Trump looking like he will turn 100 next week. Image: Video screeengrab
Trump looking like he will turn 100 next week. Image: Video screeengrab
Mamdani created a YouTube video of how to handle a blowhard in his meeting last week with Trump. If you stand up to him, Trump doesn’t know how to act.
Republished with permission from Lucian K. Truscott IV
The raging trash fire that is the so-called “peace plan” for Ukraine is all the evidence you need that Donald Trump has not only lost the narrative, he’s lost the last clue he ever had about the location of anything even resembling reality.
Trump has been bragging that he will end the war in Ukraine and get the Nobel Peace Prize seemingly since he was in diapers. Ooops. Come to think of it, he is in diapers. He keeps claiming that he has ended seven wars, at least three of which weren’t even wars to begin with. Ukraine, he realizes, is The Big One. We don’t know how often he’s been on the blower with Pal Putin, but a good guess would be weekly. One of their big ideas was to meet in Alaska to discuss the war that Putin could end if he wanted to with a single phone call. That idea fell apart after an entirely embarrassing display of obsequiosity that included greeting a man facing indictment by the Court International Justice with a red carpet that ran between two F-35 fighter jets parked on the tarmac of Joint Base Elmendorf Richardson.
Putin fired rockets and armed drones at the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv the night he and Trump flew back to their respective lairs in Moscow and Washington D.C., so that plan, which never was a plan, utterly fell apart.
It was strange to me at the time, and it remains strange today, that the mainstream media and politicians, especially Republicans, had so little to say about the fact that Putin was ordering up a war crime—purposefully killing civilians—at the same time he was holding “peace” talks with Trump. It’s as if what passes for a political class in this country has completely lost the ability to discern what is criminal and immoral in the actions of a dictator like Vladimir Putin. The “analysis,” such as it was, after the Alaska talks focused on the fact that the talks ended earlier than expected and what that meant. Well, it meant the talks had failed spectacularly, which should have been apparent when there was no press conference held by Trump and Putin afterwards. Instead, Trump stood mute as Putin launched into one of his Khrushchev-style lectures on the “root causes” of his war against Ukraine and a gratuitous and deadly boring history lesson about Russia’s former ownership of Alaska.
Trump’s remarks were uncharacteristically brief. He claimed “great progress” had been made in the talks. Incredibly, as he stood next to the man who was responsible, all by himself, for the war, Trump noted that “five, six, seven thousand people a week” are being killed while claiming that Putin wanted to see an end to the killing as much as he did.
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Lucian K. Truscott IV, a graduate of West Point, has had a 50-year career as a journalist, novelist and screenwriter. He has covered stories such as Watergate, the Stonewall riots and wars in Lebanon, Iraq and Afghanistan. He is also the author of five bestselling novels and several unsuccessful motion pictures. He has three children, lives in rural Pennsylvania and spends his time Worrying About the State of Our Nation and madly scribbling in a so-far fruitless attempt to Make Things Better.
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