We’ve all heard the saying: “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” We know the truth of this: we have lived it, and watch in horror as it plays out now, as it has throughout history.
February is a banner month for Vladimir Putin and his regime, marking the anniversaries of three grim and illegal maneuvers led by the Russian President.
February 27, 2014: Putin invaded the Crimean Peninsula, seizing control of that part of Ukraine and occupying and controlling Crimea.
February 24, 2022: Claiming, without a shred of evidence, he was “saving” Ukraine from Neo-Nazis, Putin invaded the country again. He announced his “special military operation,” by declaring war on Ukraine, in direct violation of the U.N. Charter.
February 16, 2024: This date marks the death of Russia’s top opposition leader, Alexei Navalny. After several previous attempts on his life by the Kremlin, he died “of natural causes” while being held in a special penal colony in the Arctic Circle. He was 47 years old.
Putin is now in his fifth term as President of Russia. With 25 years in power (including the four-year period his ‘puppet,’ Dmitry Medvedev, ruled, until Putin could change term limit laws), he is the longest-serving Russian or Soviet leader since Joseph Stalin, and every bit as ruthless as his predecessor.
All that is necessary to know about Putin can be found by hanging out with a willful three-year-old for an hour: he wants what he wants when he wants it. And he is willing to go to any means to get it.
Why do bullies exist? Because they can. How do bullies persist? Because no one opposes them. Finally, how are bullies stopped? Only by standing up to them. The parents or teachers of an obstinate toddler will presumably intervene to curtail their selfish actions. There will be consequences. But who dares to oppose Putin?
Just how much damage can a bully really do? A toddler: minimal. An unopposed and power-hungry leader: monumental. In Putin’s case, the stakes are astronomically high. He demoralizes, imprisons, or murders his own citizens, and attacks independent countries for the resources he wants. The entire country of Ukraine has rich farmland and vast mineral resources, and the Donbas region is one of the richest areas in the world in lithium deposits.
We need only look at recent history to see the consequences of an unleashed, unchecked bully: i.e. Adolph Hitler and the resulting carnage of World War II. An estimated 50 to 60 million people died on the European front as a result of his actions, the deadliest conflict in human history. Over a million are already dead because of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.
The accompanying photo shows our adoption agency’s “staff” in Kharkiv, Ukraine, celebrating the adoption of our then two-year-old son. Mariana, our in-country facilitator, (second from left) employed her extended family through agency jobs, ensuring their survival in Ukraine’s tough economy. Left to right: Valencia, Marina’s mother, our cook; Dimitri, her cousin, our driver; Mikhail, her son, our “tour guide”; Igor, another cousin, orphanage coordinator; and Valery, yet another cousin, whose apartment we lived in while there.
Kharkiv, in northeast Ukraine and close to the Russian border, has been bombed mercilessly for almost three years. During the first weeks of the war, network news showed Orphanage #4, where our son was, being evacuated as bombs exploded all around.
Likely, many of the people in this photo are now dead.
Innocent people everywhere fall victim to bullies’ malevolence and greed. My husband and I have also adopted from Russia. The people we worked with there were also wonderful, and also victims of Putin’s bullying.
In St. Petersburg, we clearly saw the terror and intimidation by the government in our Russian staff. They rarely smiled, and advised us not to. Smiling marked a foreigner, or someone as daft, as there was not much to smile about. Belied by government propaganda, Russians, too, are Putin’s victims, living in continual fear of his oppressive regime.
Our current and often muddled thinking might have us believe that evil and goodness are hazy definitions. But they are not.
Evil flourishes when it is not stopped, just as bullies continue to bully if they are not opposed. Courage is called for. A world leader instigating his “oligarchy” is the first clue. We must remain constantly vigilant in our own country, and act with conviction in the world.
“In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.” (Martin Luther King, Jr.)
Lockard is an Iowa resident who regularly contributes to regional newspapers and periodicals. She is working on the second of a four-book fictional series based on Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice."
A view of the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., on June 25, 2026. President Donald Trump jolted Republicans during a fiery appearance at the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday, scrapping a housing bill signing ceremony and clashing behind closed doors with a party rebel who challenged him over the Iran war. Trump had been expected to sign the bipartisan housing.
Only Trump doesn’t care about housing
It was August 15, 2024. Then candidate Donald Trump stepped out of his Bedminster, New Jersey, golf club’s columned clubhouse to a gaggle of reporters. He was flanked by tables of groceries and signs showing the rising cost of food. Also on one of the tables was a dollhouse, meant to represent the equally alarming rise in housing prices.
It was a speech about the economy, the single most important issue of the 2024 election cycle, full of promises that went right to the heart of Americans’ anxieties. While former President Joe Biden and then Vice President Kamala Harris were contorting themselves to posture a good economy that just needed more time to recover from the pandemic, Trump was preying on voters’ very real fears of unaffordable gas, groceries, and homes. It was obviously a winning message.
In that speech, Trump promised, “We’re going to open up tracts of federal land for housing construction. We desperately need housing for people who can’t afford what’s going on now.”
As of mid-2023, there had been a housing shortage of nearly four million homes, according to the National Association of Realtors. Americans all over the country were either priced out of buying new homes due to low inventory, trapped in their existing homes by sky-high mortgage rates, or facing exorbitant rent hikes thanks to corporate investors buying up rental properties. Americans needed help, and Trump promised it.
Cut to March of 2026, when Trump reportedly told House Speaker Mike Johnson, “No one gives a sh*t about housing.”
That kind of thinking may explain why Trump this week suddenly announced he was canceling a signing ceremony for the bipartisan “21st Century ROAD to Housing Act,” a housing bill co-sponsored by Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Tim Scott that passed the House 358-32 and was approved in the Senate on Monday.
Trump instead demanded Congress pass the SAVE America Act, his controversial election grievance bill that doesn’t have enough Republican support to get passed in the Senate.
It’s just the latest in a line of policy self-owns where Trump has seemingly intentionally made life more difficult for Republicans hoping to keep their majority. Despite midterm elections occurring in the midst of a blistering economy and an unpopular war, they were surely hoping the housing bill would give them something — anything — to brag about when they returned home to their districts.
And very much to the contrary, Americans do give a sh*t about housing. According to a recent survey by the Bipartisan Policy Center, a whopping 79% say the cost of housing is extremely or very important to them. Eighty-three percent say Congress should take action on the issue — like it just did. Eighty-nine percent say the House and Senate need to work together to pass affordable housing legislation — like they just did. And 63% say they would be more likely to vote for a lawmaker if they helped pass legislation to build more affordable homes and lower housing costs — like they just did.
There aren’t many issues that unite Americans like housing does, and very few bipartisan policy wins Congress can point to, and yet, Trump is holding that bill hostage in order to get his pet project — which doesn’t even have the support of his own party — pushed through.
If you’re trying to make sense of something so nonsensical, as I’m sure many Republican lawmakers are, it’s certainly sad but not actually all that complicated. Trump said what he needed to get reelected and then promptly abandoned his promises in order to pursue his own self-interests, even if those interests are bad for Republicans and bad for voters.
That’s just the kind of guy he is.
S.E. Cupp is the host of "S.E. Cupp Unfiltered" on CNN.