“I’m not happy with what Putin is doing, he’s killing a lot of people and I don’t know what the hell happened to Putin, I’ve known him for a long time I’ve always got along with him, but he is sending rockets into cities and he’s killing people, and I don’t like it at all, ok? We’re in the middle of talking and he’s shooting rockets into Kiev and other cities. I don’t like it at all. […] I don’t like what Putin is doing, he’s killing people. And something happened to this guy and I don’t like it,” [emphasis added] said President Donald Trump as he was taking questions from reporters on the tarmac in Morristown, New Jersey, on 14th May. Within several seconds the American president repeated the word killing three times and gave vent to his anger, gracing it with the interjection what the hell.
A highly emotional speech. Words and phrases that do not become a politician, especially a politician of that caliber. You may like them or not (the chances are you don’t), but neither Russia’s President Vladimir Putin nor Russia’s Minister of Foreign Affairs Lavrov have ever let themselves blurt words loaded with so much negative emotion and level them at any of the Western politicians. That says a lot about the quality of diplomacy on either side of the dividing line.
As is known, Americans are conducting talks with Russians over the war in Ukraine, and President Donald Trump has spoken more than twice over the phone with President Vladimir Putin. With this in mind, what purpose did the words spoken by the American president serve? Did he want to make his Russian counterpart be more disposed to talks and concessions? What the hell – to use Trump’s vocabulary – did the American president think he would attain in his dealings with the Russian president, almost yelling that his interlocutor appears to be a madman – “what the hell happened to Putin” – and a killer – “he’s killing people”?
One possible explanation is that President Donald Trump did not particularly mean what he said, but, acting under pressure from the media controlled for the most part by the Democratic Party and wishing to appear tough he simply wanted to make a show of anger. That might be so. Still, as said above, the Russian side does not behave remotely like that.
Be it as it may, the president’s temper tantrum is one thing: the same event exposed something of larger gravity. After Donald Trump had finished with this public show of anger and displeasure aimed at Vladimir Putin, a journalist revealed to him that “a Russian commander reportedly said Putin was almost caught in the middle of a drone attack from Ukraine.” Watching the footage of the event, one can clearly see that President Donald Trump was taken by surprise. He managed to mumble something along the lines of “I haven’t heard that,” then came up with an explanation of Putin’s behaviour, saying that “maybe that would be a reason” [behind Russia’s attacks on Ukraine in the middle of the peace talks], and added, somewhat confused, “I don’t know. I’ve not heard that.”
It transpires that a journalist had heard about a drone assassination attempt on the Russian president, but the American president had not! Where did the journalist have that information from? Did the CIA know about it? If it did not, then the agency is good for nothing. If it did, then why was the president not briefed about it? If the American president was not briefed about an assassination attempt on his Russian counterpart, was it intentional on the part of the agency? If it was, then it means that the administration is working against Donald Trump just as it did during his first term. The question remains how large a part of the administration is sabotaging the American president’s decisions and which part of it is providing the head of state with misinformation or which part of the it withdraws information from him entirely or partly. If such are the circumstances, then Donald Trump is going to fail during his second term as president precisely as he failed during his first term. If he desires to make a difference and be remembered by momentous decisions that he managed to execute, he’d better muster enough courage and determination to purge the government agencies without regard for anything and anybody, or else he will go under.
One can wonder what the thoughts of the Americans presidents were after this short encounter with the journalists and after he had learnt that he had not been informed properly about the current events. What inferences did President Donald Trump draw from all this? The government agencies – especially those gathering intel – are eyes and ears of any leader. Deprived of proper sight and hearing, a leader is doomed to failure. It is not the first time that President Donald Trump says things which reveal that his perception of reality is distorted, and it is distorted by the agencies that should keep the president in the picture. We all remember the number of casualties that Donald Trump announced some time ago: he appeared to believe that there were much more Russians dead and wounded than Ukrainians. It somehow did not bother the president to challenge such data on grounds of reality: if Russians are suffering to a much greater extent, why then Ukrainians cannot push them back? Why then Ukrainians are retreating? Why then Russians are unwilling to bring the hostilities to an end as soon as possible? Does Donald Trump not have proper mental faculties?
A leader of a superpower who acts on misinformation or lack of information (information which is otherwise available to a simple journalist) is at best pathetically ineffective, and at worst – downright dangerous.
