On February 28, 2025, Donald Trump hosted Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky at the White House, where the following (abridged) exchange occurred (emphasis mine):
Vice President JD Vance: The path to peace and the path to prosperity is, maybe, engaging in diplomacy. ... What makes America a good country is America engaging in diplomacy. That’s what President Trump is doing.
President Zelensky: Can I ask you? [snip]
Vance: Sure. Yeah.
Zelensky: You know that we had conversations with [Russian President Vladimir Putin]. ... And we signed with him, I signed with him the deal. I signed with him, [French president Emmanuel] Macron and [former German chancellor Angela] Merkel. We signed ceasefire. Ceasefire. All of them told me that he will never go. ... But ... he broke the ceasefire, he killed our people, and he didn’t exchange prisoners. We signed the exchange of prisoners. But he didn’t do it. What kind of diplomacy, JD, you are speaking about? What do you mean?
Vance: I’m talking about the kind of diplomacy that’s going to end the destruction of your country.
Six months — and tens of thousands of deaths — later, I think we all know how that turned out.
Fast-forward to August 16. Trump meets Putin in Anchorage. Here is what we were told would happen when Donald met Vladimir:
Vladimir Putin will face “very severe consequences” if he does not agree a ceasefire in the war in Ukraine at his summit with Donald Trump in Alaska.
Three weeks later, we know how that turned out, too. So, permit me to ask: “President Trump, What kind of diplomacy are you talking about?”
What say we ask the secretary of State, Marco Rubio, whose job is diplomacy? Two days after Anchorage, on Fox’s Sunday Morning Futures with Maria Bartiromo, Rubio, pressed by Bartiromo on what happened to Trump’s ceasefire demand, replied that it would be better to forgo the ceasefire and go directly to negotiating an end to the war because of the number of people who would die in the time spent negotiating a ceasefire before beginning peace talks. “Because of the number of people who would die” — or because Putin said nyet to a ceasefire?
Again, what diplomacy is Trump talking about?
Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice...well, we know how the rest goes. So, instead of wasting time — and it was a waste of time — “negotiating” with Vladimir Putin, would it not have made more sense to (1) initiate economic measures immediately, driving down the price of oil; (2) seizing $300 billion of Russian financial assets sitting in European banks; (3) using the seized assets to fund to buy weapons for Ukraine; (4) pressuring (as opposed to asking — we are, after all, the United State of America) our European allies to stop buying Russian oil; and (5) removing Russian banks and financial systems from the SWIFT system?
Yes, it would, and all of the tools needed to accomplish all of the above are there. Except there’s one thing: a president whose credo is not “let’s make a deal.”
This writer knows, because he is old enough to have lived through the administration of one such president. In 1977, the Soviet Union (Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, or USSR) was in Ukraine, just as Russia is today. And Kazakhstan. And Kyrgyzstan. And Latvia. And Lithuania. And Moldova. And Russia. And Tajikistan. And Turkmenistan. And Uzbekistan — all the former Soviet republics, plus the Warsaw Pact countries: Albania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Hungary, Poland, and Romania. Oh, and let us not forget the eastern half of a then-divided Germany.
Nineteen seventy-seven was also the heyday of “détente” — basically, accepting the Soviet Union’s permanent existence as a rival superpower and “going along to get along.”
And 1977 was the year that a certain California governor was asked what our policy vis-à-vis the Soviets should be. His reply? Four words: We win. They lose.
Four years later, Ronald Reagan would be inaugurated as the 40th president of the United States — and virtually immediately begin implementing a deliberate plan that would, less than a decade later, consign the Soviet Union to “the ash heap of history.” (You can read the details here.)
Trump built a wall on our southern border. Good for him. Ronald Reagan brought down a Wall in Berlin, a wall that divided East Germany from West Germany, or more accurately, tyranny from liberty. And then he brought down the Soviet Union itself — all of it, including all of the satellite countries listed above. Without firing a shot.
Trump, on the other hand, cannot even get Russia out of Ukraine.
In a famous presidential candidate debate, then–Democrat vice presidential candidate Lloyd Bentsen famously said that he “knew Jack Kennedy” and that his Republican opponent, Dan Quayle, was “no Jack Kennedy.” Well, this writer did not know Ronald Reagan. But he did live through both Reagan terms and can confidently say, à la Lloyd Bentsen, that after eight months of “diplomacy,” it is abundantly clear that Donald Trump is no Ronald Reagan. And never will be.
To the shock and horror of the détente-besotted State Department “experts” of Reagan’s day, Reagan did not hesitate publicly to brand the USSR an “evil empire.” And each time “the experts” removed the phrase, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall,” Reagan put it back in — and, standing in front of that very wall, proclaimed it to the world.
Ronald Reagan was a man of clarity, vision, and above all principle, a man who could see the rot destroying the foundations of a totalitarian dystopia that “the experts” could not, did not fret over how to get the Russians out of this or that country. He focused on the head of the snake and did not entertain the fools who argued that what he was determined to do could not be done.
Put simply, the difference between Donald Trump and Ronald Reagan is the difference between a president committed to “we win, they lose,” and one who just wants to “make a deal.”
Gene Schwimmer is the proprietor of the YouTube channel Gene Rants.
Image: Gage Skidmore via Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0.