Donald Trump is a Bootlicker

Trump Loves Dictators Because He is Jealous. Vance's Status Anxiety Makes Him Prone.

Hello,

Donald Trump and J.D. Vance’s obviously planned ambush and bullying of Ukraine’s president Zelensky marks a lowpoint in modern U.S. foreign policy and international relations history. Perhaps not as low as George W. Bush and Colin Powell lying us into war in Iraq, but the argument can be made.

In 2014, Putin and Russia invaded Ukraine, occupying and annexing Crimea and the Donbas region. There is lots of blame to go around: NATO expansion, U.S. meddling in Georgia in 2008, which according to former head of the CIA Michael Hayden was provoked by the U.S., the U.S. wanton, illegal, and infelicitous invasion of Iraq, and the bombing and eventual killing of Libya and Gaddafi. All of the above emboldened Putin and Russia. And the imperial and colonial mindset of dominant states, in general, can’t be ignored. Remember, prior to setting up the United Nations in 1944-1945, might made right and plunder and stealing territory was normalized and even formalized in post-conflict agreements, such as at the Berlin Conference of 1884-1885.

Then in 2021, Putin and Russia further invaded Ukraine, believing they could seize Kyiv, topple and/or kill Zalensky, and…well..I don’t know what they actually thought would happen after that. At it’s peak, Russia occupied more than 25% of Ukrainian territory and it still holds close to 20% which is an enormous amount of land. Hundreds of thousands of people have been killed, and Putin is continuing to engage in hybrid warfare in Europe, particularly in places such as Romania, which canceled it’s presidential election after it’s intelligence community presented a report to it’s Constitutional Court that Russia had interfered on behalf of Călin Georgescu, a pro-Russia who has now been charged with “incitement to actions against the constitutional order in a tempted form, communication of false information, false statements regarding the financing of the electoral campaign, initiation or establishment of an organization with a fascist, racist or xenophobic character, and promotion of the cult of persons guilty of committing crimes of genocide and war crimes.”

All that said, Putin is directly responsible for the invasion. This is a pulse check. If you ask someone who was responsible for invading Ukraine and they don’t say “Putin and Russia” they are answering you ideologically or they are deliberately obfuscating for partisan or contrarian reasons.

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A very thought-provoking essay by Dorothy Thompson in Harper’s in August 1941 called “Who Goes Nazi?,” profiles a handful of different types of people who were likely or not likely to go Nazi. Her Mr. C is absolutely a J.D. Vance figure:

“Mr. C is a brilliant and embittered intellectual. He was a poor white-trash Southern boy, a scholarship student at two universities where he took all the scholastic honors but was never invited to join a fraternity. His brilliant gifts won for him successively government positions, partnership in a prominent law firm, and eventually a highly paid job as a Wall Street adviser. He has always moved among important people and always been socially on the periphery. His colleagues have admired his brains and exploited them, but they have seldom invited him—or his wife—to dinner.

He is a snob, loathing his own snobbery. He despises the men about him—he despises, for instance, Mr. B—because he knows that what he has had to achieve by relentless work men like B have won by knowing the right people. But his contempt is inextricably mingled with envy. Even more than he hates the class into which he has insecurely risen, does he hate the people from whom he came. He hates his mother and his father for being his parents. He loathes everything that reminds him of his origins and his humiliations. He is bitterly anti-Semitic because the social insecurity of the Jews reminds him of his own psychological insecurity.”

And her Young D, who she calls the “only born Nazi in the room” is someone like Donald Trump (I mean she even calls him D!):

“Young D is the spoiled only son of a doting mother. He has never been crossed in his life. He spends his time at the game of seeing what he can get away with. He is constantly arrested for speeding and his mother pays the fines. He has been ruthless toward two wives and his mother pays the alimony. His life is spent in sensation-seeking and theatricality. He is utterly inconsiderate of everybody. He is very good-looking, in a vacuous, cavalier way, and inordinately vain. He would certainly fancy himself in a uniform that gave him a chance to swagger and lord it over others.”

J.D. Vance has no charisma or political skills whatsover, though he apparently appealed to Trump enough; and he apparently appeals to some of the manosphere online - all pathetic losers wishing they were masculine enough to appeal to other masculine types. All weird and all pathetic. Vance has very little foreign policy knowledge. What he does understand though is power and the fear of being on the losing side of power wars means he will always lick the boots of the powerful. His status envy and anxiety means he will always wear the jersey of the “winning” team.

Trump is jealous of military dictatorships because he is a pathetic narcissist with an authoritarian personality. His lack of empathy, grandiose sense of self, need for admiration, and his bottomless need for attention and validation means he can easily be pulled in various directions - especially by rich, powerful leaders such as Putin. He loves to emulate dictators because things such as laws, regulations, norms, expectations, independent sources of power and influence is threatening to his vision as a master of the universe. Persuasion takes time; brute force and bullying is easier. He does not want to do the hard work of real diplomacy. Besides, he loves Putin and he identifies Putin as “savvy” and a “genius.” He loved Russia’s interference in 2016 - asking them to “find” Hillary Clinton’s emails. And in the Oval Office, Trump riffed on his connection with Putin, explicitly saying that he and Putin, together, were victims of a political witch hunt. Poor, Putin. Poor, Trump.

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U.S. foreign policy doctrines, strategies, tactics, and decisions have been full of failure going as far back as “containment,” first laid out by George Kennan in Foreign Affairs in 1947. Korean War; devastating, brutal, and ended in a stalemate that still has negative effects on the world. Vietnam? Need I say more. The Global War on Terror? A multi-trillion dollar disaster that created failed states, produced blowback, and has not truly dented levels of Islamic radicalization, because violence begets violence.

But some of the more successful aspects of the U.S. led world order - free trade, the Marshall Plan, democracy promotion, arms control, developing and supporting multilateral institutions, such as the World Health Organization, were successful because of the implicit and explicit continuity shown by all post-war administrations.

America was always a hypocritical hegemon, supporting strongmen when it benefited U.S. corporations, and it has been on the wrong side of covert regime change dozens of times during the Cold War. But Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was unprovoked and when Trump capitulates to Putin, allowing Russia to maintain control of that much territory that they conquered, it erases 70 plus years of progress, albeit slow, uneven, hypocritical, and so on, and brings back a world of spheres of influences, might makes right, empire, and landgrabs. Prior to the new world order of the post-war globe, states “seized territory equal to 11 Crimeas a year on average,” according to amazing work done by Yale scholars Hathaway and Shapiro. And as they also remind us, “the crime of aggressive war is now one of the four crimes that can be prosecuted before the ICC in the Haque.” If Russia gets territory here, this will end the new world order of outlawing conquest and territorial spoils.

A U.S. that is nakedly transactional, mercurial, is suicidal to it’s own primacy. A U.S. that openly sides with illiberal dictators engaged in wars of aggression speeds up what I call the emerging “disruptive multipolar” world.

I’ll leave you with a prescient answer that then vice president Kamala Harris gave regarding Donald Trump’s policy on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine:

“…if Donald Trump was president, Putin would be sitting in Kyiv with his eyes on the rest of Europe, starting with Poland. What you think is a friendship with what is known to be a dictator, who would eat you for lunch.”

Putin won’t have to eat Trump for lunch, because Trump will happily just lick the boot of Putin. And much of MAGA will go along with it, because they have solely been reading, watching, spreading and mainlining Russian propaganda for years now.

Thanks,
Patrick M. Foran.