Quick Comments On the Zelensky-Trump Meeting
Since there is nothing to say about this White House mafia act that cannot be seen and judged by the whole world now, thanks to Trump insisting that the meeting ought to be held on live television for the sake of entertainment, I will restrain myself from too much overarching condemnation of what the Trump administration is doing at this moment. God and his fallen angel assistant, if they ever existed, will certainly take care of the judgments in this case. I will simply confine myself to a few brief comments about the ugly details.
Here is the infamous moment, if you can bear to watch it:
Trump sat next to Zelensky and, while explaining why he refuses to blame Putin for anything and yet has no compunction about criticizing Zelensky for “hating Putin” too much to negotiate properly, had the gall (read “world historical lack of self-knowledge”) to proclaim to the audience, “You want me to be tough, I can be tougher than any human being you’ve ever seen, I’d be so tough — but you’re never going to get a deal that way, so that’s the way it goes.” Donald Trump can be tougher than any human being you’ve ever seen! I would be laughing if he said that while sitting two feet away from Melania. The idea that he could say it while sitting two feet away from Zelensky goes way beyond laughter, and deep into staring-blankly-at-the-screen-trying-to-understand-what-I-just-saw territory.
Trump and his personal throne assistant J. D. Vance used the opportunity, on their home turf, hosting a leader whose country is being decimated to the point where he has been forced to humble himself to coming to sign over his country’s precious resources to a protection mob in exchange for their continuing to honor promises previously made, to publicly berate and belittle that leader for his lack of gratitude and his lack of self-control. What Vance is, has been too obvious to bother explaining from the moment Trump chose him as his sidekick: In short, he was selected as the option most likely to grovel on cue and serve as mouthpiece and lapdog for anything Trump wants, whether moral or immoral, legal or illegal. That’s exactly what Trump needed after his first VP let him down in that regard, and he certainly got what he wanted. Vance is a high school debate club also-ran who “argues” like a pop idol fan club member demanding that everyone must love his idol as much as he does. In the video clip above, Vance’s smug grin as the argument between the shouting, red-faced moron Trump and the calm, serious, rational Zelensky breaks down into chaos due to Trump’s stupidity and disrespect, speaks volumes about what he is, and what this show was all about.
This meeting was a kind of test of the faithful. Hearken back to Trump’s claim, before the Iowa caucus in 2016, that he wouldn’t lose his followers if he shot a man on Fifth Avenue. He is currently shooting millions of Ukrainians through the heart while publicly excusing the tyrant who is occupying their land, kidnapping their children, and killing their families. And he is doing it in front of cameras and microphones, claiming it makes “great television,” because he wants to prove that nothing, absolutely nothing that he could ever do would make a difference to the fully-drained souls of his voters. This is the one point on which Trump is right, and always has been: He won’t lose a supporter; they will only cheer him on for his tough guy hokum, laugh at his “wit” as he mocks a beleaguered, exhausted, war-weary visting statesman who, though being five million times Trump’s better, is reduced to sitting there and taking it in the hopes of saving his country.
As for the repeated mantra that Zelensky has not shown enough gratitude, and has never “said thank you” to America, this is obviously and provably false on its face. But the face of it is not what matters. Rather, what we are seeing is simple mafia language, in which “gratitude” and “thanks” are euphemisms for “money, and lots of it.” This is what comes of the old American nonsense about “running the country like a business,” or the accompanying nonsense about how “We need a CEO for president.” A businessman — not a private citizen who earns a living by producing and selling a product, but a lifetime fully committed businessman of the sort who is likely to become a billionaire — may well be very good at making money. He may even be said to be an indirect and largely unintentional benefactor to his country, by means of the invisible hand. But that such a man is likely to be a good national leader, which is to say a man mentally willing and morally able to act for the good of the country as a whole, to be “the president of all the people,” and to see all issues through the prism of the common good and the long-term requirements and interests of liberty, is, as we are now seeing in huge, beautiful neon lights, implausible at best.
Donald Trump today served notice to the whole world, in what was, in this sense alone, “great television” indeed, that he is unmistakably and unwaveringly a Putin asset, just as he has been for many years. His interests are Putin’s. The stakes he claims, though couched in abstract nonsense about “my country,” are perfect echoes of Putin talking points, both with regard to the causes and meaning of this war and with regard to the illegitimacy of the Ukrainian government. The one thing Trump has had in his favor on this issue is the normalcy bias that allowed ordinary people to refuse to believe their own eyes and ears because the truth was simply too incongruous and unstable to accept. Will the images and sounds of this meeting finally burst through that normalcy bias in the heads of a few dozen people? I doubt it. More likely they will adjust themselves to it by swerving gradually to the position that, “Well, this Zelensky is a bit suspicious somehow,” and that “Maybe Putin really does have an understandable position in this situation after all.” I believe we are already seeing evidence of such a change in segments of the American media, although it is difficult to say whether this visible shift indicates a real psychological adjustment or merely the infusion of more Russian influence behind the scenes. If Putin can own the American president, who and what in that God-forsaken country can he not own?
