The Cowards’ Logic: Trump and His Band of Putin Fellow Travelers

The problem with Donald Trump’s political rise, as I have said many times, is not so much Trump himself, but rather the tens of millions of Americans who are sanguine — nay, enthusiastic — about this buffoonish Putin agent and anti-American demagogue running roughshod over their country’s traditions, decimating its alliances, disrespecting its constitution and its institutions, befouling its public discourse, turning her into a global laughingstock and despised double-dealer, and treating billions of people’s lives, hopes, and desperations as playthings and fodder for his power-infatuated, fame-whoring vanity. What strikes me as most appalling in all of this, in other words, is not Trump’s grandiose and grotesque form of cowardice, which is truly world-historical in its proportions and effects, but the more squeamish, hide-under-the-bed forms of cowardice that are embodied in the apologias and rationalizations of millions of Americans who should know better than this — most of whom tangibly did know better before 2016 — but who, to save face and paper over their own folly and weakness, are prepared to allow Trump to drag their country into the proverbial dustbin of history, cheering him along all the way, rather than ever admit to themselves, to their fellow human beings, and to their God, that they are now following the monster they created merely in order not to incur his disapproval. Their motive is akin to that of a teenager who joins a street gang in a self-deluded effort to assuage his fears of being victimized by the gang.

An excellent example of this fear-motivated surrender of one’s intellect and pride comes in the person of Mike Lee, a formerly libertarian-leaning Republican from Utah who was, in years past, one of the more principled voices of constitutional rectitude and moral decency issuing from the increasingly muddy and milquetoast floor of the United States Senate. He negotiated a path through the first Trump presidency that was deeply compromising, as supporting Trump can only be, but not necessarily corruptive of his most essential being. Since the weeks after the 2020 election loss, however, during Trump’s thoroughly calculated and cynically staged “stolen election” fraud, when there was no excuse for anyone in Mike Lee’s privileged position to have been hoodwinked for one second by the ruse, Lee sold his remaining substance to the cult — clearly, as explained above, out of terror at being mugged by the mob unless he was willing to don the fake leather jacket and appease them by parroting their Trump-suckered nonsense.

And the hideous worm-life of the object now occupying the seat formerly filled by a morally dignified libertarian Republican continues to deteriorate into ever-lower levels of shamelessness:

A kook from West Virginia posts an old, faked video purporting to show some Ukrainian soldiers burning an effigy of Donald Trump. The kook soon afterwards, under pressure from fellow citizens who prove to be less stupid than he and his fellow Trump thugs assume them to be, admits that the video he posted is “likely” a fake — “likely” being the modifier people who have been caught spreading obvious pro-Putin propaganda use to deny knowledge of, and responsibility for, the anti-American crud they are spewing all over their country. And yet Mike Lee, even after said kook has publicly distanced himself from the pro-Putin propaganda he was spreading, takes to social media to exploit this bit of internet fakery as an excuse to demand, “Not another dime for Ukraine.”

The issue for me is not that Lee is obviously just using this video as an opportunity to serve as a faithful Trump mouthpiece, as he has been doing for years now anyway. Rather, the real issue is that he is clearly using this nonsense video to frame his opposition to supporting Ukraine — which could have been offered in strictly libertarian terms while nevertheless sympathizing with the plight of the Ukrainian people — in a manner consistent not with the principles of limited government or fiscal responsibility, but consistent instead with the intention of supporting the legitimacy and obscuring the evil of Vladimir Putin’s aims and methods. For he is implicitly using this video of alleged Ukrainians allegedly burning a Trump effigy as a premise for his conclusion that the U.S. ought not to give another dime to Ukraine, thereby suggesting that the best reason to withdraw support for Ukraine is that Ukraine is unworthy of any type of support, even moral. And what is Lee’s implied argument for this unworthiness? The alleged (but false) fact that a small group of Ukrainian soldiers, facing the imminent demise of their country at the hands of a bloodthirsty tyrant due to their cause being openly abandoned, and their right to exist ridiculed, by Donald Trump, allegedly expressed their frustration with an act of extreme personal anger directed at the visible source of their country’s abandonment, and the man who has increased the immediate likelihood of their own imprisonment or death at the hands of the Russian invader? For this alleged (but fake) private action, staged by anonymous individuals in a field somewhere in a (fake but alleged) fit of anger with the American president who has betrayed them and their country, a U.S. senator is prepared to renege on national promises arbitrarily, and to abandon a friendly nation to the wolves while facilitating the political and military advance of an enemy dictator who could have been contained and diminished through this war at relatively little cost in U.S. resources.

