White House Kayfabe

Why did Trump tank his Ukraine deal?

Prime Minister Winston Churchill in "siren suit" visiting the White House in January 1942; photo by the Royal Navy's official photographer, Lt. C.J. Ware, via Wikipedia.

Trump may have been genuinely upset by President Zelenskyy's showing up at the White House in fatigues and sweat shirt instead of a suit and tie (he once slapped his eldest boy to the floor in front of everybody in the dorm for thinking it would be OK to wear jeans on a father-and-son outing—to see a baseball game, no less), but he can't have been surprised, since it's known that that's what Zelenskyy does, and intends to do until the war is over, by way of showing solidarity with his country's troops, as Winston Churchill liked to do in one of his special rompers outfits during World War II.

So it's pretty clear that the incident on Friday was wholly staged kayfabe, from Trump's greeting as the Ukrainian president stepped out of the car ("You're dressed up today") onwards.

The reporter who fired the first shot at Zelenskyy's clothing choices, Brian Glenn, was obviously planted for the purpose—he's from one of the new media joints the White House has chosen to replace the venerable AP in small-size press availabilities, the cable channel Real America's Voice, previously best known as a venue for Stephen Bannon's show after Bannon was thrown off of YouTube and Spotify, and had been selected to lead the press pool alongside CNN for the occasion (on Thursday it was Newsmax). Glenn is also said to be "dating" Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), which sounds to me like an assertion that the two of them have regularly scheduled sexual relations, but you really don't want to get into that. (That's what she said, heh-heh.)

Reporter 5: My second question is for President Zelensky. Do you ever, why don't you wear a suit? You're the highest level in this country's office, and you refuse to wear a suit. Just want to see people own a suit. Yeah, yeah. From those a lot of Americans have problems with you.

Zelensky: I will wear kostyum after this war will finish. Yes, maybe, maybe something, maybe something like yours, yes, maybe some something better, I don't know, we will see, maybe something cheaper than that, thank you. Thank you.

Kostyum, костюм, is the Russian and Ukrainian term for a man's suit with jacket and tie, borrowed from French costume, as is the English, though the English hasn't been used with that meaning for a long time. These were the fourth and fifth times he used the words "thank you" in the meeting—the first three were all addressed to President Trump (see transcript). He did not use them again after the vice president falsely accused him of not using them.

The dustup itself began, I think, rather later, with a question from the CNN reporter Kaitlan Collins, trying to get a fix on whether the proposed US-Ukraine agreement on rare earths (or "raw earths", as Trump kept calling them) offered Ukraine any security guarantees:

Reporter: What if Russia tries to invade, or there's Russian and Russia to respond…

Trump: I just told you I don't think that's going to happen. And if that were going to happen, I wouldn't make a deal. If I thought that was going to happen, I wouldn't make a deal. You ought to focus on CNN, on survival, not asking me these ridiculous questions. Focus on surviving because CNN has got such low ratings, I don't think they're going to survive.

Reporter Marek Załkuski of Polskie Radio, jumped in gallantly to defend the seriousness of Collins's question:

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Reporter: I already mentioned Poland. Poland was under Russian control for decades after the Second World War, when I was a kid, I looked at the United States not only as a most powerful country, richest country in the world, the country that has great music, great movies, great muscle cars, but also as a force for good. Do you? And now I'm talking with my friends in Poland, and they are worried that you align yourself too much with Putin. What's your message for them?

Trump: Well, if I didn't align myself with both of them, you'd never have a deal. You want me to say really terrible things about Putin and then say, hi, Vladimir. How are we doing on the deal? That doesn't work that way... And I want to get this thing over with. You see, the hatred he's got for Putin. It's very tough for me to make a deal with that kind of hate. He's got tremendous hatred, and I understand that, but I can tell you the other side isn't exactly in love with, you know, him, either. So it's not a question of alignment. I'm in line with the world. I want to get the thing set. I'm aligned with Europe. I want to see if we can get this thing done. I. You want me to be tough? I could be tougher than any human being you've ever seen. I'd be so tough, but you're never going to get a deal that way. So that's the way it goes.

This is the maddening thing, the double standard with which Putin and Zelenskyy are approached, also evident in an anti-Zelenskyy tweet from Musk:

Only the Ukrainians are asked to make any concessions. Only the Ukrainians are asked to do anything at all. The Russians just have to sit there and wait until all their war aims are achieved, and then there will be peace. It's Zelenskyy's job to make the peace, essentially by overcoming his hatred and capitulating. That's how Trump and his sidekicks see it. The war is your fault because you haven't surrendered yet.

