America flips: Did the world’s leading democracy just become one of the bad guys?

Three times, Donald Trump was prompted to answer the simplest question. Three times he failed. And the rest of the world needs to take notice.

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Friday, US time. The end of a genuinely momentous, paradigm-shifting week in global politics. One Donald Trump spent haranguing the leader of an invaded country fighting for its survival, Volodymyr Zelensky, and parroting the propaganda of the failed wannabe conqueror who invaded it, Vladimir Putin.

A week his administration spent discussing peace talks with Russia, one-on-one, while pointedly excluding Ukraine, whose territory will of course be carved up as part of any agreement.

One he spent strong-arming Mr Zelensky, successfully it now seems, into handing over the rights to a chunk of Ukraine’s rare mineral resources, lest he incur American disfavour.

Extortion is a strong word. That doesn’t necessarily make it any less applicable, here. But for the sake of being temperate, think of this imminent minerals deal as ... a protection payment.

“Oh, you’ve been invaded, unprovoked, by a much more powerful neighbour? That’s a real shame. We would love to help but, huh, our pockets are looking a little empty. Oh hey are those lithium deposits you’ve got over there?” Etc etc.

Volodymyr Zelensky. Picture: Tetiana Dzhafarova/AFP

Don’t forget, of course, Mr Trump’s assertion this week that Ukraine “should have never started” the war, which is little different to blaming a sexual assault victim for daring to wear a skirt her attacker found alluring.

Putin, in this probably too-glib metaphor, was the incelibate creep lurking in an alleyway and salivating over an ex, muttering to himself about Ukraine having no right to independence.

And what we’ve seen, these past few days, is the United States siding with that guy. With the covetous creep living in the Kremlin’s basement. And not just Mr Trump himself, but the staff below him who are paid to repeat his views, no matter how counter they run to reality.

If you digest one thing, from this article, before writing your angry emails (all are welcome, by the way), let it be this: advocating for a peace deal in Ukraine is one thing. Believing the stalemate can’t be broken decisively, and that negotiations are necessary, is fine.

Actively and oh so credulously repeating laughably idiotic Russian talking points is another thing entirely. Taking the side of the invader over the victim is, again, another thing entirely. That is what Donald Trump did this week.

Calling Mr Zelensky a “dictator” and bashing him for not holding elections, which are illegal in his country while it is under martial law. Spewing out ludicrously inflated estimates of US aid to Ukraine – in most of his quotes double what has actually been spent. And so forth.

Mr Trump could not have done a more convincing job, coming off as a useful idiot for the Putin regime, if he had tried. If his public statements had been submitted to the Kremlin for approval, I’m genuinely not sure how Putin could have edited them to be more favourable.

Maybe if Mr Trump had labelled Mr Zelensky a Nazi as well as a dictator? He didn’t go that far. Credit where it’s due, I guess. He did implicitly endorse the fiction that NATO expansion in Russia’s sphere of influence, which stopped in 2004, somehow prompted and justified this war of expansion 18 years later.

Mr Trump. Picture: Roberto Schmidt/AFP

As always, and no less significantly, Mr Trump was loathe to criticise Putin at all.

During an interview with Fox News Radio on Friday he was gently prodded, three different times, to assign some smidgen of blame for the war to the man who actually started it.

Said prodding came amid a quite rambling monologue, from the American President, about Mr Zelensky’s supposed failings, and how the war would never have started if he had been in power instead of Joe Biden.

“You have a man who’s led a country that had the most beautiful cities demolished. Had the most beautiful domes. Those domes are the most beautiful-” Mr Trump was saying, when host Brian Kilmeade jumped in.

“But that’s Russia’s fault though, Mr President?” he interjected.

“This place. You take a look at the demolition of so many of those cities, and also those people are killed, never to come back again,” said Mr Trump, plowing on.

“But Mr President, that’s all Vladimir Putin’s fault. Don’t you agree?” Mr Kilmeade said.

“I get tired of listening to it. I’ll tell you what. I’ve seen it enough,” said Mr Trump.

“And then he (Zelensky) complains that he’s not at a meeting that we’re having with Saudi Arabia, trying to intermediate a peace. Well he’s been at meetings for three years with a president (Joe Biden) who didn’t know what the hell he was doing. He’s been at the meetings for three years and nothing got done.

“So I don’t think it’s very important (for Ukraine) to be at meetings, to be honest with you. He makes it very hard to make deals. But look what’s happened to his country.”

Mr Kilmeade, bless him, tried again. It’s a pattern you often see in Mr Trump’s friendlier interviews: the host knows what he should be saying, and tries to get him on track. But it’s like trying to lasso a charging bull with a piece of string.

“No, I hear you, Mr President, but you know who’s to blame for that. Don’t you think it is Vladimir Putin that did the invasion, unwarranted, to try to take back land he had no right to? And now both sides want to talk, it seems, so we should just get to that point,” Mr Kilmeade asked, rather plaintively.

