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Dear Friends,
It has been a ghastly week and I am having trouble coming to terms with some of its more ghastly events. I do not know if I can write anything helpful about them, but I shall try.
First, it does appear that the President of the United States is going to triple-down on his insistence that Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelenskyy is a “Dictator” who started the war with Russia and wants to keep it going out of greed for a “gravy train.” This is without question the most ghastly foreign policy spectacle of my lifetime; it is the first time I can remember when the United States performed a 180-degree moral inversion. Oh, we’ve had questionable adventures and have worked with bad actors, to be sure; but there was always a rationale of some kind and we knew and we said we are working with bad actors for some noble purpose or other. We have never quite called the good guys bad and the bad guys good. There is a first time for everything, and this particular first time is, well, ghastly.
I cannot improve on the analysis of many others, so I’ll point you to a few of them: Jonah Goldberg, Jim Geraghty, Noah Rothman, Kevin Williamson, Douglas Murray.
What explains this escape from obvious reality? National Review’s Jeff Blehar thinks it isn’t any more complicated than personal animosity. Donald Trump, you might recall, once got impeached because of a phone call he had with Zelenskyy, and so in his brain Zelenskyy is the living representation of all the harassment of the “Russiagate” nonsense of his first term. Not a bad take.
This is bolstered by the Administration’s talking points today: Secretary of State Marco Rubio suggests that Zelenskyy was, well, disrespectful or rude to the President. It would be perfectly on-point for President Trump to conduct his foreign policy on the basis of who is properly respectful to his Ego. Rubio also suggests that Zelenskyy wasn’t very enamored with Trump’s attempts to strike a “deal” on Ukrainian mineral rights. This is also in character for Trump: everything is a quid pro quo transaction (or, more cynically, a shakedown—he wants the kickbacks to which he is entitled).
I think these are good explanations, but I have one more: this is the social media presidency. Donald Trump and his minions live and move and have their being on social media. The sitting Vice President of the United States is—I kid you not—on X (Twitter) arguing with people. It is so undignified that I cringe with embarrassment. And today he did an off-the-cuff backstage interview at CPAC in which he called Zelenskyy ungrateful and “stupid” for not being more respectful to President Trump because—and this was his literal rationale—you can only get Trump to change his mind by being nice to him. This is how we do international diplomacy now: in soundbites on a social media reel. And as a substantive matter, it is ridiculous to suggest that US aid to Ukraine makes Zelenskyy some kind of vassal who must pay fealty, rather than a duly elected president looking out for the interests of his own country. And—this part is important, so listen up—it is very much in the interests of his country that the President of the United States stop lying about Ukraine and promoting Russian propaganda; he’d be derelict to not complain about that. And if complaining about that upsets Mr. Trump and Mr. Vance (because they insist on continuing to lie and promote Russian propaganda), then Zelenskyy is, indeed, in a no-win scenario.
Now, if there is one thing social media is good for, it is forming intellectual and tribal “bubbles” that are impenetrable. And this is my theory: very early on in the Ukraine war MAGA-world decided that Ukraine was the bad guy—Zelenskyy is corrupt, they said; Ukraine “made” Putin invade by seeking NATO entry, they claimed; and so on and so forth. This was around the time I basically stopped following The Babylon Bee; their relentless jokes about Zelenskyy being some kind of con-man grifter filling his pockets with U.S. aid money while innocent civilians in Bucha were being raped and butchered by Russian soldiers was grotesque.
The more important thing to notice is why MAGA decided that Ukraine was the bad guy. There is only one reason—well, two. First, because Donald Trump said so. But, more importantly, the Democrats and the Left more generally were enthusiastic supporters of Ukraine. And MAGA is for whatever the Left is against, and they are against whatever the Left is for. Their entire political “philosophy” can be summed up in two words: “Owning libs.” It doesn’t seem to me any more complicated than that, and it’s a political philosophy destined for real-world failure, if not catastrophe.
And here’s the next important factor: because of the social media bubble, these people believe their own BS. They believe they are popular, that they won a “landslide,” that Trump is King Midas and everything he says or touches is gold, that Americans want whatever he wants.
This is why Donald Trump is spending political capital like a sailor so drunk he is nearly comatose. The reality is that the vast majority of Americans know full-well that Vladimir Putin is a ruthless dictator, a butcher, the guy who invaded Ukraine, and the all-around bad guy. And if Trump really does believe his own BS, and if JD Vance and Marco Rubio really are going to triple-down on this stuff, I believe this administration might flame out just as spectacularly as it flamed up during its first month. You see, this is an issue that might lose the President his congressional support. I do not presently believe the John Thunes and Tom Cottons and Lindsey Grahams and Mike Johnsons and Dan Crenshaws and Chip Roys are, at the end of the day, going to go along with throwing Ukraine to Vladimir Putin if it comes down to appropriations or a military aid fight. And Trump needs every single one of those votes to accomplish anything legislatively he wants to accomplish. Donald Trump’s ego is going to lose him some vital leverage.
I did not think it existed, but we may have finally found the bottom. The point at which a significant enough number of Donald Trump’s sycophants stop following him. They went along with the “stolen election;” they went along with “actually, the J-6ers are political prisoners;” they went along with the degradation of the Republican platform on the right to life; they went along with a hundred other calumnies. But will they follow Donald Trump into complete and obvious moral reversal, a moral grotesquery 90 percent of the American people can see with their own two eyes? That is the dumbest electoral politics imaginable—and only Donald Trump doesn’t have to worry about elections anymore. They do.
Well, Marco Rubio’s spine somehow turned to the consistency of a jellyfish, so they probably will go along with this. But maybe not. Maybe someone other than Mitch McConnell will take up the role of loyal opposition. If no one does, heaven help us. And the Ukrainians.
Ghastly was the scene in Gaza.
The return of four coffins, handed over by Hamas to the Red Cross, was a macabre pageant. The coffins, containing (we were led to believe) the bodies of 83-year old Oded Lifshitz, 32-year old Shiri Bibas and her 4-year old son, Ariel, and her 9-month-old Kfir, all four kidnapped and murdered hostages, were displayed proudly on a stage decorated with propaganda posters, including one showing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as a vampire with bloody fangs. The coffins were then lifted and paraded through the streets by Hamas warriors in battle garb as crowds cheered and celebrated the dead Jewish bodies.
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