Trump Mistakes Weakness for Strength

By Christian Schneider

Thursday, March 06, 2025

 

Just after President Ronald Reagan finished delivering a speech in Florida on March 8, 1983, the media had their headline. Reagan had called the Soviet Union an “evil empire,” describing the Cold War arms race as the “struggle between right and wrong and good and evil.”

 

Earlier in the speech, Reagan’s rhetoric was even tougher. He noted that while the Soviets “preach the supremacy of the State, declare its omnipotence over individual man, and predict its eventual domination of all peoples on the earth, they are the focus of evil in the modern world.”

 

Warning against capitulation to the Soviets, he went on: “If history teaches anything, it teaches that simpleminded appeasement or wishful thinking about our adversaries is folly. It means the betrayal of our past, the squandering of our freedom.”

 

One of the favorite parlor games within MAGA Nation is comparing Donald Trump to Reagan, hoping to launder Trump’s weakness through a prism of morally unambiguous Reaganism. This week, Trump’s first-term deputy national security adviser K. T. McFarland, who might want to check that her house is properly ventilated, argued that Trump is doing the “exact same thing” as Reagan regarding negotiations with Russia.

 

These arguments target gullible people on the right who are also prone to believe that nobody out-pizzas the Hut. Of course, Reagan brought about the collapse of the Soviet Union through strength, moral determination, and courage. Trump’s pathetic stance toward Russia in its war of aggression against Ukraine hardly demonstrates the same fortitude.

 

Trump is a weak man, as he reminds us every time he stands in front of a microphone. During his address to a joint session of Congress on Tuesday night, he opened by complaining that his “astronomical accomplishments” weren’t being sufficiently cheered by Democrats. When discussing an anti-revenge-porn bill he wants to see passed, he took the time to remind America that “nobody gets treated worse than I do online, nobody.”

 

One thing is true: Trump’s victim act works for him. When he lost the 2020 presidential election, he claimed that voter fraud was the only possible explanation for his loss. When he faced criminal charges for attempting to overturn the election results, he spun them into a “deep state” conspiracy to get him. And yet a conservative political movement that spent decades decrying the victimization culture sown by groups on the left is now animated by an inveterate Republican whiner.

 

Trump is a man who has been elected to the world’s most important office twice and never stops litigating his grievances against people whom he believes to be insufficiently deferential. At the same time that he claims to be a champion of free speech, Trump has filed a lawsuit against a newspaper that published an unflattering poll about him before the 2024 election. In a petty attempt to punish a news organization, the White House has barred the AP from press conferences because it won’t use “Gulf of America” to refer to the Gulf of Mexico. When addressing the unfavorable media he receives, Trump has said he’s been treated worse than Abraham Lincoln.

 

Trump’s weakness further manifests itself through the lies he tells, specifically those fired off as a pretext for abandoning Ukraine. Strong people do not need to buttress their arguments with falsehoods, yet Trump said it was Ukraine that started the war with Russia (only to sarcastically deny having said the preposterous thing that everyone heard him say). He has called Volodymyr Zelensky a “dictator” while refusing to apply that label to Vladimir Putin. Trump continues to claim that the U.S. has sent Ukraine $350 billion to fight the war, around twice the actual number.

 

Further, Trump conditions aid to Ukraine not on any philosophy or strategy but on whether Zelensky has sufficiently groveled to him. This was the theme of the disastrous Oval Office press conference last week, in which Trump and his substance double, Vice President JD Vance, berated Zelensky for not having said “thank you” for all the assistance the U.S. has provided. (The Ukrainian president has thanked the U.S. for aid dozens of times.)

 

Trump harassed Zelensky, in a scene that had all the markings of having been premeditated to make Trump look tough on an international issue. Unlike Reagan, though, Trump believes berating our allies and not the “evil empire” is the essence of toughness. In castigating Ukraine (while scoffing at our European NATO allies), Trump is blaming the gazelle for being caught and eaten by the leopard. It just shouldn’t have been so delicious.

 

In fact, he has spent his career massaging Putin in public, such as when he sided with the murderous Russian dictator over U.S. intelligence agencies during a public appearance in Helsinki in 2018. On social media this week, Trump said that Americans should “spend less time worrying about Putin, and more time worrying about migrant rape gangs, drug lords, murderers, and people from mental institutions entering our Country.” Trump has been less publicly critical of Putin than of actress Kristen Stewart.

 

Of course, Trump’s weakness has permeated his entire circle of influence, as he hires only sycophants who are forced to become entirely new people to work for him. Many of Trump’s poodles in the administration and on cable TV news spent years dunking on former President Barack Obama for dismissing Mitt Romney’s contention that Russia was America’s No. 1 geopolitical foe. They spent decades ridiculing the argument that vaccines cause autism. Now, they are all willing to lay at Trump’s feet as long as he scratches their belly.

 

Take Fox host Sean Hannity, who dutifully offered his opinion that the Trump–Zelensky showdown in the Oval Office reminded him of Reagan’s 1986 summit with Mikhail Gorbachev in Reykjavík.

 

“If you recall, Reagan was a staunch believer in strategic defense. The media mocked him, ‘Star Wars, hahaha,’” said Hannity, noting that Reagan walked away from the table only to hammer out a treaty in 1987.

 

But if Trump is under fire now, it is not because he wants to protect America from Russian missiles. He is under fire because he behaved like a buffoon in castigating a democratic ally that Russia attacked. By Hannity’s logic, if Trump had poured a vat of maple syrup on Zelensky’s head and tried to eat him like a waffle, Trump would be just like Reagan solely because the media mocked them both.

 

In writing about racial groups and victimization in America, Shelby Steele has noted that being on your knees is not a position of strength. While someone claiming victimization may realize a short-term benefit, he wrote, “It is a formula that binds the victim to his victimization by linking his power to his status as a victim.”

 

Those who compare Trump to Reagan should be forced to wash their mouths out with battery acid. Trump is an emotional child without the personal strength to control his actions, thoughts, and public statements. He is a weak person’s version of a strong man, a poor person’s notion of a rich man, and a thickheaded person’s idea of a smart man.