The American Pantagruel has declared himself the enemy of the United States.

Pantagruel, (after) Gustav Dore

It took us just thirty days into the second administration of Donald J. Trump to reach a signature moment in American history. In calling Volodymyr Zelenskyy a dictator and accusing him of starting the war that his country has suffered through from Russian aggression for nearly three years, Trump has loudly and clearly taken the side of a real dictator against our ally, Ukraine. It's no longer as if Trump is acting like a Russian asset. He has raised the white, blue, and red flag of Russia over the White House. In military terms, Trump has switched sides and begun firing from Russian lines at American troops.

The United States began preparing for a land war in Europe with Russia's progenitor, the Soviet Union, 80 years ago at the end of the Second World War, when the Soviets militarily occupied the Eastern European nations which had been taken by the Nazis. The Soviets didn’t bother declaring them within their sphere of influence and immediately began treating them as client states. You need look no further than at photographs of Russian tanks on the other side of Checkpoint Charlie or rolling into Budapest in 1956 to put down the Hungarian Revolution for evidence of Russia's crimes against Eastern Europe.

In 1955, when my family debarked at Bremerhaven from a converted military troop ship called the General Patch, there were more than 300,000 American troops stationed in Germany, with about 70,000 more in France, and tens of thousands scattered around Italy, Great Britain, and other countries. We didn't arrive in Germany on a family vacation. My father commanded an infantry company in Stuttgart and was almost immediately put on alert and sent to the field for maneuvers and training that lasted for months at a time. My uncle James was an F-100 pilot assigned to fly missions along the border with Czechoslovakia to guard against encroachments by Soviet MiGs.

It was serious business to be assigned to combat units in Germany in the 1950s. The word that was used to describe the American military in Europe in those days was “tripwire.” The US Army and Air Force were stationed on European soil to deter the Soviet Union from turning the countries of Western Europe into more of its client states. The Soviet Union and its Communist leadership, headquartered in the Russian capital of Moscow, was the enemy of the United States.

Today, our enemy is the nation of Russia, led by its dictator, Vladimir Putin. If you have any question as to whether Russia has transformed itself into the enemy of Western Europe and the United States, all you have to do is look at the destruction Putin's military has wreaked on its much smaller neighbor, Ukraine, over the last three years, causing once again American military units assigned to Germany, Poland, and the Baltic states to be referred to as a tripwire.

The threat of Vladimir Putin’s Russia to Western Europe is so great and taken so seriously that Germany every year hosts the Munich Security Conference, attended by the secretaries of defense and military commanders of every country in NATO and the European Union. Those images you see in the papers or on television of European leaders around conference tables in Munich every year are not posed for show. Despite the juvenile presence of the American Vice President in Munich giving a speech that could have been written in Moscow, the security conference this year was especially serious for one reason: according to JD Vance and the drunken frat boy we have for a Secretary of Defense, Donald Trump decided to back Vladimir Putin and Russia against our allies in Ukraine. Listening to the words of Vance and Hegseth, no other conclusion can be drawn than that the United States is no longer acting as a member in good standing of NATO.

There is only one good thing about what Trump has done over the last two days. One of the readers of this column, Reed Bonadonna, put it better than I could in his comment today, which I will quote in full:

“As a military type, I feel a sense of excitement that the enemy has declared itself, looming like a hideous, toupéed Pantagruel. This, I begin to wondering see, is the battle for which we have always been preparing ourselves.”

I had to look up Pantagruel to discover how apt is Bonadonna’s comparison of Trump with this character created by Francois Rabelais in 1532. Pantagruel first appeared in his book, The Horrible and Terrifying Deeds and Words of the Very Renowned Pantagruel King of the Dipsodes, Son of the Great Giant Gargantua.

Rabelais has been described by critic John Parkin, author of “The Rabelais Encyclopedia” as “the world's greatest comic genius,” and his grand series of books about Pantagruel are seen as championing "the advancement of humanist learning, the evangelical reform of the Church, [and] the need for humanity and brotherhood in politics.” I mean, how perfect is it to compare Donald Trump to a character from the 16th century who used his own urine as a weapon in war and his tongue to shelter his army?

Humor may provide a lens through which we can consider anew this hideous monster who has been elected to the highest office in our land. But it is the fact that he has declared himself an enemy of his own country and indeed of all civilized human beings that marks this date as one we should remember and act upon.

We need to take comfort in the idea that our history has prepared us for a battle such as this one. We have risen to the occasion before, once to fight a Civil War to free enslaved human beings and make them our fellow citizens. Freedom is at stake again, this time for all of us. Donald Trump has declared himself our enemy. It is past time to square the circle and fight.