Literary Corner: Potato-in-Chief

Convinced Putin gave Trump this present just to force him to be photographed grasping an object with both hands, which always makes him look like somebody who has trouble using two hands at a time. Photo by Chris McGrath/Getty Images via NPR.

The brethren are pretty flummoxed by the Retired Emperor coming out to tell everybody, in an interview with Clay Travis and Buck Sexton (surely that's a bluegrass duo) about how "smart" and "savvy" it is of President Putin to go through with this invasion of territory he already controls and what a "genius" he is, making him sound like the bought-and-paid-for Russian asset we've been telling you he is for the past six years.

Of course that's unpossible! There must be some other explanation, of which my current favorite is the view that Trump's peculiar enthusiasms are irrelevant, since they had no effect on his foreign policy, which he had nothing to do with:

This view of Trump's "toughness" with Russia is identical to the one Trump's clowns kept putting out for four years. The focus of the White House was in fact to find every possible way of avoiding Congressionally mandated sanctions https://t.co/oEHXLlza0n https://t.co/oEHXLlza0n

— Yas We Can (@Yastreblyansky) February 23, 2022

Trump only worked for the Trump administration for a very short period of time. Maybe he showed up for a couple of meetings.

— Yas We Can (@Yastreblyansky) February 23, 2022

But that still leaves the more interesting question of why the Retired Emperor is so inconceivably stupid as to keep doing this, after all this time, and that's something we at Rectification Central are equipped to explore, with our long preoccupation with his work as a poet and the psychological profile that goes with it:

There Was a Television Screen

by Donald J. Trump, 45th President of the United States of America

Well, what went wrong was a rigged election
and what went wrong is a candidate
that shouldn’t be there and a man that has
no concept of what he’s doing.

I went in yesterday and there was
a television screen, and I said,
“This is genius.”

Putin declares a big portion
of the Ukraine —
of Ukraine—

Putin declares it as independent.
Oh, that’s wonderful.
So, Putin is now saying,
“It’s independent,”
a large section of Ukraine.

I said, “How smart is that?”
And he’s gonna go in
and be a peacekeeper.

We could use that on our southern border.
That’s the strongest peace force I’ve ever seen.
There were more army tanks than I’ve ever seen.
They’re gonna keep peace all right.
No, but think of it.

Here’s a guy who’s very savvy
I know him very well.
Very, very well.

By the way, this never would
have happened with us. Had I been
in office, not even thinkable.

This would never have happened.
But here’s a guy that says, you know,
“I’m gonna declare a big portion
of Ukraine independent”
—he used the word “independent”—
“and we’re gonna go out
and we’re gonna go in
and we’re gonna help keep peace.”

You gotta say that’s pretty savvy.
And you know what the response was from Biden?
There was no response.
They didn’t have one for that.
No, it’s very sad.
Very sad.

(Biden's comprehensive response, of course, arrived in good time, possibly around the same time Trump was doing the interview, and no more than an hour or two later. 

It's that television screen: he "went in" and there it was, and then Putin started going out and going in and you gotta say he's pretty savvy. It's the theme developed in a couple of recent posts (here and here) of how the only experiences that register as experiences in Trump's strange brain are those refracted through the television medium, which he watches with the particular attitude of the sports fan, maybe I should say the sports gambler, focused on the factors that will decide who wins, questions of overall strategy, the players' interesting personalities and health conditions, and the n-body problem of what happens when they bump into each other on the field or court.

And maybe I should add a New York sports fan, who hates his local team for the continual disappointments it provides, and is certain he could coach it better. 

That's how Trump watches politics, we've seen, centered on handicapping the Big Game in November. He has no interest in government, clearly, except insofar as it contributes to the campaigning process, and as a player in his own right, he's preferred just making promises (I'll build a wall, I'll ban all the Muslims, my healthcare plan is coming in two weeks) to trying to carry them out—the latter takes too much time away from TV. He hates Republicans, the bums who keep letting him down, and he hates Democrats, the rivals who think they're so hot, and he has no conception at all of his own performance, when he used to be a contender, coach or quarterback or whatever he thinks he was, except for the part he's watched on Fox and CNN, above all the returns coming in.

Now we see it's the same with issues of war and peace. That's an international sport, so his team is Americans, so of course he hates Americans, who are always screwing it up, choosing the wrong battles and not getting the oil, and is convinced he could run it better if he were in charge, and has only the vaguest sense that he actually was in charge, because it wasn't on TV that much. He has trouble choosing the hated rival in international matters, but I figure it's people in our own conference, the NATO members, with a special hatred for Canada and France (which acted all friendly and then made fun of him). And just as a Yankee fan can pick out a National League team (as long as it isn't the Mets) for particular admiration, showing he's a fair-minded kind of guy who knows quality when he sees it, Trump just likes Russia. 

Complete ignorance of the subject matter makes it easier. You can see that in his excitement over the declaration that the Donbas republics are independent ("he used the word"). He has no clue what it is, but it sounds really good to him, for some reason. I wonder if he thinks Putin is now Ukraine's Thomas Jefferson. The idea that "we could use that on our southern border" is even more mysterious: use it for what? To chop out little bits of Sonora and Chihuahua to rescue all the oppressed English speakers there? I beg your pardon?

He's on more secure ground with the tank parade, that looked pretty tough, and with the Russians calling themselves "peacemakers", which he plainly sees as a kind of cunning feint. But the admiration is really emotional, not technical. He likes Russia's style, and grit. And besides, since he became a star in his own right, Putin has always been nice to him when they've been on TV together (remember how he was pretending they'd been on TV together, in late 2015, and shared the green room?). Unlike those schmucks Trudeau and Macron.

And that, friends, is why he can't learn to stop saying these things. He's also a bought and paid-for Russian asset, no doubt, but it's easy for him not to talk about that—it's business. This, on the other hand, is sports. It's stuff that happens on TV. It's the most serious thing there is, but it's only a game. And Putin is the GOAT, in Trump's opinion; it would be unsportsmanly to deny it.