A Grotesquerie for Our Age
Trump blames Ukraine for being invaded.
Via NBC News: Trump says Ukraine ‘should have never started’ war in Ukraine.
President Donald Trump suggested Tuesday that Ukraine was responsible for Russia’s invasion of the country three years ago, arguing Kyiv could have made a deal to avoid the conflict.
“You should have never started it,” Trump said of Ukraine while criticizing President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who had expressed concern that his country was not included in talks between the U.S. and Russia in Saudi Arabia.
“I think I have the power to end this war, and I think it’s going very well. But today I heard, ‘Oh, well, we weren’t invited.’ Well, you’ve been there for three years,” Trump told reporters at his Mar-a-Lago resort. “You should have never started it. You could have made a deal.”
This is a stunningly stupid, enragingly awful, historically grotesque comment.
And we can add in delusional.
Trump went on to say: “I could have made a deal for Ukraine that would have given them almost all of the land, everything, almost all of the land, and no people would have been killed, and no city would have been demolished, and not one dome would have been knocked down. But they chose not to do it that way.”
Trump’s obsession with “deals” is not only silly and juvenile but rather substantially undercut by his multiple bankruptcies and the fact that his vaunted tome, The Art of the Deal, was ghostwritten.
But let’s recall that Russia invaded Ukraine. Blaming Ukraine for the invasion is like saying (to borrow from a friend on FB), “If you saw what Ukraine was wearing, you know she asked for it.”
And for all the people who continue to insist that any hint that Trump and his minions aren’t influenced by the Russians, please note Moscow’s reaction.
Meanwhile, the reaction in Moscow to the change in direction of U.S. foreign policy has been more upbeat.
The U.S. president is “the first, and so far, apparently, the only Western leader who has publicly and loudly said that one of the root causes of the Ukrainian situation was the brazen path of the previous administration to draw Ukraine into NATO,” Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said in a speech to Russian lawmakers Wednesday. “No Western leader has ever said this,”
“This is already a signal that he understands our position,” Lavrov added in a speech that covered the broader second Trump administration rather than the president’s specific remarks Tuesday.
As the AP reports: Ukraine’s Zelenskyy says Trump is living in a Russian-made ‘disinformation space’.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy accused U.S. President Donald Trump on Wednesday of living in a Russian-made “disinformation space,” pointed comments that risked further souring relations with Washington as the American leader pushes for an end to the war.
Meanwhile, Russian President Vladimir Putin said he would like to meet with Trump, a day after senior American and Russian officials held talks that were partially aimed at preparing just such a summit.
Zelenskyy said he “would like Trump’s team to be more truthful” in his first response to a series of striking claims the U.S. president made the previous day, including suggesting that Kyiv was to blame for the war, which enters its fourth year next week.
Russia’s army crossed the border on Feb. 24, 2022, in an all-out invasion that Putin sought to justify by saying it was needed to protect civilians in eastern Ukraine and prevent the country from joining NATO. Ukraine and its allies denounced it as an unprovoked act of aggression.
As I noted earlier in the week, the Trump administration is treating the Ukrainians like children, which is wildly inappropriate. And it is currently siding with its invader.
I am trying to think of a bigger betrayal of an ally by a US president, but I am at a loss. I do expect that whatever “deal” Trump hammers out will be at the top of the list.
We’re clearly at the point where, in the history of American authoritarianism and fascism, words don’t matter. The incumbent just says whatever he wants to say, whatever seems the most useful for him at the moment, whatever falsehood he wants to force others to repeat, as signs of subservience, as tools of the effort to undermine democracy, the rule of law, and civil society.
I know it’s hard not to be outraged. Some outrage is merely a natural human response, and is to that degree, a healthy reminder that we haven’t succumbed to the relentless cynicism. But we should not be surprised at anything said. Surprise means that we’re still holding on to a fragment of hope that terrible people will stop being terrible, that kindness and decency will spring ex nihilo out of their shriveled hearts. That is not a healthy response.
