While we were commemorating the 80th anniversary of V-J Day, it was ironic that two far right politicians, one a bona fide fascist, the other well on his way to becoming one (I’ll leave you to decide which is which), should be meeting in Alaska, ostensibly to try to end Russia’s war on Ukraine. You can’t exactly compare the two events, one being the end of a world war and the other being an illegal invasion by one country of another, yet it tells you that some people do not appear to have learned much from the past.
Donald Trump’s slobbering embrace of a fascist dictator, mafia man Vladimir Putin, as they met in Anchorage (which before he went Trump repeatedly said was in Russia) was repulsive to watch. The man whose hit men came to England to attack the Skripals and to assassinate Alexander Litvenenko, the man responsible for the deaths of around a million people from both sides; essentially a war criminal who should be in the dock in The Hague and not be cuddled-up to a halfwit of an American president. Their face-to-face talks were no more than an expensive PR exercise which was clearly won by Putin, who has played Trump like a fiddle.
More than that, this was appeasement on a grand scale. Instead of holding Putin to account, Trump merely blustered, talking lamely about the undefined “progress” the talks had made, having rolled out the red carpet for an unreconstructed KGB thug. This was not like Neville Chamberlain’s attempted appeasement of Adolf Hitler in 1938. It was far, far worse than that.
Putin repeated Trump’s lie that if he had been president instead of Joe Biden, there would have been no war on Ukraine and, to Trump’s great delight, referred to 2020’s “rigged election” in the USA which saw ejected Trump from the White House. You could not make this stuff up and of course worse still, Trump did not see fit to explain how Putin last year’s sham elections in Russia last year with 87% of the vote and has changed his country’s constitution so he can stay in power to 2036.
I can think of no other US president who would have allowed Putin such a clear PR victory or even have allowed him to enter the USA in the first place. If Putin had landed in any one of around 100 countries in the world, he’d have been arrested on the spot and charged with war crimes. As David Smith points out in The Guardian: “Putin’s troops have also been accused of indiscriminate murder, rape and torture on an appalling scale.”
This was a dark day for the world where a monstrous dictator and mass murderer was embraced by the so-called leader of the western world.
On Monday, the hero that is Volodymyr Zelenskyy, president of Ukraine, flies to Washington to meet Trump, presumably for some kind of update as to what wasn’t agreed in Alaska. Will Trump attempt to humiliate Ukraine’s president, as he did last time or will he show support to a country still under attack by the Russian bear? I have a sneaking suspicion we all know the answer to that.
What was it the Manic Street Preachers sang? Oh yes: “And if you tolerate this then your children will be next.” Well, quite. Donald Trump Mark 2 is even worse than the first one, this time unconstrained by having no adults in the room. While Putin is a smart operator, effectively a criminal mastermind, Trump is a not-very-bright large bag of wind with clearly declining mental faculties.
Situation hopeless … but not serious? No. It’s hopeless and serious. And if you are a citizen of Ukraine, you will feel much more worried about the future than you did before Trump met Putin.
