Here’s a surprise. Protesters in Ukraine did such top quality protesting that they got Russian soldiers to go away.

A mayor in a Ukrainian town occupied by Russian forces has been released from captivity and the soldiers have agreed to leave after a mass protest by residents.

Slavutych, a northern town close to the Chernobyl nuclear site, was taken by Russian forces but stun grenades and overhead fire failed to disperse unarmed protesters on its main square on Saturday.

The crowd demanded the release of mayor Yuri Fomichev, who had been taken prisoner by the Russian troops.

Attempts by Russian troops to intimidate the growing protest failed and on Saturday afternoon Fomichev was let go by his captors.

I find that quite astonishing. Usually invading troops who fail to intimidate the populace just move on to the mowing them down stage. This seems to hint that some (or perhaps most) Russian soldiers don’t want to make war on the people of Ukraine.

Western officials have said that Vladimir Putin had planned to take Ukraine’s capitals within days of announcing his “special military operation” on 24 February but had come across unexpectedly fierce resistance.

And maybe unexpectedly unfierce attack? By reluctant soldiers who don’t see Ukrainians as enemies?

Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on The obvious rejoinder.

Maybe the trans people aren’t getting enough recognition after all, so let’s create trans athlete divisions…. Give them what they want; proper divisions with little sexless statuettes for the winners.

But that’s not what they want. Having a separate trans division would deny them their validation as “women” in exactly the same way that “third space” toilet facilities would. Trans activists don’t want a solution that’s “fair” that does not give them the hit of affirmation they crave. They don’t want to put a spotlight on their “transness”, they want to be centered, celebrated, and rewarded for their “womanliness.” The idea behind TWAW and “NO DEBATE” is to bulldoze over the fact that they are not women. The point of institutional capture was to use the power of these institutions like so many medieval siege engines to breach the boundaries of women’s spaces quickly and quietly, without discussion or consultation, so that TiMs’ presence in them would become a fait accompli. Somehow, this was disguised and passed off as a progressive, compassionate movement. Only one thing stood in the way. Women. Women’s resistance is painted as bigotry and hatred, instead of the defence of women’s rights and safety. To put this struggle in another way, it’s aggressive, “colonial expansion” vs. spirited, self-defence of the “homeland.”

The TiM argument that “we’ve been in women’s washrooms for years” is more gloating than anything else. The denial of a conflict of rights is hard to maintain without the strenuous denial of women’s legitimate needs. Proponents of this supposedly “progressive” position are forced to publicly defend more and more indefensible things, Thomas’s blatant cheating among them. Add that to prisons, hospital wards and women’s shelters. It’s amazing how much some of them are able to stomach with a straight face. Without the collusion of the media, it would be much more difficult. Ophelia has highlighted so many stories where the denial of the material reality of sex completely transforms the meaning and import of headlines and entire stories, with ideological positions passed off as “politeness” and ” journalistic style guides” rather than an active taking of one side (and one side only) at the hearts of these very stories. Actual, unbiased neutrality would not do this.

Sometimes it just takes the breath away. This isn’t some pink-hair young adult, this is a middle-aged man with a book to advertise, and this is how he presents himself to the world.

He brags of standing outside a feminist meeting with a bunch of people shouting in order to drown them out and disrupt their meeting. He brags of it.

“Good and inspiring” to try to shout down women meeting to discuss women’s needs and rights.

Takes the breath away, I tell you.

Megan McCardle writes about Lia Thomas:

I’ve now written two columns about Thomas, and it is striking how many people — almost all of them liberal — have spontaneously erupted when I told them what I was writing about. All made the same complaint: It’s not fair.

What’s striking about that? Of course it’s not fair. The unfairness is laughably (enragingly) obvious. He’s mocking us.

There’s little question that Thomas has retained some of the many biological advantages conferred by male puberty, such as height, heart and lung capacity, and strength. But the obvious rejoinder is that of course biology isn’t fair; it never was, and never can be.

That rejoinder is not obvious at all. It’s flippant and insulting.

We aren’t going to be educated out of our feeling that there are major differences between biological men and women. The male/female performance gap appears at puberty in most sports, and quickly becomes so large that most cisgender women would never be able to compete at more elite levels if we weren’t segregated into our own leagues. Women’s sports exist to benefit us, not to keep us from hogging men’s glory.

Quite, which is why the obvious rejoinder isn’t obvious.

H/t Sackbut

How is it their “turf”?

Some background from way back on February 21:

Three decades ago, the newly independent country of Ukraine was briefly the third-largest nuclear power in the world.

