Why Ukraine triggers Trump
Kamala Harris's continued steadiness and Volodymyr Zelenskyy's latest transatlantic visit put an ongoing psychological crack-up into sharper focus
Hello! There are 39 days till election day.
Today, we look at Donald Trump’s reaction to the latest visit by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. First, some news to catch up on.
Four things to know
🇲🇽 Kamala Harris is off to the US-Mexico border today, a chance for her to shore herself up on what the right thinks is her point of maximum vulnerability. The Democrats are rather better positioned on this than they would be in a normal year thanks to Donald Trump’s decision to strongarm senators into blocking a bipartisan border security bill – one that would have gone far further than most Democrats ever would. Harris has promised to sign it.
💍 Having been almost entirely absent from her husband’s campaign since he announced it in November 2022, Melania Trump has finally given a one-on-one Fox News interview. Describing her notoriously adulterous and cruel husband as “a family man”, she fully endorsed him for president at last in a characteristically quiet but poised discussion. The former first lady is promoting her memoir, the matter-of-factly titled Melania, whose austere black-and-white cover evokes the spectacularly dark Demi Moore horror flick The Substance rather than a standard political autobiography.
📺 Meanwhile, on MSNBC, Harris this week gave her first one-on-one major network interview since her debate with Donald Trump. Journalists across the political spectrum have been demanding one for months; now she’s given one and handled it well, discussing policy specifics and offering some actual reflection on public service, few have granted it much in the way of detailed coverage. You can watch the whole thing here; clip below.
🗳️ North Carolina is in strong contention to be the state that decides the election – and with just over a month to go, the State Board of Elections has announced that it has purged some 747,000 voters from the electoral roll in less than two years. The Hill has a write-up here. Remember: in 2016, the election was decided by a margin of around 100,000 votes spread across three states, not just one.
📈 Efforts to blame Harris and Joe Biden for the state of the US economy are running into an inconvenient problem: the economy is doing better than expected. The White House Council of Economic Advisers put it bluntly in its latest press release, writing that “the economy has grown by 3.2% per year during Biden-Harris Administration—even stronger than previously estimated—and better than the first three years of the previous administration”. With impeccable timing, the Washington Post reports that in February 2020, J.D. Vance sent a message to a friend complaining that “Trump has just so thoroughly failed to deliver on his economic populism (excepting a disjointed China policy)”.
The Ukraine factor
Donald Trump will today meet with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, with whom he is often said to have a “fraught relationship”. That is an understatement.
Trump has repeatedly threatened to abandon European NATO members to Russia’s will if they don’t pay more into the alliance’s budget. He and his running mate J.D. Vance have made clear that they simply don’t consider turning back Russia’s invasion a priority.
Vance recently proposed a “peace” settlement that would essentially cede Russia’s gains to Moscow’s control, leading Zelenskyy to suggest he needs to study World War II.
There are several things at play here. A few of them:
Trump is, by all accounts, a profoundly transactional person – provided the transactions are tilted in his favour. Ukraine is essentially asking for the US’s help without having anything to offer in return. At best, he’ll view this with contempt.
His last attempted transaction with the Ukrainian government was his attempt to extort Zelenskyy’s government into investigating Joe and Hunter Biden, an effort that saw him impeached (albeit unsuccessfully) while the elder Biden went on to defeat him in the election.
Much of the pressure on the US to help Ukraine is coming from the EU and NATO, two blocs that Trump clearly hates. He is an America-first chauvinist, not a multilateralist, and any suggestion he should condescend to co-operate with an alliance of smaller countries is anathema.
Trump also takes a perverse pride in military brutality and swagger, and a personal hero of his is US Army General George S. Patton – a man who embodies the idea that it was the overwhelming might of the US, unconstrained by any pleas for moderation, that brought World War II to an end. The idea of co-operating with Europeans to formulate a careful, considered response is the opposite of Trump’s idea of power projection.
The elephant in the room, though, is Vladimir Putin, to whom Trump has been openly sympathetic for years – not just because he admires any given strongman, but because he genuinely seems to crave Putin’s personal favour.
Recall the notorious 2018 Helsinki summit at which he said he accepted the Kremlin’s claims not to have intervened in the 2016 election, going against the assessment of his own intelligence services. (His then-adviser Fiona Hill was so horrified by the meeting that she considered disrupting it by pulling a fire alarm.)
Recall also how Trump blurted out highly classified Israeli intelligence to Putin’s foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, at an Oval Office meeting in 2017, and later defended himself as having an “absolute right” to do so.
The examples of Trump’s softness toward the Kremlin are legion. And while Trump has explicitly and repeatedly praised other authoritarian leaders – China’s Xi Jinping, North Korea’s Kim Jong-un, Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro and especially Hungary’s Viktor Orbán – he does appear to have a special affinity for Putin and Putinism. Why?
I would argue for the following explanations:
Putin is given to crushing dissent and disposing of rivals at will, often lethally and wherever they are in the world, and he shows zero remorse for doing so, instead leaving lesser figures in his regime to issue farcical denials. Trump is jealous of his freedom to do this.
Trump has long sought to do business in Russia, including building a tower in Moscow. The looseness with which money sloshes around there will appeal hugely as opposed to the comparatively transparent US (though he’s trying to get his gargantuan New York state fraud judgment overturned).
Putin is a flatterer, and Trump is uniquely susceptible to flattery. He will be especially hungry for it now he is no longer sure he will be re-elected, and turning fully against Putin would risk cutting off one of his most valuable sources of emotional validation.
Still, Trump wants to be seen as someone Zelenskyy wants to talk to, perhaps partly because the Ukrainian leader seemed so at ease in Harris’s company this week.
Yesterday, he shared what he claimed was a message sent from Zelenskyy via Ukraine’s deputy US ambassador. Real or confected, the message is mostly banal, but for two things: one, it’s a follow-up to an earlier request for a one-on-one meeting with Trump, putting Zelenskyy in a supplicant position; and two, it contains the following line:
You know I always speak with great respect about everything connected with you, and that’s how it should be.
Either the message is real and Zelenskyy knows how to keep Trump sweet with treacly flattery, or it’s a false one written to sooth Trump’s emotional turmoil. Either way, it speaks volumes, and not in the way Trump seems to think.
🕵️ Further reading
Remember Mike Pence, who was forced to flee for his life on January 6th 2021 for refusing to illegally do Donald Trump’s bidding? According to Semafor, he is “quietly laying the ground for a post-Trump future”. Whether he will succeed isn’t clear:
The big question for Pence is: Is there still a place for him in today’s GOP?
The answer isn’t even clear to his fans: Pence doesn’t fit into “the Republican party of today,” said Utah Republican Sen. Mitt Romney. “The Republican Party of tomorrow may be a different matter.”
Partly responsible for displacing Kamala Harris from the news cycle is New York City Mayor Eric Adams, who has been hit with a truly spectacular indictment accusing him of illegally accepting perks from a Turkish airline, among other things. Here’s the New York Times rundown.
And finally
Donald Trump has released the latest in a long line of shamelessly grifty merchandise: a collection of allegedly “magnificent” Trump watches, the most expensive of which retails for $100,000 (not a typo).
A word of warning: according to the site’s FAQ, “the images shown are for illustration purposes only and may not be an exact representation of the product”. Also note that the most expensive watch cannot survive immersion in water.