After one month of the second Trump term, Peggy Noonan’s reaction expressed in her Wall Street Journal column is not dissimilar from mine:
When you think aloud for a living you’re lately getting a lot of wry comments like “It must be hard to come up with a topic with nothing going on.”
“It’s drinking from a fire hose,” the journalist will reply. Meanwhile, normal people are asking: He doesn’t really think he’s a king, right? I’ve grown tired of saying, “Well, that was insane,” and we’re barely a month in.
The question you really feel pressed to ask yourself is are these people crazy? Ms. Noonan reflects on that:
The most charitable gloss on the administration style—here we’re thinking of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s blithe announcement that he wants to cut defense spending 8% a year for the next five years—is that they’re simply riding high and have grown full of themselves, as opposed to clinically insane.
I think the most charitable gloss on the president’s remarks is that the president tends to speak rashly, off the cuff, and in superlatives. I frequently have no idea what he’s actually trying to express when you cut through the BS.
She turns to President Trump’s remarks about Ukraine:
The president’s remarks on Ukraine this week were wild and destructive. He isn’t wrong to wish to end that conflict—war is brutality and waste. Everyone knew that it would end on unsatisfying terms. But Ukraine didn’t start it, Russia did, in defiance of international law. The war isn’t Volodymyr Zelensky’s fault, he isn’t a dictator, he isn’t loathed by his people—all those things President Trump said were untrue. And the vast majority of those listening to these charges know they are untrue. Asking “Why does Trump do this?” is a decade-long cliché, but really—why does he do this?
Ukraine is a sovereign nation. Its citizens put everything they had on the field to defend themselves. Mr. Zelensky entered world history with spirit and guts, refusing to flee Kyiv: “I need ammo, not a ride.” After the Cold War Ukraine agreed to relinquish the nuclear weapons housed there for a promise the U.S. would always have its back. They trusted us. Must American presidents honor the honestly made vows of their predecessors? In this case surely yes, at pain of announcing to every friend we have, “You’re on your own, Uncle Sam has left the building.” Trump supporters think they want that message sent. It is a careless and destructive one.
Did everyone actually know Russia’s war against Ukraine would “end on unsatisfying terms”? I see very little evidence of that. Quite to the contrary what I have seen is persistence in holding overly optimistic views no one knew how to make into reality. Those few hardy souls who understood it would end on unsatisfying terms from the very outset have been castigated as either victims of or promoting Russian propaganda.
More on this in a later post.
You keep saying this but I think while there was a brief surge of optimism after Russia performed so poorly at the start it has pretty much been a given among people who talk seriously about foreign policy that then ending to the war wont leave everyone happy. What I have seen is that people dont want to start negotiations with concessions.
Steve