Thousands of nuclear arms had been left on Ukrainian soil by Moscow after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. But in the years that followed, Ukraine made the decision to completely denuclearize.

In exchange, the U.S., the U.K. and Russia would guarantee Ukraine’s security in a 1994 agreement known as the Budapest Memorandum.

Oh really. That’s not going all that well.

It is clear that Ukrainians knew they weren’t getting the exactly legally binding, really robust security guarantees they sought.

But they were told at the time that the United States and Western powers — so certainly at least the United States and Great Britain — take their political commitments really seriously. This is a document signed at the highest level by the heads of state. So the implication was Ukraine would not be left to stand alone and face a threat should it come under one.

Fast forward to today. Is Ukraine left to stand alone against the Russian invasion? Pretty much…although the US apparently is sending shitloads of heavy-duty missiles and the like.

Mind you it’s easy to sit on the sidelines and criticize. It’s not as if I want to see the US get into a shooting war with Russia.

Still. There’s that bit of background.

Department of really bad analogies department:

JK Rowling has hit back at Vladimir Putin, after the Russian president cited her in a wide-ranging speech that saw him criticise “cancel culture”.

Pause for correction: she hasn’t “hit back”; she has rejected the comparison.

At a televised meeting on Friday, Mr Putin compared recent criticism of the Harry Potter author to that faced by pro-war Russian composers and writers.

“Pro-war” is sloppy too, since the issue isn’t war in general but this specific “war” which is an unprovoked attack by a massive nuclear-armed country on a much smaller one with no nukes.

In the lengthy speech, which was given to the winners of various cultural prizes, President Putin claimed Russian composers and writers were being discriminated against.

“They are trying to cancel a thousand-year-old country,” he said.

No we’re not. Tolstoy and Turgenev remain on our shelves, Chekhov plays still fill theaters, Balanchine is still an influence on ballet. We wouldn’t dream of canceling them, it’s Putin we’d like to cancel.

Rowling’s response:

So the thing is, the wife of a Supreme Court justice tried very hard to overturn the presidential election last year, which is…kind of criminal? Probably impossible to prosecute but not therefore legit? Criminalish?

The messages, which do not directly reference Justice Thomas or the Supreme Court, show for the first time how Ginni Thomas used her access to Trump’s inner circle to promote and seek to guide the president’s strategy to overturn the election results — and how receptive and grateful [Mark] Meadows said he was to receive her advice. Among Thomas’s stated goals in the messages was for lawyer Sidney Powell, who promoted incendiary and unsupported claims about the election, to be “the lead and the face” of Trump’s legal team.

…

Trump spoke publicly during this period about his intent to contest the election results in the Supreme Court. “This is a major fraud on our nation,” the president said in a speech at 2:30 the morning after the election. “We want the law to be used in a proper manner. So we’ll be going to the U.S. Supreme Court.”

But of course he was lying about that; there was no fraud. Trump on the other hand pursued the fraudulent claims that the election was stolen. It’s all very scuzzy.

In her text messages to Meadows, Ginni Thomas spread false theories, commented on cable news segments and advocated with urgency and fervor that the president and his team take action to reverse the outcome of the election. She urged that they take a hard line with Trump staffers and congressional Republicans who had resisted arguments that the election was stolen.

What “hard line”? Like, bullying, pressure, coercion? Threats? Punishment? What? What right does this person have to urge a White House official to coerce staff to overthrow an election?

It’s interesting how…commonplace, trashy, unintelligent it all is. She comes across as barely literate and shockingly credulous. Just another Fox News oversharer.

Cultural differences.

She says, not taking herself at all seriously, not bragging at all, not boasting about how self-deprecating she is, not accusing other people of what she’s doing herself.

I see this claim a lot, in fact: the claim that people in the UK are massively self-deprecating. It’s a self-defeating claim, because it’s self-flattering. You can’t convince us how self-deprecating you are by bragging about how self-deprecating you are.

It seems Clarence Thomas’s wife plotted with Mark Meadows to help Trump steal the election. That’s interesting.

Jane Mayer in the New Yorker in January:

Many Americans first became aware of Ginni Thomas’s activism on January 6, 2021. That morning, before the Stop the Steal rally in Washington, D.C., turned into an assault on the Capitol resulting in the deaths of at least five people, she cheered on the supporters of President Donald Trump who had gathered to overturn Biden’s election. In a Facebook post that went viral, she linked to a news item about the protest, writing, “love maga people!!!!” Shortly afterward, she posted about Ronald Reagan’s famous “A Time for Choosing” speech. Her next status update said, “god bless each of you standing up or praying.” Two days after the insurrection, she added a disclaimer to her feed, noting that she’d written the posts “before violence in US Capitol.” (The posts are no longer public.)

