Please don’t get me wrong. I realise it’s hardly sporting trying to hold President Trump to account for anything he says.
The Donald tends to run off at the mouth before, usually instead of, taking the trouble to think things through. As a result, he often changes his mind back and forth kaleidoscopically, with one lurid verbal picture ousting another, often with little gap in between.
Yet whenever the subject of Russia comes up, one leitmotif remains constant. Trump likes Putin and doesn’t really mind what he does to the Ukraine, whose president he doesn’t like. The Donald may at times be mildly critical of the Russian chieftain, but this is only an ornamentation on the main theme: Putin is a man after Trump’s own heart, and neither Zelensky nor America’s European allies are.
Hence, against my better judgement, I propose you join me in the ungrateful task of interpreting Trump’s remarks at the G7 meeting that drew to a close yesterday. I’ll be happy to entertain any conclusions that may diverge from my uncompromising statement in the previous paragraph. So here goes:
“The G7 used to be the G8. Barack Obama and a person named Trudeau didn’t want to have Russia in. And I would say that that was a mistake. Because I think you wouldn’t have a war right now if you had Russia in.”
What conclusions can one draw from these remarks? First, Trump doesn’t have much time for Barack Obama and ‘a person named’ Justin Trudeau, and for once I share his view. Obama was a bad excuse for a president, and Trudeau for a prime minister.
Justin in particular was a joke, but then he had a bad heredity pulling him down. His mother used to bestow her favours on all and sundry, mainly pop stars and Hollywood actors. And snapshots of her billowing skirt delighted tabloid readers by proving that Margaret Trudeau eschewed a certain undergarment that many ladies in her position would have found indispensable.
Her husband, Pierre, himself Canada’s PM, had the same ideological bend and intellectual vacuity as his son, but unlike him he also possessed quite some panache.
Once, I recall, he received a delegation of workers who had been on strike so long they complained they couldn’t even afford bread. Taking his cue from the apocryphal statement ascribed to Marie-Antoinette, Pierre said: “Mangez de la merde”. I’m not sure that was an improvement on the original, but you be the judge.
Getting back to Trump, things went downhill fast after that dig at politicians he justifiably dislikes. For one thing, Trump got his facts wrong, or at least their causal and temporal relationship.
Why was it a mistake to expel Russia from the G8? The reason Trump cites makes no sense at all. That action was taken in response to Putin’s having started a war with the Ukraine by illegally annexing the Crimea in 2014.
So is Trump saying that, had Putin been allowed to stay in the G8, he would have immediately sued for peace? Sorry, but that just doesn’t add up. Another thought comes more naturally: realising that Western powers are incapable of taking any punitive action, Putin would have escalated the war to a full-blown invasion even sooner.
Still, Trump’s next statement, that Putin “was insulted”, rings true, coming from Trump. It takes one hypersensitive egomaniac to know another, and Trump understands a mind so similar to his own.
“This was a big mistake,” Trump continued. “I can tell you that [Putin] basically doesn’t even speak to the people that threw him out, and I agree with him.” [My emphasis.] The implication is that Trump himself would have reacted to a personal slight in the same criminally irresponsible manner, and I believe him.
“Putin speaks to me. He doesn’t speak to anybody else,” added Trump, paraphrasing himself, as is his wont. Birds of a feather and all that, but what’s astonishing is that he seems proud of his unique status with that mass murderer.
Not that his rapport with Putin has done Trump’s diplomacy much good. Vlad puts his KGB training to good use by leading the US president up one garden path after another, while the criminal war goes on and Ukrainian civilians keep dying.
One would be forgiven for getting the impression that perhaps the best way to speak to Putin isn’t in ego-stroking words. Take it from someone who grew up in a city crawling with Putin types: a punch in the snout works much better. In this case, that pugilistic act can take the shape of imposing tougher and strictly enforced sanctions, while increasing supplies of armaments for the Ukraine.
Trump’s art of the deal doesn’t seem to include an aspect of once bitten, twice shy. Had he allowed his business partners to dupe him commercially as often as Putin dupes him politically, the Donald would have had to declare even more bankruptcies than he did.
Yet the man is nothing if not persistent. Dealt a bad hand, he decided to double down: Trump knows of no better candidate than Putin to mediate the Israel-Iran conflict.
That idea is insane on more levels than one finds in a Trump Tower. For one thing, since Iran and Russia are military allies, one suspects Putin would be ever so slightly biased in his mediating capacity.
Still, credit where it’s due, Trump’s suggestion succeeded in making even Manny Macron sound like a statesman. “Moscow could not be a negotiator because it had started an illegal war against Ukraine,” he said. I couldn’t have put it better myself, even though I do favour the definite article before ‘Ukraine’, for old times’ sake.
Trump also managed to make Sir Keir Starmer look good, which task had until then proved impossible for Labour publicists. Sir Keir manfully rejected the idea of readmitting Putin to the forum, saying he was “happy with the make-up of it.”
If it were up to Trump, all sanctions against Russia would be lifted, Putin would take his seat at the next conference of world leaders, and the Trump Organisation would finally be allowed to build tasteless towers all over Moscow and Petersburg.
Happiness all around, except in the Ukraine and the rest of Eastern Europe. They’d know exactly what was coming.