Trump is vulnerable. Hit him. Then hit him harder.
The raging trash fire that is the so-called “peace plan” for Ukraine is all the evidence you need that Donald Trump has not only lost the narrative, he’s lost the last clue he ever had about the location of anything even resembling reality.
Trump has been bragging that he will end the war in Ukraine and get the Nobel Peace Prize seemingly since he was in diapers. Ooops. Come to think of it, he is in diapers. He keeps claiming that he has ended seven wars, at least three of which weren’t even wars to begin with. Ukraine, he realizes, is The Big One. We don’t know how often he’s been on the blower with Pal Putin, but a good guess would be weekly. One of their big ideas was to meet in Alaska to discuss the war that Putin could end if he wanted to with a single phone call. That idea fell apart after an entirely embarrassing display of obsequiosity that included greeting a man facing indictment by the Court International Justice with a red carpet that ran between two F-35 fighter jets parked on the tarmac of Joint Base Elmendorf Richardson.
Putin fired rockets and armed drones at the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv the night he and Trump flew back to their respective lairs in Moscow and Washington D.C., so that plan, which never was a plan, utterly fell apart.
It was strange to me at the time, and it remains strange today, that the mainstream media and politicians, especially Republicans, had so little to say about the fact that Putin was ordering up a war crime – purposefully killing civilians – at the same time he was holding “peace” talks with Trump. It’s as if what passes for a political class in this country has completely lost the ability to discern what is criminal and immoral in the actions of a dictator like Vladimir Putin. The “analysis,” such as it was, after the Alaska talks focused on the fact that the talks ended earlier than expected and what that meant. Well, it meant the talks had failed spectacularly, which should have been apparent when there was no press conference held by Trump and Putin afterwards. Instead, Trump stood mute as Putin launched into one of his Khrushchev-style lectures on the “root causes” of his war against Ukraine and a gratuitous and deadly boring history lesson about Russia’s former ownership of Alaska.
Trump’s remarks were uncharacteristically brief. He claimed “great progress” had been made in the talks. Incredibly, as he stood next to the man who was responsible, all by himself, for the war, Trump noted that “five, six, seven thousand people a week” are being killed while claiming that Putin wanted to see an end to the killing as much as he did.
All of which is to say, we should have seen this disaster coming. This week’s “peace plan” turned out to be the same Russian demands that Putin has been making all along – recognition of Russian sovereignty over Crimea, Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson and Ukraine’s acceptance of being turned into a half-country with a smaller military, no rights to treaties or defense agreements with other countries, a defenestrated defense establishment with no right to own or use offensive missiles…one fantasy demand after another.
That was Russia’s stance way back in August in Alaska, and it hasn’t changed a whit since then.
So, what did Trump do? Well, he took Putin’s Alaska “peace plan,” put his stamp of approval on it, and announced that Ukraine had until this Thursday to agree to it.
But that was before Rubio told a gaggle of Senators that the Russians had written the plan, then he said the plan was ours, and then Trump started to back off and claim that it was just a suggested plan and the deadline wasn’t final.
Yet another example of what you get when you mix utter incompetence with a total lack of any morals at all.
Trump is spazzing. He’s lost his grip on his own party. House and Senate Republicans both stiffed him and passed the bill forcing the release of the Epstein files. Marjorie Taylor Greene is using this moment to put herself in the spotlight as a potential future candidate for something or another by standing up to Trump and trashing him in a YouTube video announcing her resignation from the House. Greene has been something of a joke to Democrats, but she’s got the political instincts of a scorpion, and now she has shown herself willing to sting any creature that gets in her way, including Trump.
The Epstein scandal, combined with Trump’s complete capitulation to Putin, shows his weakness and proves he’s the lamest of lame ducks, even with three years left to serve in the now-desecrated White House. He’s incompetent on foreign affairs, he’s crashing the economy with his tariffs, inflation is sitting out there in the weeds just waiting to pop up and bite him in his copious ass, he has allowed the Republicans to show themselves, once again, to have nothing whatsoever to say about health care and insurance other than the same old “free market” garbage that no one takes seriously, and his poll numbers are headed for the third basement below loser.
Best of all, Trump is looking at the midterm elections knowing Republicans are going to lose the House and might lose the Senate. If that happens, he’s going to face yet another Bill of Impeachment in the House and trial in the Senate. Trump hasn’t got enough gold leaf to paper over his ego if that happens.
Mamdani created a YouTube video of how to handle a blowhard in his meeting last week with Trump. If you stand up to him, Trump doesn’t know how to act. Gavin Newsom should be on a plane to New York to sit down with Mamdani to learn his secrets, including his magic with younger voters and Latinos.
Trump is weak. Strike now.
Yes, we need to defeat him. But we can never stop there - we must defeat what he represents. He’s the figurehead, but the ugliness will still be there.
It was obvious in that meeting between Mamdani and Trump that Mamdani did his homework and played Trump to a tune. And, oh, was it so much fun seeing the MAGA constituents and press go through whiplash.