Breaking news: Vladimir Putin’s a psychopath.
According to Donald Trump, that’s a recent development. “He has gone absolutely CRAZY!” Trump exclaimed, of Putin, after a dayslong aerial bombardment killed dozens of Ukrainian civilians, making a mockery of Trump’s naive pretensions to a negotiated peace.
On Monday, following Trump’s remarks about a man he mistakenly calls a friend, the Kremlin dispatched more than 350 drones in a pre-dawn attack described as mostly indiscriminate. In addition to the UAVs, Putin’s war planes fired nine missiles at Ukrainian cities in the volley.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but this is why foreign policy experts and European diplomats shuddered this month when Trump, after a call with Putin, appeared to abrogate any role for the US in peace talks between Kyiv and Moscow. Putin saw an opening there, and now he’s exploiting it.
“I don’t know what the hell happened to Putin,” Trump told reporters over the weekend, a sentiment he echoed on social media. “I’ve known him a long time. Always gotten along with him.”
It’s difficult to overstate the scope of the credulity inherent in Trump’s remarks. Exactly nothing in his long history of public comments about Putin suggests he actually “knows” the man, and Putin doesn’t “get along” with Western leaders. He gets over on them, or tries to.
I certainly agree with Trump’s assessment that this Putin isn’t yesteryear’s Putin in some respects. But lest we should forget, this is a man who, through Machiavellian guile, co-opted every loci of power in Russia’s post-Soviet “smash and grab” era — from the oligarchs to the mob to the intelligence services — on the way to establishing a kleptocratic tsardom.
During the early years of his reign, Putin disingenuously engaged the West and exploited America’s “War on Terror” to paint his regime as an ally of the civilized world. But he also pursued systematic extra-territorial executions of Russian expats (including, famously, a yearslong murder campaign against exiled oligarchs in the UK), bought and built private mercenary armies in conflict zones and extinguished all forms of dissent inside Russia.
It’s unclear how much of that backstory Trump understands, but suffice to say Putin’s not the sort of guy who’s amenable to Trump’s “I’m not really a strongman, but I did stay at a Holiday Inn Express last night” act.
I’ve said this before, and I’ll say it again: The only Western leader Putin’s ever taken even a semblance of serious was Angela Merkel. Whatever you want to say about that relationship — and there’s a lot you can say — conversations between Putin and Merkel were at least real conversations. There was genuine engagement between the two, and that’s completely absent from Putin’s interactions with other Western leaders.
Simply put: If you’re a Western leader, you don’t talk to Putin, you get tested by him. And no Western leader besides Merkel has ever passed that test. Trump’s failed it miserably and publicly on multiple occasions, including seven years ago in Helsinki, when the world learned the importance of body language.
Trump’s strategy for ending the war in Ukraine assumed far too much for his own powers of persuasion and counted on goodwill from Putin. With apologies to the deluded among you, Trump’s not a legendary dealmaker, not even in the business world. He just played one on television. Putin doesn’t respect him. Putin thinks he’s a joke. And goodwill isn’t something Putin possesses, let alone in the sort of abundant quantities you’d need to be comfortable extending it to a guy who doesn’t always pay back his loans.
Trump’s right that Putin’s “crazy” now in a way he wasn’t 20 years ago. He’s lost irretrievably in his own revanchist fever dream, and unnervingly, he doesn’t seem to care there’s nothing to be gained from his bloody boondoggle in Ukraine. Even in a “total victory” scenario where the Kremlin manages to install a puppet government in Kyiv, this war’s a dead end.
The conflict hasn’t offered much in the way of evidence to support the notion that the Russian military’s capable of sweeping conquest. Maybe Putin can seize a few other breakaway regions in Russia’s immediate vicinity, but at what cost? And, more importantly, for what? What has Russia actually gained from this three-year-and-counting bloodbath, and what utility would there be in tacking on another couple of Donbases? That’s not going to be the USSR resurrected, let alone the return of the Imperial Russian Empire.
