underway in the U.S. Digital Service, with the team working on it being pushed out, former head of the USDS Mina Hsiang said.

​​“When you fire people who have deep understandings of the mission you want to accomplish, you’re sort of starting from zero,” said Hsiang, who left before the USDS became the U.S. DOGE Service in January.

DOGE employees have a short timeline to show what they’ve achieved: They have only months until their tenure as “special government employees” ends. In some cases, they are passing on this pressure to federal workers, giving them only minutes to complete tasks. DOGE seems to prioritize speed and coding skills over security and protecting sensitive information, said an employee of 18F, a digital unit inside the GSA.

“Anyone can make something look nice,” said the employee, who is now on administrative leave. But making sure government systems don’t break “is a lot more complicated. And I don’t think [people at DOGE] care about it at all.”