Trump Says PEACE in Ukraine Looms

Morning. Every day I read the top story in the morning’s paper edition of the New York Times so that you don’t have to, then digest it for you here. If you’re new here, welcome! Your friends can subscribe here for daily updates if you forward them the link. Let’s do this!

Today’s paper has a depressing investigation into how Elon Musk is getting a lot richer thanks to his involvement with Donald Trump’s government. I skimmed the piece and sighed, before deciding that the other story was more interesting: Trump had a 90-minute call with Vladimir Putin yesterday and says a peace deal in Ukraine is imminent. Read it here.

My wife loves to read Russian history. She gets easily distracted while reading most books but the horrors of Russia tend to keep her attention. In a book she read a couple of years ago, some Russian kids were so hungry that when they got off a train they were held captive on, they ran across the street and ate the leaves off the trees in a park. It’s turned into a morbid ongoing joke where I ask her if she’s enjoying a book, and “has anyone eaten a park yet?”

One of the most interesting things about oral histories of Russia is they tend to show that Russians both hated Josef Stalin and also, miss having a crazy daddy around to run the show. When your historic leader killed millions of your own people, it’s taken as read, or taken as red, I think, that the guy at the top should be a corrupt, murderous bastard. Otherwise you can’t respect him. This isn’t a line of thinking I subscribe to. I tend to think that leaders should make hard choices but that murderous psychos ultimately undermine a country’s interests. I wish one didn’t have to spell out such obvious thinking but we’re past the time where you could take for granted that the majority of people believed anything sane about the ideal qualities of leadership, it seems.

In my childhood I remember Boris Yeltsin’s drunkenness well. I also remember Mikhael Gorbachev’s glasnostic charisma and his feted meetings with Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. In the 1980s it seemed Russia was going to be our pal. Although it turns out Putin was involved in Gorbachev’s ouster and has most likely been pulling a variety of the strings for years as he has consolidated his power. His subsequent slide into authoritarianism—remember when he had term limits?—has come as no surprise to keen observers. One of my favorite scenes in the “Death of Stalin” movie is the last, where Kruschev takes over for Stalin, but two rows behind him is Breshnev, and you get the sense that the knives are already out.

Donald Trump, whose own daddy was a psycho, loves Vladimir Putin. Trump respects him almost as much as Elon Musk, it seems. In the first Trump term there was much made of the theory that Putin was somehow controlling Trump with a dossier of hidden information, and that could be true. Although I’d be surprised if there were any information about Trump that he’d ultimately be embarrassed about being made public. Everything public about him is already pretty dreadful, and he tends to be a man who wears his heart on his sleeve.

Putin, clearly, would prefer to have Trump in charge. When I hear Trump say things about taking over Denmark or Greenland they sound to me like lines parroted from a playbook designed to undermine American moral superiority over Russia on the international stage. But whether Putin is telling Trump to say these things, or whether Trump and his advisers—many of whom willingly parrot Russian disinformation regularly—actually come up with them independently is besides the point. I’m not sure what the point is, of course. I suppose the point is that when Donald Trump writes about “PEACE” in Ukraine, he does so in all-caps in a way that makes me think his agenda is less about saving lives and more about…what?

That’s the saddest thing for me about the state of international affairs. Whichever insecure “strong man” is vying to be in charge we lose a sense of the importance of, say, happiness and balance. These guys would say, I think, that the idea of being a “happy person” is weak. But I tend to think that Altman is describing a person whose long term sanity isn’t likely to be undermined by a feverish grip on power. It’s enough to make me nostalgic for glasnost. I do still firmly believe in the importance of trying to be nice.

You’re welcome.

Matt Davis lives in Manhattan with his wife and kid.