Trump shafts Ukraine - again

Being an avaricious mercenary and predatory sociopath, Donald Trump is more than just willing to trade thousands of Ukrainian lives for personal pots of gold. He positively drools at the gilded altar of a beckoning Midas.

I have long believed that not the stick of blackmail but the carrot of further enriching himself has been Trump's motivation in appeasing Vladimir Putin time after bloody time. And so it was that the latter despot dialed up the former yesterday in a timely intervention into President Volodymyr Zelensky's White House visit today. In the call, Putin pitched "business deals" to Trump, writes The NY Times.

The Russian cutthroat also heaped obligatory praise on his American target, for he knows that on the adulation susceptible spectrum (ASS), Trump's score is unquantifiably astronomical.

With the imbecile-enchantment maneuver out of the way — How in the name of dumbfounded gods did you ever effect the impossible dream of eternal peace in the Middle East, Donald? — Vlad proceeded to dangle the prospect of a "Putin-Trump tunnel" from Siberia to Alaska in which mined aluminum and other metals could issue, reports the Times.

Doubtless, gold-laced visions of garish Trump Towers stretching from Moscow to Vladivostok danced in the greedy narcissist's head as well — that being Putin's tactical objective. Necessary was the opening of a Tomahawk-missiles-forestalling path so that Russia could avert the mass desolation that the Kremlin's autocrat is dishing out nightly in his exceptionally barbaric invasion of Ukraine.

Trump had recently threatened to ship the devastation-enhanced missiles — Attn: Mr. Zelensky, Presidential Office, Kyiv — "if this war doesn’t get settled" soon, in his tediously recurring words. Thus the Ukrainian leader's White House meeting today. But after Putin's call Thursday, Trump backed off from the essential offense-balancing option.

"We proposed the phone conversation on the heels of President Trump’s successful trip to the Middle East," said Putin's slimy mouthpiece, Dmitri Peskov. "President Putin’s first thought, of course, was to congratulate Trump on such a success," he added, which Putin, of course, knows will convert to yet another Trumpian disaster, this one in the form of Bibi Netanyahu's unyielding genocide of Gaza's Palestinians.

"Putin hasn’t wasted any time in learning how to massage Trump’s ego," said Carnegie's Russia-Eurasia director, Alexander Gabuev, who went on to predict that "the United States would pause meaningful aid deliveries to Ukraine while a potential Budapest summit was being prepared."

The think tanker's prediction required little thinking, nor is the summit a mere potentiality. Putin had pump-primed his flattery-laden call to Trump with a call to Hungary's thuggish Viktor Orbán. I'm sure you won't mind hosting another get-together with the American buffoon, said Putin, so that he can yet again deter Trump from doing what the civilized world knows needs doing.

The Washington, D.C.-based Institute for the Study of War says the low-flying, radar-evading Tomahawks' range of over 1,500 miles would make hundreds of Russian military facilities susceptible to Ukrainian strikes. "The battlefield is what the battlefield is," as military historian Phillips O'Brien has noted. What's critical is that "you'll change the battlefield if you change what gets to the battlefield.... And that's how the war will change."

That's how the war might have changed if Donald Trump possessed what sociopathic personalities lack: concern for others — followed by turning that concern into supplies of vital aid to Ukraine. But what's critical to the foul billionaire is that his boundless avarice is satisfied in the endless process of exchanging thousands more Ukrainian lives for pots of glittering bribery. And Vladimir Putin knew it. Hell, we all did.

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Cross-posted in Substack.