What Is Trump Talking About?

By Noah Rothman

Thursday, October 17, 2024

 

In an appearance with podcaster Patrick Bet-David, Donald Trump may have revealed more of his guarded thinking about the true causes of Russia’s war of conquest in Ukraine than he has previously let on.

 

“I think Zelensky is one of the greatest salesmen I’ve ever seen. Every time he comes in, we give him $100 billion,” Trump said, rehashing a familiar knock against what he implies is the Ukrainian president’s gauchely solicitous appeal to the West to help save his country from Russian subjugation. “And that doesn’t mean I don’t want to help him, because I feel very badly for those people,” Trump continued. “But he should never have let that war start. That war is a loser.”

 

What does that mean? How, precisely, did Zelensky passively “let that war start”? Well, as the Washington Post notes, Trump has previously complained that the Ukrainian president is a “man who refuses to make a deal.” There are those who will not allow themselves to reach the obvious conclusions about what these remarks imply, but those of us who still retain the capacity for logical thought are compelled to realize that what Trump wants to see from Zelensky is surrender. He had the chance to do so preemptively, and he passed on it. Zelensky can still correct his error if he has the gumption to consign his country’s citizens to abuse, deportation, reeducation, cultural eradication, and mass death.

 

This is an immoral and thickheaded inversion of culpability for Russia’s war. Moscow invaded and dismembered Ukraine twice now, all in the pursuit of territorial conquest. Vladimir Putin is the first European to engage in that sort of adventurism since Joseph Stalin did at the end of World War II. Ukraine was not asking for it. It did not provoke anyone, just as parts of Poland and the Baltic states did not deserve to be forcibly absorbed into the Soviet prison state. To assign blame to Zelensky for failing to properly appease a land-hungry despot in Europe is not just an ethical lapse — it’s a display of gross historical illiteracy.

 

There are plenty of Republicans who still insist that we cannot know Donald Trump’s mind when it comes to Russia’s war in Ukraine. Indeed, we can. He has not made it all that difficult for us. All that is required is the courage to acknowledge the evidence of our own eyes and ears.