Vladimir Putin Isn’t Buying Donald Trump’s Shtick

By Kevin D. Williamson

Wednesday, January 29, 2025

 

One of the problems with Donald Trump is that he doesn’t … know stuff.

 

My own theory of the case, following Sherlock Holmes’ advice—“When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth”—is that Trump is exactly what he appears to be: an ignorant buffoon who has been carried to the presidency twice on the winds of resentment, romanticism, and nihilism. Trump is a weird combination of Chauncey Gardiner and the Bizarro World version of Pope Celestine V, the naïve hermit who was dragged out of his hole in the ground and plunked down in the Chair of St. Peter when exasperated cardinals decided that what the sclerotic papacy needed was a political outsider … who could be easily manipulated by insiders. (Fun fact: Celestine was nominated to the papacy by Cardinal Latino Malabranca Orsini, nephew of Pope Nicholas III and one of the reasons we talk about nepotism, or nephew-ism.) Even with years in the wilderness to prepare—not that anybody thought he was going to make profitable use of the time!—Trump walks around malevolently ignorant of the most elementary facts of political and economic life.

 

For example, when President Trump recently tried to bully Vladimir Putin (via social media, of course) into accepting a Ukraine “peace deal” (which is not a peace deal at all but another one of those “We have a … concept of a plan” Trump things), Putin did not budge. (The czar is not for budging.) And so Trump broke out his big gun, practically the only weapon in his arsenal: He threatened to impose heavy tariffs on Russian exports to the United States.

 

Putin seemed nonplussed. So did a lot of other people. 

 

Inconveniently for the tariff-loving Trump, Russia exports almost nothing to the United States, which as of 2022 accounted for about 3 percent of Russian trade. Historically, most of the Russian exports to the United States have been exactly what you’d expect them to be: petroleum products. (Russian coal imports to the United States were prohibited in 2022.) Which is to say, Trump’s big idea for putting Putin in his place is a measure that would have had very little effect on Russia (which is already dealing with Western economic sanctions) but might have led to marginally higher energy prices in the United States, where the price of gasoline is even more of an explosive political issue than the price of eggs.

 

Not that Trump has figured out a way to crack egg prices: After making egg-flation a prominent part of the 2024 campaign discourse, Trump is watching helplessly as egg prices skyrocket toward record highs. Trump now says it is very hard to get prices to go down once they have gone up. (Obviously, Trump is reading Guillermo Calvo on nominal rigidity in his spare time.) The president, who has been two weeks away from releasing a health-care plan for about a decade, once remarked: “Nobody knew health care could be so complicated!” 

 

Of course, some people knew. Everybody but him.

 

And as it is with health care and inflation, so it is with Russia’s literally genocidal ambitions in Ukraine. It is one thing to push around a country such as Colombia, which is relatively small and highly dependent on trade with the United States, the destination of one-fourth of Colombia’s exports (mainly petroleum again, as well as coffee). But Russia is far away, has an economy nearly six times the size of Colombia’s, and can lean on trade relationships with China and India, among others, with no particular need for access to the U.S. market. Which is to say, threatening to take away Putin’s access to U.S. markets is like threatening to take away Donald Trump’s library card—it’s not like he’s using it a whole heck of a lot.

 

Trump’s flurry of executive orders and memos in his first hours back in the White House made for a lot of drama, but there is only so much even the president of the United States can do by sending out sternly worded missives. Donald Trump may have convinced the lumpensuburbariat that he’s a world-class tough guy, but Vladimir Putin isn’t buying his shtick. I’ve been to Ukraine and seen some of the damage done. On July 8 of last year, Putin’s forces bombed a children’s hospital in Kyiv. Putin knows a soft target when he sees it, and there are few targets in the geopolitical theater right now softer than Donald Trump.