Steve Witkoff is teaching a master class to Russian officials on how to get what they want from Donald Trump.
On Oct. 14, Trump’s special envoy advised Vladimir Putin’s top foreign policy aide, Yuri Ushakov, on how the Russian dictator should curry favor with Trump before broaching a proposed peace plan between Russia and war-torn Ukraine, Bloomberg News reported on Tuesday.
During the five-minute call, Witkoff told Putin’s henchman that the Russian president should personally phone Trump, 79, ahead of his planned meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky—where Zelensky hoped, but ultimately failed, to secure long-range Tomahawk cruise missiles—to congratulate him on the Gaza ceasefire.
“Useful idiot”, minor but important distinction. At the end of the day yeah, he’s an “asset” in the sense that he’s doing what Russia wants. But he’s not doing it because he’s a traditional intelligence asset who’s taking marching orders from Putin. He has no ideological loyalty to Russia, hell, he can’t even muster that for the country he supposedly runs.
Rather, he has to be finessed into doing what you want. That can be a bribe (as we’ve seen many world leaders figure out for themselves) or it could just be simple praise. Throwing some narcissistic validation into the howling void where his heart should be.
Thing is, that gets both easier and more complicated as he gets more senile. Easier in the sense that (to the extent he ever had one) his conception of reality is eroding. That means he’s becomeing even more malleable as even this most baseline level of resistance degrades.
It gets more complicated in the sense that the same is true for everyone else too. Trump’s always had a tendency to agree with whoever spoke to him last, even before the very obvious recent decline in his mental faculties. Dementia is probably only going to make that worse.
The main upshot here is that if you know what your doing this man is more suggestable than ever. Which effectively means you now have to account for what eveyone else around is telling him and trying to accomplish. At least, to a greater degree than you were before.
Just a thought here, but maybe we’d have a slightly better time with leaders who aren’t suffering from extremely obvious mental decline. Anyways, I look forward to the 2028 presidential election, when America will finally elect Ronald Reagan for a posthumous third term via the proxy of a ouija board operated solely by Henry Kissinger’s corpse.
Thing is, that’s a distinction without a difference, at least in the eyes of analysts in the IC, the people charged with making a formal assessment. From that perspective, what you do is more important than why you do it because the effects aland the fallout are all the same.
Oh yeah no. If your working backwards from the end result I totally get that approach. I’m not making a moral defense here. All I’m saying is that while we’re in it it’s important to understand what’s going on (and perhaps more importantly what isn’t) in his head so that we have an understanding of what’s possible. What he might be thinking. In that world, not that of the IC or one that’s capable of assessing legal culpability, it’s important to draw a distinction between a principled ideologically driven actor and one that’s just floating on the whims of their shattered psyche.