Later that January, the Washington Post revealed that she had also been agitating about Trump’s loss on a private Listserv, Thomas Clerk World, which includes former law clerks of Justice Thomas’s. The online discussion had been contentious. John Eastman, a former Thomas clerk and a key instigator of the lie that Trump actually won in 2020, was on the same side as Ginni Thomas, and he drew rebukes. According to the Post, Thomas eventually apologized to the group for causing internal rancor. Artemus Ward, a political scientist at Northern Illinois University and a co-author of “Sorcerers’ Apprentices,” a history of Supreme Court clerks, believes that the incident confirmed her outsized role. “Virginia Thomas has direct access to Thomas’s clerks,” Ward said. Clarence Thomas is now the Court’s senior member, having served for thirty years, and Ward estimates that there are “something like a hundred and twenty people on that Listserv.” In Ward’s view, they comprise “an élite right-wing commando movement.” Justice Thomas, he says, doesn’t post on the Listserv, but his wife “is advocating for things directly.” Ward added, “It’s unprecedented. I have never seen a Justice’s wife as involved.”

The January 6 Committee has those texts.

These text messages, according to sources, took place between early November 2020 and mid-January 2021. Thomas recently revealed that she attended the pro-Trump rally that preceded the US Capitol attack on January 6, 2021, but says she “played no role” in planning the events of that day.

The text messages, reviewed by CNN, show Thomas pleading with Meadows to continue the fight to overturn the election results.

“Help This Great President stand firm, Mark!!! … You are the leader, with him, who is standing for America’s constitutional governance at the precipice. The majority knows Biden and the Left is attempting the greatest Heist of our History,” Thomas wrote on November 10, 2020.

It’s all very dangerous, and horrifying. It’s also very dumb. This great president? Trump? That dimestore bully who can’t utter an adult sentence? But very dumb can be just as lethal as brilliantly Machiavellian, so these stupid pipsqueaks are no less dangerous for being thick as a plank.

There was a Woman’s Place UK meeting in Manchester tonight. Apparently the usual happened.

Of course there were men with megaphones outside. Can’t let women talk unopposed.

Yglesias is really making me cross, I must say.

Come on. This is not primarily (or secondarily and you could go through quite a lot more numbers) an issue of linguistic change. The word is not some relatively unimportant vocabulary item, it’s the word that names the female half of the set of human beings, the half that is the source of all human beings. That’s what matters about it. The fact that “language changes over time” is not central to this controversy and he must know that perfectly well.

Mar nails it.

Yet another man telling us yet again that we have to accept the “new” meaning of the word that names us. Language changes, you fools! Live with it!

Funny how he’s not talking about people with XY chromosomes. Funny how people like him always know which people to lecture and bully.

The BBC has a long piece about life on the front lines in Kharkiv:

Russia invaded at 05:00 on 24 February. The night before, 22-year-old Vlad and his brother-in-arms Mark, also 22, were at a fellow private’s wedding. Columns of Russian tanks, howitzers, armoured vehicles and troop transports rolled across the border, just 40km (25 miles) away. Despite the long build up of Russian forces, the move was a shock – Ukrainian troops scrambled to defend the city.

When they learned of the attack, Vlad and Mark joined their battalion – the 22nd Motorised Infantry – and headed straight to the front lines. They have been there ever since. I have visited them there twice on the city’s northern edge – a once pleasant suburban neighbourhood, which has now become a muddy battlefield strewn with corpses and burned-out Russian tanks and vehicles.

It’s so easy, and disturbing, to picture – a suburb just outside the city, suddenly a war zone.

On that first day, one group of Russians made it into the centre, but were repelled after three days of hard, bloody fighting – with heavy casualties on both sides. The Russians were forced out beyond Kharkiv’s edge.

A month on, while Russian missiles still strike at the city centre and at least half the 1.4m population have fled, there are neighbourhoods that remain untouched.

But, the city’s eastern and northern residential neighbourhoods, which were largely intact when I arrived here three weeks ago, are unrecognisable. A tree has an unexploded Russian shell in its base; an apartment block has a 500kg bomb resting on its roof – if it had detonated, the whole building would have been brought down.

