The Art of the Kneel
George W. Bush once reflected on a meeting with Putin by saying, “I looked the man in the eye … I was able to get a sense of his soul.” Bush should have looked a little deeper. If he had gotten to Putin’s colon, he would have seen a puckered-up Donald Trump holding a sack of cash. Back in 2018, in Helsinki, in what should have been the end of any notion of him as president, Trump sided with Putin over US intelligence agencies on the issue of election interference. John McCain responded to Trump’s hellish Helsinki performance by explaining, “Today’s press conference in Helsinki was one of the most disgraceful performances by an American president in memory. The damage inflicted by President Trump’s naiveté, egotism, false equivalence, and sympathy for autocrats is difficult to calculate.” At the time, Trump’s siding with Putin over America was shocking. Today, his Helsinki performance barely makes the greatest hits list of Trump’s international betrayals. His latest affront is lifting sanctions against Russia to buy diesel in a clear siding with Putin in his murderous invasion of Ukraine.
+ Six senators call for Trump administration to ‘immediately reverse course‘ on Russian diesel plan. (That’s only 94 senators short of where we should be…)
+ Anne Applebaum in The Atlantic (Gift Article): “In the past 72 hours, Donald Trump has dropped all pretense, torched a couple decades of American policy, and undermined 18 months of his own diplomacy. He lifted sanctions on the import of Russian diesel fuel, in violation of the letter and spirit of laws that he himself signed. He has threatened to stop sharing intelligence with Ukraine, unless Ukraine agrees not to target Russian refineries, thus demanding that Kyiv give up its most effective weapon while asking nothing from Russia in exchange … He has lied repeatedly. He declared that Ukraine and Russia had agreed to an ‘energy cease-fire,’ an announcement that surprised the Ukrainians and that in any case the Russians immediately broke, hitting a power plant in Kharkiv only hours later … He has described Ukraine’s democratically elected president as an obstacle to negotiations and told him to leave office. But on Friday, before making these new decisions, he held yet another long, friendly telephone conversation with the Russian dictator, who really could end the war today. All Vladimir Putin has to do is tell his soldiers to stop fighting, and then the war is over. The Ukrainians cannot stop fighting because, if they do, their country will be conquered and they will suffer the fate of their occupied territories: leaders murdered, children kidnapped, repression and concentration camps for everyone else. If Trump knows this, then he does not care.” Trump’s Message to Ukraine Is Now Crystal Clear. Aside from being a Putin puppet for years, why is Trump doing this? The deal doesn’t involve enough diesel to make a real difference in global prices. Go with the Occam’s razor explanation (at least until it’s rebranded as Trump’s razor). “This looks, instead, like something very different: an abrupt, Hail Mary attempt to force Ukraine to surrender and to save the Russian economy, perhaps in order to finally complete the multiple business deals that the Russians are known to have discussed with American negotiators and others in Trump’s orbit.”
+ “Since Trump’s return to power in 2025, the Putin regime has dangled lucrative deals in front of the president’s entourage.” David Frum: Trump Is an Easy Mark for Putin. “Putin is attempting to leverage Russia’s most strategic asset in his war on Ukraine: Trump’s weakness for corruption. The 2.25 million barrels of diesel Putin offered Trump will have zero net impact on world energy markets or the world price of diesel. But accepting those barrels will collapse the U.S.-led sanctions regime on Russia—and align Trump with Putin against the Ukrainian air attacks on Russian energy production.” (Trump is an easy mark for Putin, and for years, tens of millions of American voters have been an easy mark for Trump.)
