Trump, Zelensky & The Limits Of Outrage

With Trump, style is always a distraction from substance.

When Donald Trump got reelected, I made what amounted to a series of New Year’s Resolutions - call them New Term’s Resolutions.

In a lot of ways, Trump is manna from heaven to a writer/commentator. Love him or hate him, the guy is nothing if not interesting. And what makes him so interesting is his propensity to do things that violate the established norms of politics.

Biden, even if he’d been in better health, would never have been able to keep up with the Trump circus. Trying to pay attention to Joe Biden, with Trump lobbing bombs from the sidelines, was like sitting in your accountant’s office and watching him do your taxes while the parade made its way up Main Street.

It will come as no surprise to regular readers that I intensely dislike Trump, and intensely disapprove of [most of] what he’s done since returning to office. I could probably spend the next four (or eight, or twelve…) years churning out a steady stream of Trumpish outrage porn, and some readers might even enjoy it. But doing so would violate at least two of my New Term’s Resolutions:

1. Be less angry

2. Substance over style

I did not enjoy watching Donald Trump and J.D. Vance dress down Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office. And since it’s all anyone is talking about just now, it was unlikely that I was going to be able to refrain from commenting on it. But as distasteful as I found the performance, I’m not just going to join the chorus of outrage.

I don’t see the point. And my heart’s not in it.

Both the Oxford and Cambridge definitions of ‘outrage’ include the word ‘shock.’ To be outraged at something isn’t just to be angry about it, it’s to be surprised by it. To have failed to see it coming. I would really like to know: who out there was actually surprised by what they saw unfold at the White House? Who genuinely missed the signs that that was coming?

Trump has not been shy about his feelings on the Ukraine war. Since it started, which was well before his reelection, he has had a consistent message, whatever one thinks of it: “The war would never have started if I was president, it’s bad, they need to cut a deal to end it, and that deal is going to involve Russia getting something.”

There is simply no excuse for any foreign policy observer to have been unclear on what Trump’s view of this conflict was. He articulated it repeatedly, and enough voters were okay with it that they made him president again. If you don’t like it, it’s a good bet you were one of the voters who didn’t choose him to lead. But at the risk of stating the obvious, your side lost.

I have to believe that even Trump’s fiercest critics understand this, and understood it prior to this weekend. So the explosive reaction to Trump/Vance’s showdown with Zelensky cannot, I don’t think, be explained by shock at the discovery that Trump doesn’t really like this guy, and doesn’t want to continue helping him.

What’s riled everyone up is having had to watch Trump say it all to Zelensky’s face.

The outrage here is about style, not substance, because the substance, we already knew. And getting outraged about Trump’s style does nothing. Zero. Zilch. It doesn’t hurt him. The more Trump is loathed by those outside his tribe, the more his tribe loves him. He cannot be damaged by things that would damage an ordinary politician. Especially when those things are central to his brand, as norm-busting very much is.

I don’t know why, but I always revert to sci-fi references to explain this dimension of Trump’s appeal. Trump and his followers are like The Borg in terms of their threat response; whatever they’re hit with, they absorb, and can both defend against the next time they encounter it, and use whenever they wish (yes, nerds, I know that’s not a perfect analogy, but it’s close enough for the non-Trekkies in our midst). The point is, coming under attack only makes Team Trump stronger. If you prefer fantasy, Trumpism is like a goblin-made weapon in Harry Potter; it absorbs that which would harm an ordinary blade, and grows more powerful through exposure to danger.

Liberals, despite having 8+ years to watch how he works, have studiously failed to learn this lesson about Trump: every time they freak out, they help him. Every time they think, “this time will be different,” it’s not different. As far as this spat with Zelensky goes, hey, maybe the 900th time will be the charm. But probably, it won’t be.*

*Quick interjection to allow for the fact that I could be wrong here. Trump does appear to have incensed actually everyone outside his core group of supporters. Talking Points Memo is keeping a running tally of Republican congressmen getting spanked at town hall meetings over DOGE and Trump’s Russia pandering. Could it be that he’s finally overplayed his hand? Time will tell. I’m not holding my breath, but nor would I completely discount the possibility.

