By Jim Geraghty
Tuesday, May 27, 2025
In addition to a typically unhinged and raging screed as
his Memorial Day message — “HAPPY MEMORIAL DAY TO ALL,
INCLUDING THE SCUM THAT SPENT THE LAST FOUR YEARS TRYING TO DESTROY OUR COUNTRY
THROUGH WARPED RADICAL LEFT MINDS, WHO ALLOWED 21,000,000 MILLION PEOPLE TO
ILLEGALLY ENTER OUR COUNTRY, MANY OF THEM BEING CRIMINALS AND THE MENTALLY
INSANE” — this weekend, President Trump jumped onto Truth Social to announce to the world, “I’ve
always had a very good relationship with Vladimir Putin of Russia, but
something has happened to him. He has gone absolutely CRAZY!”
Trump has given this topic some thought; earlier this
month, the Wall Street Journal reported that Trump asked advisers if they thought Putin
“has changed since Trump’s last time in office, and expressed surprise at some
of Putin’s military moves, including bombing areas with children.”
While speaking to reporters before boarding Air Force One
Sunday, Trump reiterated how surprised he was by the way Putin and the
Russian forces are fighting the war:
Trump: I’m not happy with
what Putin’s doing. He’s killing a lot of people, and I don’t know what the
hell happened to Putin. I’ve known him a long time, always gotten along with
him, but he’s sending rockets into cities and killing people, and I don’t like
it at all. Okay? We’re in the middle of talking and he’s shooting rockets into
Kyiv and other cities. I don’t like it at all.
Q: Mr. President, what do you
want to do about that?
Trump: I’m surprised. I’m
very surprised. We’ll see what we’re gonna do.
Got that? Trump is “very surprised” by Putin’s actions.
As I noted when I wrote about the WSJ report in that other Washington publication I
write for, you can almost excuse Trump’s question about Putin changing. Russia
analysts have wondered whether Putin’s long isolation during the pandemic altered his thinking and
made him (even more) paranoid and reckless. Others have speculated that Putin has some secret health issue affecting his actions and
worldview. In the weeks before the war, lots of international analysts, and United Nations Secretary General Antonio Guterres confidently
predicted that Russia would not invade Ukraine because Russia had “nothing to
gain and much to lose.” Clearly, Putin’s risk-reward calculations were
different in 2022 than they had been in previous years.
Regarding Putin, Trump’s Truth Social post continued, “He
is needlessly killing a lot of people, and I’m not just talking about soldiers.
Missiles and drones are being shot into Cities in Ukraine, for no reason
whatsoever.”
It’s good of Trump to notice this; the war is only in its
fourth year. How can Trump possibly be very surprised that Putin’s
forces are bombing civilians?
You figure one of the great benefits of being president
is having the world’s most extensive intelligence network at your fingertips —
never mind the resources of our allies, the “Five Eyes,” etc. Just about anything in the world you want
to know, they can either find out or try to figure out. The U.S. intelligence
community isn’t perfect and makes its share of misjudgments. What it gets wrong
(Iraqi WMDs, not foreseeing the 9/11 or 10/7 attacks) usually turns into
front-page news; what it gets right (hopefully) stays secret. But the U.S. government spends about $100 billion per year on
intelligence-gathering. Getting our lawmakers the best possible information
to make the best possible decisions is an enormous priority of our government,
and there are signs that Trump just isn’t that interested in using that
resource.
Trump has been in office 127 days. According to his
public schedule, he’s had 13 intelligence briefings in that time, on
January 23, January 28, February 10, February 27, March 19, March 27, April 3,
April 10, April 16, April 23, May 1, May 7, and May 22. (In 2018, the Washington Post reported that Trump
“rarely if ever reads the President’s Daily Brief, a document that lays out the
most pressing information collected by U.S. intelligence agencies from hot
spots around the world.”)
Trump’s Truth Social post continued, “I’ve always said
that he wants ALL of Ukraine, not just a piece of it, and maybe that’s proving
to be right, but if he does, it will lead to the downfall of Russia!”
Trump may have always said that Putin wants all of
Ukraine, but he rarely acts like it.