Mark and Vlad keep this grimness of war from family ears on the calls home they make most most days, just a couple of minutes each to mothers and girlfriends. So there is no mention of the dead bodies at the back door and in the next garden, no mention of the colleagues killed by Russian shelling, or of the tank commander who died the previous day. And nothing that could reveal operational details.

There were expectations that the invasion of Britain would be like that – village by village and town by town, with the local people resisting to the bitter end.

The Ukrainian soldiers might have it rough, but the Russians seem to have been particularly unprepared for anything other than the shortest possible campaign in Ukraine. The corpses I have encountered in the snow have been poorly dressed for a winter campaign, and Ukrainian soldiers say they found the most meagre of rations with them.

Now that is truly startling, given the fact that it was the Russian winter that foiled both Napoleon and Hitler. How ironic if Putin ends up being the Napoleon Q. Hitler of Ukraine.

A purported intercepted phone call, along with Western intelligence reports, may provide some of the answers. It is from a Russian commander in Mykolaiv, south of Lviv in western Ukraine, to his superiors on 11 March. It was released by Ukrainian officials and has not been independently verified. It paints a picture of Russian misery and incompetence in the Russian campaign that both the US Pentagon and the UK’s Ministry of Defence have, in part, detailed.

Troops lack basics such as tents and body armour – and are digging trenches in freezing ground to sleep. Two weeks ago, at another front line position in the city, I asked a young Ukrainian commander if his men slept in trenches. “Why would we sleep here when we can sleep in houses. The Russians sleep in trenches, but we sleep over there,” he said, pointing to a well-heated house filled with men. He explained that the dead Russians had Kevlar body armour but many lacked the armoured plates that make the vest effective.

…

A video of a captured Russian army cookhouse gives an unappetising glimpse of the meals served to troops. Servings piled high with onions and potatoes – all held together with congealed fat. Russian army rations – Meals, Ready-To-Eat (MRE) – with an expiry date of 2015.

An army marches on its stomach, remember?

When I met Mark and Vlad the first time, their commander gave me one of their sturdy green packs of Ukrainian daily rations – a leaving gift, he said.

There were 17 different things inside: wheat porridge with beef; rice and meat soup; beef stew; chicken with vegetables; pork and vegetables; crackers; biscuits; tea bags; coffee; blackcurrant drink; honey; sugar; black pepper; chewing gum; bar of dark chocolate; plastic spoons; moist wipes.

Shoot, a fella could have a pretty good weekend in Vegas with all this stuff.

Beardy bro wonders why there are so many more bitches in the UK than in the US and Canada. Fellow beardy bro helps him out.

Turns out it’s because…uh…we have such excellent social support for women in the US compared to the UK. Yes, sure, that’ll work.

Oh no, that’s all too kitcheny, too Mumsnetty, too of the earth earthy for them. Zack can hold a baby but he’s not going to do any of the gruntwork now is he.

Janice Turner noticed a certain…something…about this pleasant chat among beardies.

What would we do without them?

The Women’s Aid statement:

Our roots are in the international women’s rights movement, and our federation developed in the 1970s and 1980s in response to patriarchy, sexism, and male violence against women. Domestic abuse organisations and refuges were originally created by and for women – many of whom were survivors themselves – as spaces free from men for safety, healing, mutual support, and solidarity.

We have been at the forefront of shaping and coordinating responses to domestic abuse for nearly 50 years. We have done so by placing the needs of survivors at the heart of our work and by responding to their needs and many of our staff, board members and supporters are survivors of domestic abuse. Together with our members, we support women and children experiencing domestic abuse, challenge the root causes of violence, and address women’s experience of intersecting and overlapping systems of oppression.

But that was then. Now it’s been decided that the purported needs of men who identify as women come first.

Today, it is still widely acknowledged by expert service providers that single sex, trauma informed spaces are crucial in providing safe spaces for recovery from abuse and violence for women and their children. However, there is a trend towards gender neutral commissioning of services and its abandonment of commissioning the specialist domestic abuse services which are needed for all parts of the population. A consequence of this is that woman-led, single sex services are losing funding, which results in local communities losing the deep expertise and decades of experience these services provided. This is part of a worrying move by commissioners to disregard the sex-specific nature of domestic abuse.

Additionally, there is an ongoing exchange of different views on the inclusion of trans women in single sex spaces including with commissioners, within feminist movements and organisations, and across society at large.

So they decided to do a clarification.

Our members are a diverse group of organisations providing a range of high-quality support and services. Some members offer support to women and children only, while others support all victims of domestic abuse. Most member organisations deliver at least some women only (single sex) services, most commonly through refuge accommodation and groups.

