February 8, 2025

Trump’s gift to Putin

IMMEDIATE RELEASE 25 January 2025
WASHINGTON MERRY-GO-ROUND
Today’s Events in Historical Perspective
America’s Longest-Running Column Founded 1932
              Trump’s gift to Putin
By Douglas Cohn and Eleanor Clift         
 
WASHINGTON –President Trump’s fondness for Russian President Vladimir Putin is well documented. He has called him a “genius,” and took the Russian leader’s word over U.S. intelligence agencies at a summit in Helsinki in 2018 when he denied Russian involvement in the U.S. election. But the friendship has taken a turn, and Ukraine is about to reap the consequences.
Trump suddenly turned on Putin, declaring on his platform, Truth Social, that his pal is “destroying Russia” with a war he is “grinding out” and “not doing very well. . . . Russia is bigger, they have more soldiers to lose, but that’s no way to run a country.” Trump is threatening to put “high levels of Taxes, Tariffs, and Sanctions on anything being sold by Russia to the United States, and various other participating countries.”
Why the change? Trump is no longer a Putin puppet.
We all remember Trump’s son, Eric, telling a golf reporter in 2014 about how his family business survived the Great Recession of 2008 that severely harmed the real estate world, which is Trump’s world: “Well, we don’t rely on American banks. We have all the funding we need out of Russia.”
Trump has been carrying a lot of debt and some of his companies declared bankruptcy four times, but since the Recession, he has more than made up for any losses. According to Forbes magazine, which keeps track of the richest people, Trump’s net worth is now $6.7 billion. Trump Media is the largest single chunk of his fortune although it makes very little money. His wealth comes from the publicly-traded company that owns it. This will last as long as loyal Trump investors ignore traditional metrics such as revenue and earnings and continue to buy the stock.
Trump has no compunctions about cashing in on the presidency, and a Republican controlled Congress is unlikely to hold him accountable for violating the Emoluments Clause of the Constitution by monetizing aspects of the office.
The recently launched Trump coin potentially adds another $8.2 billion to Trump’s net worth, which means Trump is a free man in the sense he does not have to cozy up to anyone for financial reasons although he is on especially good terms with America’s oligarchs. And that brings us full circle back to Vladamir Putin.
Trump campaigned on ending the war in Ukraine. He made it sound so easy. All it would take is a phone call to his buddy, Putin. But Putin said, “Nyet.”
Trump doesn’t like it when people say no to him, so he lashed out with threats about sanctions and tariffs to get Putin’s attention. He is not sweet talking what he wants Putin to do, which is to come to the table and negotiate an end to a war that was only supposed to last a week or two and is now in its third year.
The likely deal is for Russia to keep what has been seized from Ukraine in exchange for a security guarantee for Ukraine. Whether any security guarantee from the West would have any real merit is debatable without backing from NATO, an alliance Trump is intent on weakening.
Conflicting priorities have long been a Trump problem, but this time there may be an unintentional turn. A primary reason Putin ordered the invasion of Ukraine was to prevent that nation from joining NATO, an alliance Putin views as a bulwark against Russia. Not only has Ukraine survived, the invasion propelled Sweden and Finland into NATO’s fold. Now, offsetting these events, Trump made a move that only Putin can love. He just announced withdrawal of 20,000 U.S. troops from Europe. Coupled with his unrealistic demand that the NATO countries up their defense spending from 2 percent to 5 percent, Putin is being rewarded for his militarism.
              In the end, the stage is set. Trump is no longer beholden to Putin, but thanks to Trump, Putin has less to fear from NATO and can declare victory over Ukraine, a NATO surrogate. NATO will be hobbled, and Ukraine will lose territory. This may be how Trump defines success, but there will only be one winner: Vladimir Putin.
 
See Eleanor Clift’s book Selecting a President, and Douglas Cohn’s latest books The President’s First Year: The Only School for Presidents Is the Presidency and World War 4: Nine Scenarios (endorsed by seven flag officers).
          Twitter:  @douglas_cohn
          © 2024 U.S. News Syndicate, Inc.
          Distributed by U.S. News Syndicate, Inc.
END WASHINGTON MERRY-GO-ROUND

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *