Mel Brooks had it only partly right. It’s good to be king, but it’s hell to be president.
Republished with permission from Lucian K. Truscott IV
Let’s try to imagine ourselves into the mind of Donald Trump. I know, I know…you don’t want to go there, and neither do I, but I don’t want you to contend with every dark corner of the echoing cavern of his madness, I just want you to ask yourself, what could he have been thinking when he came up with the idea that he could get along with Elon Musk and Vladimir Putin?
Last year, when Trump was running for president, he took nearly $300 million from Musk to help him win key battleground states, and he bathed in Musk’s daily X posts and re-posts attacking Biden and puffing up his pal Trump. In return, upon taking office, Trump basically turned the government over to Musk and his video game playing cohorts whom he hired to staff DOGE and let him run amok for the first few months of his administration, slashing budgets, firing people, even closing completely an entire department of the federal government, USAID.
When it came to his buddy, Vladimir, Trump made ending the war in Ukraine the linchpin of his “America first” foreign policy agenda, bellowing from rally stages again and again that he had such a wonderful relationship with Putin, he could get the war in Ukraine ended “in a day.”
There is a popular phrase that springs immediately to mind: how did that work out for you?
What was really behind all that buddy-buddy talk about Putin and Trump’s real, in person, buddy-buddy behavior with Musk? I mean, how could Trump thank him? What can you give the world’s richest man? You can’t buy him anything. He’s got all the Gulfstreams he wants, all the fertile girlfriends he can handle, more children than Noah had animals on the ark, he owns X, and he’s got the majority of satellites that orbit around the earth, more than any other country including the United States.
So, he does something no other president has ever done in the 249 years of our history. He turns over the most precious square footage of real estate in the world to Elon to put on a show for the media with his son, engaging in a spew of braggadocio that left Trump sitting there at Abraham Lincoln’s desk with a blank look on his face.
Trump didn’t even wait to move into the Oval Office to start talking to Putin. He was chatting up the Russian axe-murderer during the campaign, the transition, from Mar-a-Lago, he even brought Musk in on a Putin conference call. What do you think he figured he could accomplish? Did he really believe he could talk Putin into anything, much less ending the war that has come to define the man’s power over the country of Russia?
I think Trump wanted their respect, Putin’s and Musk’s. If he got their respect, then the world would respect and fear him, all those European priss-pots in their hand-tailored suits and ferriner attitudes. Even his fellow despots like Erdogan and Orban would look up to him.
But it fell apart, didn’t it? And fast, when you think about it. He’s a little more than five months into his presidency, and he’s having a hell of a time making stuff happen the way he wants it. Look at the train-wreck this week over aid to Ukraine! Somebody suspended it. Trump doesn’t know who. He answered a question from a reporter in the White House with “I don’t know. You tell me.” Another reporter asked him today if he had been able to “figure out” who cancelled the Ukraine aid. Here is Trump’s reply: “Well, I haven’t thought about it because we’re looking at Ukraine right now and munitions, but I have—no, I have not gone into it.” The same reporter asked, “What does it say that such a big decision could be made inside your government without you knowing?” Trump looked flummoxed: “I would know. If a decision was made, I will know. I’ll be the first to know. In fact, most likely, I’ll give the order, but I haven’t done that yet.”
This after reports in the press that defensive weapons are back in the pipeline, that 30 Patriots are sitting in Poland ready to cross the border, that shipments of artillery shells have resumed.
The matter of the Epstein files, something he and his supporters promised would blow the lid off all the pedophiles in the Democratic Party they’ve been yapping about since Pizzagate, has blown up in his face. Nobody is happy. The MAGA base is screaming. Steve Bannon is sweating through his three shirts in his air conditioned studio. Trump’s favorite suck-up, Pam Bondi, is left sitting there telling the same lies they’ve accused the Democrats of telling, that there is no there there with Epstein, and nobody from Biden World or anywhere else got into the Manhattan jail and murdered him.
And then the heavens open up in central Texas and his whole fire-em-cut-em-and-forget-em strategy about that damn guvmint the right has been screaming about for 40 years got drowned in 30 feet of water along with more than 100 bodies, and counting. The NOAA was a hotbed of global-warming libs! We’ll take care of them. We’ll fire ‘em and reassign’em and close their offices and tell ‘em to stop sending up all them weather balloons, ‘cause we’ve got Mr. Sharpie in the Oval Office! The man can turn a hurricane around with the stroke of his pen!
Can’t a guy get up in the morning and have something go right? His pal Musk is threatening to form a third party, and that MF’er is the one who said Trump was in the Epstein files in the first place! And Putin! Jeez, you call the guy up and ask him to lay off Ukraine and start thinking about what kind of deal we can make, and 30 minutes later, he launches one of the biggest barrages he’s ever fired at Ukraine’s population centers! “He’s not treating human beings right. He’s killing too many people.”
If it’s not the floods killin’ em, it’s the measles, and that blows up the whole anti-vax thing he kept hinting at, wink-wink, maybe try some bleach and vitamin A, wink-wink, I’ve got RFK Jr. in my pocket, wink-wink, and if it’s not the measles, it’s Putin’s fucking drones killin’ em, and take a look at what he’s saying about his pal Vlad now: “We get a lot of bullshit thrown at us by Putin, if you want to know the truth. He’s very nice all the time, but it turns out to be meaningless.”
Duh.
Mel Brooks had it only partly right. It’s good to be king, but it’s hell to be president.
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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