Anyway, you can count me among the millions of observers worldwide who thought that, if a conversation like the one we just witnessed needed to happen, it should have happened behind closed doors. Whatever you thought of Zelensky’s demeanor (and for the record, I really didn’t see a problem with it, but whatever) watching the supposed leader of the free world bark at a guy whose country is being invaded by a much more powerful neighbor was a pretty grim spectacle for many.

But that was, of course, the intention.

It strikes me as very unlikely that Trump failed to spot all the cameras in the room, or got confused about how many members of the press were watching him. Which is to say, he and Vance did what they did, in the way they did it, because they wanted you to see it. They wanted to piss you off. They are counting on your outrage - and the outrage of the rest of the free world - to give them the domestic political cover they think they need to reshape American foreign policy.

My New Term’s Resolution to be less angry isn’t some zen thing. It’s not inspired by a Christian will to forgive, or to turn the other cheek. It’s an attempt to make myself less manipulable. Ordinary politicians operate by trying to win hearts and minds. Under that ordinary paradigm, it can be very useful to be angry and combative. It can signal that pacifying you will take more than a few smooth words, and it can make you resistant to being buttered up.

But Trumpism functions in a totally different way. Trump isn’t playing the Biden/Obama/Clinton game of trying to make nice with his opponents to keep them off his back. He wants his opponents on his back, in his hair, and up his ass, because he knows he’ll emerge all the stronger for any attack.

When Trump does something outrageous, and you blow a gasket, you are handing him, on a platter, the exact thing he wants. The exact thing that will help him. You are allowing yourself to be loudly distracted by his style while he quietly beats you on substance.

So the million dollar question: what should we make of the substance?

I don’t want to have to turn in my lib card, but I am deeply ambivalent about our continued support for the Ukraine war. I was passionately supportive in the war’s early days, but will confess to not knowing anymore if that’s the correct moral position to maintain.

When the Russians invaded and were, against all odds, kept at bay, it seemed right to me to give the Ukrainians whatever they needed to continue holding them off. We didn’t want a guy like Vladimir Putin thinking he could run roughshod over Europe, and since the war was going so disastrously for Russia relative to expectations, it seemed reasonable to think that with enough forceful pushback, he might cut his losses and sulk back to his corner.

But it’s been three years now and that hasn’t happened. For reference, in a conflict spanning nearly two decades, 58,220 American servicemen died in Vietnam. In just three years, an estimated 70,000 Ukrainians have died in the fighting and Russia’s losses are approaching twice that figure.

In three years.

Trump may not be motivated by righteous intent here, but he is not wrong that this conflict is a moral emergency. And if not through the brokering of some kind of peace deal, I’m beginning to lose sight of how we think this will end.

The anti-Trump, anti-Putin position seems to be that western powers should continue arming Ukraine until…I actually don’t know what we think we’re waiting for now. A knockout blow? What would that even be?

Our support has landed Ukraine in a lethal no-man’s land. With our guns and money, they can keep fighting, and the war can continue. They won’t lose. But they also won’t win, because to offer them enough support to fully roll back the Russian advance would risk provoking Russia into retaliating against NATO. And we big time don’t want that. That’s playing chicken with nuclear armageddon.

It’s very hard to parse Russian sentiment about the war. By most accounts, Putin has the Russian people on his side (though their support might be wavering). The question is, are they wavering enough to make a difference? Anti-war sentiment has to be phenomenally intense to actually stop a conflict, and the impulse to save face is a reliably powerful one for wartime leaders.

Nobody should know this better than Americans.

We stayed in Afghanistan for 20 years, hoping to find a way out that would allow us to claim some kind of victory. We couldn’t, and we left with our tail between our legs. After 20 years. A kid old enough to fight at the end of that conflict wasn’t even born when the conflict started.

When Daniel Ellsberg leaked the Pentagon Papers, Americans learned that since the very early days of the Vietnam War, the military and civilian brass knew it was unwinnable. They kept sending young boys into the meat grinder purely because they didn’t want to lose face. And they didn’t want to look like idiots in front of the Russians.

Is it really a smart bet to assume that asshole, strongman Vladimir Putin will be willing to do something that, in a combined four decades of war, we couldn’t bring ourselves to do: admit defeat?

