Trump-Putin – Dummy and Manipulator

Mark O'Neill April 17, 2025 16:18

The Western world, including half of the population in the United States, are in a state of shock and disbelief at President Donald Trump, who took office just two months ago.

He is signing presidential orders at a rate not seen since Franklin Roosevelt, who signed 3,721 during his 12-year term from 1933 to 1945. He fought the Great Depression and the Axis Powers in World War Two.

To justify his orders, Trump has also declared a national emergency, even though none exists.

Most shocking and incredible is Trump’s support and friendship with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Putin is the greatest butcher in Europe since Josef Stalin and Adolf Hitler. In 1999, he launched the second Chechen war that left 50,000-80,000 dead, including Chechens and Russian soldiers.

In August 2009, he launched the invasion of Georgia, which led to about 850 deaths and 100,000 people being expelled from their homes.

In 2014, he launched the invasion of eastern Ukraine, which led to 14,500 military and civilian deaths that year. In 2022, he launched the all-out invasion of Ukraine, which has far killed or injured more than 43,000 Ukrainian civilians.

An estimated 100,000 Russian soldiers have been killed. In mid-February, President Volodymyr Zelensky put the number of Ukrainian military dead at 46,000.

Before and during World War Two, leaders of Britain, France and the U.S. had limited knowledge of the atrocities committed by Stalin and Hitler. Their men killed their victims and often hid the crimes.

Not so with the crimes of Putin. Trump need only turn on his television and computer to see the Ukrainian schools and hospitals destroyed by Russian bombs and the military cemeteries in Russia stretching without end into the distance.

But Trump calls Putin his “friend” and says that he has a good relationship with him. There is even talk in Washington that he will go to Moscow on May 9 to attend the giant military parade to mark the 80th anniversary of the end of World War Two. Since Xi Jinping will also be there, this seems most unlikely.

Denying the evidence of his own Defence Department and the Central Intelligence Agency, Trump says that Ukraine started the war in 2022.

According to American scholar Francis Fukuyama, Trump first visited the Soviet Union in 1987. He met then President Mikhail Gorbachev; he considered him too weak.

“On returning home, he published paid advertisements in the New York Times and Washington Post, saying that the United States should stop paying to defend the countries of NATO. He adopted the Soviet position. He has never deviated from this position.

“All of Putin’s strategy was to wait for the return of Trump to power, so he could take as much of Ukraine as possible,” he said.

Earlier this month, the U.S. announced it would withdraw military personnel and equipment from the southeast Polish city of Rzeszów. Close to the border to Ukraine, it has since 2022 been the main hub for aid to Ukraine.

“This will save American taxpayers tens of millions of dollars per year and will see NATO and Poland itself take greater responsibility for security around Rzeszów,” the U.S. military said.

In late March, four American soldiers died in a NATO training exercise in Lithuania. Hundreds turned out at a memorial ceremony in Vilnius, including the country’s president, to honour and thank them.
When their bodies were flown home, Trump did not go to meet them. Instead he attended a dinner with leaders of a golf tour in Florida.

John Bolton, Trump’s National Security Adviser from April 2018 to September 2019, said that Trump was incompetent and not fit to be president.

In his book “The Room Where It Happened” published in 2020, Bolton described Trump as egotistical and narcissistic.

“I was appalled at the freewheeling and hyper-personal way in which Trump engages his global duties and other world leaders,” he wrote. “What bothered me most was the Trump style of freelancing policy and switching up the national posture, sometimes on an hourly basis. It is a degree of random inconsistency It was chaos as a way of life."

He said that Putin did not consider Trump a friend.

“He thinks Trump is an easy mark. And he thinks he’s manipulable. And he has been manipulating him,” he said.

Thousands more will die because of this combination of Putin’s wickedness and Trump’s stupidity.

Mark O'Neill

A Hong Kong-based writer, teacher and speaker.