Trump: Promises Made, Promises Forgotten

 

In George Orwell's 1984 three warring states, Oceania, Eurasia and East Asia were constantly at war, but alliances and opponents kept shifting. If you lived in Oceania, one year you might see messages about the perfidy and evil of East Asia, but a few months later you saw that East Asia was a wonderful state, and now it was Eurasia which was bad. 

Memory was short in 1984.

In Animal Farm, the messages were written in chalk on a blackboard, which was convenient because it was easy to erase memory and change the message, and so "Four legs good, two legs bad" became "Four legs good, two legs better," when the ruling pigs learned to walk on two legs.

For the dystopian Orwell, memory manipulation was the sine qua non of dystopia, if you could control (change) the past, you could control the present and the future.

Nowhere is memory control more obvious and important than in our current dysptopic America, D.J. Trump has mastered memory control by the simple expedient of throwing so much up on the blackboard and changing it so often, nobody can really be sure what was true or how it changed.

Even in the information age, it's hard for the average citizen who does not have a research staff to dredge up Trump saying one thing and then just the opposite a little later.

"I will end the war in Ukraine Day One! I'm the only one who can do it!"

Mad Dog remembers it, and online "Facts First" shows 21 times Trump said he would end the war in Ukraine in 24 hours. But somehow that promise, not kept, does not stick. The blackboard has been erased.

It was obvious it wasn't Trump who was the one man who could end the war in Ukraine; it was Putin who was the only one who could do this. What wasn't obvious is whether Trump could even remember what he had promised on Ukraine--he makes so many promises they all tend to wind up in some huge dumpster of history.

But, for a few moments at least, it did look pretty obvious Trump did have a  grand strategy for ending the war in Ukraine: to bludgeon Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky into surrendering to Russia. "You don't hold any cards!" Trump shouted at Zelensky, who never asked for cards, or for a ride out of Kiev, only for "ammunition."

 

And, like most bullies, Trump arranged for his sidekicks to surround Zelensky in the Oval Office, to gang up on him and catcall insults about Zelensky's clothes--no Armani suit for Zelensky--and to shout him down for not thanking America for all it had done for him. The classic playground bullies. Let's all gang up on the little guy and none of us will get hurt. So Marjorie Taylor Greene's newest squeeze, Brian Glenn, who was present as a White House correspondent for Real America's Voice, got his line off on cue, "Hey why don't you wear a suit?" You see, Zelensky had disrespected the Oval Office, which Trump had done up in gold like a Parisian brothel.

One wonders whether Mr. Glenn would have had the balls to call out  Joseph Stalin for not wearing a suit. Actually, we don't have to wonder. We know. We can know a great deal about Mr. Glenn just from that incident. He is beyond an empty suit. He's clearly a coward, hiding behind a couch and group of playground bullies, lobbing his insults safely protected. He is not fit to carry Mr. Zelensky's shoes.

Zelensky, amazingly, had the presence of mind to reply, "I will wear a costume when this war will finish. Maybe after the war I will buy a suit, maybe better than yours."

Of course, we could all see this diminutive and besieged Ukrainian president was wearing battle fatigues, and was a giant among pygmies in that office. 

It was as revealing a video moment as Dr. Fauci slapping his head when Trump suggested from the podium that intravenous bleach might be the best way to kill COVID virus.

Playing Soldier

All those empty suits, with short memories, with heel spurs and not a one of them had ever faced a bullet fired in anger. Even Trump, who eventually did have a bullet fired in anger at him did not face that knowingly. He required no courage to be shot at because he couldn't be aware of the danger that day. So only Zelensky in that room had been in peril for his life and acted boldly in the face of violence aimed at him. J.D. Vance was in the Marines and he sat on a golden couch taunting Zelensky, but he was a military correspondent and he admitted in his book he never saw any real fighting.

So alone, among the boys in their splendid expensive suits, Zelensky had faced lethal fire and he never flinched. When he was offered a way out of Ukraine during the early onslaught, he famously replied, "I don't need a ride. I need ammunition."

Mad Dog cannot imagine Marco Rubio, Brian Glenn, J.D. Vance or Trump reacting that way. Trump has said soldiers are saps and fools. They work for peanuts and risk their lives for small salaries. "I don't like guys who get captured. I like the guys who don't get captured." That's Trump invoking the old Japanese bushido ethic, as if he ever would have the courage to even put himself in the position where he could be captured. 

But if he did get captured, he would deny it the next week and he would sue any newspaper which dared publish an account of his capture and he would direct the FCC to remove any TV news program and network from the airwaves which reported on it.

She Wears No Suit; She is Better Than That

So, now we have Mr. Trump, yesterday, saying maybe Ukraine should continue to fight on. Maybe the US will arrange a loan they will have to pay back, for new drones and missiles. But that is only the current line; tomorrow neither he nor his MAGA millions will remember whose side he is on this week.