You will have seen the most morbid news of the week, that of a young Englishman with a history of mental disorders who was killed by a tiger in a zoo. A video of the horror was happily posted by the idiots who swarm the networks, among them, Donald Trump.
Only he had to go further. He then sent another video, generated by AI, in which he replaced images of himself with those of the deceased, in combat with the same tiger. Let us remember that not long ago he gave us a meme with him playing the role of Jesus Christ; another in which he dumps poop from a plane onto a crowd of anti-Trump protesters. In the most recent case, the fictional Trump, king of the jungle, tames the tiger and hugs him.
Trump has declared countless times that he is the best president in US history, a joke that he, in his infinite unconsciousness, believes. Less a cause for laughter is that in the world today there is no leader anywhere on Earth who is more rude, more childish, more clownish, more amoral, more ignorant, more corrupt, more narcissistic and more supremely irresponsible than Trump.
Well, perhaps in one or two of these categories it has a rival. But not in all of them at the same time. He owns the complete pack alone. It would be enough to look at three things he has done in the last ten days to award him not the Nobel Peace Prize that he so ridiculously longs for, but the prize for the world champion of idiocy.
We have the tiger thing. For the fifth time in a month, Trump promised that all Americans of legal age would receive $5,000 if Republicans gained control of both houses of Congress in next month's elections. And, by far the most repugnant, we have his decision to finally remove what was left of his mask and unambiguously side with Vladimir Putin in his imperial war against Ukraine.
More eager on the eve of congressional elections to lower prices in the US than to avoid more bloodbaths in Ukraine, Trump agreed with Putin to import diesel from Russia. Which serves two purposes: to give more money to Putin to bomb hospitals, schools, train stations or energy infrastructure in Kyiv and to provide the US with 300,000 tons of said fuel, enough to cover US needs for… 14 hours, nothing more.
Result: diesel prices in the US will not drop and Putin will be able to kill more innocents. However, Trump declared after the agreement: “I want to thank President Putin.”
Volodymyr Zelensky's response: that “more people will die”, that he felt “betrayed”. The president of Ukraine noted that, to make matters worse, the United States had just reduced its military's access to Starlink communications technology, Elon Musk's company, thus increasing his country's vulnerability to Russian missiles. Trump's response: “I think it's time for Ukraine to change its president,” something he has never said about Putin. In fact, he has a photo of Putin hanging in the White House.
With more insistence than ever the question is heard in the US: “Is Trump a Russian agent?” If true, it would be the most unlikely and shameful case of betrayal since the Russians signed a non-aggression pact with the Nazis in 1939 so that both could divide Poland. (Little doubt, for that matter, that Trump would have allied with Hitler in World War II.)
The Russian chess champion Gari Kasparov, exiled in New York, answers the big question with another. "If Trump were a Russian intelligence agent, what would he be doing differently? Nothing." For now, what we know is that, at the very least, Trump has become a spokesman for the Kremlin. Zelensky, he says, is “a dictator,” and Putin, “a friend.” When Zelensky ordered more attacks on Russian refineries this week, Trump's comment was: "It's a shame." Not much, however, about the twenty Ukrainian children who died under Russian missiles the week before the trade agreement with Putin.
Such is the fascination that Putin exerts on Trump that he remains blind to the most basic truth of the war in Ukraine: that it ends the day Russia stops fighting; that the day Ukraine stops fighting, Ukraine ceases to exist. But Trump insists, after almost five years of war, that the main obstacle to peace is not Russia. “Zelensky could have ended this war many times over,” he said. “And he chooses not to.”
There is an even more blatant betrayal, that of Trump against his own country. She persists in her love relationship with the most undemocratic leader in the world despite the fact that her intelligence services (I mean, those of the US) tell her that Russia has been giving technological assistance to Iran so that it can launch attacks against US military bases in the Gulf. In other words, Americans and their allies die thanks to Putin, without any consequences for him. Quite the opposite. Oh, and the real driver of rising inflation in the US has nothing to do with Ukraine and everything to do with the war that Trump started in Iran.
Now, we must recognize that in one sense Trump is right. There is logic in their decision to buy diesel from Russia. All polls say that in the November midterm elections the most negative factor for his Republican party will be the rise in the cost of living. The deaths that the US causes in Ukraine or the manifest truth that Trump belongs not in the White House but in an asylum are politically irrelevant. What Trump does know is how to manipulate his loyalists. He calculates that his energy deal with Putin, however cruel and useless, will convince them.
