No cease-fire, just a misfire as Trump gets tapped again

“There will be very severe consequences” if Russian dictator Vladimir Putin does not stop the war he started in Ukraine, said President Donald J. Trump on Wednesday. He said he “won’t be happy if I walk away without some form of a cease-fire.”

On Friday, Putin refused to agree to a cease-fire, and Trump refused to announce consequences of any sort.

TACO. First time I am using the acronym for Trump Always Chickens Out.

He often — not always — threatens to do something, then does not.

It is sometimes excused as a bargaining tactic.

That’s not what it looks like now, with almost 40 million Ukrainian lives at stake. Along with Russian lives.

Trump muffed his Ronald Reagan moment, to declare, “Mr. Putin — end this war!”

Trump dropped his demand for a cease-fire, and accepted Putin’s scheme for an overall peace settlement, with Russia keeping all Ukrainian land it has grabbed so far, and wanting even more it could not seize. The Russian bear is hungry, and on the prowl.

Those are the facts. Will that agree with what Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and some Western allies are expected to be told during a Monday White House meeting? Trump holds most of the cards, to dredge up Trump’s disgusting metaphor from the last White House meeting, where he and Vice President JD Vance disgracefully cooperated, like in a tag team wrestling match, to beat down the democratic leader of an ally. 

Trump described his meeting with Putin as a “10,” because of warmth, while Zelensky gets the cold shoulder.

The former KGB officer gave Trump a belly rub by claiming the 2020 election was rigged due to mail-in ballots, and even that, parroting Trump, the war would not have happened had Trump been president. Blowing air up Trump’s skirt allowed Putin to keep, in Trump’s words, tapping him along. Immobilizing him. 

TACO.

From threatening “very severe consequences” if Russia continues the war, Trump has pirouetted to “We don’t have to think about that right now,” and “Now it’s really up to President Zelensky to get it done.”

Up to the victim of aggression to get what done? 

Sign a Munich-style appeasement package, at the very moment even a majority of Republicans now support giving more arms to Ukraine? A majority of Democrats have always believed the U.S. has a responsibility to help Ukraine.

This is happening while overall American support is at its highest levels since the war began more than three years ago. Most Americans understand that Russia is the bad guy, the aggressor, even if they don’t understand a lot of the background or the Russian propaganda about how Russia “owns” Ukraine, which they want back.

What would Trump’s reaction be to Russia wanting to take Alaska back? Like Ukraine, it was once “theirs.”

Alaskans won’t have it, and neither will Ukrainians, although a growing number want negotiations, if not surrender of territory.

What Trump calls progress, was just words he got from Putin, promises that if Putin got what he wants, he wouldn’t do it again. No more land grabs.

Which is exactly what Adolf Hitler promised after Munich. 

A promise he soon broke, and there is no reason to believe Putin’s voracious appetite for conquest is any less than Hitler’s. Putin already has taken chunks of Georgia and Ukraine and continuously threatens his neighbors in his announced desire to re-establish the Soviet Union.

He thinks the implosion of the Soviet Union was the worst thing to happen in the 20th Century, quite ignoring that it collapsed because of internal rot, and that no one, except maybe him and some Communist hard-liners, mourns its death.

How good is Putin’s word? Just last week Trump himself said, “We get a lot of bullshit thrown at us by Putin.”

Negotiator Steve Witkoff mentioned the possibility of an “Article V” assurance to Ukraine. Article V in the NATO charter requires all members to come to the aid of any attacked member. If true, that would be as good as NATO membership for Ukraine, which Putin ferociously opposes.

Trump called the meeting a “10,” exercising his usual gift self-promoting exaggeration. The meeting was very warm, he said.

He must have been referring to how Putin roasted his nuts.