Trump: What’s His Deal?

“He has made us competent to be ministers of a new covenant, not of the letter, but of the Spirit. For the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life.”

2 Corinthians, 3:6

Hello from Kyiv, Ukraine.

I’m writing this on March 2, 2025, and, by the time you read this, many things I say may be out of date.

There was a deal. Now, there’s no deal. Maybe Macron and Starmer can salvage the deal?

Putin’s Puppet?

It’s possible to be wrong on something without being a useful idiot or a foreign agent.

Nobody controls Trump, not even Trump.

That’s the problem.

5D Chessmaster?

It’s possible to be right about some things without being right about everything.

Trump’s not stupid or evil because the American people aren’t stupid or evil.

He was elected and re-elected for a reason.

“Trump plays chess while everyone else plays checkers.”

If everyone else agrees to play checkers, and you insist on playing chess, you lose due to forfeit.

If you want to play chess, find an opponent willing to agree to those rules.

Examples…

Mediator or Negotiator?

Usually, when you try to create peace between two or more belligerents, you’re not really negotiating a deal.

Why?

The ideal mediator is a referee, not a counterpart.

The ideal referee doesn’t side with either party but with the collective good of all parties.

A negotiator, however, always has a counterpart.

Trump’s peace deal is a real estate deal drafted by real estate developer Steve Witkoff. The same peacemaker who wants to put Casinos on the Gaza Strip.

Real estate deals tend to be more zero sum than win-win. I have no personal criticism of Witkoff, but he’s a shark. In the right situation that’s fine, because he’s America’s shark.

Baseball and Rare Earth

Belligerents in the middle of a war will not accept being treated as counterparts by the referee. If New York has a “subway series”, the ultimate baseball battle between the Yankees and the Mets, the umpire is not allowed to accept payments in the form of rare earth from either team.

Trump apparently wants both teams to pay the US.

Budapest Memorandum, 1994

The problem is that Ukraine is in no mood to be taken to the cleaners by the US… Again. When they signed the Budapest Memorandum in 1994, they agreed to give up their nuclear weapons in exchange for US and UK protection against Russia. Because they were working against another smooth negotiator, Bill Clinton, there were plenty of loopholes in the agreement that the Ukrainians didn’t see before it was too late.

With Clinton, however, there was no illusion that he was a referee because Ukraine and Russia were not at war. Clinton put “America First” in the interests of nuclear de-proliferation. As a negotiator, defeating his Ukrainian counterpart, former Ukrainian President Leonid Kuchma, was Clinton’s job.

Trump and his circle are indignant because the Ukrainian people feel America owes them something. Guess what? We do.

At least that’s how the Ukrainians see it because we signed on the dotted line.

That’s how Boris Johnson sees it, not a Lefty, and how I see it, also not a Lefty.

Maybe we don’t legally, but if there is a God, he/she/it doesn’t care about the letter of the law nearly as much as the spirit of the law, as referenced in the Corinthians quote at the top. The Bible is full of rulers and empires that think they are stronger/smarter/more worthy than God.

Clay-foot Colossus, anyone?

Exposing Corruption, Within Your Counterparts

“I’m going to show the world how corrupt you are and run you out of office! Let’s do a deal.”

Who wouldn’t want to negotiate with someone like that?

Taking your counterpart to the cleaners may be ok (somewhat). Taking your counterpart out…

Word gets around.

Trump is no longer known as someone who negotiates in good faith. If Trump hated Zelensky so much, he never should have offered him a deal in the first place.

Trump hates Zelensky, and JD Vance told us why. Trump and Vance want payback for Zelensky’s appearance in Pennsylvania during the 2024 election because they view that as having campaigned for Kamala Harris and the Democrats. Maybe it truly was a form of election interference.

(I understand that Vance and Trump might want to repay Zelensky’s election interference with some election interference of their own, but that doesn’t give them the right to interfere in the elections of Germany and Romania.)

Regardless of whether some of Trump’s anger towards his counterpart is justified, Ukraine would be foolish to negotiate with someone who hates their leader, let alone allow someone with such an emotional bias to be their referee in a war that threatens their existence.

Trump called his counterpart a dictator and tried to push the Ukrainian people to violate their own constitution and hold an election when they couldn’t even operate airports due to air strikes from missiles and drones.

