Is staying out of jail easy, too?
Because this animation popped up first thing, and because former U.S. Ambassador to Russia, Michael McFaul, saw fit to retweet it, I decided to read Fred Kaplan’s Slate column about Donald “I alone can fix it” Trump’s boast that he could end the Ukraine war “in one day.”
Kaplan writes of the conspirator-in chief:
His one term in the White House should have disabused him of this notion. The fact that he still believes in his unique talents as a deal-maker—after his bargaining tactics with China, Russia, North Korea, and Iran accomplished nothing or worse—suggests he is incapable of seeing the world as it is, or at least of learning any lessons from it.
One anecdote alone is worth your time.
After George H.W. Bush was elected president in 1988, Trump lobbied to become his Russia negotiator on strategic nuclear arms. Bush’s aides had a good laugh. Instead, Bush chose a seasoned diplomat, Ambassador Richard Burt, and later:
Around 1990, when Burt was beginning a new round of Soviet–American nuclear arms talks, he ran into Trump at a reception in New York. Trump expressed envy of Burt’s position and asked if he’d like some advice on how to cut a “terrific” deal. Burt suppressed a chuckle and said, “Sure.” Trump told him this: Arrive late at the next negotiating session, walk over to where your counterpart sits impatiently, look down at him, poke your finger in his chest, and scream, “Fuck you!”
Burt eventually negotiated the START treaty without taking Trump’s advice. Not that Trump learned humility from it. The real estate grifter who “boosted profits by bilking suppliers and evaded debt by declaring multiple bankruptcies” still thinks he’s the smartest person in any room.
The heart of Trump’s failure as a foreign-policy president was that he had no concept of what U.S. national interests were and therefore tuned all encounters to his own interests and the appeal of personal relationships—as he saw them.
And Trump’s boast to “bomb the shit” out of whomever (or the “hell” or the “crap”) to resolve conflicts?
We should all beware presidential candidates who bear “secret plans” to solve some hideous crisis that the incumbent has somehow been unable to handle. In the 1968 campaign, Richard Nixon said he had a secret plan to end the Vietnam War. It turned out to be the “madman theory”—having his national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, tell the North Vietnamese that Nixon was crazy and that he would drop an A-bomb on Hanoi if they didn’t engage in peace talks now. When that didn’t work, Nixon dropped more than 20,000 tons of conventional bombs on North Vietnam in the course of 12 days. That didn’t work either.
Trump has the right to remain silent, really, as he faces prosecutions already under way and those to come. But the living, breathing Dunning-Kruger effect can’t unlearn the “Fuck you!” bravado that brought him down in 2020 and will have him spending the rest of his days in courts or in jail.
From what we know about Trump, what kind of plan might be churning in his head to end the Russia–Ukraine war in a single day of talks? If he actually does have a plan, it probably involves two elements. First, he would halt arms deliveries to Ukraine. He’s leery of foreign commitments broadly, and he dislikes President Volodymyr Zelensky in particular; it was Trump’s “perfect” phone call—in which he held up Javelin anti-tank missiles pending Zelensky’s agreement to dig up dirt on Joe Biden—that led to his first impeachment. Second, he would ask his good friend Putin for a favor.
In short, his idea of a deal rests on the usual combination of personal relationships (animosity toward Zelensky, illusory friendship with Putin), naïvete (the notion that those relationships would drive either leader to abandon his interests), a lack of understanding about the nature and stakes of this war, and a complete indifference toward its outcome.
More than that, it wouldn’t end the war, though it would make things easier for Putin. And that would be just fine for Trump.
As Kaplan suggests, Trump has no concept of where U.S. national interests lie and even less concern for defending them. Unless, of course, there’s something in it for himself. Like a Trump Tower in Moscow if not asylum.