But here’s the thing: By adopting an adversarial approach to NATO which some view as tantamount to the US abandoning the Baltic states, and by suggesting Washington’s prepared to cut Kyiv lose, Trump’s risking a scenario where a “crazy” Putin decides to take what’s being handed to him. The unspoken check on that’s supposed to be — and try not to laugh — Trump’s tough guy bona fides. Something like this: “I’ll pursue a de facto policy of appeasement in order to get the war stopped, and Putin won’t try to press all the advantages inherent in the concessions I’m making because he respects me.”
To call that a questionable approach would be to materially understate the peril. What’s Trump’s strategy if Putin keeps it up in Ukraine? Or if Moscow invades some other pro-Russia, separatist enclave that’s part of another sovereign state? Putin knows what millions of red state voters in America somehow don’t: Trump’s no sort of bad ass. Credit where it’s due, he brushed off a bullet to the ear like it was a mosquito bite, but… well, look, getting grazed by a bullet doesn’t necessarily a tough guy make.
So, when Trump says, as he did Sunday, that Putin’s “sending rockets into cities and killing people, and I don’t like it at all,” I can just hear the Kremlin laughing: “We don’t give a damn what you like or don’t like. What are you gonna do about it?”
For now, Putin’s not saying that publicly. Instead, his ventriloquist dummy Dmitri Peskov excused Trump’s “crazy” characterization as an errant remark born of “emotional overload.” But I worry — and Europe worries and Ukraine worries — that when it comes to Putin, Trump’s admonishments are all bark and no bite.
BARKING WHILE BACKING UP AS FAST AS HE CAN. We all know dogs like that,
I had a fever dream that Trump gets pissed enough at Putin for not making Trump look good (and also sees a way to turn the table around, negating whatever skeletons Putin holds over Trump’s head), and so Trump unleashes some of America’s fury at him in Ukraine. A back-footed Putin gets rattled (but only because his military is already so decimated), that the nuclear war threat isn’t on the table, and he pulls out of (most of) Ukraine (he likely wouldn’t leave entirely). But of course, I realize that, like you said, Trump doesn’t have the backbone and Putin wouldn’t rattle easily. Plus, an emboldened Trump who gets a whiff of military might isn’t an outcome I’m comfortable with, either.
I’m sure he feels the same about himself too.
Of all the things to be worried about in Mar-A-Lardoverse, and there are too many to catalog in any one post or comment, two that I worry most about seem sort of nebulous in comparison to the rest (e.g., highly classified info floating around). First is Trump’s sudden willingness to deny his own self-declared omniscience. He’ s always done this when it comes to anyone he’s previously engaged with and/or elevated who then gets into trouble, and all of sudden Trump barely knows or never met the person any longer. But now this is spreading to his own behavior and sphere where he seems (and so far it has generally proven out) willing to offer up excuses like “this is the first I’m hearing about that” or “I don’t know anything about that,” or “you’ll have to ask Howard about that.” I don’t think these sort of supposedlty out-of-the-loop confessions come naturally to Trump, so they raise whatever hair’s remaining on the back of my neck when they occur. In many ways, they feel worse than even the common outright lie, because it’s either too big to bother trying to lie about, or he just can’t be bothered, despite it coming so naturally.
But is also worrying to see Putin go out of his way to embarass or humiliate Trump, for no apparent reason (at least to me). I acknowedge that a little dick swinging may be par for the course at Big Beautiful World Autocrat Club, but given that Putin’s never had an oranger goose in the White House, it’s hard to reconcile his gratuitous potshots at Trump. I can only guess he doesn’t have much tolerance for being out-maniaced.
But so I can be spared my own humiliation on behalf of a President I loathe, I suggest he take his own advice about the Qatar Flying Bribe if he wonders if Putin’s gone crazy — if they give you a disputed region or Baltic state, you say thank you — as H has said her. And hopefully that will put an end to the high school head cheerleader laments over social media. Have we already forgotten the embarrasment of “Vlad, STOP!” That STILL makes me cringe.