Members routinely use exceptions within the Equality Act 2010 to provide single sex services. They do this because survivors have told them that they and their children experience trauma responses when in contact with males, particularly at the point of leaving an abusive relationship but also for some time afterwards.

Many members provide responsive and effective community support and emergency accommodation to trans and non-binary survivors. A relatively small number of trans women need to access emergency accommodation. Where they do, some member organisations provide this within their accommodation on a case-by-case basis while others provide alternative dispersed accommodation or signpost to other organisations.

So…let’s punish them, yeah?

Women’s Aid said a thing yesterday:

They have both – single sex and those that meet the needs of trans and non-binary people. But oh no, that can’t be allowed – women can’t have anything that’s just for women.

They just said that they have services that meet the needs of trans and non-binary people – but let’s bully them anyway, just for the hell of it.

Scotland Women’s Aid sides with the bullies.

Originally a comment by Bjarte Foshaug on Now that the word’s been taken away. [Title by Sastra]

That’s exactly it! As I keep saying we know for a fact that many of the people now riding the gender ideology bandwagon used to say things that would now get them labeled as TERFs and demonized any time. E.g. I have personally been referred to as both “man” and “him” by “trans allies” who, in the absence of telepathic powers, couldn’t possibly know anything about my “inner sense of self”. I have also heard some of these same people say things like “douches are really bad for women”, talk about abortion rights as a “women’s issue”, refer to vaginas as “lady bits”, talk about the Bechdel Test and how a certain movie only had x “women” in it (when the movie in question didn’t offer any clue about the “gender identity” of these people) etc… etc… The list is practically endless.

This was less than 10 years ago, and even today they keep slipping up and making revealing blunders (e.g. Silent Bob’s taunt about Ophelia’s “overwhelmingly male commenters”) showing that even they are unable to consistently live up to their own demands. When specifically talking about trans issues words like “man” and “woman”, or even “male” and “female”, refer to an inner sense of self etc., but for all other purposes (in good Orwellian fashion) they still talk, think, and act as if they knew perfectly well how to tell a biological female from a biological male. It also goes to show that (despite claims to the contrary) gender critical feminists and their allies are not the ones who have betrayed their cause. My concern was for biological females whatever you prefer to call them ten years ago, and my concern is for biological females whatever you prefer to call them today. The “gender uncritical” side, on the other hand, may still claim to stand up for people called “women”, but that’s just a bait and switch since the people called “women” now are not the same as the people called “women” back then.

Indeed, as I keep repeating ad nauseam, everything about gender ideology ultimately comes down to a “bad pun”. If you have what it takes to detect a pun when you hear it, you know everything you need to know to debunk all of gender ideology: If the person formerly known as Ellen Page is a “man”, then I’m not. You can’t define that person in without defining me out, certainly not while insisting on a non-trivial distinction between “men” and “women”. After all, you have just taken the only thing that ever made me a “man” out of the definition of “man”. On the same note any definition (if they had one) of “woman” designed to make it true that TWAW also makes it no longer true that biological females are “women” in any sense of the word that’s relevant to the issue. Yet the whole justification for why transwomen TIMs need to be included in all the spaces previously reserved for biological females ultimately rests on the premise that both groups are the same in some real sense (as opposed to in name only).

And this explains, once again, why everything about gender ideology is “best left unspecified”. I have often invoked the metaphor of a boat full of holes where the water leaks in. You might be able to plug some of the holes some of the time, but there are too many holes and not enough plugs, so in the end the only way to stop a leak in one place is to remove a plug from somewhere else, thus opening up another leak. If they were upfront about which plug they are using to stop which leak at any given moment, the bait and switch would be obvious to everyone, so the compromise is to keep everything perpetually in the air and try to have it both ways, e.g.:

• For the purpose of making it true that biological females are “cis women”, “cis” simply means “not trans” and doesn’t come with any implicit claims about what’s going on inside other people’s heads. But for the purpose of making it true that “cis women” are whatever they have to be to make “cis women” and “trans women” subsets of the same group, there are distinct and identifiable “feminine” ways of thinking/feeling/behaving/”presenting” (best left unspecified) that both groups supposedly have in common, thus making them the same “kind” of people.

