When It Comes to Jake Broe Videos, He Still Needs to Show Analytic Courage
- john raymond
- Aug 19
- 3 min read
Jake Broe has built a valuable platform as an explainer of the Ukraine war. He outlines Russian atrocities, documents Ukrainian resilience, and consistently calls attention to the stakes for democracy. But even in his best videos, one element is consistently missing: analytic courage.
Again and again, Broe frames Donald Trump’s conduct toward Vladimir Putin as cowardice or weakness—Trump is told “no” and he backs down. This description may have superficial accuracy, but it avoids the deeper, harder truth. Trump is not weak in relation to Putin. He is obedient.
To say Trump “chickens out” whenever he faces the Kremlin is to imply that his natural inclination would be to resist, and that he is simply too afraid to follow through. The evidence of forty years says otherwise.
Trump has worked with Russian money and networks since the 1980s, laundered oligarch capital through his properties, and consistently aligned his political positions with Moscow’s interests.
As president, he undermined NATO, attacked Ukraine, and publicly sided with Putin over U.S. intelligence services in Helsinki. Now, in his second presidency, he repeats the same patterns: advancing Russian territorial demands, laundering propaganda about “land swaps,” and trying to corner Ukraine into concessions.
This is not the behavior of a man who is secretly tough but personally timid. It is the behavior of an asset—someone whose loyalty runs toward Moscow rather than Washington, whose role is to serve Putin’s regime security needs.
Broe’s refusal to acknowledge this is not an analytic error, it is an analytic omission born of timidity. By calling Trump “cowardly,” he softens the reality of treachery into the language of psychology. That is not analysis, it is evasion.
From the perspective of strategic frameworks, the evidence is overwhelming. Putin’s regime security requires breaking Ukraine’s momentum and halting the deep strike campaign that is bleeding Russian industry and logistics. Trump advances that by pressuring Ukraine to concede.
Asymmetric warfare requires narrative inversion, and Trump provides it—casting Ukraine as the obstacle to peace while Putin poses as the reasonable party. And in the Traitor-General frame, Trump’s conduct is textbook: he does not represent American national interest, he executes Kremlin objectives inside the halls of American power.
The analytic courage that Broe lacks is to state this clearly: Trump works for the Russians. He is not duped by Putin. He is not cowed by Putin. He is aligned with Putin.
The failure to say this directly is not a small oversight—it distorts the very frame of understanding for viewers who look to Broe for clarity. To leave Trump’s alignment unspoken is to mislead, to allow the most important truth to remain hidden in plain sight.
The consequence of this omission is that audiences are left with a comfortable fiction—that Trump is merely weak, erratic, or incompetent. But weakness is not the problem. Treachery is.
Until analysts like Jake Broe can summon the courage to state that fact, they will remain trapped in a half-truth, and their audiences will remain disarmed against the full scale of the threat.
Analytic courage requires naming the betrayal. It requires saying the words that shift the frame from cowardice to assethood, from error to intention, from weakness to treason.
Until that shift is made, Jake’s commentary on Ukraine will be more than structurally incomplete—it will be filled with its own cowardice.
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