By Jim Geraghty
Tuesday,
March 12, 2024
For
nearly two years now, former president Donald Trump has insisted he has a
secret plan that would end the war in Ukraine in 24 hours. It appears that
Hungary’s prime minister Viktor Orbán has let the cat out of the bag, and revealed that Trump’s
vision of “ending the war” is to just let Russia win it:
“He (Trump) has a very clear vision,” Orbán
said in an interview to Hungarian broadcaster M1 broadcast on Sunday. “He says
the following: first, he will not give a single penny for the Russo-Ukrainian
war. That’s why the war will end, because it’s obvious that Ukraine cannot
stand on its own two feet.”
Orbán’s comments came after Trump hosted the
Hungarian strongman at Mar-a-Lago on Friday. The former president and a small group of close
advisers met with Orbán at the Florida resort for roughly an hour Friday
night, sources familiar with the matter told CNN, with one of the
sources describing it as a “social meeting” with no agenda. A separate source
called it “friendly. . . .”
“If the Americans don’t give money and
weapons, along with the Europeans, the war will end. And if the Americans don’t
give money, then the Europeans won’t be able to fund this war alone. And then
the war will end,” Orbán said.
Believable,
isn’t it? Orbán has no discernible reason to lie, and he’s always been one of
Trump’s biggest cheerleaders. Trump’s claim to have a secret plan always
sounded like nonsense, or it was at least dubious that his plan would have any
good result for Ukraine.
It
is hard to imagine a clearer green light to every other autocrat, hostile
regime, and rogue state. The lesson would be clear: Aggression works. In
Trump’s vision, NATO and the Western alliance are indeed weak, although not
because of any inherent lack of resources or resolve, but because he chooses to
make them weak.
I
sense a sneer in the declaration that Ukraine “cannot stand on its own two
feet.” As if Hungary, or any other country in Europe, could resist an invading
Russian army without any help from allies.
You’ll
recall yesterday’s discussion of how pro-TikTok Trump sounded distinctly uninterested at
best in defending Taiwan from a Chinese invasion, and you’ll recall Trump’s
insistence that he has no interest in defending NATO members who spend less
than 2 percent of their GDP on defense. Oh, and while lot of Trump defenders
insist he’s the best friend Israel ever had, at Israel’s direst hour, he was
obsessed with rehashing past disagreements with Bibi Netanyahu.
Add
it all up, and it isn’t hard to envision the world’s most hostile and
aggressive regimes interpreting a Trump inauguration as a green light to invade
and conquer anyplace they want.
Yesterday,
Trump was at least kind enough to call in to CNBC and offer a detailed plan
for how he would handle entitlements:
CNBC’S JOE KERNEN: Have you changed your,
your outlook on how to handle entitlements Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid,
Mr. President? Seems like something has to be done, or else we’re going to be
stuck at 120 percent of debt to GDP forever.
PRESIDENT TRUMP: So first of all, there is a
lot you can do in terms of entitlements in terms of cutting and in terms of
also the theft and the bad management of entitlements, tremendous bad
management of entitlements. There’s tremendous amounts of things and numbers of
things you can do. So I don’t necessarily agree with the statement. I know that
they’re going to end up weakening social security because the country is weak.
And let’s take a look at outside of the stock market, are, we’re going through
hell. People are going through hell. If they have and I believe the number is
50 percent. They say 32 and 33 percent. I believe we have a cumulative
inflation of over 50 percent, that means people are, you know, they have to
make more than 50 percent more over a fairly short period of time to stay up.
They’ve gotten routed. The middle class in our country has been routed and the
middle class largely built our country and they have been treated very, very
badly with policy. When I was president, I was doing a job, we’re going to
start to pay off debt. We were drill baby drill. We were producing oil, but we
were going at a much higher level oil and gas. We were doing, you know, we were
third when I started and when they ended, we were one by a long-shot and we were
very close, we’re energy independence, we’re very close to becoming energy
dominant Joe, we’re gonna be dominant so dominant, like double what Saudi
Arabia and Russia were doing. And we were on that path. We were gonna be paying
down debt. We were doing, we were doing a lot of things and then we got hit
with Covid. We did a fantastic job with Covid. But nobody, nobody wins with
Covid. I guess China found that out because they also really got hit very hard
also, but nobody wins with Covid. And so we had to get to we had to do other
things. We had to help. You know, if I didn’t do the expenditures that we
didn’t do the kinds of things we did for the economy, we would add in 1929-type
depression. And I had to stay out in front of it, and we did we did a great job
on that and we did with all of the things we’re coming up with Regeneron doing
so much else, getting all because you know we had empty when I came in, we had
empty, I call them empty cupboards. We had empty shelves, we didn’t have
equipment, we didn’t have the gowns, we didn’t have the ventilators. We didn’t
have anything. This country wasn’t prepared for a thing like that. And I’m not
even blaming anybody in that. Because, you know, when when it came, nobody
thought the pandemic would ever happen again. It sounds like an ancient’s
problem, not a problem that you’d have you know at that time, you know, in
modern, very modern age. It was like an ancient thing. We you know, who, who
would ever show I’m not blaming anybody, but we had empty cupboards, and I got
them stocked and I got them stocked fast. And we did a great job with it. Never
got credit. I got credit for the greatest economy. I got credit for foreign
policy. I got credit for knocking out ISIS and not going into wars. But we beat
ISIS, but I never got the credit for having done a great job with that.
That’s
the Republican nominee. Great call, everybody.
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