President Donald Trump’s greatest delusion is that he is a superior president to George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and Thomas Jefferson. Perhaps Trump’s second-greatest delusion is that Russian President Vladimir Putin respects him.
Putin has repeatedly proven his disdain for the president, most recently with an assassination plot in the Washington, D.C., suburbs. But having tricked Trump into drinking from his poisoned energy chalice, Putin is now brutally presenting Trump as a foolish Muppet.
On Sunday, Trump declared that both Ukraine and Russia had agreed to end attacks on one another’s energy infrastructure. While Ukraine quickly expressed its support for the ceasefire and suspended attacks on Russian energy sites, Russia stayed quiet, at least rhetorically. After all, just a few hours after Trump’s statement, Russia struck a Ukrainian power plant. Then came the Russian onslaught overnight on Tuesday. In a massive attack involving more than 100 ballistic missiles and drones, Russia struck numerous Ukrainian energy sites. Some 600,000 people lost power, and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky warned that the energy network was under extreme pressure. Putin seeks to freeze Ukraine’s people as the cold winter approaches.
Trump has been made to look like a very Russian-style fool. Rather than show even the slightest regard for Trump’s energy ceasefire, Putin has flipped the script, using missiles to paint the American president as utterly impotent. The scale of Tuesday’s attack proves that Putin believes Trump lacks the stomach to confront him. Assuming Trump fails to punish Putin for so bloodily repudiating his peace efforts, the Russian leader will score a further victory: He’ll be able to present the United States as weak and its president as a vacuous blabbermouth. American allies will lament it, but Chinese President Xi Jinping will surely toast Putin for that gift.
Trump has a big problem here. Putin is challenging him in the most visceral way possible. These attacks on Ukraine’s energy infrastructure are plainly designed as a very personal affront to Trump’s much-valued sense of machismo. Here, too, we see Putin’s KGB officer gamesmanship.
First, Putin successfully leveraged Trump’s frustration over escalating diesel prices in the run-up to the Nov. 3 midterm elections. Offering Trump the dangle of diesel exports that will have a negligible effect on gas prices, Putin banked on Trump’s impulsiveness and associated unwillingness to consider second- and third-order effects. Getting Trump’s public gratitude for his blatant gimmick, Putin thus danced on the will of Congress and the grave of his despised enemy, Sen. Lindsey Graham (Graham’s sanctions bill on Russian energy exports became law shortly after his demise). Putin has also utterly undermined the West’s unified sanctions against his war.
UNABLE TO BREAK UKRAINE’S DEFENSE, RUSSIA EMBRACES ISLAMIST TERRORIST STRATEGY
But it gets worse. So delusional is Trump about Putin that he also appears to have suspended the sharing of U.S. intelligence that warns Ukraine of incoming Russian ballistic missile attacks. The U.S. claims that “bad weather” was responsible for a missile-warning intelligence failure earlier this week. But that excuse is laughable. U.S. missile-warning systems rely on extremely advanced, redundant infrared and radar systems. Washington, not weather, is the problem here.
In short, Putin has made Trump dance as his blood-soaked Muppet. If Trump has any sense of reality or self-regard, he will teach the Russian leader that he has made a major error.