Comrade Trump

It suddenly made terrible, nauseating sense.

Dan Henninger, the calm and perceptive editorial page writer for the Wall Street Journal, appeared Saturday on the Journal Editorial Report on Fox News Channel, discussing Friday’s Oval Office bullying of the president of Ukraine by Donald Trump and his pudgy verbal thumb-breaker, J.D. Vance.

“I think he is quite willing to abandon Ukraine,” said Henninger. “And I think the message he was sending to Zelenskyy there is that the Ukrainians need to be prepared essentially for surrender. . . .

“I think Donald Trump really is more interested in making a grand deal with Russia. He wanted to do that in the first term, he wants to do it in this term. And then he will turn and make a similar deal with the other great power, China.

“Trump is essentially dividing the world into these three great superpowers. They will have their own spheres of influence and Ukraine simply doesn’t fit into that equation.”

Henninger is not a screwball or a conspiracy theorist. He has merely put together the pieces. All the pieces fall into place. Like the boiling frog apologue, Donald Trump and his coterie of shady advisers have been leading the country in a bad direction.

If there were truth in titling, Trump’s book would have been called “The Art of the Swindle.” He thinks he keeps the country entertained and can get away with anything, and he’s out to prove it, all for the greater glory of Trump. And “deal” is a much prettier word than “betrayal.”

Trump is the Gorgeous George of politics. It’s all he’s good at.

Well, and he’s good at the grift and at holding the little guy in contempt — we’re seeing him “negotiate” with Ukraine by strangulation, and sucking up to despots because they stroke his insatiable narcissism. He respects them in the forlorn hope that they might respect him, which they don’t and won’t. But they’ll say they do to achieve their ends.

Russia admits that its conspiracy with Trump is in motion. Said Russian state television Sunday, “Now everything is being decided inside a big triangle: Russia, China and the US. Within this, the new construction of the world will come to fruition.”

During the campaign numerous people likened Trump to Hitler. That doesn’t survive inspection, but comparing him to Hitler’s junior partner, Mussolini, does. It’s increasingly clear that Trump is the dancing monkey of far more clever autocrats who know that they can control him by telling him what he wants to hear: nice things about himself. He doesn’t believe, can’t believe, that he was elected because, and only because, he is not Kamala Harris.

There have been many peculiar events recently that individually seemed odd but viewed in this light are ominous.

In just the last couple of weeks, Trump called elected Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy a “dictator,” said he had only a 4 percent approval rating in Ukraine (it is actually about 57 percent, higher than that of Trump in the U.S.) said Ukraine had started Russia’s invasion, and had the ink-monster third-string weekend television host who is Trump’s secretary of defense order the U.S. Cyber Command to stand down in its defense against Russia. (Trump later semi-denied having called Zelenskyy a dictator, but it could be that the translation from Cyrillic was given to him at the last minute and he read it without it ever really registering. Not that Trump is opposed to issuing as a royal decree anything that pops into his head, knowing that his militant followers will believe it without question.)

Monday night Trump cut off military aid to Ukraine unless it agreed to whatever Trump dictates, which corresponds exactly with what Moscow dictates, which is Ukrainian surrender. (By the way, we are obligated to guarantee Ukraine’s security. We are signatories to the Budapest Memorandum, even if we have treacherously made a habit of flinging down and dancing upon that supposedly solemn international agreement.)

It is no surprise to hear Trump praise Vladimir Putin — calling him “genius” — for having invaded Ukraine, and verbally abuse the president of Ukraine. He has spoken approvingly of North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un. (Perhaps he envies Kim’s power to colorfully execute anyone in North Korea who refuses to believe that Kim’s father took up golf and in his very first round scored 11 holes-in-one.)

Trump is an admirer of prevarication backed by a gun. So much easier, when genuine respect eludes you.

Putin and Kim are Trump’s kind of guys. Likewise China’s Winnie the Pooh-lookalike Xi Jinping, also praised by Trump. (Example: Congress passed and Biden signed into law a prohibition of Red China’s TikTok spy application, and Trump simply ignored it, so Putin’s isn’t the only tune to which the orange man dances.)

But he does especially admire Putin, who turned Russia from a fledgling democracy into an autocratic dictatorship in under a decade. That kind of thing sounds good to Trump. Watch as he sides with Putin more and more. Remember that his entire “national security” staff is pro-Moscow.

He’s being increasingly pushed in that direction by Donald Trump Jr.’s buddy and Trump adviser Tucker Carlson, who is a full-tilt Russian agent, though we do not know whether Carlson is being paid for his treachery or is a volunteer. Carlson is in some part responsible for Tucker sucker Trump’s selection of J.D. Vance as vice president. Vance does what Carlson tells him to do. I have no doubt that Friday night Vance was rewarded with an extra dog biscuit, having danced on his hind legs the way he did in the photo-op with Zelenskyy.

Not much was made of it last week, though a lot should have been, when there was a United Nations vote on a resolution calling on the Russian invader to withdraw from Ukraine. The United States voted against it! Trump was joined by Russia, Belarus, North Korea, and 13 other non-free countries, and, inexplicably, Israel (perhaps hoping the bear would eat it last) in opposing the resolution; 93 countries, including all of our allies except for Israel, voted for it. China and Iran abstained. That should tell us all we need to know about Trump. He has cast his (and our) lot, and it’s not with the good guys.

