Biden did it
Before meeting with Zelensky, or any other world leaders in town for the event, Trump was already telling reporters that peace could come “almost immediately” if Zelensky ditched NATO and gifted Putin Crimea – the diplomatic equivalent of telling someone to end a mugging by handing over their wallet and the deed to their house.
Jeezus, of course the war would be over if Zelensky surrendered; everybody knows that.
And then it went on. And on, and on, and on. Asked directly about what was happening in Ukraine, Trump would wheel out an irritated, detail-free “We’re going to have lasting peace,” before going right back to his own agenda.
“I used to get great publicity. Now I get the worst publicity that anyone’s ever had in office,” he said, after an unconnected question. Moments later, apropos nothing: “Joe Biden’s a very corrupt politician — not a smart man, by the way. Go back 40 years and he wasn’t smart then, either.”
Says the stupidest adult on the planet.
This tirade continued for a while, took a left turn into how the 2020 election was supposedly stolen from him, and ended with a Biden jab: “He was a horrible, corrupt president!” Zelensky had only minutes before been talking about a one-and-a-half-year-old child who had just been killed in Kharkiv by Russian missiles.
And Trump continued on. He was going to end “corrupt” mail-in ballots and “the machines” (never mind the defamation lawsuits already lost by right-wing media spreading conspiracy theories about voting machines giving inaccurate results.) Mail-in voting is “a fraud” and “the Democrats want it because it’s the only way they get elected.” By the way, they also want “transgender for everybody.” And “they love crime”.
Sir sir sir sir sir we’re here to discuss Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, sir.
And so, somehow, Biden — who isn’t even in the room, who hasn’t been for months — became the central villain of the narrative, eclipsing both Putin and the ongoing missile strikes killing civilians. It’s a remarkable inversion: the man praising the aggressor, lecturing the victim and saving his deepest rage for his domestic rival. If you want to know what obsessions animate Trump’s foreign policy, don’t look to maps of Ukraine; look to the 2020 election.
I’ll admit to believing that it couldn’t get worse than the school bully-style treatment of Zelensky last time he visited Washington, but this was worse. To listen to this press conference, you’d think Biden really was the one rolling tanks into Donetsk. A grievance recital that used the background of war for the foreground of Trump’s hurt feelings is so much less than what the world deserves.
We all saw the red carpet on Friday, the festival-style “ALASKA 2026” and the photo-ops. We all saw the apathy today. Civilians die in Kharkiv, Europe flies in en masse to prop up Ukraine and Trump still finds a way to make the story about his ratings, his stolen thunder, his petty personal rants. If Friday was Broadway-style theater, today was a tragicomedy. And somehow, in the midst of war and mourning, the only thing that got center stage was Trump’s ego.
Well, it does blot out the sky, so…
The whole fiasco is terrible fo Europeans, but perhaps the most terrifying for those in America, especially in the USA, is this bit:
He’s planning to start a war, isn’t he? This time, who’s going to stop him?
I also suggest taking a look at Trump’s response to Ursula von der Leyen saying that what also needs to be brought up in negotiations is Russia’s abduction of possibly up to 35,000 Ukrainian children and their return to Ukraine. Trump obviously did not want to address the matter at all, and pointedly started talking about something else entirely. Another wholly disgusting performance.
It might be difficult to hold elections during a war, but the US has managed it frequently. FDR didn’t call off elections for WWII. Lincoln may have suspended habeas corpus, but he didn’t call off the election. LBJ didn’t call off elections while we were in Vietnam.
It’s also different for Ukraine; they are at the front. The US has always been on the periphery, except in the Revolution and the Civil War. Most of ‘our’ wars are fought on other countries’ territories. We barely know what it’s like to be in a war, in spite of all our air raid drills, nuclear drills, and other things where we practiced ‘duck and cover’.
But is he stupider than the people who vote for him? I hope so…the thought of so many millions as stupid as Trump is, to say the least, frightening. The fact that I live in a state full of Trump voters makes it even more frightening.