A tsunami of Trump Derangement Syndrome is washing over us once again in the wake of the White House meeting between Volodmyr Zelensky, President Trump, and Vice-President Vance. Trump and Vance took Zelensky to task for opposing a cease fire, forcing Ukrainian conscripts into an already lost war, throwing good money after bad, and demonizing Vladimir Putin to the point of making peace negotiations impossible. The remarkable confrontation played out like a reality TV episode, one in which Trump did everything but shout in Zelensky's face: "You're fired!", a fate the seriously unfunny comedian more than deserves.
As usual, simplistic characterizations rather than insight dominates the headlines. Zelensky is a "democratic leader" and Putin is a "dictator," although Trump has - gasp! - called Zelensky himself a dictator. This judgment, our mind managers tell us, is just more evidence of how stupid Trump and his MAGA supporters are. How could Zelensky, champion of the Free World, possibly be a dictator? Just because he jails his political opponents, bans independent media, and shuts down religious organizations doesn't mean he isn't a democracy-loving freedom-fighter. How could it?
MSNBC's Lawrence O'Donnell is incensed that Trump is "not educable," thus incapable of understanding that U.S. media hacks are infallible in their "value-free" judgments about political reality. Trump "knowingly lies" about key statistics like how much aid the U.S. has sent to Ukraine. Horrors! This he takes to be far more significant than the fact that Trump correctly states that (1) Ukraine cannot defeat Russia on the battlefield (2) that it is therefore pointlessly sacrificing huge numbers of its own people, and (3) that it is "risking WWIII," (especially when it shoots U.S. ATACM missiles deep into Russian territory as it did in the final months of the Biden administration). O'Donnell and his fellow media hacks don't enlighten their audience about any of this, which is the heart of the story vis-a-vis the Ukraine war. Lies of omission, as the late Aldous Huxley noted, are the most effective element of propaganda.
Putin has long objected to NATO expansion, as any Russian head of state necessarily would, and questioned why it still exists after the parallel Warsaw Pact disbanded at the conclusion of the Cold War. The West continually stated that it didn't want any more Berlin Walls, even as it kept expanding the Russia-hating military alliance to the East. NATO liked to claim that it was transforming itself into more of a political organization than a military one, to which Putin sensibly replied, "but if it's a political organization, why did it bomb Yugoslavia?" (in 1999).
For Moscow, following through on the Minsk Accords, adopted by Russia, France, Germany, and Ukraine in 2015 and endorsed unanimously by the UN Security Council, was the only path to progress in Ukraine, which had essentially become an extension of NATO. The agreement implicitly assumed no formal membership in NATO for Ukraine, an outcome that any Russian leader would have had to insist on. It called explicitly for disarmament of the Donbass and withdrawal of Russian forces while basing the overall settlement on three elements: (1) demilitarization (2) restoration of Ukrainian sovereignty (3) full autonomy for the Donbass. The Minsk Accords were never implemented because Ukraine didn't want them to be and Washington didn't insist on them.
Putin has long objected to the U.S.-dominated, "democratic" world order, which is built around Washington using force in international affairs without a thought to the consequences, as in the Balkans, Afghanistan, and Iraq. Putin especially disliked the U.S. overthrow of Qaddafi in Libya. The UN resolution authorizing a no-fly zone over that country was "defective and flawed," he said, because, "It allow[ed] them to do what they like, to undertake any manner of actions against a sovereign state." It reminded him, he said of "a medieval crusade."
In a speech to the United Nations General Assembly at the end of September in 2015, Putin blamed the refugee crisis (roughly five million people displaced) stemming from the Syrian civil war squarely on the West, which had induced hundreds of thousands of desperate families to rely on rickety boats to flee to Greece, the nearest European Union state. The U.S., which supported ISIS, was behaving as though there were "good terrorists and bad terrorists," Putin thought, without noticing that there was no easy way to distinguish the two groups. "Is it," asked Putin, "that the so-called moderates behead people more delicately or in more limited numbers?" Touche.
For Washington's neo-con crusaders, the "good" terrorists are whichever ones we're cynically using at the moment, which is why no one should be surprised that the head-choppers displaced Bashar al-Assad with U.S. air support last fall. Eight months from now they will commemorate 911 for the twenty-fourth time, piously renewing their imaginary permanent opposition to jihadi-style terrorism.
By comparison, Putin is a saint.
Sources:
Lawrence O'Donnell, "The Last Word," MSNBC, February 28, 2025
"Putin" by Philip Short (Henry Holt, 2022) p. 369, 522, 588-9, 652
Noam Chomsky with C. J. Polychroniou, ed. "Illegitimate Authority - Facing The Challenges of Our Time," (Haymarket, 2023), p. 160
