Vladimir Putin’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine, soon to reach its three-year bloody anniversary, has failed to capture Kyiv and other key locales thanks to heroic defenders under President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, but it has succeeded in conquering the mind of Donald Trump with crude Kremlin propaganda that should make an old KGB colonel like Putin proud.
Zelenskyy rightly complained about the failure to have Ukrainians at the U.S./Russian peace talks in Saudi Arabia and Trump replied straight out of the Moscow manual: “But today I heard, ‘Oh, well, we weren’t invited.’ Well, you’ve been there for three years. You should have ended it three years. You should have never started it. You could have made a deal.”
So the victim is the aggressor and up is down and black is white, or as Orwell put it in “1984”: “War is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength.”
Yesterday, Trump went further in the Pravda playbook, calling Zelenskyy a “dictator without elections,” a provably and obviously false claim that was just one of a pantheon of falsehoods, misrepresentations and misdirections in the president’s stream of consciousness on his Truth Social platform.
Among these was the notion that this is a war mainly important to Europe and not the United States — in part because of the “big, beautiful ocean,” a child’s manner of thinking — and that the U.S. “will get nothing back” from its significant investments in Ukraine’s defense and security.
It’s as though the American and Russian officials are sitting on the same side of the table. No wonder Zelenskyy and the Europeans are worried. After Ukraine, who is next up on Putin’s menu?
It’s difficult to imagine how Putin could have gotten a better outcome. The bulwark of a NATO fronted by a committed U.S. is splintering, and he’s negotiating the fate of the Ukraine war directly with Trump, an admirer who’s spent a suspiciously large chunk of the past decade praising him, and who parrots Kremlin-approved talking points about the war and its causes.
This bit is unsurprising from a real estate promoter who has never once been able to look at anything other than as a potential deal with some monetary return, but Trump seems to believe that it was Ukraine that caused this war, claiming Zelenskyy roped the U.S. into a war. By that token, WWII also didn’t have to start, but it was not Poland’s fault that it did. Or maybe Trump blames Pearl Harbor on the U.S. fleet sitting at harbor, not the Japanese?
Trump is right that someone is being played “like a fiddle,” it’s just not Joe Biden by Zelenskyy, as he claims, it’s Trump himself by Putin, who’s gotten more than his money’s worth in backing Trump.
The cruel irony here is that Trump has access to and the ability to command the production of the best intelligence and analysis that money can buy. Instead, he’s seemingly chosen to rely on the lies spun up by Putin and his disinformation agents. As a result, we will all be living in a more volatile and more dangerous world as our European allies chart their own path forward and Ukraine suffers.