Because Trump’s instinct is to always draw moral
equivalence between the invading Russians and the victimized Ukrainians, the
president felt compelled to add, “Likewise, President Zelenskyy is doing his
Country no favors by talking the way he does. Everything out of his mouth
causes problems, I don’t like it, and it better stop.” You see, Putin is bad
because he’s slaughtering innocent civilians, and Zelensky is bad because Trump
doesn’t like what he says. A pox on both your houses!
Trump’s post continued, “This is a War that would never
have started if I were President. This is Zelenskyy’s, Putin’s, and Biden’s
War, not ‘Trump’s,’ I am only helping to put out the big and ugly fires, that
have been started through Gross Incompetence and Hatred.”
Mr. President, perhaps the reason that people started to
expect that you could end the war quickly was because you said it at least 53 times on the presidential campaign trail in
2023 and 2024. In his April 22 interview with Time magazine, Trump said:
You said you would end the war
in Ukraine on Day One.
Well, I said that figuratively, and
I said that as an exaggeration, because to make a point, and you know, it gets,
of course, by the fake news [unintelligible]. Obviously, people know that when
I said that, it was said in jest, but it was also said that it will be ended.
Ah, so all 53 times, the pledge to end the Russian
invasion within a day was said “in jest.” Now he tells us!
Trump loves to insist that the war never would have
started if he were president. Maybe that’s the case, maybe it isn’t, but it’s a
moot point now. The war started. It’s been going on for 1,191 days; or three
years, three months, and six days; or long enough for me to take three trips there and for a bunch of you to tell me how you’re sick of
hearing about the plight of the Ukrainians. (The fact that you’re tired of
hearing about a particular problem doesn’t mean it’s stopped happening. I’m
sure there are plenty of Democrats out there who got tired of hearing about the
open border, or food prices, or inflation, or Hunter Biden during the Biden
years.)
The war started, Mr. President. The question is, what are
you, as the leader of the United States, going to do about it? You wanted this
job. You wanted to be in that chair behind the Resolute Desk in the Oval
Office.
When the topic turns to Trump and his support for
Ukraine, some defenders of the president will often offer some variation of the
argument, “Obama sent blankets, Trump sent antitank missiles.” And that’s true, and it’s probably
one of the best pieces of evidence disputing the notion that Trump is a stooge
of Putin. In fact, that may have been one of Trump’s best and most farsighted
decisions in his first term. But that was before the war. What does Trump want
to do now?
This morning, the Wall Street Journal reports “Trump is eyeing sanctions against Moscow this
week,” But they note, “Trump might also decide not to impose new sanctions.” We’ve heard this song before.
I would love to see it, and I’d love to see the U.S.
conclude that Putin’s intransigence and brutality justify additional arms
transfers. But I don’t think anyone should hold their breath.
In the July issue of National Review magazine, David
Satter — the only American journalist to be expelled from Russia since the end
of the Cold War — concludes, “Trump’s statements and actions, from his
recycling of Russian disinformation to his naming of his real estate partner
Steve Witkoff as a special envoy, demonstrate that he does not understand the
seriousness of what is taking place. This is not a border dispute but a
conflict between Western values and criminal nihilism that threatens not only
Ukraine and Europe but also the U.S. . . . Putin will withdraw his troops from
Ukraine when he decides that continuing the war is more dangerous to his power
than ending it. It’s the task of the U.S. to help him reach that realization.”
Meanwhile, our Andy McCarthy writes:
The incumbent president is not
interested in pressing America’s overwhelming advantages against Putin. For all
the nationalist blather, Trump is more of a personalist. Europe may be
important to the United States, but it is not important to Trump. He has
convinced his devoted base, and maybe himself, that the war on the continent,
like other global crises, can be resolved through the sheer force of his own
persona, the occasional tariff, and his capacity to forge one-on-one
relationships with despots, shorn of such complications as morality, justice,
American tradition, and international norms. Good luck with that.
ADDENDUM: Over in that other Washington publication, I noted that
everyone — as in literally every senator in a vote last week — wants to
eliminate federal income taxes on tips. Even though tips are, you know, income.
Out of nowhere, we’ve got this broad bipartisan consensus that a significant
portion of the income of waitstaff, bartenders, and strippers should be
tax-free, but not those of concession stand workers, fast food employees, or
janitorial staff. (By the way, one study concluded that 37 percent of workers
who earn tips “had incomes low enough that they faced no federal income tax in
2022, even before accounting for tax credits.”
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