We need to be able to put the right words to what is happening, not just to frame our outrage properly, but also to ensure that we insist on the right choices. “Ensuring Ukraine’s security” is a far too antiseptic polite word for, “Preventing any further Ukrainian children from being murdered, maimed, or kidnapped, along with all the other atrocities that Russian has inflicted.”
Hey, when you’re talking about OIL, REAL ESTATE, HOTELS, what’s the problem with delivering some Ukrainians to the Ruskies or cleansing some Palestinians.
All the while, Repubs in congress sit silently in agreement.
Peace in our time, baby!
Does anyone remember the Japanese blamed America for Pearl Harbor?
He is fully beholden to Putin. There can no longer be any doubt.
@Kingdaddy: Sadly, I am not surprised.
So what happens if US announces some surrender plan for Ukraine, but Europe steps in to continue to support Ukraine without American insistence? Is that when we step out of NATO? Do we begin actively assisting Russia by first lifting sanctions and then what? When are we in a proxy war with our former European allies?
Not unexpected. The orange Putin-puppet praised his bestie Epstein for liking women “on the younger side” and publicly lusted after his own daughter. So it’s been known from long ago that Trump is lacking in the most basic ethics and morals — hence why he’s supported by the biggest losers in America.
That Trump is shameless pathological liar who was compared to Hitler by his own VP, top general, and chief-of-staff is also no secret. Trump’s supporters and defenders also lie constantly.
So of course Trump and Musk would falsely blame the people of Ukraine for Putin’s imperialistic warmongering that has seen Ukrainian men, women and children slaughtered, raped, kidnapped, and bombed. Amorality + rightwing dishonesty = the inevitable.
MAGA hates America, hates Europe, and hates Western values. MAGA loves Hitler, fascism, and Putin. This is the inevitable consequence of re-electing MAGA’s depraved leader, a traitor and thug who incited a terror attack on Congress.
Just watched a video clip of Trump’s Neville Chamberlain warm-up.
By way of CNN:
Yeah, the approval ratings show Zelensky at 57%. Is the margin of error here at +/- 53%?
He’s using Russian talking points, disinformation and lies without attribution.
Several years ago, Trump said that he’d have the Ukraine war settled in 24 hours if he were president. How? “Give Russia what it wants.”
His words.
The Putin deal was: here comes our tanks down the highway to Kiev, surrender your statehood, language, identity while we pillage, rape your women, kidnap your children.
Trump, in addition to being a moron, is a pathological liar. We all know this. The world knows this. But our fellow citizens who voted for him do not care, because their bigotry and/or opportunism, takes precedence over practicality and honest-to-goodness morality.
Our fellow citizens have zero sense of the “treasure of a society” they will lose in making their pact with the devil.
It is no small coincidence that Trump himself lusts after empire, threatening our allies and neighbors and renaming whole chunks of geography.
Again, let’s be clear, Trump is a moron, but he has a cadre of misanthropes feeding him the details and the methodologies.
Isn’t this about the time where @Andy should tell us that we have nothing to worry about and that Trump‘s words really don’t matter and that we should wait and see for his language to have real world impacts before we react negatively?
Asking for a friend
Meanwhile, we have a growing measles outbreak in West Texas and New Mexico. Polio is making a comeback. The bird flu is expanding, and the DOGE team has fired the NIH researchers working on the bird flu and can’t figure out how to hire them back
Nothing to see here, folks. Move along.
If you can, get out. It’s not going to get better anytime soon.
God forbid AP should report that Trump is lying and/or wrong, rather than simply noting that Zelenskyy said something. At a certain point, “some scientists question idea that moon is made of green cheese” is an abdication of journalistic responsibility.
@Kathy: It’s even worse/stranger/weirder than that. It’s England blaming America for the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor.
The sheer stupidity and arrogance and fealty to Russia/Putin is astonishing.
There is no excuse for this. He has lost his damn mind.
This morning Trump called Zelenskyy a dictator. He also claimed that Zelenskyy has a 4% approval rating. In reality, it’s 57%–that’s 8 points higher than Trump’s.
I’m upping my direct donations to Ukraine.
This country acted as one with moral clarity during WWII, opposing the obscenity of Nazi fascism, and then quickly pivoted to block Soviet aggression expansionism. Korea came on the heels of WWII. Keeping the south from being consumed by the north in Korea has proven to be a good decision.