Most of the Ukrainians I know are part of the Kyiv-based educated class that voted against Zelensky. Regardless, most of them don’t want to hold elections during the war or have Zelensky take Trump’s deal (if it still exists). None of them want to surrender to Russia or America. Why should they have to worry about surrendering to the referee? I explain why Ukrainians don’t like Trump’s deal here: https://medium.com/@davidfrancisblanc_37502/a-dmz-must-have-teeth-by-david-francis-blanc-28904eb57896 (This was based on Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s proposal, which seems reasonable compared to Trump’s current offer.)

Trump thinks his chess game is working so well that he’s decided to try it on America’s allies. Notice that I didn’t say Trump’s allies. People that came before Trump built those relationships. Now Germany, Romania, and the UK get to be lectured on how to govern themselves by someone who may or may not stay in NATO.

My point is that counterparts are allowed to be adversarial, but they still have rules. Trying to remove your counterpart from office is not negotiating in good faith. Once word gets out, people will choose their counterparts elsewhere.

Orange Man, Bad?

No. Orange Man, good. Muskrat, good.

The idea that these two are in it for money and power is a myth.

They already have plenty of both and don’t need the aggravation.

They mean well and believe completely in the rightness of their cause.

If Shakespeare were alive today, he would make them the heroes of his plays, with their tragic flaws inseparable from their virtues.

Musk is so brilliant that nobody can tell him he’s wrong.

Trump is too tough for his own good.

When he descended the golden escalator in 2016, that billionaire was no warrior. He is one now.

Never in my life have I seen a POTUS subjected to so much hatred and punishment and still stay standing.

They tried to defame him, bankrupt him, imprison him, and kill him. He could have given up, walked away, and enjoyed his billions..

The problem is that Trump has suffered so many unfair attacks and betrayals that he sees enemies and traitors wherever he goes.

Like many captains of industry, he’s also an outsourcer. The ultimate outsourcer.

Where other CEOs outsource the day-to-day operations of their companies, Trump has outdone them. He has outsourced his ideology and even his thoughts.

This isn’t laziness or dishonesty. He’s a big-picture guy trying to make big things happen. He taps into populist think tanks like Fox News and the Intellectual Dark Web to get a feel for what his base wants. He turns these thoughts from outsourced teams into policy.

The problem is that he has no compass, not because he’s amoral, but because all that thinking takes away from all that important “president stuff” on his calendar.

Things did not end well for Hamlet and Macbeth, but those tragic heroes didn’t have nuclear weapons.

Trump’s Mandate

Trump has emerged from the 2024 election as the most powerful POTUS I’ve seen in my lifetime. His party has the Whitehouse, the Supreme Court, both chambers of Congress, virtually all of the swing states, and the relevant podcasting world. (The last item has destroyed legacy media’s relevance, trust me.)

His coalition is more diverse than that of any Republican POTUS in history, crossing previous barriers of race, religion, and even sexual orientation. (The architect of the Pennsylvania victory was Scott Presler, founder of Gays for Trump.)

IMHO, the American people decided that Biden has crashed the car.

The American people want a reformist, and Trump knows that midterms will happen in less than 20 months. That’s why DOGE is moving at warp speed. That’s why the rest of his cabinet is purging any Deep State holdouts.

IMHO, Trump has some justification. The DOJ and intelligence community were weaponized against him, his associates, and even angry soccer moms. Biden did call more than half the American electorate garbage. The architects of the Iraq War, the Cheneys, crossed “party lines” to endorse Harris, and Harris bragged about it, giving credence to the conspiracy theory that the Democrats and Republicans are actually a monoparty.

So much power, and what has he been doing with it?

Wrecking American credibility and burning bridges that have taken over half a century to build.

America First has turned into America Alone, and we’ve just finished month one.

Worse, he didn’t do it as a master chess player.

He did it to show the world how big his hands are.

He did it on a whim.

I wouldn’t be surprised if Trump puts the blame on Vance sooner or later. I’m sure former Vice President Pence would agree.

What Trump did to Zelensky, he will do to every counterpart at every table around the world whenever his mood changes.

Trump sees any refusal to kiss the ring as a betrayal. When he feels betrayed, he rages publicly, in front of the cameras and on social media.

If Trump doesn’t wake up, America will be seen as the peacemaker looking for an advantage, the isolationist that tells its allies how to govern themselves, and the superpower so concerned about nuclear war that it derailed a ceasefire deal, effectively putting 7+ billion people at risk, over a dress code violation.

As the Ukrainians say, you can’t put one ass in two chairs!

A president and a country were humiliated this week.

It wasn’t Zelensky, and it wasn’t Ukraine.

Cool aid is cool aid, regardless of the flavor. Left, Right, or MAGA.

I’m not drinking it. Peace.

Slava Ukraina, Heroium Slava!