Another question: is it really sensible to base our fears over Russian expansionism on Adolf Hitler? Because we definitely are - Ukraine discourse is positively awash in WWII references.

It’s pretty damn easy to say, “No Appeasement!” from behind a screen in a country that isn’t at war. But is that even the right framing? Past them both being assholes, is there any real reason to think that Putin wants precisely what Hitler wanted? Do we think, for real, that if not checked, he’ll be invading France next?

I’m actually asking here. I don’t know.

The parts of Ukraine that Russia now controls, and the parts that Putin is demanding he keep as part of any peace deal, are all overwhelmingly Russian-speaking. Which okay, that forms a pretty worrying parallel to Hitler’s annexation of the German-speaking Sudetenland. But on the other hand, if Hitler had been satisfied with the Sudetenland, it might not, on its own, have been an enormously big deal that that slice of land was brought into Germany proper. Given the staggering loss of life, not to mention the actually apocalyptic consequences associated with fucking this up, shouldn’t we be very careful before we assume that Putin is Hitler 2.0 and treat him as such?

I don’t like a bully. I don’t want to see Vladimir Putin rewarded for what he’s done in Ukraine. But I’m not convinced that a) a peace deal that offers him some Russian-speaking territory would embolden him to hit Poland next, or b) that a peace deal that doesn’t offer him some Russian-speaking territory is even possible.

On the other hand, Trump really doesn’t feel like an honest broker in this. Whether he is actually compromised by Putin, as many liberals think he is, or whether the two men are just simpatico in terms of how they see the world, the result is the same: Donald Trump has picked a side in this, and it ain’t Ukraine’s.

But elite liberals, angry over Trump’s willingness to make concessions to Russia, are employing some serious Underpants Gnome logic here:

Step 1: Arm Ukraine.

Step 2: ???????

Step 3: Victory!

I’ve tried hard to avoid my usual cynicism up to this point, but I’m afraid it’s going to be making a center-stage appearance now. It cannot be ignored that US interests are very well served by a prolonged confrontation that drains Russia of resources and clout, while requiring no blood sacrifice from Americans.

We don’t need Ukraine to win for us to win. We just need them to keep fighting. And the longer the better.

We aren’t just sending weapons to Ukraine because they’re our friends, or because they’re the underdogs, or because our hearts are with them, even if all those things are true. We’re doing it to keep Russia from threatening our global hegemony. This conflict is weakening Russia - and Russia, these days, isn’t all that strong to begin with. The more they bleed, the more they have to stay in their lane.

What Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin want is a return to a multi-polar world, in which powerful nations are allowed to run things in their respective neighborhoods without US client-states on their respective doorsteps. In this world, the United States would step down from its self-appointed role as global policeman, disentangle from its world-spanning web of treaty obligations, and stop interfering with the business of other, powerful nations. Russia could mess with Ukraine, China could mess with Taiwan, and the US could mess with Greenland, I guess.

I’m not necessarily an advocate for a framework like that, but it’s difficult to look at American conduct since the end of the Cold War and conclude that we’ve been anything like an effective peacekeeper. We really can’t claim to be standing on the moral high ground. We ceded that the moment we invaded Iraq, if not before.

Trump was a dick to Zelensky, and I have no faith in his being motivated by anything good or noble. I’m just not sure that makes him fundamentally wrong. And I’m not sure that there’s a realistically better way to end the bloodshed.

On the other hand, I’m also not sure that my view of this isn’t desperately naive. Or that Putin, if “appeased,” won’t be back with a vengeance as soon as we clear out and he retools.

Here’s what I’m very sure of though: it isn’t either of my kids on the front line.

If it were, and if my choice is between them coming home to me and my side getting to win, I don’t even have to think about it. That’s no choice at all. Patriotism is nothing to me. Borders are meaningless. The people confidently saying things like “Russia only understands strength” aren’t saying that because they’re experts on Russia or on international diplomacy. They’re saying that because they saw it in a movie, or they heard it from someone else who saw it in a movie.

More than 100,000 Ukrainian parents are never going to hug their children again, and that’s true of even more Russian parents. The reason I’m not more pissed about Trump being an ass to Zelensky is because the only actually intolerable outcome, as far as I’m concerned, is for those numbers to needlessly increase.