But ever since that time with Vietnam, Grenada, Panama, and more recently with Afghanistan and Iraq 2.0, motive became questionable and moral clarity lacking. The lies have been stacking up.
We are now confronted with the most globally consequential armed confrontation of our time since WWII, against a resurrected foe that we spent maximum national effort for 45 years to contain.
Now Ukraine represents, to the West and the U.S., national security, economic stability, and moral clarity all rolled into one cause.
I stand with Ukraine.
My go-to comparator for Trump is Andrew Jackson. I think it holds up here.
Jackson defied court orders to carry out Indian Removal – ethnic cleansing. Many of the native peoples who were removed were groups that had been his, and the US’s allies in conflicts both against the British in the War of 1812 and the Spanish in the whole Florida thing.
I don’t know how to compare this, though. It’s breathtakingly awful. Ukraine is going to need to get nukes.
@Kathy:
Seems there was some blame tossed about, over the U.S. restricting Japan’s trade and access to materials like steel. Probably some material on the topic in the neo-fascists’ reading rooms.
@Joe:
Yep. That is a real possibility.
@Jen:
I adore you, Jen. But no, he hasn’t lost his damn mind.
He knows what he is doing.
These people are pro-imperialism. End of story.
Their supporters are some combination of: religious zealots who think policy will bring Armageddon, selfish, stupid, loud, arrogant, pliant, colonized, wear their intellectual learned helplessness as a badge of honor, marks, lazy, entitled, live in a fantasy land, authoritarian, fascist, ‘libertarian’. Some of those people think the US is entitled to whatever they want.
Trump may be mediocre intelligence-wise, but he knows how to get seals, mostly already trained, to bark. Irony alert, @Connor used that phrase to describe the front-pagers and almost every regular here.
Musk is a typical tech version of something we know well–managers and financiers whose main talent is convincing the public that they did the hard work.
They know what they are doing.
Here is something that I have been unwilling to say. Actually, unwilling to think:
If @Andy is wrong, we will be weighing some serious moral questions at some point in the near future. Some of them, the majority of us here have not had to consider as more than abstractions. Other questions, we have had to make peace with, knowing that we benefit from the blood and bones of others. But for the first time, we will have to come to terms with the whole bowl of shit.
Then there will be a test of practical resolve if that rubber has to meet concrete.
I am hoping that I am overreacting to the news in combination while simultaneously reading a book about Allen Dulles.
I’ve never had to hope to be wrong quite like this.
Fuck.
@Rob1: I praised Trump a few weeks ago for talking tough to Putin. I thought maybe he planned to get at least one thing right.
I should’ve known better.
I was hoping for a bit of pushback from Fox News, but it seems not.
They don’t say that Zelensky’s approval is 4 percent, but they say it has plummeted since the start of the war, and that elections in Ukraine have been delayed (for fear of election interference by Russia).
That’s a hell of a game plan (by Putin, who has said that “democracy’s time is coming to an end”. I guess he figures he’s the guy to end it.
These are the stakes, though. Make no mistake. Putin wants to end democracy. Not just in Russia, or Ukraine. Everywhere.
@Jay L Gischer:
And Trump is okay with this, apparently.
Maybe George HW Bush screwing over the Kurds. Maybe.
But this is top tier betrayal.
Unless we were ever ostensibly allies with any Native American nations, in which case definitely them.
@Kingdaddy: “We’re clearly at the point where, in the history of American authoritarianism and fascism, words don’t matter. The incumbent just says whatever he wants to say, whatever seems the most useful for him at the moment, whatever falsehood he wants to force others to repeat, as signs of subservience, as tools of the effort to undermine democracy, the rule of law, and civil society.”
‘Incumbent’? Methinks that you are misspelling’Trump’.
@Gustopher: This is a betrayal which will likely have huge consequences, far beyond Ukraine.
Mike Pence has blasted Trump on Twitter for saying that Ukraine started the war, per ABC.