During the Friday beatdown of the little guy, Trump slipped into his real self and started talking about his having allowed Ukrainian President Zelenskyy become a “tough guy,” and saying Ukraine didn’t hold “the cards.” That’s not presidential talk. That’s the language used by the business agent of a medium-sized local of a mob-affiliated garbage haulers union. Trump wants to be recognized as a thug. I’ve occasionally wondered if little Donny Trump got beaten up a lot on the playground. It would not be a surprise to learn that as a child he enjoyed torturing small animals. He’s the type. And now he seeks revenge.

He has aspired throughout his career to be a powerful mobster — a “tough guy.” He thought he could become a “man of respect” when he opened a hotel and casino in Atlantic City, but like most Trump endeavors it went bust. Locals were not sorry. “I wish he was in there,” said an Atlantic City resident who had paid $500 to watch Trump Plaza get blown up with dynamite in early 2021. Trump couldn’t even get the respect of a retired old lady.

Trump’s actions are not how mob guys are. Mob guys are the bosses of punks like Trump, as Putin has learned. Trump is actually the kind of guy whose precise location in the New Jersey pine barrens is disclosed to the grand jury in exchange for immunity. He could have been the model for Moe Green.

Trump is and always has been desperate to be thought of as somebody. He has worked hard at it and has even fooled a great many people. But it will never be enough, because he knows that it is all, to employ one of his favorite words, fake.

Early Tuesday morning I was directed by a reporter of my acquaintance to a serious, scholarly video that explains why Trump is as he is. If you watch it, you’ll likely agree. It is about narcissism.

If Trump can’t make you respect him, he can join with Putin and Xi to make you fear him and do what he says, or perhaps so he thinks. He’ll never be respected by anyone whose respect is worth having, but maybe he can have muscle. He thinks he’s Don Corleone, but he’s only a flabby, elderly Luca Brasi, in the service of his betters, with Putin the brains of the outfit. He sure has showed that diminutive Ukrainian man who has endured three years of war, hasn’t he. But Putin and Xi are better at it than Trump will ever be, because they aren’t pretending. And they are playing Trump for a chump. Yes, when Trump calls people “suckers,” he’s projecting.

The Putin-Trump alliance (Putin is controlling partner) has become even more obvious since Friday.

The Financial Times reported Sunday that “A former spy and close friend of Vladimir Putin has been engineering a restart of Russia’s Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline to Europe with the backing of US investors, a once unthinkable move that shows the breadth of Donald Trump’s rapprochement with Moscow.”

On Monday, The Hill reported that Putin couldn’t be happier: ” ‘The new administration is rapidly changing all foreign policy configurations,’ Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said, according to Russian state media. ‘This largely aligns with our vision.’”

Russia’s vision is to somehow extract victory from defeat, and Trump is there to help. Russia attacked Ukraine without provocation in February 2022 and found more fight than it had bargained for. Employing bravery, ingenuity, and outside help, Ukraine halted the Russian advance and had been clobbering Putin’s forces ever since. Russia got the worse of it, losing close to a million soldiers (and now having to import them from North Korea). Without intervention, the war of attrition could continue pretty much indefinitely.

Trump decided to bail out Putin. To Trump, there are no bad guys or good guys, only things advantageous to him and things that aren’t. He wanted a deal and in his case as always, the execution of the swindle is all that matters. His pal Vladimir said he was up for a deal in which Ukraine surrendered. An experienced swindle-maker, Trump thought he could make it happen and he could claim to be the hero. And when Ukraine said that no, it needed no help in a brokering its surrender, Trump began to pressure Zelenskyy. Monday, he yanked support. Ukraine has nothing much to offer him, but Putin tells Trump he can offer much of benefit to Trump.

Trump is a talented fabulist, and at his combined story hour-and-a-half and “Queen for a Day”-style game show last night he announced in effect that Zelenskyy had succumbed to Trump’s demands and had now groveled and praised Trump sufficiently.

Then Trump introduced a recently-released American hostage who had been held by Putin’s regime. Funny coincidental timing. Did he trade Ukraine for the hostage? We don’t know, but can’t discount it. Maybe the hostage had been given, and accepted, as a kind of party favor. “There’s more where that came from, comrade,” Putin might have said.

Inflation is returning, because despite his degree (in real estate) from the University of Pennsylvania, he knows neither economics nor arithmetic, as witness his lies about how much the U.S. has given Ukraine.

The Atlanta Fed reports that GDP has dropped 2.8 percent this year as American exports have collapsed — we’re cruising toward a recession, or worse. And that was before Trump’s suicidal tariffs went into effect. Those benefit no one but the Liberal Party in Canada and Vladimir Putin. If he were trying to destroy every economy in the world except those of Russia and North Korea, and make every country except Russia, China, and North Korea our bitter enemy, there’s little more that he could do. It does, though, remind us of Trump’s insane suggestion that he will take over Canada and Greenland. In his speech last night he again suggested we might take over Greenland by force. Putin would enjoy watching the attempt, and it would do further damage to the West.

The polls already show that Trump is slipping. He is under water in a couple of them. He will continue to fall in popularity (following the bump from his entertainment program last night). Even the spineless majorities on Capitol Hill will know when supporting the orange man is no longer in their interest.

Trump thinks that he and Xi and Putin can take over the world. Xi and Putin no doubt find this very funny.

They know that Trump is not a smart man. He is not a decent man. He is possessed of no moral compass. He is not a man you’d want to be around. But he is a lucky man.

So far.