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In his ghostwritten 1987 bestseller, The Art of the Deal, Donald Trump delivers his own version of the American Dream. Get as much as you can for yourself. There’s always someone out there who’s stupider than you. Any attention is better than none. Promise people the Earth even if you know you can never deliver. Paint yourself orange and glue what’s left of your hair to your head. This is business as a macho willy waving contest. So much so you suspect The Donald is deeply insecure about the size of his own.
But maybe we should have read between the lines better. For the real message is: “Always let someone else take the hit.” After all, it wasn’t Trump who was left out of pocket when his hotels and casinos six times filed for bankruptcy between 1991 and 2009 due to an inability to meet scheduled payments. It was his creditors. That’s a business style The Donald has taken into his presidency. After the Trump Plaza and the Trump Tower, we now have the Trump Toilet. To flush away Ukraine.
Trump promised to deliver peace to Ukraine on day one of his presidency, but it took him until now to come up with a plan. Not a lot of thinking appears to have gone on in the past three weeks. Almost as if The Donald had been winging it all along. Who would have guessed? How very unlike him.
It was late on Tuesday night that Trump announced he had had a one-hour phone call with Vladimir Putin. For The Donald this was a ”peace in our time” moment. His legendary negotiating tactics forcing the Russian president to his knees. Perhaps not. Because far from demanding the impossible to get as much as he could, Trump gave away almost everything in the first round of talks. This was capitulation bordering on appeasement.
Here was the deal. Ukraine was to have no say in the future of Ukraine. Russia would get to keep all the land it had annexed since 2014. Ukraine would never be part of Nato or subject to Nato protections. The US would play no part in maintaining the subsequent peace. This was geopolitics as a real-estate deal. Who cared about Crimea and the Donbass anyway? They weren’t great locations for golf courses and casinos like Gaza.
Putin could barely contain himself. The negotiations had taken barely a couple of minutes. All he had had to do was say yes to everything. The remaining 58 minutes of the conversation were spent telling The Donald how brilliant he was.
“You’re a genius,” said Vlad. “The world is going to be so much safer now you are in the White House. Together we’re going to carve up the world.”
“A lot of people say that to me,” Trump replied. “You won’t believe how much peace I am going to bring. The bigliest amount of peace the world has ever seen. I tell you, everyone is going to be so grateful to me. Some are calling me the Messiah.”
Over in the UK, you could hear the sense of despair in government circles. Not another mind-blowingly unhelpful intervention from the US president that some poor minister would simultaneously have to defend and disown? Labour’s insistence on doing nothing that might upset The Donald at all costs must be maintained at all costs. Whatever you do, don’t call the president stupid. Especially when he is being stupid.
With the defence secretary, John Healey, away in Brussels, the poor person left to explain the government’s position on Ukraine to the Commons was the junior defence minister, Maria Eagle. Understandably, she looked nervous and miserable throughout. This was so far above her pay grade. She looked down at her briefing notes and willed the 45 minutes of the urgent question tabled by the shadow defence secretary, James Cartlidge, to race by.
Maria began by insisting that Ukraine had a right to decide on its own peace terms. It hadn’t spent the last three years in a bloody and murderous war only for someone else to determine its sovereignty. Europe must now step up to partake in the peace process. That was why the UK would continue to supply arms to Ukraine. So far so good.
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That was the easy bit. Then came the obligatory praise for the US. Trump had been right to realise there was a war taking place that needed to come to an end. No one else had noticed the war was ongoing. It had been an act of strategic brilliance for The Donald to pick up the phone to Putin. She also wanted to congratulate the US defence secretary, Pete Hegseth, on being Pete Hegseth. No one could have been a better Pete Hegseth than Pete Hegseth. And when he said that Ukraine should have no say in its own future, what he really meant was Ukraine should be cut into the loop.
You sense there is a vein of ice-cold sadism running through Cartlidge. Why else would he have demanded this UQ? He had nothing different to say to Eagle. Every party defends Ukraine’s right to agree to the terms of any peace. He just wanted to see her squirm as she mangled her words of praise for the US. For once, James also breathed a sigh of relief he wasn’t in government. There but for the grace of God … No one cares about inconsistencies in Tory policy these days so no one raised an eyebrow when he said we should be backing Europe after months of saying we should cosy up to the US.
There weren’t many MPs in the Commons for the UQ – though Rishi Sunak did make a rare guest appearance – but they all spoke with one voice. The US couldn’t dictate terms to Ukraine. Especially not the ones Trump had come up with. That was an admission that aggression always paid off. An incitement for Putin to have another go at taking Kyiv in a few years time. This wasn’t a peace that could last. Tory Julian Lewis was outraged that the US was calling the shots when it wasn’t even prepared to hang around to make the peace work. It was appeasement plain and simple.
The longer it went on, the more unhappy Eagle became. Part of her was dying inside having to defend any part of this American intervention. Dealing with Trump is like wrangling a toddler. First it drains you of your self-worth. Then your will to live.
