President Trump has done a 180-degree turn on Vladimir Putin. He has compounded this change in attitude by resuming the sending of weapons to Ukraine. Trump spent months repeatedly asking for a ceasefire in the Russo–Ukraine war, whether permanent or temporary, ceasefires that Putin repeatedly broke.
Recently, he stated of Putin, “He’s very nice all the time, but it turns out to be meaningless,” and “We get a lot of bullshit thrown at us by Putin.” In turn, Putin has escalated bombardment of civilian areas inside Ukraine, to which Trump responded by stating, “Something has happened to him. He has gone absolutely CRAZY!” and “I’m not happy with what Putin’s doing. He’s killing a lot of people.” And “I don’t know what the hell happened to Putin.”
Trump’s turnabout seems puzzling, but it can be explained.
During his campaign for the presidency, Trump claimed that he could end the war in a day because of his relationship with Putin. This “relationship” was a con job that Putin put on Trump based on the persecution that Trump had been subjected to during the Clinton-created Russian collusion hoax, and which was promoted endlessly for years by Democrats and various other mediocrities like Stephen Colbert, not to mention the media hivemind.
The Russian collusion accusation was, of course, as transparently bogus as G. W. Bush’s “weapons of mass destruction,” but it took months and months of stress on him — not to mention it was very insulting — and Putin let Trump know he had been equally frazzled by it (in reality he had shrugged it off as an absurdity), and Putin often commiserated with Trump, which made the latter feel they had bonded over a shared trauma.
Meanwhile, Putin let on that, concerning the war, Russia was the injured party, citing this and that, and the president may have swallowed some of that BS, which would explain the treatment that Zelenskyy received at the White House.
And let us not overlook the fact that Putin can be very persuasive. How persuasive?
Remember the military commander of the Wagner Group, who was in the process of marching on Moscow two years back. Putin called Prigozhin, said he understood the commander’s concerns, all was forgiven, and Putin was very interested in implementing Prigozhin’s suggested reforms, so come on over, take a plane, and we’ll discuss them in detail when you arrive.
The plane was shot down en route, and his forces were redistributed.
However, Trump may be seeing clearly now.
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Armando Simón is a retired historian and psychologist, and the author of When Evolution Stops and The U.