In all my time of following American politics I’ve never seen the country so thoroughly dishonoured by its president. Nixon, Clinton, even Biden all look like moral giants compared to Trump’s performance yesterday.
It’ll take the nation a long time to live down the shame it must be feeling today. And if it’s not feeling any shame, it deserves nothing but contempt.
The way Trump (and his flunky Vance) treated President Zelensky has analogues not in diplomacy, nor even in politics, but in the gangster folklore fostered by blockbuster films like The Godfather.
However, if you insist on political analogies, all I can think of is Eduard Beneš being harangued by Hitler’s henchmen in 1938 or Baltic ministers curtly dismissed by Molotov a year later.
Don Trump has the mentality of Don Corleone, but he has none of the Godfather’s quiet dignity. As you remember, Don Corleone refrained from making threats, and he acted civilly even towards rivals he was planning to put down.
By contrast, Trump is a loudmouthed thug more in the vein of Al Capone than Carlo Gambino, the prototype for Marlon Brando’s character. Or perhaps Bugsy Siegel, Trump’s fellow casino builder for the Mafia, would be a tighter parallel.
Even if the US president had been right in his claims and gripes, his disgusting behaviour would by itself have been sufficient to bring the whole country into disrepute.
But his gripes were totally unjustified and his claims totally mendacious. For example, he again floated the lie that aiding the Ukraine cost the US $350 billion.
The actual number, as provided by Pentagon and State Department records, is $57 billion. There exists an aid commitment lower than Trump’s claim but in the same order of magnitude. However, it’s to be spread over 10 years, and none of it has so far been delivered.
Trump and his merry friends claim they want peace, but that too is a lie. They want Putin, with whom they feel inner kinship, to win and the Ukraine to lose. To that end, they are prepared to lie, cheat, blackmail, threaten, bully and in general do what thugs do.
The greatest lie, schizophrenic in its break from reality, is that somehow it’s the Ukraine in general and Zelensky specifically who are to blame for the war and its hundreds of thousands of victims (not millions, as Trump claims).
Every halfway decent country in the world has condemned Russia as the aggressor and Putin as a war criminal. International courts have issued warrants for his arrest, and that’s just for what he did to the Ukraine.
So far his turning Russia into a murderous fascist regime bristling with guns and hostile intent hasn’t attracted legal censure. The hostile intent, stated a thousand times if it has been stated once, is directed not just against the Ukraine but also the West in general, including the US.
On countless occasions, Putin and his stooges have threatened to turn the US into “radioactive dust” or else create the ‘American Strait’ between Canada and Mexico. Trump puts it all down to the misdeeds of the previous administration, but he either doesn’t understand or pretends not to understand the loathing Putin and his fascist entourage feel for the West.
Yet Trump has no problem with Putin. Putin, as he lied the other day, “keeps his word”. It would be tedious to list all the instances the Russian dictator has broken his word and reneged on the treaties his country signed, not to mention the ceasefire agreements ratified in 2014. Let’s just say that such behaviour is to be expected from a career KGB officer and, by the looks of it, his best Western friend.
Putin “respects me” said Trump at the end of the press conference, while both he and Vance repeatedly accused Zelensky of being “disrespectful”. The two chaps use ‘respect’ the same way Italian mafiosi use rispetto, as a synonym for servility and sycophancy.
There was Zelensky, a small man with a big heart, facing up to two big bullies with no hearts, saying reasonably – and respectfully, in the traditional sense of the word – that any peace without security guarantees is tantamount to surrender.
Yet every time he tried to get a word in edgewise, he was rudely shouted down by his two tormentors. “It’s disrespectful for you to come to the Oval Office and try to litigate this in front of the American media,” harangued Vance, normally more articulate than his semi-literate boss but evidently taking lessons in Mafia-speak.
“You don’t have the cards right now,” added Trump. “You’re gambling with World War Three, and what you’re doing is very disrespectful to the country that’s backed you.”
Right. It’s Zelensky who is “gambling”, not his fascist enemy threatening nuclear annihilation of the West every morning between brushing his teeth and having breakfast. Zelensky, who according to Don Trump, provocatively refused to capitulate when Putin’s hordes streamed across the border to murder, loot and rape, to turn his country into an enslaved province of Russia.
Trump then dismissed Zelensky like an inept servant who had failed to run the bath at the right temperature. “Come back when you are ready to talk peace,” he hissed. Meaning to surrender.
The denizens of the Kremlin were triumphant: their soulmate in the White House did them proud. “The insolent pig finally got a proper slap down in the Oval Office,” wrote Dmitri Medvedev, Putin’s perpetually drunk poodle. He too knows how to speak Trumpish.
To their credit, European countries disavowed the revolting behaviour of the so-called leader of the free world. Poland, Germany, France and Britain restated their commitment to stopping the barbarian onslaught in its tracks.
Will they put their money where their mouth is? asked several editorials. I have a solution: the money they can put where their mouth is doesn’t have to be theirs.
Currently, some $300 billion in Russian assets is frozen in the West, most of it in Europe. The solution proposes itself: this money should be confiscated and converted into armaments for the Ukraine.
This will be enough for that heroic nation to hold its own against Putin and his friend in the White House. (Always provided Trump doesn’t send 82nd Airborne to attack the Ukraine from the rear.)
At the same time, Trump must be told in no uncertain terms that America may be the bee’s knees, the land of the free, the home of the brave and all that. But she still needs reliable allies, and if Don Trump thinks Putin is it, there’s a bridge across the Potomac I’d like to sell him.
Trump doesn’t seem to realise that geopolitics is different from building and operating Atlantic City casinos. You can’t wing it by playing lickspittle to the strong and dumping on the weak, and there is hell to pay for betrayal.
Back in July Trump betrayed Taiwan by signalling he wouldn’t defend it from a Chinese invasion because the country had grown rich by “stealing” US microchip production. Now it’s the Ukraine’s turn.
Trump’s idea of making America great again seems to be based on the mental image of a world divided among communist China, fascist Russia and Trump’s US.
Wrong company for America to keep, Don Trump. That’s not how you make her great. That’s how you make her despicable – and those of us who have warm feelings for the US know the difference.
P.S. For your delectation, here’s an excerpt from Trump’s bravura performance: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/videos/cdel2npwe50o