• For the purpose of arguing that TWAW, physical traits are totally irrelevant to “gender”, no body type is any more or less “aligned” with being a “woman” than any other, any body belonging to a person who identifies as a “woman” is by definition a “woman’s body” etc. But for the purpose of arguing for the necessity of puberty blockers, hormone therapy, surgery etc. changing one’s body into a bad imitation of the other (supposedly non-existent or at least totally irrelevant) biological sex is so vitally important that anything other than automatic and unconditional affirmation is “literal violence” or even “murder”.

• For the purpose of making TRAs a legitimate social justice movement “trans rights” simply means “the same kind of kind of rights as everyone else”. But for the purpose of making it true that “TERFs” are “denying the rights” of trans people, “trans rights” means 100 % blind, uncritical, unconditional, unthinking acquiescence to all their demands in advance.

• Etc… etc…

The Guardian frowns on Ron DeSantis for saying that men shouldn’t compete in women’s races.

Florida governor Ron DeSantis has issued a proclamation that a resident of his state is the “rightful” holder of the NCAA 500m freestyle title won by trans swimmer Lia Thomas last week.

Trans swimmer? So Thomas isn’t a real swimmer but just identifies as one?

Also, we can do the scare quotes thing too. DeSantis said a resident of his state is the rightful holder of the NCAA 500m freestyle title “won” by trans swimmer “Lia” Thomas last week. Thomas didn’t actually legitimately win that title, because it was a women’s race and he has a male body.

The Guardian does the careful wording thing throughout – generic “trans” instead of trans woman, to make the story less clear; LGBTQ+ to disguise the fact that it’s purely T. It’s sneaky, and it kind of reveals that they know they’re not being honest.

Thomas made history last Thursday as the first known transgender athlete to win a US college swimming championship when she took the title in Atlanta.

Like there. The issue isn’t transgender athlete, it’s intrusion of a man into a women’s competition.

However, her victory caused a backlash among right-wing politicians as well as groups that oppose transgender athletes taking part in women’s competition.

Not “transgender athletes”; specifically male transgender athletes. We object to it because of the obvious grotesque unfairness, which you’d think the Guardian could mention right up front.

DeSantis’s proclamation has no power to change last week’s result and is a continuation of policies in Florida that target the LGBTQ+ community.

That’s probably true, but the fact remains that Thomas should not have been in that race, for the obvious reasons that the Guardian has still not bothered to mention.

In June, he signed into law the Fairness in Women’s Sports Act, which bans anyone assigned as male at birth from competing in girls and women’s sports.

Yes, and why is that? Believe it or not the Guardian still doesn’t say.

Thomas has received both support and criticism. On Monday, World Athletics president Sebastian Coe said transgender athletes pose a risk to the integrity of women’s sport.

Why? How? Guardian still doesn’t say.

“Gender cannot trump biology. As a federation president, I do not have that luxury. It is a luxury that other organizations not at the practical end of having to deal with these issues have,” Coe told the Daily Telegraph. “But as far as I am concerned, the scientific evidence, the peer-reviewed work we have done, those regulations are the right approach.”

Why? How? Guardian still doesn’t say.

We get four more paragraphs, and still it doesn’t say.

It’s quite extraordinary – a whole long piece on the subject and the Guardian never says why anyone thinks it’s unfair for men to compete on women’s teams.

Bozo is saying how much better he would handle it.

“I listened to him constantly using the N-word, that’s the N-word, and he’s constantly using it: the nuclear word,” Trump told Fox Business on Monday.

…

“We say, ‘Oh, he’s a nuclear power,’” Trump said. “But we’re a greater nuclear power. We have the greatest submarines in the world, the most powerful machines ever built …”

Idiot. It doesn’t matter whether we’re “greater” or not because a nuclear exchange with Russia would mean millions of people dead, whole cities destroyed, survivors if any poisoned and helpless.

“You should say, ‘Look, if you mention that word one more time, we’re going to send them over and we’ll be coasting back and forth, up and down your coast. You can’t let this tragedy continue. You can’t let these, these thousands of people die.”

No, that is not what he should say.

When Trump was in power, in 2018, he announced that the US would withdraw from a cold war nuclear weapons treaty which kept US and Russian nuclear weapons out of Europe. It duly did so. 

Very. bad. move.

In office, Trump also demonstrated a cavalier attitude to diplomacy regarding North Korea, another nuclear power.

Though he courted the dictator in Pyongyang, Trump also told Kim Jong-un he had a “much bigger and more powerful” nuclear button and would answer any threats “with fire and fury like the world has never seen”.

He also asked the rapper Kid Rock and rocker Ted Nugent what he should do about North Korea.

It’s a mistake to give clowns access to the nukes.