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Donald Trump loves to speak extemporaneously, and usually, he makes very little sense. (Sharks? The Unabomber? What?) Trying to turn his ramblings into a coherent message is like trying, as an old European saying goes, to turn fish soup back into an aquarium. But he is the president of the United States and holds the codes to some 2,000 nuclear weapons. When he speaks, his statements are both policy and a peek into the worldview currently governing the planet’s sole superpower.
This morning, the commander in chief made clear that he does not understand the largest war in Europe, what started it, or why it continues. Worse, insofar as he does understand anything about Russia’s attempted conquest of Ukraine, he seems to have internalized old pro-Moscow talking points that even the Kremlin doesn’t bother with anymore.
The setting, as it so often is when Trump piles into a car with his thoughts and then goes full Thelma & Louise off a rhetorical cliff, was Fox & Friends. The Fox hosts, although predictably fawning, did their best to keep the president from the ledge, but when Trump pushes the accelerator, everyone goes along for the ride.
The subject, ostensibly, was Trump’s supposed diplomatic triumph at yesterday’s White House meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and seven European leaders. The Fox hosts, of course, congratulated Trump—for what, no one could say—but that is part of the drill. A Trump interview on conservative media is something like a liturgy, with its predictable chants, its call-and-response moments, and its paternosters. Trump ran through the usual items: The war was Joe Biden’s fault; the “Russia, Russia, Russia hoax”; the war never would have happened if Trump had been president. Unto ages of ages, amen.
But when the hosts asked specifically about making peace, the president of America sounded a lot like the president of Russia.
The war, Trump said, started because of Crimea and NATO. Considering his commitment to being a “peace president,” Trump was oddly eager to castigate his predecessors for being weak: Crimea, he said, was handed over to Russian President Vladimir Putin by Barack Obama “without a shot fired.” (Should Obama have fired some? No one asked.) Crimea, you see, is a beautiful piece of real estate, surrounded by water—I have been to Crimea, and I can confirm the president’s evaluation here—and “Barack Hussein Obama gave it away.” Putin, he said, got a “great deal” from Obama, and took it “like candy from a baby.”
Trump did not explain how this putative land swindle led to Putin trying to seize all of Ukraine. But no matter; he quickly shifted to NATO, echoing the arguments of early Kremlin apologists and credulous Western intellectuals that Ukraine existed only as a “buffer” with the West, and that Putin was acting to forestall Ukraine joining NATO. Russia was right, Trump said, not to want the Western “enemy” on their border.
This might be the first time an American president has used Russia’s language to describe NATO as an enemy. Perhaps Trump was simply trying to see the other side’s point of view. He then added, however, that the war was sparked not only by NATO membership—which was not on the table anytime soon—but also by Ukrainian demands to return Crimea, which Trump felt were “very insulting” to Russia.
Trump is a bit behind on his pro-Kremlin talking points. The Russians themselves long ago largely abandoned any such blather about NATO and Crimea. Putin claimed early on that Ukraine was infested with Nazis—in the case of Zelensky, apparently Jewish Nazis—and that even if it weren’t for NATO and Nazis, Ukraine is organically part of Russia and belongs under Kremlin rule. For three years, Putin has been slaughtering Ukrainian civilians to make the point that his Slavic brothers and sisters need to either accept that they are part of Russia, or die.
Trump then stumbled through a discussion of security guarantees, wandering off topic repeatedly while the hosts tried to shepherd him back to the safety of their questions. And then the president of the United States showed the entire world why the past few days of international diplomacy perhaps haven’t been going so well, and why a delegation of European leaders had to parachute into Washington to stop him from doing something reckless.
“Look,” Trump said, “everybody can play cute, and this and that, but Ukraine is gonna get their life back, they’re gonna stop having people killed all over the place, and they’re gonna get a lot of land.”
Notice how the president described people getting killed as if mass death is just a natural disaster that no one has any control over. (Later, he added that he was in a hurry to get to a peace deal because thousands were dying each week—again, as if people were perishing from regularly scheduled earthquakes instead of Russian bombs.) His comment about Ukraine getting lots of land also betrays his default acceptance of Moscow’s imperial demands: The land Trump is describing already belongs to Ukraine, and any deal that does not return all of it is a net loss. The American president, however, is speaking as if Kyiv should be grateful for the scraps of territory that Trump and Putin will grudgingly allow to fall from their table.
And then the discussion got worse. “Russia,” Trump ruminated, “is a powerful military nation.” (Well, yes.) “You know, whether people like it or not, it’s a powerful nation. It’s a much bigger nation,” Trump said. “It’s not a war that should have been started.” (Again, a perfectly reasonable statement.) “You don’t do that. You don’t take on a nation that’s 10 times your size.”
Wait, what? Who doesn’t take on a bigger nation? Who does Trump think began this war?
Trump’s answers to the uneasy Fox courtiers summarized his belief that Ukraine, not Russia, was the aggressor, merely by refusing to roll over and hand its land and people to the Kremlin. The president seems to have embraced Putin’s sly use of the term root causes (an expression Putin used again in Anchorage). When the Russian dictator says “root causes,” he means Ukraine’s continued existence as an independent nation, which Russia now views as the fundamental justification for its barbarism.
Trump then bumbled into several other verbal brambles, but none of them mattered as much as this revealing moment. Zelensky and Ukraine are the problem, and the rest is just an ongoing tragedy that the Ukrainians can end by being “flexible” and by putting their president in a room with the man conducting atrocities against them.
In the end, Trump even suggested that cutting through the knot of war in Ukraine could be the ticket to salvation. “If I can get to heaven,” he said, “this will be one of the reasons,” because he will be recognized, presumably, as one of the great peacemakers. As for Putin, Trump knows they can work together: “There’s a warmth there,” he said of his relationship with an indicted war criminal. Blessed, perhaps, are the warmongers.
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