A Trump-Putin confidence scheme in real time. The marks, Ukraine and the West.

"Trump said ..."

— the first two words of a deliberate muddle, a fated betrayal, a con game's inexorability. With "Trump said," the scheme is in motion, the incoherence begins to take form.

With "Trump said," somebody is going to get screwed.

In the latest unfolding of his swindling pathology, "Trump said," reports The NY Times, that Vladimir Putin "agreed that Ukraine should have " precisely what the Russian tyrant has opposed fang and claw throughout his manly campaign of slaughtering thousands of women and children: a postwar warranty against an absolute — another invasion, another epoch of mass murder, another Ukrainian holocaust.

That Putin agreed to any such thing with so much as a dram of sincerity is laughable, that he faked it is questionable, and that Trump simply made it up — pretty much bankable. It's what con artists do.

"Trump said" just before the Alaska meeting of brains and bullshit that a ceasefire is uppermost and vital. Absent that, not one step farther, no sir. But five minutes with Putin and the paramount ceasefire morphed vaporously into the solid form of a peace settlement — an even mightier impossibility.

Which was Putin's keenest objective. He conned Trump out of a ceasefire and now Trump is conning others about a postwar security guarantee. Or let's just say he's trying. "Ukrainian lawmakers cautioned that they remained confused about what exactly Mr. Trump had in mind and what Mr. Putin may have agreed to," writes the Times.

Trump's thinking and Putin's agreeing translate into a session of three-card monte, and the lawmakers know it. But in reactive understatement, they're being tactful, "express[ing] worries that Mr. Trump may have misread what Moscow would be willing to accept and overstated his own proposal to Ukraine" (italics mine).

Trump's overstatement is far likelier than his misreading of a fellow scammer. At any rate, Volodymyr Zelensky — remember him? the bombed and bloodied country's president? you know, the Alaska meeting's irrelevancy? — now "aim[s] to seek clarity on potential security guarantees" when he visits the former United States on Monday.

Hell, Trump'll give 'em writing. What does he care? This Bernie Madoff of international negotiations will sign agreements and guarantees with all the pious abandon of a Ribbentrop in 1939. Zelensky, however, is no Molotov.    

Yet awareness of Trump's double-crossing con artistry won't save his country. And therein lies the facedown joker in the scheming twosome's three-card fraud: NATO-Europe is perforce unwilling to do what the West owes Ukraine and itself — military intervention.

Zelensky's continental friends "including France, Britain and Germany formed a 'coalition of the willing' to help safeguard an eventual peace," notes the Times. "They would be willing to send troops to Ukrainian soil after the conflict ends." How very timeline-twisting, how obliterating for Ukraine, how suicidal for Western civilization.

Were Trump a part of the latter, were the U.S. still the free world's leader dedicated to maintaining its freedom, Europe would follow — to be followed by the West kicking Putin's hegemonic ass back to Russia's soon-frozen steppes. As it is, all liberal democracy has globally is "Trump said ..." And with that, the good guys are going to get screwed.

* This piece is cross-posted at my Substack page; subscribe to be notified of new posts, no cost.