“They only want to talk because of me. If I wasn’t involved, they wouldn’t be talking to each other,” Mr Trump said.

“If it wasn’t for me, they wouldn’t be talking at all. I’m the only reason they’re talking.”

(They aren’t talking to each other. The United States is speaking to Russia, yes, and separately it’s also speaking to Ukraine. To Russia it’s offering significant pre-emptive concessions while demanding, seemingly, nothing at all. From Ukraine it is demanding economic compensation. What is Mr Trump even talking about here?)

He’s saluting other Americans here, to be clear. Picture: Roberto Schmidt/AFP

One more example for the sake of fairness and thoroughness, from a press conference at the White House on the same day.

“You called President Zelensky of Ukraine a dictator. Do you think President Putin of Russia is also dictator?” a reporter asked him.

“I think that President Putin and President Zelensky are going to have to get together. Because you know what, we want to stop killing millions of people,” Mr Trump answered.

Now look. If those instances above were isolated, we could give him the benefit of the doubt. Maybe he woke up with the Tetris theme in his head on Friday, and found it so delightfully catchy that he felt like going easy on Russia for the day. But this is representative of a pattern we have seen ever since Mr Trump entered politics a decade ago.

Whenever he is asked directly about Putin and his crimes, he dodges. He bulldozes. He ignores. He makes excuses. He talks about something else. He has always been reluctant, to an astonishing degree, to criticise the Russian dictator.

Trying to get Donald Trump to say something – anything! – negative about Putin is harder than convincing a toddler to eat his vegetables. You try to spoon-feed him something sensible, like Mr Kilmeade there, and he responds with an irrelevant tantrum.

In fact Mr Trump has never, ever said anything about Putin to match his tirades against Mr Zelensky this week. Not. Once.

We are talking about a man who suppresses all political dissent in Russia. Who poisons and assassinates his political rivals and, failing that, sends them off to some desolate hole in Siberia to die, forgotten. Who has inconvenient people thrown out of windows. Who has been the expansionist aggressor in conflict after conflict. Who has given persistent support to the world’s worst actors, including sponsors of terror in the Middle East. Who has enriched himself by corruptly plundering the wealth that should have belonged to his people. Who, notoriously paranoid, hides in the Kremlin while pitilessly sending others to die in his wars with little more dignity than the plastic figures on a Risk board.

That is the man Donald Trump refuses to denounce, refuses to blame and seems, from a long record of strikingly fawning public statements, to even admire.

Russian “President” Vladimir Putin. Picture: Alexander Zemlianichenko/AFP

Mr Trump’s critics have tended to respond to this reticence with one question: why? Why won’t he be critical of a man who is, objectively, among the most malicious and destructive dictators of the last several decades?

It should not be remotely difficult. “Is Putin a dictator?” The answer, for any democratic leader with a properly functioning brain, is an easy, immediate: “Yes.”

Say whatever else you want after that. Rant about how crap Biden was, or how lovely the domes of Mariupol were before Russia bombed them into rubble, or how there would be no war if you’d been in power. Fine. But do start with a simple “yes” or “no”.

He can’t do it. Or won’t do it. Either way, he doesn’t do it.

And that is kind of what I’m getting at, here. All the focus on why Mr Trump is so inexplicably pro-Putin has led the man’s opponents – the Democrats, hostile parts of the media, whatever – down far too many rabbit holes.

How many years were consumed by theories about his first presidential campaign’s supposed “collusion” with Russia? The evidence for it never materialised. How many words were read and written about his financial interests in Moscow? Or about whatever psychological issues drew him to prostrate himself before the world’s worst dictators?

Maybe the why doesn’t really matter, in the end. He behaves the way he behaves, whatever the reason. And that behaviour is consistently, nakedly pro-authoritarian.

This is a President with endless excuses for America’s enemies, and bottomless contempt for its allies. We may never know why. That’s just the way it is.

Does a great duck face though. Picture: Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/AFP

The rest of the world has to plan, and act, accordingly. We can’t fool ourselves forever into thinking this guy is playing grandmaster-level chess on the world stage, will eventually shout “checkmate!”, and will then morph into a new Ronald Reagan. That is some truly delusional, unhinged, fantasy-level stuff at this point. You may as well imagine Emilia Clarke jumping into your Tinder DMs.

If this is how the United States is going to act, going forward, then the rest of the Western world needs to organise some alternative leadership, quicksmart. Let Mr Trump form a league of tinpot authoritarians. Let him hold summits with Putin and Kim and Orban and Lukashenko and Xi, hosted by the Saudis, while those leaders with still-functioning moral compasses do their best to maintain a liberal order.

What we can’t do is accept leadership, in the world, from a country whose outlook has become fundamentally immoral and predatory. We cannot accept, as leader of that free world, someone who is duped so easily by the most ludicrous propaganda of malicious actors.

If Mr Trump lacks the wit to see Putin is using him as a credulous fool, when it could not be more blatant, what other choice do we have but to turn our backs on him?

Twitter: @SamClench

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