Thursday, February 20, 2025

Welcome to the theater of the absurd

Ukraine Gets a Bit Part in the 'Theater of the Absurd'

As life imitates art, President Donald Trump tries to invert reality in Russia and Ukraine, and his acolytes are letting him.

February 20, 2025 at 8:33 AM PST

Bloomberg

8 hours ago

By Andreas Kluth

Andreas Kluth is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering US diplomacy, national security and geopolitics. Previously, he was editor-in-chief of Handelsblatt Global and a writer for the Economist.

Welcome to the theater of the absurd.
Photographer: Joe Raedle/Getty Images

Every week, day and hour that passes suggests that this second term of Donald Trump is turning out both more perfidious and more absurd than anybody could have feared.

The president, after talking to his Russian counterpart, is clearly preparing to betray Ukraine, Europe, the West and whatever remains of the “rules-based” international order.
And not only his MAGA fans but almost all Republicans in Congress, with enthusiasm either genuine or feigned, will let him.

Trump’s latest foreign-policy rampage (as distinct from the domestic one) began with a presser at Mar-a-Lago, at which he not only distorted the roles of the Ukrainian and Russian presidents but outright inverted them, and reality in general.

Politico

2:54

Highlights from Trump's freewheeling Mar-a-Lago presser

Decrying the awful war that’s been raging for three years, Trump placed the blame on the leader of not Russia but Ukraine. “You should have never started it,” he railed, addressing Volodymyr Zelenskiy in absentia. “You could have made a deal.” A “deal” to surrender and cease existing as an independent nation, he seems to mean.

What about Vladimir Putin? It is the Russian president, after all, who has been waging unprovoked and genocidal war against Ukraine, letting his troops commit atrocities along the way. Not in Trump’s mental universe. “Russia wants to do something,” Trump said. “They want to stop the savage barbarianism.” Come again?

Down he doubled the next day, hurling more invective and lies at Kyiv. People in the West, including America, generally view Zelenskiy as a complex man, but above all a hero for resisting the brutish Russian onslaught, ever since the early hours of the invasion, when the Americans offered to whisk him out of danger and he stoically replied: “I need ammunition, not a ride.” Not Trump. He sees Zelenskiy — and not Putin — as a “dictator.”

Inversion of truth — on the premise that the Bigger the Lie, the more compelling — is one device favored by demagogues throughout history. Exaggeration, hysteria, hyperbole are among the others, as are Orwellian euphemisms to brush aside any inhumane consequences that may arise.

For social psychologists the puzzle is how majorities and even entire populations can succumb to such demagogy — for example, how ordinary Germans in the Third Reich (or Russians under Putin) became, through the subtle gymnastics of self-deception and denial, a “nation of bystanders.”

At one end of the spectrum are functionaries looking to save or advance their careers who go along with whatever nonsense the leader spouts, even if it contradicts tenets and values which they once held deeply. Secretary of State Marco Rubio springs to mind. Playing Talleyrand to Trump’s Napoleon, this former Russia hawk now parrots the president’s whims.

At the other end are acolytes, henchmen or zealots vying for the leader’s favor by stretching rhetoric to ever greater extremes.
Ambitious MAGA politicians have noticed, for example, that Trump likes renaming things, so that the Gulf of Mexico becomes the Gulf of America or Denali reverts to Mount McKinley.
They’ve also picked up that he wants to take Greenland from Denmark. Lo and behold, Congress is now processing a bill called the “Red, White, and Blueland Act of 2025.” It would do just that: authorize Trump to rename Greenland. . .