And that's where the part we've mostly seen on video begins, with Vance's confusing attack on Joe Biden ("The path to peace and the path to prosperity is maybe engaging in diplomacy; we tried the pathway of Joe Biden, of thumping our chest and pretending that the President of the United States's words mattered more than the President of the United States's actions"), and praise for Trump's "diplomacy", and the ensuing crosstalk match in which Zelenskyy tried to explain how the history from 2014 onwards made him unable to trust Putin and Trump went off on his own track, eventually shouting him down like he did Hillary Clinton in 2016, yelling about how Zelenskyy was now "in a bad position", "in trouble", "didn't have the cards", and was being "disrespectful".

But I think there's no doubt that the outcome of the thing was determined in advance, almost like a WWE match, except that in WWE the loser is allowed in on the planning and gets paid. The question is why in this case: what does Trump gain from tanking the deal negotiated with Ukraine?

I'm interested in John Ganz's idea that the point is to destroy Zelenskyy in the United States, among the voters—

My basic takeaway is this: what Trump and Vance are trying to accomplish is the political destruction of Zelensky, at least as far as Republicans and Trump-leaning voters are concerned.... It’s clear from Axios that the story the White House wants out there is that Trump got mad about the suit issue. They must figure the furor over diplomatic decorum helps them because they want to frame support for Ukraine as a kind of bougie, college boy (or, really, girl) thing.

—but I'm wondering, for what? Zelenskyy's not running for anything over here. For revenge? Trumpublicans have a theory that Zelenskyy campaigned for Kamala Harris in last year's presidential race, which Vance in fact referred to in the dressing-down ("You went to Pennsylvania and campaigned for the opposition in October"), but it's pretty obviously false, and why should he feel such a need to avenge himself for something that didn't happen? Or has somebody managed to explain to him that the rare earth deal he was so proud of having negotiated couldn't possibly generate even a small fraction of the $500 billion he was claiming it would (New York Times calculated that if Ukraine had 20% of the world supply of rare earths, which it doesn't have anything like, it would take 150 years to realize that much money off of it)?

An Occam-simple explanation you may not like, because it's not very helpful, is that Putin told him to:

Reporter: You guys spoke to Vladimir Putin a couple of days ago. Just to be clear, that's a new call? What did you discuss?

Trump: I've spoken to him on numerous occasions. It went well, I think we're going to have a deal on the minerals.

That must of course be the deal he and Zelenskyy were scheduled to sign at the end of the meeting, right? Though we've also been hearing tales of a possible rare earths deal with Russia, if only the sanctions on doing business can be removed. "I think"? You mean you don't know, an hour or two before the ceremony? What exactly is he talking about?

It reminds me of another Trump statement I've never understood, at the Helsinki summit in July 2018, when the attending press asked him about the allegations of Russian meddling in the 2016 election, who he believed—his own intelligence community, or Putin's protestations?

"President Putin says it's not Russia. I don't see any reason why it would be," he replied.

For one thing, of course he could see a reason. He's pretty stupid, but not that stupid, and it's something he talked about all the time, what a great relationship he and Putin had, and what a great thing it would be for the world for them to be working together. And then it's presupposed that somebody had meddled in the election, the "it" that might or might not be Russia. Why wouldn't it be Russia? Who else would be doing it?

(Keep in mind that he and Giuliani were already nourishing the insane theory that the supposedly Ukrainian company Crowdstrike that had caught the Russian hackers of 2016 had itself stolen some batch of Hillary Clinton emails and was hiding them somewhere in Kiyiv, but it never became coherent enough for prime time.)

However, Trump did know it was Russia, as Mueller and the Senate Intelligence Committee were able to demonstrate in their reports. All those people clutching their pearls over how could he choose to believe Putin over his own intelligence services were completely missing the point. He was just lying.

He knew Russia was trying to help him get elected in 2016, and he welcomed it, at the latest in April 2016, when he unveiled his weird Russia-heavy team of foreign policy "advisors" and Dmitry Simes (now self-exposed as a Russia agent and living in Moscow exile) coordinated his maiden foreign policy speech at the Mayflower Hotel, with the Russian ambassador in attendance. And Ukraine always had something to do with it, most likely as the quid pro quo for Putin's support (Trump seems to have had two different teams working on secret Ukraine "peace" plans conforming to Putin desires at the time of the transition in 2016-17, the Cohen-Sater lowlifes and the Manafort-Kilimnik gents). Trump is supposed to be delivering Ukraine to Putin, in return for what Putin has done for him, and Putin tells him what to do. That's what we've been watching over the last couple of weeks.

It's not a very helpful explanation because nobody in power, I'm thinking especially of the NATO and EU leaderships and other US allies, can make any use of it, or even let on to whatever suspicions they may have. But for us out here in the wilderness, who can afford to think clearly, it's really necessary. Never start believing the pro wrestling is real.