In other words, Mike Lee’s implied argument here is exactly this: If any random foot soldier in the army of a friendly nation under invasion happens to get so angry at having his daily risks and fears mocked and spat upon by the leader of a supposed ally that he dares to act out his indignation in a foolish (but materially harmless) manner, then it is justifiable for the government of that supposed ally to summarily withdraw all military and humanitarian support for that random soldier’s entire country in protest over this foolish foot soldier’s private act. 

That, ladies and gentleman, is neither moral nor economic logic. Nor is it any other sort of responsible thought process. It is pathetic and brazen Russian propaganda, bottom-of-the-barrel agitprop, and the most desperately idiotic attempt at a moral equivalency argument, delivered in the thin guise of run-of-the-mill Trump-bootlicking. On the matter of foreign policy in general, and the war in Ukraine specifically, Trump-bootlicking is of course Putin-bootlicking, for on these matters Trump is Putin’s willing and eager agent. 

Why? Here we come to the point. It is because Trump is a coward, scared to death of the big world players he has no heart to face down. And so, in the name of preserving his vanity in the face of his fear, he joins the gang, doing the bullies’ bidding in order to (so he hopes) escape their assaults, all the while trying to save face amidst his abject moral and material surrender by playing tough guy with the weak neighbors, longtime allies, and gang-molested underdogs fighting for their lives against the gang — in other words, acting as a de facto arm of the gang itself, while showing off his gang jacket as a boast to the equally frightened neighborhood teenagers he hopes to impress. Mike Lee, being one of the more influential and ridiculous of those neighborhood teens, buys the act and joins in with Trump’s pseudo-tough calls to beat up the plucky underdog, knowing of course, as does Trump, that he himself will never have to do any of the real beating, since the gang leaders will take care of that for them. And millions of Americans of little voice and less influence, terrified like weak old men at the prospect of having to fight for their neighborhood with pride and dignity against the punks, are willing to hide and sniffle in their dark corners, fudging, obfuscating, and outright denying everything they see happening in front of their eyes, in the hopes that their willing acquiescence to evil, which they too present with all the false bravado they can muster, will somehow conceal their snivelling surrender behind the cowardice-concealing mask of hatred and mockery aimed at…the same people being happily victimized by the gang that rules the neighborhood entirely thanks to the collective cowardice of the young man who joins the gang to save himself, the teenagers who sidle up to the youth for fear of having to stand up to his gang friends, and the emasculated old men whose souls have dried up in the dark. The domino dynamics of neighborhood cowardice.

And so now Donald Trump, who promised before the 2024 election that he could end the Ukraine war in one day, is openly blaming not Putin but Putin’s victim, Volodymyr Zelensky, for thwarting his big promise by refusing to agree to the outrageous surrender of his country’s territory, sovereignty, and future self-determination, in a “deal” made behind his back — and behind the backs of everyone except Trump and Putin, which means Putin and his willing American agent. Trump’s answer to Ukraine’s pride in the face of this sub-Munich-Agreement rape, after all that country has suffered and fought for over three years, is to accuse Ukraine of “starting” the war (as though she had somehow invaded herself), and calling Zelensky “a dictator,” while negotiating away Zelensky’s country in private “discussions” with an actual dictator whom Trump continues to treat and speak of as a partner and friend with legitimate interests in the region that must be protected at all costs. In short, he is playing the same game with Putin that he played with Kim Jong-un during his first presidency, handing legitimacy and rhetorical protection on a platter to a global pariah and brutal killer without a conscience. The stakes this time are much higher, of course, but the motive is the same: cowardice through and through, mixed with a feeble and desperate vanity that must save face at all costs in the best way possible to the weakling without a soul: He allies himself with the most dangerous gang of thugs, hoping to protect himself, even to the point of feeding actual friends and suffering victims to the thugs, so that they will continue to leave him alone. The gang will indeed leave him alone, precisely as long as he continues to be useful to them — which means until they have, with benefit of his complete surrender, swallowed up the whole neighborhood for themselves, at which point of course they will come for his house, and everyone in it.

Dmitry Medvedev, one-time placeholder and current tough talk lapdog for Putin — essentially the Russian counterpart of Trump himself — responded to Trump’s latest barrage of bullcrap against Zelensky and Ukraine in the predictable way, which is to say exactly as would best massage the fully owned ego of the coward who flung this Putin-approved poo:

“If you’d told me just three months ago that these were the words of the US president, I would have laughed out loud,” Medvedev wrote on X, adding that Trump is “200 percent right. Bankrupt clown…,” referring to Zelenskyy.

Speaking of bankrupt clowns, tens of millions of Americans have sold their lives and their country to the suicidal masquerade called “Donald Trump.” I hope most of them live to see what they have wrought. That they will have enough independence of mind left to understand what they have wrought, let alone to feel any shame or self-loathing for it, I would never dare to hope. That, sadly, is another implication of the logic of cowardice.