by Claudiu Secara

There is a certain stupefaction in the world today. Did Trump just ambush Zelensky in a premeditated act of political theater, or what?

Here is my take on this big White House drama.

President Trump is desperate. I can imagine that Elon Musk had a conversation like this with Donald Trump. “Mr. President, we are f’d up. We are heading for imminent bankruptcy, the country’s finances are maxed out, we’re adding 2 trillion dollars in debt every year, of which 1 trillion goes just to pay the interest. Our real economy is not 27.5 trillion dollars but by my best estimate is somewhere between 15 and 18 trillion dollars. What we’re facing is bankrupcy within the next 4 years and you’ll be remembered as the president who brought the US to a historic collapse.”

Really?! said Trump, and what can we do, is there anything that we can do to avoid that?

“Yes, Mr. President, there is. We need to stop the war in Ukraine immediately, now, at any cost. Then we can cut half a trillion expenditures from our military immediately. Another half a trillion dollars we can cut from various other spending, such us USAID, the National Endowment for Democracy, foreign aid, subsidies for illegal immigration , etc . . .”

Would that be enough, Donald Trump asked. “Not quite, because that would be only half out of our annual deficit.” Tell me more, Elon, you’re smart as a real rocket scientist.

“We can impose tariffs, 25 percent or more, on all the countries that we do business with. Then we can take over all the minerals from Greenland, or even from Ukraine. Stop paying for shipping through the Panama Canal, claim that it’s ours since we built it, etc.”

“But first, we need to stop the war with Russia. Full stop. Now.”

That seems to have been Trump’s state of mind when he made his big offensive as a ‘man of peace’. Nevermind that, as Zelensky reminded him, it was under Trump’s first presidency that the war in Ukraine escalated just like the war in Syria.

Is that what motivates Trump’s desperate histrionics when faced with the incredulity of his former European allies? What? Stop the war against Russia’s aggression, and capitulate tomorrow? We, the whole of the West, 450 million strong plus 330 million in the US, to be defeated by a rusty Russian army running on a rusty economy?

But Trump cannot afford to tell the rest of the world that the US is a dead man walking. He needs to act like the tough boss, the most powerful president of this “beautiful and wonderful country”. He acts like the man whose next payment is due tomorrow and if he can’t make it, he has no other choice but to hang himself.

The spectacle that we have seen on this day, February 28, 2025, in the Oval Office of the White House, is the culmination of some 40 years of reckless, American-style casino economy. This is the day when the emperor showed up with no clothes.

America has no options left. The president of a rump Ukraine walks out of the US president’s office as the antihero hero. Meanwhile, in an act of total juvenile hubris, the US Secretary of State refuses to meet with the EU’s second in command, Foreign Minister Kaja Kallas, who was in Washington for that purpose. Trump has the Polish president standing and waiting in the antechamber for one and a half hours only to see each other for 9 minutes. He keeps poor Macron sitting at the corner of his presidential desk and intimidates the King of Jordan to the point of a nervous breakdown.

What Trump and his sidekick Vance remind me of is another pair from the post WWII boomer generation, Clinton and Gore, whom senior Bush couldn’t stop himself from calling the two Bozos (almost sounds like Bezos). The same antics by two brassy spoiled brats who finally had their toy taken away by the adults in the room, after annoying everyone with their obnoxious hair pulling.

Trump came across as the bully, the erratic would-be mafia boss, before the proverbial “the king goes mad”?! After making promises left and right, saying things that did not add up, while we mere mortals presume that he knows something that we do not know, the time has come to get the first results. Was he playing multidimensional chess, a super-clever “master of deception”, as Doctorow calls him, or just an ordinary jackass liar? The kind that disappears with your money that he swindled from you?!

After today’s attempted entrapment of Zelensky, Trump ended up like the guy who fell into his own trap. A lot of people tonight are singing hosanna to the still composed and clever Zelensky. No sign of what Lavrov snidely promised just the day before: how the “Europeans” one after another will wag their tails at the feet of Trump. So much for the Russian Intelligence Services’ insight. Ha, ha. If that’s the basis of their strategic planning in the multipolar world, no wonder their “best [or second best] army in the world”, couldn’t run over the dilettante Ukrainian army.

One thing seems highly likely, this presidency is not going to end well.

Note: Having said all of that, a note of caution. It is not entirely out of the realm of possibility that in their mutual desperation, the US and Russia might resort to the same formula for the third time. And that is, turning their rivalry into a military coalition in order to destroy Europe for the third time. And divide it again. They seem to have a sinister hatred of their natural superiors.