Transcript: Trump Press Sec’s Fury at Media Erupts as Putin Mess Grows

And Trump, even at the start of the war, gushed that it was savvy and genius to attack Ukraine like that. Real quotes, savvy and genius was his reaction. A big part of it is also his worldview: that the strong should be able to push around weaker ones. He and a lot of his staff bathe in online right-wing propaganda that the Ukrainians—like the West are weak and woke and too gay to fight. And that has nothing to do with warfare, how it actually works. That’s culture-war nonsense. But they really are caught up in a lot of that. And so his worldview—a lot of their worldview—needs Russia to win, to have some success to validate it. And the type of actual response to Russia that would really get them to stop the strong, sustained military effort—that would make them realize either that their war effort would collapse or make them realize that it was futile and unlikely to succeed, not worth the effort, and that they should just take what they can get—that’s the only real path to peace. And Trump can’t do that because he simply—I don’t even think he’d be capable of it. But even if he were, he does not want it. He doesn’t really try for it. I, at the very least, think it’s safe to say, based on all his actions, he does not want to see Putin lose, actually lose. And therefore he can’t do what the Ukrainians and the Europeans need.

Sargent: Well, that brings me to the question I wanted to close out on. Just to go big picture, we keep being instructed to worship Trump as a great world-historical peacemaker. But at the end of the day, you put your finger on it there: Trump is setting us up for a world in which the alliance of Western liberal democracies is weaker and autocracies are stronger. It’s a world in which quasi-genocidal conflict and invasions like Putin’s are rewarded. Can you talk about where we’re going here and what that might look like, that world?

Grossman: Sure. I think that this is without exaggeration one of the biggest things that’s happened in modern history. Essentially, the world order from World War II on and especially from the end of the Cold War was based on the bedrock of American power. America is the champion of democracy, is the policeman of the world, is the head of the liberal world order, whatever euphemism you wanted to use for it of American hegemony. And Trump has abdicated that role. By Americans electing him once, a lot of other countries could say, Oh, it’s a fluke, but doing it again after seeing all the criminality, after seeing the first term of him in office has signaled to the world that the U.S. is not reliable.