Let’s cast our memories back to Donald Trump’s meeting with Vladimir Putin in Anchorage, Alaska on August 15. Trump was criticized by many for excluding Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy from that conclave. Usually that means nothing, but lo and behold, this was one time when Trump clearly felt he needed to respond to the criticism, because he had Zelenskiy and other European leaders to the White House the following Monday. Unlike the Anchorage tête-à-tête, the failure of which even Fox News couldn’t avoid noting, the Zelenskiy meeting was all smiles. Trump said at the time that the United States would give Ukraine “very good protection, very good security.”
There were references in the American media to the supposedly cunning three-dimensional chess game Trump was playing; in the right-wing media, there was copious bleating about the inevitability of Trump’s Nobel Prize. Trump also said that day that Putin had agreed to accept security guarantees. Trump envoy Steve Witkoff went even farther, asserting that Russia had agreed to “Article 5-like protections”—a reference to the NATO charter, implying that Putin had privately signed off on the idea of Ukraine being part of a Western defense pact.
What’s happened since? Putin went off to meet with China’s Xi Jinping and India’s Narendra Modi in a strongman summit that was obviously designed to announce to the world: We are uniting against Trump, and we are not afraid of him. Modi is furious about Trump’s tariffs (he’s levied a whopping 50 percent on India), and Xi is anxious about them (Trump has extended the deadline for a deal into November). As for Putin, his participation was a clear sign that if Trump had made any progress with him in Anchorage or since, Putin sure wasn’t taking it seriously.
As if to further turn the tightening screws, Russia has since bombed a Ukraine government building. The weekend attack was the largest drone assault of the entire three-plus-year war, and it was the first time Russia managed to damage a building in the governmental area of Kyiv. There’s no nice way to say it: Putin is ratcheting up the war that Trump said a thousand-and-one times that he was going to end very easily on his first day in office.
In the meantime, what has the United States government done? Made moves to pressure Putin to come to the table, you might venture? Well, that would be the normal thing. But this is Trump. So instead, we have rounded up Russian dissidents seeking asylum and sent them back to Putin, so they can be returned to prison or sent to the front lines. It’s hard to know the number, but The Times of London says it’s “dozens.”
It was always astonishing to me that anyone fell for Trump’s obvious horseshit about ending that war. He gets away with it because too many people—including too many people in the journalism profession—permit the central lie about himself that he’s been peddling for close to four decades now to persist in our political imagination: Namely, that whole “art of the deal” thing.
It’s one thing to peddle that when you’re a huckster real-estate man. But when running for the most powerful office in the world, you should be subject to a little more scrutiny. So it’s a huge indictment of our media and our entire culture that a guy who cheated nearly everyone he came into contact with, who filed for four bankruptcies, and whom a reputable bank wouldn’t touch for the last 20 years of his life could get away with making a claim like that and having it taken remotely seriously by anyone.
The Russia-Ukraine conflict isn’t the only war Trump assured us he was going to end on day one. Violence in the Israel-Palestine conflict has only gotten worse and worse, and more and more abominable, with each passing week. On Sunday, Israel flattened a high-rise in Gaza City, along with a school and other targets, killing another 52 people. News broke over the weekend that Witkoff sent a new proposal to Hamas. We’ll see what happens. But even if there is a ceasefire, the next phase would apparently be Trump’s morally repulsive idea to turn Gaza into a new Monaco, with (undoubtedly) a Trump hotel and casino, having dispensed with the vast majority of Gazans first.
With Trump finding it impossible to play tough guy in Russia or the Middle East, he’s settled on a new target for his destructive desires: Americans, beginning with those in Chicago and other American cities. That “Chipocalypse Now” social media post on Saturday about how Chicago is about to find out why the Defense Department is now called the Department of WAR (all caps, naturally) was yet another new low. The poison that he and his people inject into the civic bloodstream on a daily basis is truly sick. He is a sick, sick man.
He walked the post back a bit on Sunday (“we’re not going to war”). But that’s what he almost always does, after the real message has been sent. So, imagine being an immigrant in Chicago right now. Someone who crossed the border illegally perhaps, however many years ago, but has been here living a decent life and paying taxes and raising kids. Or maybe even being an immigrant who came here legally. Because they’ve been snared in this net, too. They must be terrified.
That’s what Trump wants. It’s what he needs—for someone to be terrified of him. It’s at the core of fascist belief: that others must live in fear of the leader and his movement. If Putin isn’t, if Benjamin Netanyahu isn’t, if Hamas isn’t, well, then, he’ll find someone who will be. That’s why it’s crucial for Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker and Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson to show zero fear. When Democrats stop showing fear, when they get right back in his face and mock him and fight back—that’s his Kryptonite. (That, and those Epstein files.) He’ll start melting down. In fact, he already has.
