Nothing New to Report, All Reports to the Contrary Notwithstanding
Every few weeks, the news media on all sides of the issue try to find evidence of a substantial change of perspective in Donald Trump’s actions regarding the war in Ukraine. Being a quintessential pitchman and obfuscator for profit, Trump is excellent at offering superficial alterations to his rhetoric in order to string his customers along with false promises of appreciating their wishes. And each time, those of us who prefer reality to fantasy insist that picking through Trump’s mess of convoluted half-statements in search of a fundamental shift in attitude or policy toward Vladimir Putin is a fool’s game, as it entails simply ignoring the single most transparently obvious truth about Trump’s foreign policy in general, namely that he is a stooge and asset of Putin, and has been since the first day of his first presidential term. He will not “come around” on understanding how Putin is playing him. His role in this game is to be played by Putin, while selling his endless string of concessions and apologias as a tough-talking (but never-ending) series of “last chances.” Selling garbage to the gullible is the one great talent Trump has had all his adult life.
Here is Trump’s latest statement, responding to Volodymyr Zelensky’s request for long-range missiles in the wake of increasingly fierce waves of aerial attacks from Putin:
He’s always looking to purchase missiles. Listen, when you start a war, you got to know you can win a war. You don’t start a war against somebody that’s 20 times your size and then hope that people give you some missiles.
“When you start a war”? Yes, we are back to this again, Trump framing the situation as Zelensky’s war against Russia, rather than Ukraine’s attempt to survive against Putin’s utterly unprovoked war of annihilation against a neighbor on NATO’s border.
For the record, Russia is not “20 times” Ukraine’s size, either in habitable area or, more importantly, in population, where the difference is less than four to one. And that gap is shrinking all the time, as Putin continues to sacrifice the lives of his own cannon fodder army in horrific numbers. Trump’s exaggeration, of course, is not just his typical lack of knowledge. It is his attempt to portray Ukraine’s situation as hopeless and futile — which it certainly is not, based on results so far, but Trump continues to wish to convince the world that Ukraine has no chance and must therefore surrender. Now why would he wish to convince the world of that?
