Even by his recent standards, Tuesday night’s stream of unconsciousness from Donald Trump took some beating. Hot on the tail of excluding Ukraine from the first round of peace talks with Russia and in effect threatening to withdraw the US from Nato, the Donald has now suggested it was Kyiv who started the war with Moscow.
More than that, he declared President Zelenskyy’s popularity ratings had slid to just 4% in his own country and that he had assumed the role of dictator by not holding elections. He ended by claiming that the US had given more than three times as much aid to Ukraine than the rest of Europe combined. You could almost hear Vladimir Putin cheering from the sidelines. He couldn’t have written the script any better. It was perfection.
It goes without saying that everything the US president had said was complete doggy-bollox. Russia first invaded Ukraine in 2014 and seized Crimea. There was then a pause in hostilities before Putin invaded a second time almost exactly three years ago.
Claiming Ukraine started the war was like believing that Poland invaded Germany to trigger the second world war. Or maybe the Poles were just suffering from false consciousness and were yet to understand they wanted to be subjugated by the Germans. Hell, maybe Trump thinks “no means no” is just some politically correct wokery and that when the Ukrainians said they would rather not become Russian what they were really saying was: “Yes, please. Do what you like.” Much like the Americans were gagging for the Japanese to bomb Pearl Harbor in 1941.
That was just the start. Trump’s claim that Zelenskyy’s approval ratings were 4% were just his delusional, senescent fantasies. The real figure is 57%: about 10% higher than the Donald’s own. And no one in their right mind is suggesting Ukraine holds elections while the war is ongoing. There again, Trump is clearly not in his right mind. His aid figures are also way off. Collectively, Europe has given Ukraine £132bn since the start of the war. America has given £114bn.
While a shrink would have a field day trying to untangle the workings of the Trump psyche – is he a narcissist or solipsist? Does he actually believe what he says or do his words have an independent existence to his brain? – it’s left to the rest of us to pick up the pieces. Much as they might like not to, other world leaders have to find a way of engaging with him. The Donald is the most powerful man on the planet and whatever he says counts for something.
So spare a thought for junior minister Diana Johnson, who found herself scheduled to do the morning media round for the government. She had hoped she would be called on to talk about the latest knife crime initiative but found herself asked about Trump’s latest dangerous ramblings. You could almost hear the panic in her voice. Whatever you do, don’t criticise the president. Just say it’s all very interesting but Ukraine must be involved in its own peace negotiations. She just about got away with it as the presenters took pity on her. They appreciated her dilemma.
The strangest response came from Boris Johnson. With Kemi Badenoch and other senior Tories strangely silent, the disgraced former prime minister popped up on X to offer his analysis. Trump was just doing his best to end the war. No one cared more about peace than the Donald. The US president had never meant for anyone to take him seriously about Ukraine starting the war or Zelenskyy’s popularity ratings. It was just his way of trying to get everyone round the table. His funny little ways. As with Boris, Trump could only be trusted to tell the truth half the time. The trick was trying to work out which half was which.
Boris ended his tweet by suggesting that Russia was desperate to have its assets unfrozen so it could hand them over to rebuild Ukraine. To think, Johnson used to consider himself Ukraine’s biggest ally. Right now, he sounded suspiciously as if he had morphed into another Kremlin sycophant. He will certainly be off Zelenskyy’s Christmas card list.
You might have half expected Johnson to have pitched up at the third and last day of the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship conference at the ExCeL centre in London. He would have fitted right in. A deeply unserious man for deeply serious times. ARC seems to exist in its own ecosphere, cocooned from the real world. So much so, they seem to be a year behind the rest of us. None of them has realised that their man is now calling the shots on wokery from the White House. They prefer to be the victim. On the outside looking in.
Any discussion on the most important issues of the day, like the war in Ukraine, appeared to have been kept off the schedule. Just speaker after speaker congratulating themselves on saying the unsayable, apparently unaware that no one was stopping them saying anything. If you want to understand the importance of free speech, ask Alexei Navalny. Except you can’t.
But even all the endless complaints about political correctness came with a heavily sanitised air. No one was allowed to raise a voice of disagreement. Just endless self-congratulation. There weren’t many female speakers anyway, but those who were invited seemed happy to accept their role in the new world order was simply to produce more children. A man got a standing ovation for fathering 10 children. And how did Dougie Murray, a gay man, feel about Jordan Peterson describing homosexuality as a deviation?
This felt very much a day for the B-list speakers. First up was the deeply unpleasant Konstantin Kisin, who this week had suggested Rishi Sunak was not English on his Triggernometry podcast. Er… he was born in Southampton. Presumably Kisin thinks Kemi is also not English. But KK wasn’t here to repeat that line; he was just there to make a couple of mildly racist jokes and wallow in his own imagined brilliance. Onanism par excellence.
Then we had Toby Young. Or, as we should now call him, the anti-establishment Lord Young. I’m surprised some peers haven’t given up their titles in protest. He was there to wang on about free speech and how hard done by he has been. You can say what you like, Toby. Just don’t expect congratulations for it. He rather undermined his whole point by admitting there was a law protecting free speech after all.
Others came and went. Eric Weinstein suggested we should defy physics and live on the stars. Nice work if you can get it. The closest we had to a big name was Vivek Ramaswamy. Though we managed to get through the entire interview without him being asked why he had accepted Trump’s invitation to jointly head up “Doge” and his subsequent falling out with Elon Musk. At which point the last remaining particle of credibility ARC may have had left the conference centre. It had been that sort of a day.