@CSK:
From October of last year:
Kamala told us this would happen before the election, but Fox News, Twitter, and Republicans en masse said she was lying. She wasn’t lying, but too many citizens were betrayed by the GOP and their disinformation system.
At risk of beating a dead horse, the American voters were sold a fraud and now they are being betrayed.
@Scott F.:
Didn’t Trump also say he’d lower the price of groceries on Day One, too?
So, I think it’s awful, y’all think it’s awful. NATO leaders think its awful.
I wonder about how the American voters feel about it. What are the polls gonna say tomorrow or Friday?
I mean, it’s one thing to think we are spending too much on aid to Ukraine – the “it’s not our problem” camp – and quite another to think “Ukraine started it”.
@Jay L Gischer: American voters, by and large do. not. care.
They are innumerate enough to think that us handing over Ukraine’s fate to Russia is going to “save us money” and they do not know, or care, enough about the world at large to give AF about the broader geopolitical implications.
It’s depressing.
@Kathy: Interesting you bring that up. The home base of the US Pacific fleet had been San Diego for many years. Moving it to Pearl was ‘aggressive’ much like promising Ukraine membership in EU/NATO is ‘aggession’.
@al Ameda:
Rather unfair on Chamberlain.
At least he never blamed the Czechs for Munich.
And ended up declaring war on Germany, and spoke to the nation with these words:
I seem to recall Churchill saying of Chamberlain (can’t find the exact quote or source) something like:
“Hitler misunderstood Chamberlain, and mistook his hatred of war for cowardice. In fact he had a stern core, and hated being deceived and cheated by that man.”
@JohnSF:
Fair enough. But as you probably know, many of us came to know of ‘Neville Chamberlain’ as being synonymous with appeasement. It is a shorthand term to be sure.
@Jen:
Ding. Ding. Ding.
Nor do they understand that there will be economic consequences.
I have run across so many posts on Reddit from Europeans responding to dumb posts by Americans. They express shock at the ignorance and poor thought processes on display. (That doesn’t even get into the collective head shaking about how poorly structured the economy is.)
The kicker: if one looked only at form, often the OP would not appear to be dumb. But content-wise? Oof.
I am pretty much stuck here, too.
My best shot at an exit plan was a woman I dated for a year or so. We broke up several weeks ago. She has UK citizenship. But that relationship did not progress. Did not click enough.
@Barry:
On that point of “words don’t matter”, what bothers me is the press. Watch that press conference. Trump spouts false statistics and the press people there never asked him for the source of those figures. It’s the obvious question. Are they are all afraid of getting banned from future press conferences? That posting, for journalists, is a high achievement. They finally “made it” and are afraid of losing it, I guess.
For the moment Trump has them cowed…and he knows it. Words still matter, it’s the truth that doesn’t.
@DK:
That’s all part of the Trump blowhard routine. And you never know what’s going to come out thecl other end.
@JohnSF:
Making Chamberlain the scapegoat avoids the truth of UK public opinion, when the majority still had The Somme in mind. “It was all Neville’s fault” is what the public prefers to remember. Churchill knows this when he cuts Neville some slack: The British military was not in any way, shape or form a plausible threat to the Wehrmacht and Luftwaffe in central Europe at that time.
@Jen:
Can anyone lose something they never had?
@JohnMc:
I can’t see anything short of massing troops at the border, or engaging in a deliberate troop/ship buildup, as aggression, absent tangible, actionable, and reliable intelligence that an attack is being planned.
@dazedandconfused:
Also the Labour Party’s tendency to re-write history and shuffle aside whistling from it’s record of voting against defence spending increase before 1938.
And it’s fantasy of reliance on vague “League of Nations collective action”
Though it must be said that the British Army and RAF were both in a poor state in 1938.
But nonetheless, in combination with the French, given the will, could probably have punched through to the Ruhr, if the Wehrmacht had been engaged in Bohemia.
Certainly a lot of German generals were worried about that danger.
My opinion has always been that of Churchill: the UK and France should have declared war the day that Hitler decreed the reintroduction of conscription. Before the army reserves were rebuit, German was in a hopeless position.
But, alas, politics and public opinion in both countries ruled that out.