After weeks of stunned inertia, Democrats seem to have found their issue. Once again, it’s Russia.

After last week’s White House meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, the Democratic virtue signalers have been displaying the Ukrainian flag in street protests and on lapels at the Oscars. Zelensky’s eviction from the White House for failing to adhere to previously agreed-upon terms for ending the war, including a rare earth mineral deal that, according to one news source, was “originally floated” by Zelensky himself, also resulted in President Trump suspending military aid to Ukraine on Monday.

Over the weekend, to disguise what appears to have been yet another Democratic plot to undermine the president, The New York Times’s Bret Stephens and Maureen Dowd provided readers a series of little history lectures referencing the sainted Franklin D. Roosevelt.

We expect unhinged psychoanalysis and bitter “humor” from Dowd, but Stephens, a putative conservative, seemed to be in a contest with her on Saturday. He described what he called a “sickening spectacle: the man who tried to upend democracy bullying the man who is fighting for democracy” (which these days apparently means martial law, canceled elections, and forced conscriptions). Trump, on the other hand, is “the most mendacious vulgarian and ungracious host to inhabit the White House.” Stephen’s column was cleverly titled, “A Day of American Infamy.”

It began:

In August 1941, about four months before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Franklin Roosevelt met with Winston Churchill aboard warships in Newfoundland’s Placentia Bay and agreed to the Atlantic Charter, a joint declaration by the world’s leading democratic powers on ‘common principles’ for a postwar world.

Among its key points: ‘no aggrandizement, territorial or other’; ‘sovereign rights and self-government restored to those who have been forcibly deprived of them’; ‘freedom from fear and want’; freedom of the seas; ‘access, on equal terms, to the trade and to the raw materials of the world which are needed for their economic prosperity.

Stephens called the charter, “and the alliance that came of it … a high point of American statesmanship”—”the opposite” of Friday’s meeting.

In fact, Churchill, as he mentioned to the queen before he left for the meeting, had thought he would be getting a declaration of war from Roosevelt. In volume one of his own six-volume history of the war (The Gathering Storm), Churchill claims that the Charter proved he was giving up the imperialistic “Old World outlook.” But historian David Reynolds writes that Roosevelt, on the first night of the conference, suggested a joint declaration of principles. The next morning, Churchill gave Sir Alexander Cadogan of the Foreign Office his broad aims and told him to come up with a statement, which Cadogan did while having breakfast. What did not make it into Churchill’s famed history was the fact that at the meeting Roosevelt had told Churchill that “he would wage war, but not declare it, and that he would become more and more provocative.” He would look for an “‘incident’ which would justify him in opening hostilities.” The Charter had no binding or legal authority.

When it came time for real negotiations, FDR’s ineptness and infatuation with Stalin ensured it was Soviet Russia that “aggrandized” territory—including Ukraine, of course.

But, Stephens huffed, “If Roosevelt had told Churchill to sue for peace on any terms with Adolf Hitler and to fork over Britain’s coal reserves to the United States in exchange for no American security guarantees, it might have approximated what Trump did to Zelensky.” As Ben Shapiro has noted, however, the American presence in the Ukrainian mining industry would itself serve as a security guarantee.

Maureen Dowd, in her column “Trump Is Rootin’ for Putin,” a cute title that would have served any number of times since 2016, also offered a little history lesson. Dowd, like Team Obama member Susan Rice, claims that the meeting was a setup for Zelensky’s humiliation. “Can you imagine F.D.R. petulantly ordering Churchill to be more thankful?”

Actually, yes. One can easily imagine such a thing, as FDR repeatedly bullied and humiliated Churchill for Stalin’s benefit.

Then, Dowd peered into Trump’s mind: “Trump does not do well with reality; he tries to impose his own on the rest of us.” Zelensky, whose “name has become synonymous with wartime bravery … deserves our thanks,” Dowd lectured. “He has endured so much, keeping the David versus Goliath dream alive.…” (Indeed, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick cast Zelensky’s demands for $300 billion in reparations and security guarantees from the United States before the fighting ended a “make-believe bargain.”)

Dowd resorted to script, charging that Trump wants a “troika of strongmen—himself, Putin and Xi Jinping—astride the world.” (Actually, this sounds a lot like FDR, who wanted “Four Policemen” to rule the world: the United States, the Soviet Union, Britain, and China, with the last two being virtually powerless.)

In truth, liberals have been the fiercest defenders of Communist strongmen, beginning with Stalin. They seem to forget that Putin favored Obama over Romney after Obama promised that he would have “more flexibility” after his reelection. And it was the East Coast elites and Hollywood, not Middle America, that supported FDR’s wartime push. FDR attacked as “Copperheads,” “Fifth Columnists,” and fascists Americans belonging to the America First Committee, which opposed aligning with murderous Soviet Russia.

Now, 80-some years later, liberals, as represented by The New York Times, the Pulitzer Board, and such, who make excuses for one of their own for lying about Stalin’s orchestration of the famine in Ukraine, want us to believe they are for Ukraine.

Zelensky, recall, just as Vice President JD Vance charged at the meeting, “campaigned for the opposition.” He had been taken by a U.S. Air Force C-17 to Pennsylvania to tour a bomb factory with Kamala Harris surrogate Governor Josh Shapiro. He then advertised his visit with the images, recorded a message from the inside the aircraft, stating, “This fall will determine what’s next in this war,” and made negative comments about Trump and Vance in a New Yorker interview.

In spite of such “foreign election interference,” Zelensky found himself requesting the meeting from Trump. Yet, as revealed by Democratic Senator Chris Murphy’s social media post, Zelensky told him and other Democrats during a meeting immediately before the White House meeting that the “Ukrainian people” would not support Trump’s “fake peace agreement”! Of course, as Diana West has reminded those paying attention, peace might mean the possibility of a “reckoning” with Ukraine’s notoriously corrupt Burisma corporation.

Less than 24 hours later, Zelensky sent a message via X, saying that Ukraine was ready to sign “the agreement on minerals and security.”

This should be one for the history books. But don’t trust the Democrat version.